Space Express by gmaker 2023-05-07T17:18:05Z
I like the gravity physics! It would be cool if there were more opportunities to play around with gravitational pull. It felt like I had to travel in a straight line most of the time to save on fuel.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → sudocoffee
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Overall | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥈 | 2025 | 57 | Depths | Topography | compo | 4.33 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥈 | 2025 | 57 | Depths | Topography | compo | Audio | 4.34 | |
| 🥈 | 2025 | 57 | Depths | Topography | compo | Fun | 4.25 | |
| 🥈 | 2025 | 57 | Depths | Topography | compo | Innovation | 4.70 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | Trailwork | compo | 216 | 3.19 | 2.93 | 3.68 | 2.95 | 3.28 | 3.04 | 3.65 | ||
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | The Glasses Shop | compo | 85 | 3.50 | 3.34 | 3.78 | 3.40 | 3.02 | 2.88 | 2.50 | 3.48 | |
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | Topography | compo | 2 | 4.33 | 4.25 | 4.70 | 4.41 | 4.18 | 4.34 | 4.18 | ||
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | Look | compo | 158 | 3.55 | 3.25 | 4.08 | 3.02 | 3.11 | 3.41 | 3.47 | ||
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Summoner's Dilemma | compo | 201 | 3.37 | 3.23 | 3.85 | 3.50 | 3.53 | 2.30 | 2.96 | ||
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Elevators Go Boink | compo | 264 | 3.27 | 3.23 | 3.80 | 4.33 | 3.13 | 4.09 | 3.33 | ||
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | Bricks and Fire | compo | 327 | 3.09 | 2.84 | 3.34 | 3.52 | 3.72 | 3.25 | 2.71 |
I like the gravity physics! It would be cool if there were more opportunities to play around with gravitational pull. It felt like I had to travel in a straight line most of the time to save on fuel.
Beat the game with 729/600! I almost wish the difficulty curve was harsher, and forced me to use the special effect type plants more often. I was able to survive much of the game on Sunflowers and Pumpkins. Otherwise it was a lot of fun trying out different plants and seeing how they worked together.
I spent the jam learning Godot too! I thought it was hilarious launching the parcel at light speed across the map. I tried minimizing the browser and dragging all the way to the right, and I was able to clip outside the map xD
I loved the puzzle, it was super challenging! The music is great and the graphics are really clean. I almost made it to the end, had that one pizza left at the very top, then rolled over and over and never got the pizza xD
It took a while to figure out the rules, especially around the clock dice. I'm guessing it would have benefited from a separate screen with more detailed rules written out. I also almost never used re-rolls. Most of the time, it seemed like a better deal to place my dice in empty spaces then re-roll all three, rather than risk losing one or two clocks. Not sure what the math looks like there.
Just a few things that I'd suggest visually:
* At first I didn't know you could place anything on the road -- I thought it was three different grids on the three grassy areas. Maybe you could have the grid overlap the road somehow.
* I didn't realize the houses were connected, since the food is still in a grid-like pattern (I treated them like apartment buildings). Probably could be described more clearly in the rules, but maybe there's something visual you could do to make that more clear.
* If this were a table-top game, you would know how many clocks you lose after rolling 1 or 2. It'd be cool to see that number in the top left right after rolling.
Otherwise though, I had a lot of fun, probably my favorite game I've played so far this jam!
Visuals are really pretty! One thing I might add to the darkness is a clearer indication of when it's about to cause the end of the game. That could be a progress bar of some kind, or it could be stronger / different effects to emphasize when the darkness is about to take over.
I absolutely love the main menu music @nrankin13! One note on sound: the collect-present effect was panned to the left, which sounded odd in headphones. Not sure if that's an issue with the source file or how it was added to Unity. More of a personal choice, but I also might reduce the hard pan for some of the soundtrack instruments, as they stand out a lot for a game-play background track.
For controls @Johnsensei, I would suggest making the hit-box for clicking / dragging the reindeer much larger (maybe 2 or 3 times the size of the deer), as well as adding something to indicate that the reindeer should be dragged. That would make it much more intuitive, especially on mobile.
Aside from fixing the presents going off screen, I'd also suggest limiting how far to the sides the presents can go. It's a little awkward dragging all the way to the sides on mobile, and it might trigger accidental swipe gestures for some phones.
The background objects should blend with the background more so that they're clearly differentiated from obstacles. It might be enough just adding some transparency / color filters.
Otherwise nice concept, and neat to see a Unity based mobile game.
Cute little game! After delivering the last mushrooms, it might be helpful to indicate that I need to go back to the large bug. I kept trying to jump over the ledge to the right of the map :P
Art is gorgeous, and the game feels really tight for a weekend of work!
Tutorial took a second because I kept selecting the Ears / Eyes when the head was missing. Also might make the fail / success messages longer, otherwise there isn't time to look across the screen and read them (and they're really quirky and fun). But other than nitpicky things, I have no complaints. I really enjoyed playing!
First tried on my laptop, and the frame-rate was so low I clipped through every wall and fell into the void xD
It's a neat game, feels really snappy to control (especially with the sound effects). I had to be quick about entering buildings, it was game-over if the guards saw me in one. I'd suggest it could use some way to know where you've been and/or need to go, so that you're not searching the entire map for the last present or two (since it's a pretty large map).
Pretty fun concept! I used a track-pad for double the challenge (or was just too lazy to grab a mouse). I liked that their horizontal movement slowed quickly whenever I'd accidentally fling them towards one side of the screen.
I didn't quite make the juggling connection at first. I wonder if there's something more you could write in "How to play" that hints at juggling multiple babies for combos?
I love the palette and style of the game! The puzzles are really simple, but the level layout always looks very natural. The only bug I found was in map 7, the first couple times I played it the leaves got stuck in the passageway. I might also give the player some way to view the controls during the game -- I got stuck part-way through and didn't know what the reset button was.
I love the visual and audio vibes. There are a couple points (especially the tree platforms towards the beginning) where it feels a bit random whether or not you stick the landing or fall off the other side. The wait for every recharge starts to feel a bit tedious towards the end, it might feel more fluid with a shorter / instant recharge. But otherwise, I thought the platforming was super tight and inventive, and I really enjoyed the concept!
Sound design here is awesome! I loved that every single sound effect had a pool of sounds that were randomly selected between. It sounded very natural (for a bunch of beeps and boops).
