Solrun

Gut Reaction by blacksheepza 2018-08-30T21:59:15Z

The art and the animations are very nice for this. Well done. There are a lot of different foods and they are all high quality pixel art. So that is impressive. It is a little weird to go from the style of the menu screen to the pixel art of the main game. The UI was very clear and helpful once you played a bit. The first few times you play, you're a bit too overwhelmed to notice the UI. After that, you notice the dots on the clock telling you when the meals are and the notices when a meal is coming up which is fairly handy.

The game is fun, but it's really hard. I found I was running out of ammo way too quickly. A lot of enemies spawn at once and there's not a lot of downtime between the waves of enemies. And enemies seemed to be deteriorating so fast that I had no chance at all to deal with them. I couldn't keep up with killing enemies, grabbing ammo, and taking dead enemies to the hole. The game is still fun. The shooting is fun and killing enemies, then needing to dispose of their bodies is a neat mechanic. I just found that I could only play a few days at a time. I would play about 2-3 days, then lose and then just start again at day 1.

The Longest Jump by A-Flat Miner Studios 2018-08-18T21:53:00Z

I'm really digging your sense of humour. I want to play more just to find out what all the possible tweets are.

The graphics are pretty nice for this. The background space is fantastic and the art for menus and UI like the Twoofer twoofs are really well done. It all fits together really well. The characters, while small, still do give you a sense of what they are about. Bootsie McGee has larger boots so you can remember that his boots pull you down for example.

The characters all have an interesting and different personality which is great. I think my favourite is probably @BOOTS_BOOTS_BOOTS #Only90sKidsRemember. I do wish their special abilities were shown and explained a bit before you pick them. It's not a big issue as their abilities are fairly simple and you get a feel for them after an attempt or two.

I'm not really sure I understand how the jumping off the platform works. Do you just click once to launch off the platform or is a hold and release sort of thing? Any character other than Boom Boom seems like you use their ability and it's still pretty random where you're going to end up afterwards. I'm probably just not any good at the game. I did get the bounty hunter dude to go flying off the screen and then when he came back, he landed pretty much straight down from where he left so that might be a decent strategy to getting repeatable landings.

Space Cadet by bobismijnnaam 2018-08-30T21:20:28Z

That was kinda weird. And kinda spooky. I'm not really sure if I got to the end of the game or not? I never got the one door to open. I think I bought everything I could in the game. I may have had another spacebar delivery I could've bought, but it was at like 40000. Everything else was greyed out even when I had enough money for it. I fed the Buddha 4 spacebars and it took me back to the main menu. It didn't seem to be any different if I gave him the spacebars on day 2 or day 10.

I didn't mind the clicker game at first, but now I've played it a million times trying to see if I could open the last door to no avail so now it's a little less exciting.

I like the mood this game sets. You can just tell how much of this guy's life is absorbed by the clicker game. All he has in his house is the clicker game and some spacebars. He has even taken off all the other keys on his keyboard. He has a note on the wall reminding himself of how much he loves spacebars as if he had to remind himself to get more spacebars. The game itself also seems to be more than a game. It has upgrades that you can purchase in game so that your space bar lasts longer. It's a game that somehow also interacts with the real world. Plus you have the otherworldly nature of the Space Buddha you can order that will murder you if you give it 4 spacebars and the Strange Floaty that gives you more spacebars.

Crates by Solrun 2018-08-30T21:31:43Z

@bobismijnnaam Weird. Our games are fairly similar. Yours is more of a game than mine is. Mine kinda plays itself.

It sounds like your playthrough is exactly what I wanted the experience to be like. I wasn't sure if the stuff I had would pique peoples' interests enough, but it does seem like they did.

SWORD1 by Lawrence 2018-08-18T19:51:58Z

This is a sweet game! I had a ton of fun playing this!

The floaty controls were perfect I thought. I can't count how many times I beat a level, just to end up careening off the side like an idiot (which just made me laugh more so than get frustrated, but that may just be me). Not to mention all the times I kept strafing around the enemies to line up perfectly to only fall off the side without even hitting anything. It's sort of like drifting in racing games where it's just fun to run around the map, just barely keeping your character under enough control that you don't quite fall off, but still toeing the line.

The art is great. I love how most everything was only one colour, but still everything stood out and was recognizable (I think the see-through nature of everything really helped with that). Having the important parts like the ends of weapons be a slightly different colour helps to notice them easier. The clouds in the background and the grass on the field really filled the space nicely in a non-distracting way. My only gripe about the graphics was how the ellipse that closes in wasn't pixel perfect, but it probably would have looked terrible if it was (no offense, just how it works at that low scale of pixel art). But I guess weapons move around 360 and the clouds stretch a bit so maybe that's not a fair gripe as you don't seem to be going for pixel perfect.

Thank you for adding the bombs, the higher hp enemies would have been a nightmare to kill otherwise. I did however want to use the bombs more to blast enemies off the edge more with smart bomb positioning, but they didn't have a lot of knockback force and pretty much just one shot the smaller enemies anyway so it wasn't necessary. I think the enemy attacks could have been a bit slower and telegraphed a bit better. I was never really sure when the enemies would attack; I would just get too close and then the would attack lightning-fast before could even react. The dominant strategy seemed to be to just run around them in circles because they couldn't turn fast enough, just ignore trying to figure out when they would attack and just hope that you didn't get hit.

Adware Attack by AdonisDevs 2018-08-30T18:13:38Z

This was a surprisingly fun game. Turns out laughing at ads and scrambling to close them all is a lot more fun when those ads are fake and pose no real threat to your computer!

The game is crazy frantic in a good way. You definitely managed to instill some anxiety in me with the background noise and the way the ads move across the screen. Near the end when you have just ads on top of ads on top of ads and you just realize that there is no way you can clear them all is the perfect way to sum up the mood of this game.