At first I missed the part of the tutorial that explained where to drop the cards, so it took a second to figure out where to place things. It might be more intuitive if the dialogue box got pointed out when picking up a card.
I played the web version. At first, I was pretty confused because I could travel straight through the ceiling and over the wall. I ended up flying into the void for a while (which was eerie in its own right). Also had the above mentioned issues where moving up was much faster than moving in any other direction, and the camera wouldn't cut up/down until I had flied a bit into that space.
Otherwise, I loved the visual and audio design. It's just the right amount of deranged and uncanny. The game-play was pretty simple, but the overall experience was really effective.
Super neat concept! The tutorial at the beginning was spectacular at teaching the controls. I had trouble getting any rank above poor, but you might be able to fix the difficulty issue with a slower depot timer, and maybe a grace period after a strike.
@sezdev -- Eh, I guess that makes sense! Didn't really think about humor one way or another when making the game, but I see why that could be pretty hilarious. Went ahead and added the humor rating.
@phlip45 -- Haha, glad to hear that! Cool to have a fellow godot learner.
Thanks all!
@gametrodon -- That was a side effect of A) boxes generating more frequently over time and B) combined boxes moving faster. Once the boxes are frequent enough to combine by themselves, the first one snow-balls and eats up every box in the game. Wasn't originally intended, but I was scrambling and didn't get much time to playtest :)
Definitely makes sense about the fire tool. I had meant to add some kind of target under the mouse while that tool was selected.
@johnsensei -- Not quite hand drawn, I drew it all in Krita with a pen tablet. But I definitely went for a hand drawn look.
@jk5000 I totally meant to add sound and music, but ran out of time. Maybe next jam :)
The tile placement should probably follow the mouse position -- I didn't realize at first that you could un-select with the right mouse button, and the tile placement was offset from the mouse, so selecting a new tile was a little awkward. Otherwise I like the cute visuals, and it's awesome that you got this put together in 6 hours.
I got through most of the game, and I figured that I'd seen all the mechanics and polish you could throw into a 48 hour game jam. And then I found the final boss, and was pretty blown away. Really fun take on the theme, thanks for making!
The HD surround audio and RTX visuals were on point! Honestly this is my favorite game so far this jam. Was nearly laughing out loud the whole time. I love games that experiment with unconventional mediums.
Playing it on Firefox (on Windows) has ~5 second pauses a few times a minute, so I switched to Edge which ran fine. Probably something wrong with how Firefox updates the address bar.
I'm extremely impressed that you made a compo game, in 3D, in VR, using Godot, and managed to make it look pretty too. That seems like a herculean feat.
I played on an Index and everything ran great. It took me a while before I spun around and saw the message board, so I wasn't sure what I was doing at first (normally you'd want messages like that to be oriented at the front of a player's playspace). I'm also not sure how to interpret the scoring. But otherwise I thought it was a cool 3D puzzle to mess around with in VR. Thanks for making!
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I played through nights 1 and 2, then attempted night 7, which went like you might expect :)
Rather than memorize the specific drinks people needed, I tended to take orders in a circle, then deliver drinks in that order (since they appear in order on the table). That stopped working though once the food table got added. I enjoyed the bit I played, and seems like it'd be a lot of fun with 2 players.
The sound effects were adorable, and the music was an absolute bop. I loved seeing the dancers moved back and forth with the music, it really set the mood for the crowded dance floor.
It's hilarious that band-aids act as shields for the cars. I don't think I would have gotten past this level otherwise:
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5 minutes and 54 seconds! There were a few mouse / control issues with the web build (I didn't try the other builds). Game was short and sweet, and it felt like I always had some direction. The line of masks were a super cool visual.
Music and concept were surreal. I didn't understand all the mechanics (not sure what the outlook at the end was based on), but it was cool experimenting with different setups. It feels like I got to progress through someone's life in some abstract sense.
I was able to get an ending outlook of -228 by always filling the grid with bad experiences (does that make me a terrible person?)
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Feel like I can relate this jam (running circles around code and not getting time to flesh out the idea). The map generation is pretty cool! I guess my tip in a pinch would be to make the map smaller with less houses so it's easier to finish, since there isn't much to motivate players after the first couple.
By far the coolest thing was getting to read about your process! It's super fascinating to see how something got to the place it's in.
It's fun playing around with the grabber physics, thanks for making. Not sure I'll recover from this one though:
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I never played the first one, but this was really cool! I love puzzles with novel mechanics where I have to learn new ways to think about things. The art and music (and that 100% theme xD) were really nice.
There's a bug that caused me to reset one playthrough (I'm on the Windows build). If you're in the Ribbon Customizer and make some changes, and then press Esc without confirming the changes, it will save the state of the ribbon buttons in the menu, but not save the ribbon itself. This can make it so that I'm no longer able to de-select any of the ribbons:
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It's definitely cool using the jam to learn new things. I agree with the comments above about pausing between levels and wanting to speed up the game. Have you tried increasing the Physics FPS under Project Settings > Physics > Common? That might help with clipping problems caused by speeding things up.
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.5/tutorials/scripting/idle_and_physics_processing.html
Woah, that was a whole lot of fun, and the prettiest game I've seen so far this jam. The way the music and mood shifted between the two dimensions was surreal. The only game-play aspect that didn't quite work was that the little creatures never got close enough to be a threat (since you have to circle around the room so much for refills). Otherwise it was really cool dodging bullets in slow motion while jumping between dimensions.
This was a fun little challenge, and the visuals are really hip! You did a great job tutorializing with the level design. It's cool trying figure out how my character needs to fit in tight spaces as he expands.
The title is hilarious, that's what hooked me to download :)
The music and sound design here are extremely cool! I love all the different march/tapdance sounds for different sizes of people. The only complaint (aside from the slow movement) is that I wish I could see which people were connected without having to click on each one individually. The puzzles were simple but fun to solve.
I stopped playing pretty soon after the tunnel showed up. It started to feel tedious, especially when I made the wrong move and had to restart the order. It's a decent concept for a puzzle game though, having the player pick up items in a specific order.
The space ship had a cool vibe!
Thanks for the reply! I hope I wasn't too harsh, it's seriously impressive seeing such a polished looking game in 3D for the compo.
When the upstairs floor was added, I ended up having to pick up that set of items four times before I got it:
* First try I misclicked the right mouse button and lost all my items. That happened a couple times during the game, so it should probably be a little harder to drop everything. * Second try I picked up the wrong last item (and there's no way to drop just one). * Third try is where the item order came in. I don't remember exactly, but I up picked up two dishwashers, a telephone, and something else which brought me to 205 weight, so it wouldn't let me pick up the last item. * Fourth try was a successful delivery :)
Those combined with having to crawl through the tunnel every time were what made it feel a bit tedious. So mostly bad luck on my end.
Otherwise though, it was a neat experience. I should have played a little longer to see the end!
I played through the full game with my eyes closed, and it's neat thinking about game design with sound only. I had to really learn each of the level layouts to beat them (the cavern level was the hardest).
I thought the instructions were clear and easy to understand. Only things that were missing without visuals:
* I had no way to know what level I was on (I cheated and peaked). * I sometimes forgot which sounds were which. The sounds mostly work great, but only so much you can do with 8-bit noises.
In any case, the game was a lot of fun. Thanks for making!
That was a hilarious trip, I loved every second of it! I think I found all 4 endings :)
I got it running for dreamcast
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It's awesome and hilarious how glitchy and janky this is to control. I got a little (or a lot) stuck a couple minutes in:
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This game has the coolest sound design of any game I've seen this jam! The music is a bop, and I love the dynamic planet-screaming effects.
The gameplay is fun, and really challenging to get the gravity right without destroying Earth. The only aspect I didn't like was how hitting an asteroid in the later levels reset all space debris. It was hard to predict whether I'd hit one, so it felt random whether my shot would go through. Otherwise though this was a really neat entry!
This was really fun to play. It's interesting how making good pixel art isn't the best way to make money, since you're trying to get the closest match (not the most recognizable match). I still tried to make pixel art anyway :)
Some of my 120 second masterpieces:
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Game is super cute! The enemies hit harder than I expected, but it was pretty forgiving if you lost all HP, so it felt like a good balance to keep people playing.
This was fun! I liked the tile-management aspect. Music and art are awesome.
One suggestion is to make the water a bit more visible. First run I had no idea what was going on, and had to read the instructions to figure out that tiles were slowly sinking into water.
2nd place :)
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Everything here is really cool! The voice over and background music especially have some Metroid-like vibes. I never figured out the 5 button puzzle, but I pushed lots of random buttons and he eventually let me through xD
I haven't parallel parked since I took a driver's test, so can't say I relate... but definitely captures something hectic about driving in traffic.
Awesome seeing what you came up with learning Godot! Figured out if I boop it once, I think it will always reach the goal eventually (based on math, maybe).
Audio is a boop.
The ending was terrifying, didn't expect that jump scare. I think the waving effect did a good job making the cave feel claustrophobic.
This game is brutal, and also my favorite game of Ludum Dare 54. At first I didn't read the instructions (usually a bad idea), and kept thinking I wished there was a checkpoint system, and also a way to pause the game so the cursor wouldn't move while I'm letting go. And it turned out both of these were totally built in.
I love how the laser gets louder the closer you get to it. And the visual representation is kind of perfect. Only criticism I can think of is that it's non-obvious that the seaweed is dangerous (since the bubbles are not).
Also ouch my wrist xD
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Neat little puzzle game! I got 153 seconds first try, didn't even know I was being timed :)
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Got to the end, though it took me a moment to find it. I wasn't expecting that wonderful view. Only complaints are that the table was really hard to get upright (so I could jump from it) and that the scanner was a bit of a mystery to me (it could have had better indication of what was actually scanned). Sorting boxes did start to feel tedious, but that was the point of the story :)
Music and visuals were super cool. All in all awesome job!
This was a lot of fun! Didn't beat it (not skilled at bullet hells) but it was 5/5 on theme, I really liked the use of space (it was so tiny towards the end). The music was awesome, and the cadence of enemies appearing on the screen was a work of art in itself.
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This game is very fun and very cute!
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This was one of the neatest uses of parallax I've seen in a game, and the game is gorgeous too. Only critique is that it was often hard to get the foreground where I needed it before my character hit the edge of the screen (resetting the parallax). Otherwise the controls were really smooth.
The Game Boy style graphics and audio are pretty slick. Have you ever looked into GBStudio?
This is a game after my heart -- I used to create custom AoE2 maps as a kid that I'd just fill with 100% forests, and sit and watch the NPCs try to chop their way through the forest. It's an awesome spin on the theme.
Took a few tries, but beat your high score :)
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On one play-through I tried deleting the initial TC for a quick market, but it didn't work out great. Seemed like having a constant stream of new villagers was a better strategy. For the 1569 score I didn't even purchase the Wheelbarrow and Treadmill Crane upgrades (I couldn't tell if the 1500 extra wood or the 1/2 time wonder were a better pick).
The atmosphere was on point! I got to the dungeon, but never figured out how to open the gates or avoid the monster outside (long enough to put coins in the chest). It could have used a little more instruction, as I wasn't sure where the inventory system came in, or how items worked. But it was super cool exploring and feeling lost in the level design.
I love the music, it's really relaxing to listen to. I thought the game was fun to get the hang of, and I love the way you had to work around the enemies blocking your way. It would be cool with even tighter corridors / other level layouts.
The art is cute! Occasionally I'd get a cookie stuck behind a wall and couldn't get to it, but overall the levels were fun to play. Someone mentioned above, but also wish I could repeat / select a level (and farm those sweet, sweet high scores).
The leaderboard was super cool, there aren't many Ludum Dare games with one. Got high score for level 2!
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The visuals are very cool. The game-play is a bit wonky and really punishing if you manage to let them close in. But it was fun trying to figure out a good strategy. Ended up making a corridor around all four edges so I could keep them trapped in the center and let them out a little at a time.
Beat your score :)
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Edit: but @ellaris did way better xD
It took a minute to realize I needed to hold x to get past the menu screen (mostly my fault). I love all the little visual effects! The gravestones are a neat way to ramp up difficulty.
I read the instructions before reading the description, so I wasn't quite sure what the house or fireplace did. Biggest suggestion for a full game would be some a tutorial + in-game descriptions you can read while you're playing.
Visually it's super unique. Not sure if you plan to keep the solid-color shading, but it felt a little awkward on the ground, since you can't actually see the terrain. I wonder if you could add additional layers (kind of like the sand next to the water).
Once you add music and some more features, I could see this being a really relaxing experience.
Finished in 518 seconds :)
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It was neat having to avoid the cursor while controlling the ship, I thought that was the most unique aspect of the game. Agree about having more damage indication, but otherwise the UI is really clean.