I'm really digging your sense of humour on this game. My only gripe was that the game was so frantic that I didn't have time to read all of the ads (I'm sure no one in the history of the internet has ever said that before). The design of the ads and especially the blurry art definitely fit into the style of early internet days you seemed to be going for so great job there.

I'm not sure if I liked the consistency of all the ads being the same size with the x in the corner or if I would have rather had some variety in the size of the ads and the methods for closing them. My very first ad was the basketball so for a bit I thought I had to move the basketball into the hoop to close it. That may have been interesting, but would have been near impossible to do later on when there were tons of ads.

The Subway: horror within by Bibilega 2018-08-18T21:01:18Z

The art for this is incredible (but you knew that). The characters were all great and interesting in their designs. The buttons for your abilities all looked nice and they totally fit right into the side of the train car. The countdown clock looked a tad out of place as a result (mostly just because the ability buttons fit so well with the environment). The little things like having the line of passengers alternate between foreground and background as they moved was a nice touch.

I found it a little odd that the game happens in increments (like the passengers move every 2 seconds or whatever), but that your abilities activated in real time. It made it feel a bit bad to use your abilities a soon as other passengers were in range. You wanted to use it right before they acted, but it was hard to know when exactly that would be. It was also a bit tough to tell when the other passengers were quite close enough to you. Like could I wait for them to move once more before they pushed me or not? I'm not 100% sure how I would suggest fixing those issues. You would click the ability to queue it up, then it would fire when the passengers move next, not immediately. Possibly your abilities would cooldown at the same time as the passengers move. So when they move, the circle icon would fill in one quarter at a time instead of continuously filling in the circle. This wouldn't actually affect the game, if it took 6 seconds for the cooldown before, it still would take 6 seconds, which would be about 3 turns (if turns between passengers move is 2 seconds). That's a lot of text and would be a lot of effort to implement for a probably very small benefit. As for knowing when they will push you out, maybe have the the characters change to a slightly different pushing sprite when they are going to push you next turn?

I did find the different abilities you could use quite interesting. They seem to be fairly well-balanced in my playthrough. I was pretty much using them as soon as they came off cooldown and I would just barely get an ability back just in time to get rid of some passengers and not get pushed out of the train. So the tight cooldowns definitely kept the game pacing up and kept it quite frantic. The ultimate ability was fun to use once I go there. i thought it was pretty funny when I used it. It's also a very nice touch how the ultimate ability changes the train after you use it and how those effects stick around for the end of the game.

The Subway: horror within by Bibilega 2018-08-19T07:20:25Z

@daria-s I think the passengers' incremental movement gives the game a sort of rhythm that keeps the pace of the game moving along and the tension up. I wonder if a part of that would be lost if it was fully real time? Just something else to consider. The incremental nature also lends well towards the static sprites. Having them stop and start like that makes it seem like the characters are taking steps even if the art doesn't change. If they moved in real time, it could just look like they were just sliding. You've already done a nice job of making them smoothly move from point to point so maybe you could make them move in real time nicely too.

I'm pretty sure most of the effects when I used the ultimate ability faded away, but it left some stuff in the background. Stuff like the text graffiti seemed to stay I think.

Purple Void by mochakingup 2018-08-18T20:30:44Z

Seems like a cool game. The art is really nice. I liked the animations for the menu, your attacks, and the blocks disappearing and reappearing. The characters all have personality just in their looks. The main character has some interesting gear that give a cool space theme and a cool headband scarf.

Having the ranged attack be charged by melee attacks is a simple mechanic, but really helps give the game a bit more depth which is nice. Instead of spamming ranged, you need to charge it, and with the floor disappearing, the ranged attack gives you something to do when you can't melee. The 3 hit combo the character has is quite nice. It seemed like the third hit could be handy for maneuvering around the map. I found myself trying to move around with this the first few times I played because I forgot I could dash with f. I think the controls could be a bit better. I would rather have had the dash on space instead of space being an alternate way to press left mouse button. If you had used something like GetButtonDown("Jump") instead of GetKeyDown("f"), I would be able to change the "jump" keybind from "f" to "space".

Dying and then having the whole game reset to the title screen was VERY frustrating. I also found it very hard to tell where exactly the yellow orb attacks were going. I got hit a lot of times when I thought I should've been safe because I couldn't tell where I was and where the orbs were. I think having the camera higher up or the orbs closer to the ground, or giving things a shadow might have helped this problem. I want to play this game more because it's pretty, it seems like fun, and I want to get to the later maps because they seem more interesting than just a square arena, but I'm just frustrated by the large amount of downtime between tries. If there was a 3 lives system or I could retry the level faster, I would be more inclined to keep trying.

AsterVoid by F1Krazy 2018-08-18T19:22:52Z

My sister saw me playing this game and said "What? Flying toast?" and now I can't stop seeing the asteroids as toast. The dying animation is quite satisfying too. It lessened the blow of dying a bit which was nice. And I died a lot because it's actually pretty difficult.

It's a nice and simple idea that fits the theme and that you executed well. You could

SpaceBox by stderr 2018-08-30T18:48:47Z

It's an interesting idea for a game. Because all the boxes fall at random, there is no dominant strategy of stacking all the boxes against a wall which is nice. You have to just deal with moving just the boxes that are in the way and trying to leave yourself room to store more boxes and move around.

The falling indicator with the growing shadow and the sound effect were very handy for telling where a box would land. Even with different sized boxes, you had a good idea of when the box shadow was done growing and a box would fall based on the sound.

The movement controls and moving the boxes was a bit too clunky to be able to play the game for any length of time. If a new box coming in was going to fall on 2 boxes, there was almost nothing you could do. I found it almost impossible to pick up one box, set it down, then pick up the second box before the first one fell. I didn't really understand what governed where a box would be set down when I pressed space so it was hard to position my character to be able to drop the box. Mostly I just moved and spammed space until the box was out of my hands.

Super Square Dodge XLII by DoubleBlackStudios 2018-09-04T17:11:19Z

Woah that was fun. But very hard.

The extra polish on stuff really showed. The cool particle effects, the screen shake(maybe a tad too much), and the preview to show where new threats were coming from was really well done.

The level design was awesome. It wasn't just more of the same all the time. You had new layouts around every corner.

Space Waste by BBApps 2018-08-30T22:16:16Z

It's a neat little game. Very simple to play, but has some complexities to it once you get into it.

Thank you for including the tutorial. Tutorials are hard to make, but your tutorial was well made and taught me how to play the game in like 10 seconds.

The art style is cute and the UI is quite helpful. It's super handy to be able to just click on the notices at the bottom to go directly to that planet to fix the problem. One thing I think would have been nice is some numbers by the planets. It mostly helps early game to keep track of the population on your planets without having to click on all the planets you've colonized.

The game very quickly turns into just clicking things as fast as you can because your planets are populating and creating trash faster than you can even think about moving it elsewhere. It's pretty fun to frantically click on planets and just try to keep your head above water. Everything is pretty well polished. Between the tutorial and the alerts that take you directly to the planet, it is very easy to play; the menus don't get in you way, the only thing in your way is how fast you can click and running out of planets.

After writing this all about how frantic the game becomes, I now remember that there is a pause button in the game... Oh well, I liked playing it frantically, just throwing trash and people at random planets.

Bunny Ice Cream Maker by rkhadder 2018-08-30T19:23:30Z

That's a pretty funny game. The full voice acting was great and the faces the bunnies make really sell the sounds. The game being pretty nonsensical fits well with the sense of humour. Having an ice cream making machine is silly enough, but then having it be this huge contraption that sprawls all over the place with pipes everywhere and you need to press 5 buttons in just random spots to get it to function is just crazy. Not to mention the operators of the machine are bunnies, because why not? All that combined is not too far fetched, but then you have the toilet that teleports around the map for no particular reason that is just the icing on the cake. The whole game is just whimsy stacked on top of whimsy which gives it a good sense of humour and makes it oh so charming.

The art is pretty reminiscent of Dr Seuss which also stacks onto the whimsy in a great way. The giant jar of cherries and the ice cream machine itself on the right are both quite a bit busier than the rest of the map. I think it would look a little bit better if some of that detail was spread across the whole scene a little bit more. Having fewer, larger cherries in the jar would have fit the art style a bit better.

Well done on the flowing ice cream. It looks great when it's flowing and when it merges with itself and when you eat some of it.

The jumps for the bunnies were pretty good. They were quick jumps and took you high enough. The jumps weren't the exact height of all the platforms (they were higher which is a good thing) so you had a bit of wiggle room with your jumps and didn't have to time them perfectly to get onto the platform. The double jump, however, was a bit inconsistent. I had a lot of trouble jumping to the top button from the pink pipe. It didn't want to let me double jump a lot of the time. The movement speed may have been a little slow, but it was okay. It was only ever really a problem when you went all the way up to the top right and then it was a long ways back down. Having a way to drop from there could have been handy, but that's minor. The speed of eating the ice cream and the amount you could eat seemed to be well balanced. I never felt super overwhelmed by the amount of ice cream on screen. I knew I could quickly gobble it up and be fine. Having one button for using buttons, eating ice cream, and using the toilet was very simple to use, but it did cause some issues when you wanted to use the button and couldn't because there was some ice cream nearby that you were trying to eat. Maybe you want that as part of the game that you have to clear the ice cream before you can use the buttons, but maybe something to think about.

Infiltr8 by joe40001 2021-05-13T20:30:56Z

That's a pretty cool game.

The level-within-a-level concept was pretty cool and performed really well even when you got like 5 layers deep. I had mixed feelings on the last level when I kept seeing that there was more recursion inside them. On one hand, it's a cool idea, but on the other it just meant the game was going to be that much longer when I thought I was pretty close to the end. I think having the mazes be a bit simpler would have helped a bit with fatigue. Instead of being like 8x8 or whatever they were, the recursion mazes could have been like 4x4 or 5x5. I think the fatigue was mostly from the colours. Holding z to zip all the way out from the depths of the mazes was a lot of fun.

I'll be honest, I hated the red-green colour scheme. The animated effects on the wall looked pretty cool, but it just needed some different colours. Showing your trail from last level was quite handy so I didn't have to solve the mazes again. The mazes weren't really hard per se, but the low contrast just made it really hard to tell where the walls were.

Not game related, but it's pretty easy with Unity to build your games to be played right in the browser. Then people can just click the link and the game plays, no need to download anything. I found a video that explains how to do it in a minute: youtube.com/watch?v=fNLpZVNDQqc&ab_channel=N3KEN

Your game really fit the theme well. I thought there might be some games with the level inside a level thing and I think you executed it really well.

Depth Gauge by Solrun 2021-04-29T00:55:03Z

@not-as-artistic Thanks for the feedback. If only I had like a day or two more to work on it. Sorry about the sound stuff. It sounded fine on my headphones, but then I played the game on my brother's headphones and it was so bad. I added a mute button in case it's really bad for anyone else.

Depth Gauge by Solrun 2021-05-10T21:33:20Z

@neverautomatic That's pretty much all I was going for with this game. Deeper and Deeper being going down and going in. And I thought a rope zip-line to get out would be fun.

@andre-sadie I did want to make some of the deeper layers more maze-like with the indestructible rocks, but didn't get around to it. With the rope, I was trying to be clever so that I wouldn't need an anchor point at each tile, but I think the rope outsmarted me and my clever assumptions weren't so clever.

@inno Gotta go deeper and deeper.

Depth Gauge by Solrun 2021-05-14T21:15:52Z

@hunter-x The canvas has a Canvas Scaler component that I just had to change 1 field to scale with screen size. Who knew it would be that easy? I did have an idea for a 'boss fight' where you have to dodge a giant wurm in the depths while mining the last ore.

@superpokeunicorn I agree it's a bit too cluttered. I think I just got too used to it that I kinda forgot it was there. The rope was my favourite part. I wish I could've made it so you could use the rope to rappel down deep holes; that would've been cool.