This is neat! A short and sweet resource management game. When I started out I had a bit of trouble figuring out what each of the icons on the right meant (even after reading the tutorial). It'd be cool if those also had rollover names or descriptions. Otherwise, it was cute, and I liked how I needed to be strategic about where I placed things to deal with the rising water.
This was fun! It's a really nice take on limited space, and interesting how "cheaper" items were always just as useful than their larger counterparts.
I think I may have found the max score:
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It requires restarting several times until you get the right RNG, as you need to get a potion from the old lady and a necklace from the shiny thing in the ground. After that, everything just barely works out to let you keep all of your most expensive items (although I got unlucky once with a 2x2 shield at the castle, and had to toss one of my items).
Nice project in Godot! The gameplay doesn't have a lot to give yet, I think because of a combination of A) the amount of time you have is static and B) there's no difficulty curve. If there's a next step for this game, I'd recommend looking in one of those two directions.
Otherwise the game looks and sounds really polished.
This game is extremely cool and addictive. Somehow made 10th at 1281 :)
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You have some wild art, but a lot of it is cut off on Itch. You might be able to fix by setting width + height in the embed options:
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This was a cool experience! There aren't a lot of narrative games made for the compo, so it's always refreshing to see something like that here. It was eerie seeing the subtle changes as you found more orbs. Sometimes the game felt a little slow for the orbs I had to loop around multiple times for, but that also added to the suspense. Art and music fit well together, and I loved seeing the splash of color at the end.
I remember you talking about this one, nice execution of your idea! It would be cool if it had more odd shaped blocks, I was able to solve all the puzzles without re-placing anything.
5/5 on theme, it's really cool to to throw tiles (and yourself) at enemies, and have to manage those tiles as level layout at the same time. The visuals are really slick. Only critique is I wish I had an explanation for multiple bubbles, I didn't quite understand what that meant.
Played through to the end, it was fun!
The visual design is awesome, I love all the pixel-3D effects. The text was sometimes hard to read because of aliasing during movement. It might help to keep the text from growing / shrinking with the character / scene.
Thanks @daniel-davis-music -- that's valid on the controls. I personally liked how the tank controls turned out, but the game around those controls was last minute and the NPCs make it really hard to have control over your character.
Haha thanks @nikolaj -- sometimes body parts would clip outside the box, I wasn't sure how to fix (or if I wanted to fix). But hell breaking loose sounds about how I programmed it :)
@defrag -- Yeah, the game was originally supposed to be a narrative game with some mechanical things thrown in, but I didn't really get to the content part until Sunday afternoon (the chat system took most of Saturday). The get-to-the-button-through-hoards-of-npcs quest was the best I could come up with at the last minute.
Thanks @killerb -- the elevator buttons were a last minute addition, but they definitely needed to be more visible. I'm split on highlighting the player character though, I kind of like the idea that you're just another person in the crowd (although the original story concept is missing).
@kasmilus -- Haha yeah I missed the chance for some killer elevator music! I started to look at music an hour before the deadline, but realized I didn't know my audio software well enough (and had never added music to a game in Godot before). So I skipped it and spent the rest of the hour fixing last minute issues.
@captaindreamcast -- Thanks for playing! I love games with quirky controls (think Katamari Damacy or Getting Over It), and it seemed like it'd be fun to have that in a crowded elevator. One idea I had to make it easier to keep track of your character was to let you talk any time with the space bar (so it'd show a line to your character). I also tried to make it easier to push NPCs out of the way with your character, but never quite figured out the physics for that. Just meant you had to wait for the NPCs a lot.
Thanks @jose-bonilla! Originally there were going to be more ways to get kicked out of the elevator ("lose the game"), so I based the fade on character position instead of scripting it. Works here most of the time, but means you sometimes get stuck listening to screams for eternity :)
@lincolnsalles -- Nah, the only controls are the arrow keys. I tried to fix the physics to make it easier to push NPCs around with the movement keys, but didn't quite get that working right.
Losing track of your character (especially while reading text) seems to be the biggest problem to making the game accessible / pick-up-and-play. Having the player blend in with the crowd was important thematically, but I have some ideas to balance that with making it easier to keep track of things.
Thanks for posting the explanation video, that helped me figure out the rules :)
The art and audio create some great vibes, and the concepts behind the gameplay are awesome. I liked the real time aspect. It added a lot of tension to a type of game that normally wouldn't that (maybe similar to a chess clock).
It felt a little tedious clicking all of the enemies whenever they needed to spawn. You might be able to get rid of a lot of those clicks if you did something like the following:
* Allowed the player to select a specific spawner as an active spawner. * Let the player select available spaces at the edge of a group of enemies, then calculate how the enemies move in a line from the spawner to that point.
That way the player would only have to click once or twice per enemy, but it wouldn't change much about how the gameplay works currently.
Otherwise, I thought it was a really neat idea and I enjoyed playing!
The large spans of black and white across the screen are really mesmerizing (although probably eye-straining after a little bit). It's a cool effect.
I was about to stop playing right before I found the finish (I wasn't sure if it even had an end). I'd suggest either making it shorter, or giving the player some hint that they're getting somewhere. Though... I guess my confusion did play into your theme, so maybe that was on purpose :)
Also didn't get to read all the text at the end, it faded away too quickly.
Otherwise it was a cool experience. It felt rewarding every time I found the light of the orb I sent flying away.
That was hilarious! I loved the sounds effects. I tried writing notes down, but really had no idea what was going on, so I just guessed at the end (3 out of 6). It certainly nailed the feeling of cramming for a test and knowing none of the material.
That was a cute little game. I almost quit the window before the twist at the end. Barely made it out of the tower in the last second.
This is cool! Almost like a cross between Breakout and Ikaruga.
I got the ball stuck the same way as mao above, there should probably be a limit to the ball's angle.
Cute game! I love all the stuff going on in the scene, reminds me of reading Where's Waldo as a kid.
Everything is untidy and hand-made, and I kind of love that. It feels like I'm exploring some weird universe where nothing quite makes sense. The shrinking universe theme is a lot of fun.
One small bug: if I lose and click Esc to go back to the menu, it doesn't reset the timer or start a new world.
This was a pretty hip game! I loved the quirky storyline.
I played version 3 with the SDFG control scheme (on a QWERTY keyboard) -- I touch type, so I needed to keep my index finger on F for the letters to make sense to me, which meant I was reaching over for G. But I found it comfortable enough to play.
If you want to use keys based on physical location though, it looks like Godot has a [physical_keycode](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_inputeventkey.html#class-inputeventkey-property-physical-keycode) property for keyboard inputs. That might bypass the need to detect what layout they're using.
I like the mechanics, it's cool having to think about camera angles to capture the right shots (kind of reminds me of Pokemon Snap).
One suggestion: at the start of the game I got confused because I was trying to take pictures in previous levels. It might be good to block off past areas or remove the old items if they aren't going to work for future puzzles.
Really impressive how much of this was from scratch! It's also really cool to see your process listed out, I love seeing what goes into making different games.
A lot of fun strategizing for a game with only 12 slots and 3 weapons! High score of 17622 after two attempts.
This was a well thought out, satisfying puzzle game. I got gold for all 6 levels, wish I had more to play!
I honestly thought the controls were fun! I think a WASD-to-move-in-that-direction scheme would have made the game less interesting to play. Instead, the tank-style controls meant there was less I could at any one time, so I had to strategize about what to focus on in a given moment. I liked the asteroid swarms (especially the massive asteroids), it was always a stop-what-I'm-doing-and-defend-now moment.
The camera felt fine when it was smaller in the browser (I played the GX version), but when I made it full screen it did feel a bit jarring. I think the problem was the low resolution, combined with how the pixels snapped to the grid during movement. I'm not sure what GameMaker has to adjust this, but if you had a way to make the pixels scroll smoothly across the screen, that might make it feel less jarring. The screen shake also might feel better if you limited it to foreground objects, but didn't shake the stars in the background.
I had to read the instructions in your description to figure out what was going on at first. That's a hard part to get right in a game jam though. Only other suggestion is that I wish I could see the score while I was playing. Otherwise I couldn't figure out how the score got calculated at the end.
6295 second try:
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Thanks for making this! It was cathartic wandering around the apartment cleaning things up. The art and lighting were simple, but really effective in setting up the atmosphere. One of my favorite experiences this jam.
Couple things I'd recommend for mechanics: * If the trash can falls over, it's hard to put it back upright. There should probably be something in place to keep in (mostly) upright. * There's no crosshair, which I think works well with the atmosphere. However, it also makes it harder to pick up objects. Not sure how you'd implement, but would be nice if it picked up objects in a wider area in front of the camera.
Bonus pic -- I found out you can make a pizza hover board by standing on one before picking it up:
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Super neat game! I loved the dynamic music system (and smiley faces), it really added to the experience. Only things I thought were missing were an explanation of the scoring system, and some way to know the level I'm currently on.
This was a lot challenging than I thought it'd be for something with so few tiles. I finished all the levels, great job on the design.
It's neat concept, even if you didn't get to finish the enemy part. I'd be interested to know what rules are running the cell logic, since it's a little different than the game of life.
One suggestion, the drawings sometimes obscured what was going on with the grid. Maybe the drawing could be placed in the background (behind the grid) on start?
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This was really cool! I soft-locked the game a few levels into the blue stages (seems to happen if I alt-tab out of the game while dead), but I got all the lanterns up to that point. Some of the levels were tricky, and I enjoyed figuring out strategies for each of them.
Some of the instant-recharge items were a bit redundant, since you could also fly through the air with short throws. Not sure if that was an intended mechanic.
Loved the art and sound, they were a real vibe.
I went through all the dialogue trees, I wonder if there's a way to get 12/12?
Anyway, I loved the art, music, story, atmosphere, everything. The spirit world was totally surreal, definitely the coolest environment I've seen this jam (honestly cooler than most games generally).
I used the Windows version on Linux (ran fine in Wine). The volume was too loud at the start, I had to pull off my headphones. And there was a piece of dialogue that was cut part way off. But otherwise didn't run into any issues.
It's a cute puzzle game! There should probably be a reset-level button -- there were a couple points I got trapped and didn't have a way to sacrifice my last clone, so I had to reset the game. I also got stuck on the 10th level, where a bug wouldn't let me select the top two squares. Is there another way to solve the level?
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This was a really groovy game! I loved the two music tracks, and the world was bizarre and ethereal (in a good way).
At the split path on the third screen, I went left first, and was a bit confused by "shoot staff with j" since it J didn't do anything (and I didn't know about the staff). It would probably help to signal the player to go right there, or hide that message until the staff is picked up.
There was at least one time where the black transition between screens caused me to fall into spikes. Not sure what engine you're using, but maybe the game can be paused during the transition screen?
Otherwise it was fun flying around levels with the dragon, and I enjoyed how the game introduced new mechanics over the course of the game.
Bonus pic, you can get trapped in the ceiling if you're up there when the dragon disappears :)
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Did Learning and Practice modes first, and it seemed a lot easier to just use my character as a sheep dog. Then I tried Hard, and... that strategy stopped working xD
Controlling the dog felt pretty natural after a bit of play. First time got all 30 sheep in on Hard mode by sneaking around the sheep and blasting them from specific positions, but trying to do that with speed was a lot more difficult. Got a best score 2:35 (all 30 sheep):
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I see someone was ready for a few different themes ;)
There were so many different cool mechanics working together here. I loved how the digging was it's own kind of puzzle (since you couldn't dig up). One suggestion would be a way to know what level I'm on, or some indication of where the difficulty curve is at (although I couldn't tell if the difficulty actually changed or not).
My score second try:
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Game is tricky with a trackpad, but that just added to the chaos. Fun concept, and the art was wonderful, I sometimes just let them cause chaos to see what they'd do.
Nice submission, the sigh whenever you fall off is priceless. I forgot at first that you could shoot, so I had a bit of trouble getting across while being knocked around by a dozen ravens at once :)
At first it looked like a puzzle game about figuring out how to use the cat-command-line. I missed what the [command]:[object] line was referring to, and kept trying to write arguments with a space between them (like I would on a normal command line). Didn't figure it what I needed to do until I read your extra descriptions below.
Otherwise, it was cute helping people find the cats they wanted. I liked the one about Luna missing her sister (it took a moment to figure out I needed a female cat there).
This was a really beautiful game. The character's slow, methodical walk felt so serene, I wish I could have stayed there longer. Probably my favorite experience of the jam so far.
The scroll wheel movement was a bit tricky on a laptop trackpad, but that just added to the tension. If there was a gameplay thing I'd change, it would be making the target / shield intersection a bit more clear for the moving targets at the end.
pres2300 and andrekennedy above mention auto-walking, but I personally think auto-walk would have made it a worse game. I enjoyed feeling like I was the one moving with the walking stick, rather than just watching someone on screen.