@joe40001 Ya, I should've made the messages disappear over time. The messaging system isn't as robust as I'd like so I felt keeping the last one up was safer than having it disappear before you read it.

@fargred I've been getting a bit of feedback about how it's hard to make out the layer in front of you. I'm not really sure how I could've done it differently so you can see through it easily, but can still see what's there if you want to dig some stuff towards the camera. The effect is less pronounced when you get deeper in the z direction. Then you only have 1 layer in front of you. For the first ~4 layers, you can have 2 layers in between the camera and you which looks muddier (The layers move towards the camera and the camera moves closer to the player as you dig in is why you see fewer layers deeper in). And regrettably, the first ~4 layers is where you'll be for 90% of the game. Sorry, I'm just rambling/thinking out loud. Thanks for the feedback; it lets me think about these things.

@super-hadoken I'm not an artist so I'm quite proud of how well some of the art came out. I was definitely trying to make it feel claustrophobic so it's great to see it was working.

@someone There's a speech bubble that pops up when you first are able to dig in teaching you how, but I do agree it's not super noticeable so I could have done a better job on teaching that.

The UI: I didn't realize this was such an issue. I just assumed everyone would play it in fullscreen so I just made it work for that. I've fixed it now and it was easier than I thought it would be. Wish I would have fixed that 2 weeks ago, but thanks for bringing it to my attention all the same. Maybe I'll remember how to fix this for next game.

Implosion by Caveman54 2021-05-10T20:48:10Z

This game is pretty sweet. Cool concept for a puzzle game. The levels were all pretty hard, but fair.

I think level 5 and level 3 should have been swapped. Level 5 just teaches how you can move the blue layer without moving the red layer so well (because that's all you can do). The current level 3 doesn't do as good of a job because you have more options so you struggle with it a little bit, then get to level 5 and it's too easy because you already learned that. A lot of the levels came down to just solving the lowest layer because it didn't affect any other layers. So I really appreciated the levels where you had to keep the lowest layer around a little longer (because there was a key across some cracked tiles that you needed a higher layer to allow you to move over there). But at the same time, it is nice when you can get a bot to an exit so you don't have to think about that layer anymore. I imagine that's a pretty tough line to walk when designing the levels and I do think you did an excellent job on level variety.

Others have said that the game is a bit too slow. Once you figure out you need to move right 3 squares, it still takes you like 30 secs just to input the solution and watch all the robots move. I found level 10 was really bad for that because you were just moving in long straight lines for much of it.

The game art was really well-polished with pretty much everything having a little animation. I do wish the walk animation was bit better. It's probably the animation you notice the most, but it didn't seem to live up to the quality of the other animations.

I think this was one of the most imaginative games from this theme and you executed it in a great way with smart puzzle designs and a lot of polish.

Deep Space Beat by Srynetix 2021-05-10T21:23:24Z

The way new tunnel sections pop in was a cool effect. I really liked all of the visuals for the game. The ship looks cool as some smoke in a cage. The text effects were nice too how the text was different colours for emphasis and how it waited a second before displaying your insult for dying. The space background with the twinkling stars gave a nice space atmosphere. I'm pretty amazed at how the visuals are so simple- just lines and colours, but then it looks so clean.

My first run was pretty hard to see what was going on because I just happened to steer up near the ceiling and it made it hard to see the rest of the tunnel. When I stayed closer to the bottom of the tunnel, it was a bit easier to see where I was and where the enemies were so I could dodge. Maybe it would be easier to see if the camera tried to stay in the center of the current tunnel segment instead of sticking to the player. Then you could see the whole scene. If that makes the game too stale, you can kind of combine the 2 approaches and have the camera center itself halfway between the player and the center of the tunnel. Then it would show most of the tunnel, but still follow the player a little bit.

It would be nice for the movement speed to be like half of what it is. I found I was trying to tap a direction for only fractions of a second so I didn't fly outside the tunnel. It would probably feel better if I could hold the button for a second to get the same distance. I don't think moving half as fast would really be a downside. Most of the time I was tapping a direction, then not pressing any buttons for a few sec so I think you would still have enough maneuverability.

ROAD TXTR by congusbongus 2022-10-14T23:00:22Z

I really like how the menu works as a tutorial. You can test out the buttons, cycle through some texts, and it forces you to learn how to drive the car to start the game - smart.

All around great entry. There's a lot of polish in stuff like the progress bar at the top, the end game status report (3 correct text, 5 wrong texts, 4 pedestrians killed), and your car damage sprite gave good feedback on stuff to let you know how you're doing. Usually these small things are invisible to the player in a game jam so I'm glad to see them here.

I like the swapping of modes that happens in your brain when you get a text. I found out I'm terrible at texting and driving half the time I would just ignore traffic to focus on the phone and the other half I would just completely guess when answering the phone. It's neat to have the car on the left side of the screen controlled with my right hand on the keyboard and the phone on the right controlled by my left hand.

Gold Collex Hex Defense by Solrun 2022-10-12T05:29:46Z

@juxipolo You drag gold onto towers to build them. So if it isn't doing anything, it's probably already built. I apologize that it isn't very clear.

I released a new build with some tutorial text on the side. It also kinda fixed the fps. Instead of starting with a large grid of hexes, they pop in over time so you can start at high fps and watch it go down over time. I think I'm just looping over large amounts of things every frame and I could probably optimize that.

Gold Collex Hex Defense by Solrun 2022-10-14T21:05:07Z

@booremi Thanks! Taking a while to get it seems like a common issue. I didn't do a great job of making things intuitive. The enemies can hurt you by grabbing your gold and running away, but it doesn't really hurt you that badly. I thought about making a lose condition if they stole enough gold, but never got around to it. I've found it's easy to make your game not frustrating if you just don't let players lose (and less effort for me).