This was a neat idea, and it was fun to experience juggling work-life balance as a skeleton. It took a lot of random guesses to get to the end (gave her the ring). It might be nice to have hints / shortcuts / checkpoints / or something else so players don't have to go through the same dialogue more than a couple times.
I really liked the concept (though I didn't get all that far). It seemed like the main idea was figuring out the best action to build based on A) the limited words available to you on the left screen and B) the limited info you have on the right screen (since you can only see part of the map).
The way the left screen seems to work now, is that the player can generate as many words as they want by moving around pieces, and the limit comes from the limited space the player has to store pieces. It's a bit hard to keep the screen from filling up though. Part of that comes from the randomness of which piece you get. The other part, though, is that you gain a new piece every time something is moved, so forming a sentence tends to add a net positive number of pieces. Maybe some other mechanic could be in charge of spawning new pieces?
There were a lot of cliffs / walls on the right, and I wasn't sure if the character ever interacted with them, or if they were just decorative. Overall though, the art and aesthetic were awesome, and I loved how the random maps looked.
This was a cool experience, and I loved the vibes. It was hard to understand at first what was going on or what needed to happen, but it was an awesome (if unintended) moment when I realized that I was one of the blue initiates moving around the world.
I got down to me an one other initiate, then I got eaten by the demon.
@mdotedot -- Sound would have been great (along with some actual playtesting) but I over-scoped and ran out of time. I'll try to get to it next jam.
@zowie -- Thanks for playing! I agree the balance is definitely off. I can barely get to the fourth floor, and only with trickery around "copying" almost grown plants (I'm able to get 60 per floor that way). I have some theories though about getting to floor five.
@vegeo -- It was cool putting together gifs for the after-Friday, after-Saturday, after-Sunday versions. Coming up with new ways to survive was my intention, so glad you enjoyed that part of it.
@camd67 -- The clock and orb affect the whole room, but that only matters if you summon new clocks and orbs (or lose them on later levels). That's a good point though, it could certainly be more clear in-game.
@arcolm -- Didn't think about it while developing, but Baba Is You is one of my favorite games, so I'm sure there was some subconscious influence here. It probably looks similar because of the outline-less, blobby sprites.
@candlesan -- Thanks! No intended tricks, I kind of just threw mechanics together and forgot to playtest for balance. If you can find a way to get 60 mana on every floor though, that should just barely get you to floor four.
@rob6566 -- I thought about pause mechanics after the jam was over, I think it would have benefited the game a lot (along with a much lower mana drain / curve).
@happyglitch -- The clocks and orbs should disappear at the same time-of-day you summon them on the previous floor (for example, summoning a clock at 8:00 on floor 1 will make it disappear at 8:00 on floor 2). It wouldn't surprise me if that's bugged though.
@saprina289 -- Thanks! I knew there were issues with the game after I posted it, but writing that dev log helped me drill down and figure out what those issues were. I also love reading other people's development processes, and thought it'd be cool to write my own here.
@nazorus -- Sorry it wasn't clear! Picking up items is the only way to interact, which does different things depending on the item:
* Placing a seed on a pot will cause the seed to grow over time. * Picking up a fully grown seed will eat it and regain mana. * You can summon items from the blue platform if you place the item you want on the red platform. * Some items affect the game by just existing (you can manipulate the quantity with the summon mechanic).
It could definitely use better descriptions in-game though, as well as some tutorializing.
Thanks @myse -- found that bug after release, the entire game gets duplicated if you press space more than once at the very start.
I played through and won the first time (and got the sans-serif win screen), and just had to go back and see if the lose screen was in a serif font (spoiler: it was). Hilarious concept, and fun to watch all the letters battle each-other with parentheses and bleed in asterisks.
This was a seriously awesome puzzle game! The audio and visuals were a vibe, the puzzles were all satisfying, and I loved the little melodies on the flute. Flying through the air in the last room was kind of magical.
Also found speedrun strats:
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This was a neat mechanic. I liked how I needed to use spatial intuition to figure out where to send the bridge, and how it always ended up a bit twisty. I also liked how it zoomed out at the end to show you the whole course.
My only criticism is that the camera movement speed was low, which made it a bit hard to control with a trackpad.
My 10 tower course:
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I don't think I'm ready to start level 100:
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I got over 1,100 is that a high score?
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This was fun, and super stylish. It was a bit hard to predict exactly where I'd end up after a kick, so I usually ended up holding the opposite direction as soon as I started kicking. Not sure if that was the intended style of play. The Scarecrow tutorial at the beginning was perfect.
Ran into an issue at the start where I zoomed in with the scroll-wheel without realizing it, and couldn't see anything on the screen (maybe a weird Unity default). Also didn't realize you could place multiple little dudes on a single cauldron until I looked more closely at the screenshot you posted.
Otherwise, the visuals and audio were a bop, and it was pretty fun pushing summons and monsters around to protect the circle.
The pixel stretching and dithering for this game are awesome, and I love the 4-color palette. The music really put me in the mood for an adventure.
The gameplay itself was neat, if a little random at times. The best strategy I could come up with was --
- Always ship, because the extra research doesn't seem likely to pay off by the end of the survey.
- If an affinity for the most expensive category is known, choose that affinity.
- If an affinity is known for other categories, and those affinities lean towards one side, then choose the opposite side (to decrease the chance of drawing those categories in favor for the more expensive category).
- If an affinity is known for other categories, and those affinities lean equally in both directions, then choose the affinity for the more expensive category.
The only real critique I have is that the mini-game could have been more challenging, or more dynamic than a boolean outcome, since it took up a lot of the gameplay time. Otherwise, it was a cool vibe seeing the dwarf descend into the depths while the light slowly faded around it.
Only got #5 on the leaderboard. I didn't know how to get the second survey bonus ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
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@jimbly -- No problem! I tried the new version, and I think it's an improvement all around! It's a challenge to get the 4x bonus, and the minigame is a lot more tense when I'm always right on the line between death and a 4x bonus. The weights having more influence did give a stronger feeling of control over the outcome (which is great, if that's what you were going for).
The swap of goals (between money and dwarves) is interesting, and probably an improvement, because it makes destroying the exotics more important. The $4500 goal makes the game a lot longer than it was before, and maybe too long for the amount of content in the game, since each round is pretty similar.
Ran into a weird bug on the second planet, where it occasionally set the safety to zero for an instant loss. It mostly only happened while I was straddling the safety line, which meant I sometimes couldn't safely get the bonuses.
@jimbly -- First planet I had (roughly) one $10 exotic and three $30 exotics. I got all four survey bonuses, and a 2x bonus most of the time, and a 4x bonus occasionally. I only lost one or two probes. I started with an all-ship strategy, and then used a few dismantles towards the end. I don't remember the affinities, so I'm not sure why it took that many rounds ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Tried a second time, this time doing an all-dismantle strategy (seemed better to know the affinities early, since I'll need the survey bonuses anyway). Lost one dwarf, and mostly got 2x, plus a few 4x. I hadn't realized before that the average values go up, does that happen whenever you get that particular exotic?
Still took 27 dwarfs, but I have a screenshot this time --
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@jimbly -- Glad I could help! I think it's fun picking apart mechanics and seeing a game develop like this.
I must have missed the tutorial, or the language it used didn't make sense to me when I first read it, so I didn't understand the split between DW and AFRS until just now. That makes things a lot easier (and probably why the other playthrough took me 40 probes).
The new 4x mechanics also made it fairly easy to 4x almost every time. New pic in 15 probes (and even overshot by a bit) --
Screenshot_20241012_132131.png
If anyone's looking for emulation info, the [emulation wiki](https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Pok%C3%A9mon_mini_emulators) is always my goto source. I got the game running on the PokeMini Windows executable on Wine on Linux.
Booting it up, it's really impressive for something made from scratch for a game jam! If the ant could get a bit closer to the edges, that might make it easier to avoid unwinnable situations (by giving more options to the player).
My high score:
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This was a neat! The music was kind of a bop, and it was fun how it sometimes played at double speed when you enabled it. I enjoyed drawing the stage as I played, although I never figured out how the boredom meter worked.
My solution to expanding the tardigrade population:
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Don't have much to say, except that I finished the game, and it's unhinged and totally awesome for it. Even the console text is great --
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This is super cute! Kind of Katamari Damacy vibes, but with plants that can eat you and a fixed camera angle. It feels like a complete and polished experience, which is pretty rare for a game jam game.
This is a really cool little adventure game (with time travel, sort of?). There were so many details, like the seamless music transitions, or the various parallax effects, that didn't stand out but added a lot to the overall experience. It was cool seeing the entire story told without a single word.
The concept here is really cool, like a cross between pipe mania and a rubik's cube. The early levels were a bit harder than the later levels, just because they were less likely to have the ideal pieces I needed. And the game could have been a lot shorter (for a game jam environment). But it was cool getting the hang of shifting pieces around to build my setup.
My strategy for each level:
- Step one, block the entrance so the beetles don't get in my way while I'm configuring the map.
- Step two, locate all the straight horizontal pieces. If there aren't enough to fill the width of the map, then I'll have to add 4 corners for every two spaces I'm missing. There were a couple times I had a three-space-gap, and had to use 6 corners plus a vertical piece to fill it.
- Step three, build the structure I need, but offset by one so that it's easy to shift it in place, but still keeps the beetles out.
- Step four, shift everything in place, and put on my sunglasses, because my beetles are going home for dinner tonight. (⌐■_■)
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This was a neat game! I got maybe a half a dozen waves in, and lost to the crazy birds with the bombs. It was satisfying flinging the slimes all over the map, and I liked that you're always multi-tasking on offense and defense.
The music and art is great, and I especially love the title screen music. It's such an awesome vibe, between the clusters of soft notes in the background filling out the scale, and the soft, sporadic drums. And then the English horn comes in and tops the cake.
Super cozy! Only time I had to interact was when I noticed they were all sitting around, waiting for coconuts. Otherwise it was just nice to relax and watch them to do their thing.
The sword mechanics were a lot of fun! The first time through, I was wondering if there was a penalty to farming the animals. And then I got to the end, and the score was based on number of rounds to complete. Oh well, I guess my farming empire will have to size down a little :)
After realizing that, the game transformed into something partially about sword fighting, and partially about resource management and deciding when to cut losses, which was a cool dynamic. Best strategy seems to be buying as many pals as possible for the first couple rounds, then maxing out offensive stats to finish the game.
Got 21 my first try, and 3 on my second:
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The game was fun! There was something really satisfying about running around the house squishing tiny bugs. I loved the screen shake every time I stomped, it's such a simple and effective visual device.
I loved the intro cutscene. Kind of reminded me of making movies in Kidpix as a kid, where it'd record you dragging a bunch of sprites around the screen.
The gameplay was fun. I like puzzle games with physics, and this one had me thinking a lot about how to get the character from point A to point B.
Once you get to rabbit platforms, it does seem easy to run into soft-lock situations, since there's no way get rid of structures without the gold platform. Example below (pretend the double-jump area isn't there) --
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The singing is charming, I like how the vocals fade in and out when you step on and off the platforms.
I kind of love typing games, and this one is pretty unique. Reminds me of the old Tontie games from Eyezmaze. The sound effects and screenshake are perfect.
"Kiosks" is now one of my favorite words. High score --
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That was a really unique (and hilarious) way to control the character. The wrench was OP (not in a bad way), I got to stomp hoards of bugs as fast as I could click. And then it ran out and I stomped through the floor :)
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The way the world expands as you get deeper into the cluster of shapes is mesmerizing, and I love how all the lines and art start to flutter and align to the grid when you get really close. It creates a really chaotic mood. Floating point imprecision as an art style is something I've never seen before, and it's awesome.
Only the second game of yours I've played, and its an total riot like the last one, my top pick for humor. The extra voiceovers after the dialogue are priceless.
Tried getting the game set up on the Flycast emulator, and it worked, but it didn't have the voice-overs and the music cut out after playing for a few seconds, maybe an emulator issue? Dreamcast is a console I plan to pick up someday, if I do, I know what I'll be loading up on my giant stack of old CDRs.
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This game has incredible style and atmosphere. The transition in the music when the void starts approaching is perfect.
It took a lot of experimentation to figure out how the signposts work. It would be nice to see an explanation in the description above (like holding right or jump to go farther horizontally or vertically). But once I had a handle on the controls, the game felt beautiful to control. The gliding was really satisfying, especially when I could manage to swoop over a platform to keep my momentum going.