@baylock I wouldn't've called my graphics catchy, but at least they seem more serviceable than I thought. I like the 10s rule to spawn gold around towers every 10s. I do want to add some more complexity, but ran out of time. I might keep working on this game though. I'll be sure to check out your game. At least playing the games of people who comment on my game is the rule I usually go by in game jams.

@lepoulet The game isn't super intuitive to figure out how to play; sorry about that. The boss maybe has too much health, but I wanted to have it have high health so the player will try to build more towers to build up their economy by investing gold into new towers to produce more gold. And to get in a sort of flow state of just generating as much gold as fast as possible. The game is largely an idle game like a clicker game more than a real strategy game. So I kinda needed the boss to have high health to help players get to that experience.

Gold Collex Hex Defense by Solrun 2022-10-14T21:07:04Z

@cslupius It works for me on Firefox so I don't know what to tell you. I'm using Firefox on windows. Maybe it doesn't work on mac or Linux? And it is weird that Firefox has slightly lower performance. I start at 60fps on chrome, but 57-58fps on Firefox.

Gold Collex Hex Defense by Solrun 2022-10-14T21:42:06Z

@mossieur-patate 1. I've been liking Bevy so far. Although I am so much slower at using it as compared to Unity. If I had made this game in Unity, I probably would have got twice as much done. But I have almost 10 years of Unity experience. 2. I guess I can link to the windows build. I just figured people would play online if given the option. 3. Agreed. I was struggling trying to figure out how to fit a tutorial in and putting text was quicker. 8. Boss appears when you build 10 towers. 9. No sound. 10. Ya, I could probably make the tutorial less wordy. Good tutorials take too much time to make. I should really practice them so I can make them quickly in a game jam. 11. The leash range on dragging gold is intended. If your mouse gets too far away, the gold stops following. 12. I made the victory screen so you knew it was over and nothing new would happen, but you could continue if you wanted to see how many towers or how big of a pile of gold you could make. It's also easier than figuring out what to do at the end like roll credits or whatever. 13. There are a ton of entities in this game. And it is very poorly optimized because I don't really know how to work with Bevy yet. Each gold is checking the distance to every other gold so they can push each other away and fill space. So that is O(n*n). Each enemy is checking each gold to find the closest to try to pick up. So that is O(n*n) too. Your mouse is checking every tile each frame to figure out which one it's touching every frame. Just loads of looping through every entity every frame because I'm using Bevy wrong. It's kind of a showcase of how powerful an entity component system can be even when you code it very poorly. 14. Agreed. The enemies are only really a problem for the first 30s of the game and then after that you can largely ignore them. 15. X and G are pretty useless. I originally had the idea that the map would be much larger and spaced out. So you'd want to grab gold from the spaced out towers and bring it to a central location (a gold pile) for storage and then use it later. But you can just build new towers and store gold in them by paying for them bit by bit over time. The gold piles can cut down on lag I guess. 18. That is the intention, but I didn't execute it super well.

This is very much a prototype. My main idea for this game was a tower defense game with an emphasis on the economy aspect - how you get gold to make towers. Usually you just kill enemies and they drop gold and then you spend it on new towers. So I made the towers produce gold and you have to use your mouse to deliver it. And by having gold produced on the open land around towers, it challenges the conventional wisdom of tower defense games to stack all your towers together. The expanding map was actually a gamechanger in a way I wasn't really expecting. It used to just spawn at full size at the beginning. So you could just place all of your towers in optimal places from the get-go. With it growing over time, you have less space so you can't always place towers with 6 empty tiles around them to maximize production. Which was more interesting. Plus the growth looks cool. Sounds - I'm not great at sounds and I was kinda worried that they would get very repetitive. If I had something for gold spawning it might get really annoying when you have a bunch of towers spawning gold. So I didn't bother with sounds.

Thanks for all the feedback!

Gold Collex Hex Defense by Solrun 2022-10-14T21:45:50Z

@mossieur-patate I am aware I should give feedback on other peoples' games. I took like a week to figure out how to make a web build with Bevy so I just recently published this game so I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

The fireballs are what your towers shoot at the enemies. They are pretty low contrast so they are hard to see if you're not looking for them. (which is also fine if you don't notice them because they don't actually rotate to face where they're moving so they travel backwards sometimes)

Gold Collex Hex Defense by Solrun 2022-10-14T21:48:43Z

@congusbongus You left click to place an unbuilt tower, then drag gold onto it to pay for it and build it. Then once it's built, you can't drag more gold onto it. Drag gold by just moving your mouse, you don't need to press any buttons.

The unbuild towers have a health bar below them showing how much gold you have drug onto them. Once it's full, the health bar goes away. So it there is no health bar, that's a fully-grown tower and you don't need to feed it anymore.

Gold Collex Hex Defense by Solrun 2022-10-15T22:27:55Z

@congusbongus Red squares are enemies. They come in to steal your gold. Orange squares are gold piles. They just store gold. glenugie is right. In the screenshot at the top of this page, you can see a bunch of gold, 2 towers that have been built and one tower that hasn't been built yet (the short one to the left with a red progress bar (I should have made the progress bars gold instead of red because they measure gold, not health)). That's weird that you need to use shift on a mac.

@glenugie My main goal with this game was to just produce as much gold as possible and then just build more towers to make more gold just for the sake of it. The boss should be clearer. I guess I forgot it's only explained in the itch description.

Teleporter Malfunc-ten by glenugie 2022-10-16T10:28:06Z

Oh man, that was a really cool game. 10 seconds was just the right amount of time for switching between the modes. With a lot of games, the switching things up every 10s just interrupts you, but here it just works. I think having the 3 modes really helps keep up a bit of variety. It's just enough time to get you to switch your thinking up for this specific zone (like where can I stand to line up multiple ore), and then 10s is up and on to the next. I especially like how you heal over time at home so it plays with the 10s you have there. You can't always get a full heal and trying to shop cuts into your healing time which is really cool. Lowering your attack speed on some upgrades felt pretty bad. Some of the upgrades felt like you were losing DPS with how large the slowdown was. I just wish there were other tradeoffs that didn't make it feel like you were losing so much power. I only saw 1 rainbow power up in like ~200 teleports and I don't think it counted when I grabbed it. I must have been full and it was just deleted? So it's unfortunate I didn't get to see what the rainbow upgrades do. I was really impressed with the level of polish on stuff. Like the huge variety of enemies and little things like having the UI fade away when you are behind it was nice to have. Or having each area be the same as when you left it so you're just teleporting into the same mess again was cool.

Minigulf Gods by Joror 2018-05-13T03:47:26Z

I got a hole in one on the first hole so I'm basically the best. I like the art of this game. I really love how you did your water. The texture looks great and the slow movement of it is nice. The water currents are very clear and intuitive, but still in a fairly subtle way. They still look like they belong like they're just markings on a map.

The music and sound effects really fit with the tribal island theme.

I've played the last mission a couple times and finally beat it without getting -7000 points. I feel like I'm still a little confused on what I'm supposed to do. I feel like if I send my archer islands in to attack the volcano, they just die and I lose. It seems like it's just easier to attack the small islands, put 1 villager on them so I can control them and then try to fire them at the volcano for damage. I suppose what I'm most confused about is how the villagers swap islands. It seems to be a max of 1 villager on the small islands and when the 2 archer islands are nearby, they share villagers. When the archer island goes near the non archer island, they steal all the people. So the time I got a good score, I just went and stole the one island, packed it onto my archer island, then flung my 2 archer islands at the volcano.

Ｘｘ_ｓｋａｔｅｂｏａｒｄｉｎｇ_ｘＸ by MrChippy 2018-05-11T23:03:43Z

How is this the best game in the whole jam? It isn't fair.

The music is perfect. The sound effects are perfect. The art is also perfect. I would have liked the ground texture in the second and third stages to tile a little bit better. The first level ground texture and all the backgrounds tile fine. The Arizona Iced Tea is pure art.

Each level is unique. Each level is fun. Each level is exactly the right length so when you fail, you don't go back too far, but it not so short that it still requires some skill so you can't just beat it by dumb luck (usually). The design of the different challenges is great. Everything is extremely clear so you just know what you have to do intuitively. There are a number of times where the targets line up perfectly so you can get snipe two at once and it is very satisfying. There's never a boring part of the level. Each level you get to do at whatever speed you choose to do it at (except for some spots where you need to exercise some control). This isn't your mom's platformer. This is exactly outside the tape-your-right-arrow-key-down-while-you-go-grab-a-drink genre of other platformers. There should be an alternate mode where you can only shoot after you do a 360 in the air.

It is just plain fun to mash left click to get moving and to do a 360 every time you get bounced into the air. The humour in this game kinda reminds me of these videos:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOvWhQwC3oY and:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnNemokPEIQ

Having each level be skippable is such a nice thing to do in a game jam. I didn't use it because that would have robbed me of the experience of one of the levels. But it's nice to have nonetheless.

Zumaster by infinitycore 2018-05-01T17:58:34Z

The physics of everything was great; hitting an asteroid with another ball and having it get pushed around by the force was very satisfying so kudos for that. The spaceship movement was stellar as well. I felt like I had exactly the right amount of control when I needed it, but could also drift around in a way that felt great.

I think it could have been really cool if the when the asteroids collided with one another, they could get matches and clear for you (that might be really hard to do and then maybe the game would play for you, but it would still be cool). Playing again, it actually seems like this might already be the case, maybe it's just very rare.

Good job on the visuals. The spaceship showing the next ball to be fired looked great and was intuitive. It's a great way to give you all the information you need in a minimalist way. The balls too were great. Each of the icons looks like they belong (it's not like square, triangle, cat for example). Having the colour coding and the icons was handy because I would get a little confused by the yellow diamonds and orange moons at a glance. I'm not a huge fan of the different texts. The score text is different from the main menu text and the cursive is a little harder to read. The pop animation of the balls was quite cute. A small score popup when you cleared balls would have been nice. I never actually noticed the score tracker in the top left until I saw it in the screenshot here.

Sound effects were good. Nice pop sound, shoot sound, and spaceship thrust sound. The music was a little bit exciting which sort of captured that epic feeling of flying through space and dodging asteroids, but chill enough to not make you anxious the whole time. Except right when you load the game; you get an annoying pop sound if you're wearing headphones.

@GenTel That isn't the only way to clear the board. Getting down to, say, 3 green and 3 purple, you would just need to get one colour, then the next in order. Which is only (2/6)*(1/6) I believe. A possible way around the nearly impossible clear chance would be to eliminate a colour from coming up in your spaceship once all of that colour is gone from the asteroids.

Jeff From Accounting by Almax 2018-05-11T21:01:18Z

Cool game. The art is incredible. I like the style of having larger than life office furniture. Gave it a cool absurdist vibe. Having glowing red eyes on enemies made it super obvious which things are bad. The text above their heads was very clear. The impact red splashes was nice. The enemy health bar/name with the delayed red text was really cool. It helped to show you when you missed a letter. You would feel like you're pumping out letters, but if their name didn't keep turning red, you knew you had missed a letter.

The sound effects were great. The typewriter had awesome typing sounds, a satisfying lock and load and firing sounds. I would have liked the enemies to have some sort of sound. It was super creepy advancing into an area, not knowing if you were going to get flanked by a killer desk fan.

The main loop of pressing r, typing, then hitting enter and unloading on the enemies was very satisfying and fluid. I was only getting like 5 fps for some reason and it was still playable. After restarting my computer and trying again, everything worked fine.

It would have been handy to be able to heal somehow. I tried typing out health, and it would have been cool if that worked. I failed one time on the very last enemy because I had gotten down to 1 H left. The hitboxes for the enemies hitting you was a little bit large so it was kind of frustrating when you were trying to take a corner to skirt by them and they still got you.

All in all, cool game. I found myself actually wanting to look around a bit (once I checked my surroundings as to not get flanked) which is more than I can say about most jam games. I even restarted my computer to try to get more than 5 fps because it was a game I wanted to try out. That may sound minor, but I mean it as a compliment.

Harvest Royale by neverautomatic 2018-05-13T03:28:44Z

That's a pretty chill game. Nice to play when you're kinda tired and just wanna relax and just farm. You've got a nice little run animation and the sprites for the plant growth are very clear. No ambiguity about what stage of growth a plant is at. Which is nice so you don't have to wonder if the plant is ready to be harvested or not. The little particles when you hoe earth or sprinkle some water or when the plants grow are a nice addition.

There's very little downtime in this game which is cool. While I'm waiting for my plants to grow, I can go hoe some more plots and water them to get them ready. Near the end, I was trying to get my farm large enough that I could just continuously run around in a circle, watering the plants that had just grown, but I beat the game before that happened.

FetchQuest by radmccool 2018-04-25T05:27:42Z

That's some cute art of the main character. He's got a nice run and a cool hat. The grass looks kinda off because of the dots of a different shade of green. Maybe it could have kept the same one colour style of everything else by having two greens make a checkerboard pattern? (like how they cut the grass on a baseball diamond or most other sports fields).

I think if you're going to have the player run back and forth to fetch a bunch of items, it would've been nice if there was some variety like the different objects were in slightly different spots and if it was a bit shorter. Of course, the shorter the walk, the less likely you are to forget what you came out to grab so maybe that takes away from the memory aspect.

FetchQuest by radmccool 2018-04-25T20:21:54Z

@radmccool The level changing every time could be good or bad depending on how you did it. If it was super random, then the player would have to try to find the items again. It would feel less like taking endless trips to the store and more like searching a new area every time. A little bit of randomness might help in between the roads or something. If the route was mostly the same every time, but the orange platforms were a bit random. I don't think changing the level necessarily equals more fun. I think more fun would come from the movement being more fun. If there were more mechanics than just running around like jumping or something it could break up the monotony of just running from one side of the screen and back. I do think the monotony of running back and forth plays into the theme of the pet sim. I think it's supposed to feel like a chore taking care of the cat and chores aren't inherently fun. So that's just how that works. Maybe if there was a disconnect between the player and the character like the player is getting annoyed with doing the cat's errands endlessly, but the character in game is super happy to do all this work and hums and skips to himself it could add some humour. Basically, I don't think randomness is the only answer and making the movement more fun by adding more things to do or things in the world to interact with (like running through moving grass, chasing birds, kicking leaves) could add a bit more fun to running around.

Pet sim to be rewarding: I think giving the cat and character a personality would go a long ways towards making it more rewarding. Like if the character talked to the cat a little bit when he brought a toy. He could just ask the cat "Is this what you wanted?" and place the item on the table. The cat could then just pay little mind to the guy bringing him something new. Then the cat would push the item off the table (as cats do) and request a new object. No matter what you bring the cat, he wouldn't be happy (which is how the stereotypical cat is), but the character would just want to please the cat so he would go get something else to try to please the cat. You would need to be careful with this to not confuse the player. The player would need to know that the cat was just being difficult and not that the player made a mistake.

Ya, that's about what I was thinking for the grass. It fits the rest of the art style much better.

Pseudonarrative Dissonance by Baby Dino Herd 2018-04-25T05:47:06Z

How you did the setting was very nice. The dark alleyway setting with the fog, the streetlights and the moon giving off the monocolour light all sold me on the noir theme. I can't say I really understood what he was talking about most of the time, but the words I did understand and the structure of the narrative immersed me in the world.

Underground by Solrun 2018-04-25T06:34:07Z

@radmccool Nothing really does damage, hitting stuff just adds to your count. The game is more about intrinsic value than a set of rules. It tracks your time so if you want to lay down a blazing fast time, you can. If you want to crush as many skeletons as you can, you can rack that number up. If you want to try to take as few hits as you possible, go for it. You can even try to see how many fireballs you can catch if you'd rather grab them instead of avoid them.

Aggroculture by primitive-concept 2018-04-25T07:10:25Z

The idea that you replay the same level over and over, but it changes based on your previous runs is a cool idea. It was nice to fly by and see the plants that I had planted on the previous run. The main mechanics of the game take some getting used to. I didn't really realize the controls until a few days in when I remembered there were other buttons and started pressing stuff. The upgrades for the weapon feel a little bit off. The weapon you start with feels a little too slow. A lot of times I would miss an enemy by a hair and then not be able to maneuver into position and fire again before he killed me. The first upgrade fire rate felt better. The fire behind you felt pretty useless and then the triple fire felt way too powerful. I found a good strategy was to just get to the triple shot as soon as possible, then you could just sit in the middle of the screen and mash fire and kill everything. I would have like slightly faster attack speed for the base gun and just more enemies to kill. Maybe less spread on the triple fire so it doesn't cover the whole screen.

I think throwing down seeds and growing them with the blood of your enemies was a great idea. The only problem I had with that was how hard it was to water them. I found it rather difficult to kill the enemies over top of a specific plant (It also seemed like blood from enemies in the top half of the screen wouldn't drop to the seeds). Mostly I would just try to cover the entire floor in plants to have a higher chance to get one of them to grow. I think having like double the amount of enemy spawns might help that problem a bit.

I didn't find the speed upgrade or using my own blood to be very helpful. The speed upgrade just made me run into the floor and ceiling more, thereby killing myself. And the blood sacrifice was too great of a risk of accidentally killing yourself. Both of which lead you to go back to using the basic gun again. I think blood sacrifice may have been a bit better if you lost blood when hit, but didn't immediately die. Then you would have more of your blood being spilt and a little bit less punishment (losing your upgrades).

The pixel art is pretty nice. The blood splatter animation is pretty satisfying and the parallax effect on the background adds some depth to the background.

All in all, I think it's a cool idea and it was fun to play.

Skaart And The Cursed Woods by Kwisarts 2018-05-11T21:39:20Z

It's neat idea for a game. Your art is quite great all around. I love the colours of everything. The way the slots spin is quite satisfying how the things seem to drop faster once they're past the center. The animations are all good and quite subtle so they are easy to miss. The forest sprite guys have a nice flowy animation, the muzzle flash and gun smoke are nice for the gun. Very cool attention to detail there.

The sound effects really fit for everything. The bullets and bomb sounds had a lot of weight to really sell their impact which is great.

I think a potential easy fix for the slot being 2/3 bad would just be a add a smaller bullet. It would be functionally the same as the bullet, but just do less damage. That way, if you pulled the small bullet, it would still suck because it wouldn't do much, but it wouldn't suck as bad as the bomb killing you or the coin doing nothing.

The amount of downtime in the game made it very slow. You have ~5 seconds in between every shot and even when you start up the slot machine, it seems to be impossible to select the first 2 items in the list. You said this is a bug so I guess that's that.

Seems like most of the bad parts of this just came down to time constraints so that's too bad. I know I've totally missed stuff that becomes painfully obvious once I release it and people comment on it.

The gun gave me the feel of the sniper in Risk of Rain if you've ever played that game. It's a little bit of a different mechanic, but it does feel quite similar.

Devil's Playground by NullSpace 2018-04-25T05:11:05Z

Wow, I somehow managed to guess all 3 tricks on my first try. What are the odds? I was worried it was just going to last forever, but then it started getting faster. After a point, I wasn't even sure what trick I was supposed to be doing. Like I didn't know if what he was saying was the current trick or the next trick and my brain couldn't keep up so I ended up with 109 tricks. The second try is quite tricky when you change around the symbol. The symbol that used to be jump is now sing. I think that's more tricky than the first time around.

I like the style of the horns in the title page and how the menu fades in so you have a chance to look at the art. It seems like the menu and end game screens are a little bit higher quality art than the main game which seems backwards. Although, your eyes are locked to the top 10% of the screen on the commands so you don't see much of the rest of the game screen. Having the commands closer to the middle might let your eyes take in some of the rest of the scene easier. The music was cool, but it didn't really keep up with the mounting speed. An easy trick you could try is increasing the pitch a little bit over time to get the music to sound like it's going faster (maybe you do something already, but it was too subtle for me to notice).

Shoot bullets in my head while I play golf by FabianLC 2018-04-25T06:18:19Z

This game is really fun considering I can only play the first 30 seconds of it. The bullet hell elements are really great. The plane and the windmill have very unique firing patterns, but they are very predictable so they still feel fair to the player, but they are 10 steps past the basic "this guy shoots one shot", "this guy shoots 3 in a cone". I mean, it is borderline impossible for someone who isn't the dev to be able to dodge anything with the amount of bullets on screen and the move speed of the player. I'm not a huge fan of the pacing of the game. The movement speed is too slow (compounded by the terrain that slows you down more), the scrolling is too slow, and the difficulty ramps up too quickly. It would be nice if scrolling was more dynamic so if you manage to kill the first windmill quickly, you could putt up and gain some good distance without being hindered by the scroll speed of the game.

The art is fantastic. The bullets background texture looks great and it tiles well. All of the art matches. The ball rolling animation is cute, but subtle, your gold swing is very smooth and has some nice heft behind it.

The music is pretty catchy actually. It got me pumped up so that I kept retrying the game even though I knew it was impossible.

All in all, I would've really like to have seen more of this game, but I'm garbage so I can't make it very far.

Tactical Hydra by MacDoom 2018-04-25T04:55:44Z

This game is very complex. As such, it would be super handy to have all of the controls stay on the screen the entire time. It takes a few tries to get the controls down and figure out what all the buttons do. You have quite a few options at your disposal every turn.

I really like your art style. The lines around and behind your ship as you zoom across give the movement a great feel. The music and sound effects are also quite good and fit the game nicely.

Crane Command by Hyohane 2018-05-01T18:45:28Z

The art really sells the scale of your units. They feel like toys because they are so small in relation to the large glass bin they are in. The pattern on the floor is a bit much. I found the units get a little bit lost in it; there isn't enough contrast. The inside of the claw machine is a nice setting for this and I like your artistic choice to make everything feel so small. The arrow and square cursor above the active unit are nice to identify which unit is moving. The grid lines are also handy so I don't have to guess if a gap is 2 or 3 moves away.

The controls are a bit weird, but you get used to them. Thanks for putting up the alternate controls build because I don't have a numpad.

I think having little arrows telling the player where they could go would help with people understanding that you can move diagonally. When it's a toy's turn, there would be 3 little arrows (like the arrow that tells you which toy's turn it is, but half the size) in front of them pointing upRight, right, and downRight. And then once you've moved, these arrows would get an attack icon (like some swords or something) so the player knows the movement phase is over and now when they press a button, they will attack.

I also never noticed that I could use the mouse to see the stats of units. It might have been more likely for players to stumble upon this if the info was displayed right at the mouse (or on that specific unit's head) instead of in the top left corner. Then as you move your mouse across the screen, you would notice the popups. Individual health bars might get lost on top of one another. I found that I wasn't always quite sure if the unit I was moving was the one I was thinking or the one in the next row because the perspective kind of breaks down in the center. Other than the center, the one point perspective is very nice for spacing out the units to be able to see them without being all on top of one another and losing the little guys behind the robots.

Farmer's Delight: A Twin-Stalk Shooter by Dovakla 2018-04-25T06:03:05Z

I wasn't sure that the crops were ready the first time around. They were all glowing so I thought maybe they needed water, but then they got up and attacked me. It's very handy that they drop a few seeds when you kill them so you don't just end up with nothing if you mess up the harvesting the first time so good job having that safety feature in.

The enemy animations were actually pretty cute. They kinda dance around in a silly way.