One thing I might change about gliding is to allow for a steeper descent. The couple places with pillars coming down from the ceiling were a little awkward, since there was no way to fly around them. It also might increase the skill ceiling a bit if you could make quick, tight swoops downwards for faster acceleration.
There are a couple places where the signposts were a bit tricky to use. The first signpost on level 3 I always had to use a double jump from a swoop to get over the spikes, but I missed it 90% of the time (not sure if I'm doing it wrong). Also, the first signpost on level 4 could be a bit closer to the right edge of the platform so the sugar-glider doesn't hit its head on the ceiling.
Otherwise, I had a blast playing through the levels and racing my high scores. Got "legend" for the last three, but had trouble getting it for level 1, not sure how I'd improve that more than I already have.
My scores for the leaderboard:
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Who's this "Daniel" going after my scores??
My updated times:
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Would like to mention that this has been my favorite game to play this jam, certainly top in the fun category. Learning to make tight swoops around objects, or drop and start flying again at the right moment, it just feels great to control, and the skill ceiling is really high, so it never feels like I've reached a dead end for improving my scores. Would be cool to see this as a full game some day.
This game has a super unique visual and audio style, and I like the core gameplay loop. Especially how you have to strategically decide where to place your lightning bolt (?) since it randomly changes direction.
Only issue is that the difficulty ramp could be a lot higher and faster. I got to level 5, but it didn't seem much harder, and it took a while to get there, so I let the mountain take over at that point.
Otherwise though it has a super cool atmosphere, and I enjoy the simulation game-of-life type thing it has going.
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I actually thought the tank style controls were this game's strongest point, especially the lack of strafing. It made it so that every confrontation had to be approached a different way, since taking cover was really difficult, and that added a lot of variety and tension to a game that would otherwise just be a point, shoot, and cover kind of thing.
One thing I might change is to add a bit of hit detection behind the bullet. Otherwise, the bullets spawn on the other side of the enemy when they're right next to you.
The music and graphics gave the game a really cool atmosphere, and I liked how the music was understated enough not to feel repetitive after playing for a few minutes.
This game was tough! It always had a specific solution in mind for each puzzle, but was flexible enough to leave some wiggle room in the way you moved creatures around to clear the traffic. Really decent puzzle game!
Also, the sax was epic, I'm impressed (I played bari back in high school).
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Game was cool, and I love the soundtrack! The church bells in the distance added a really neat atmosphere, even if I wasn't quite sure how it related to snails :)
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It was so satisfying to see the little guys pop up in the air, jump over obstacles, and push things around. A lot of fun to play, even if there were only two levels to solve.
This is an absolutely lovely little experience. Especially on a laptop trackpad, there was no way I was going to be able to save everyone, or more than a handful of people. So I just had to watch on as almost all the humans ran over the cliff, and select a few to keep alive. The art, text, and music are simple and really effective. I like how limited the pickup range is, makes everything feel a little more futile.
Only thing I could think to add is a fullscreen button.
Sorry you didn't get to finish your original idea. The 3D thing you did make is cute, and I got the robot to balance the ball on its head --
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This game had vibes like nothing else! Had one of them "achieve" death, and I didn't know what to do with the dead body until I saw the cannibalism upgrade, and knew what had to be done.
Ran into a (possible) bug where one of the treasure spots showed up at the shoreline (half under the waves), and I couldn't get the aliens to dig there.
5/5 on the cute visuals. I love the little view into a big world feel the game has.
The controls aren't listed anywhere, so I had to experiment to figure them out. It was also awkward using the mouse button to swing the sword, since otherwise the mouse doesn't have any affect on the game.
Otherwise the rules were well telegraphed, and the character felt good to control. Was there gameplay you had in mind for the mini window other than just a visual thing?
Neat little civilization builder. All of it made sense to me without a description, except for the research bar, which I figured out about half way through was tied to the number of villagers at home. It was cool figuring things out though and watching my population grow and scurry about the map.
I liked that I could look both horizontally and vertically. Only being able to see the top or bottom of the stalk helped it feel taller than it really was.
Towards the end, I recalled all 38 of my busy villagers back to town for a huge meeting. The word? "It's time to summon the giant eyeball in the sky." They all left in a swarm of bodies to join the other workers laboring at the stone. It only took a minute or two. And then...
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I loved the old school adventure game vibes. The humor and charming music really brought in the mood, and it was so fun all the little hidden ways you could get juice.
Didn't quite get all 100, but pretty close?
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I loved the absolute chaos of having 100s of them flying all over the screen chomping everything in their path and saying nom in unison. Kind of an awesome experience.
At one point I traveled far enough that I stopped seeing anything, and I wasn't sure if I could make it back. Are the soldiers/corpses generated infinitely in each direction, or do they stop after a certain point? If it's the latter, it might be good to have a barrier of some sort.
Played through all the levels, and it was fun coordinating between the three characters. I especially love that color palette, how did you end up with those colors?
Wasn't expecting "do do do do, dooo" when I saw the cover art. Cool vibes for a short little game.
This was a fun little simulation. It seemed like maybe eating a lot of food at the beginning was actually detrimental, since you're essentially removing your own pest control. I chose spider every time, but the spider race was never quite successful. It's lonely being the only spider on my face /╲/\( •̀ ω •́ )/\╱\
It might be nice if the game made sure creatures didn't start in an overlapping state (to prevent an instant loss condition). And there could be a bit more differentiation between worms and demodex (they were hard to tell apart on the small screen embedded into the Itch page).
Otherwise, it was fun just exploring the face and seeing the bugs do their thing.
This was a really cool game! The low-res pixel art is gorgeous (same as your last game), and I love the otherworldy vibes the game gives off between the craft-able creatures and alien mounds of pixels.
My contribution to science --
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I enjoyed the game! It was satisfying running over hoards of bugs with the vehicle, and there was a nice variety of bugs to kill. The Lady Bugs were the hardest (once bugs started coming from multiple directions), since running into them stopped the vehicle's momentum. It's also cool seeing games limit themselves to a small number of inputs, it tends to make games that feel fluid to control.
I was caught off guard a little bit for wave four when the phone said they were coming from one direction, but didn't mention the other directions they were coming from. Not necessarily a bad thing, just an interesting surprise when I heard the bugs start chomping.
It's awesome that you had time to add a full tutorial (with camera panning, even). It was a little long, mostly because the text stayed on screen for a while. It might be nice to have a way to skip through the text, though I'm not sure how you'd do that and still keep it a one-button game.
I died to the final hoard, but it was chaotic and fun to watch.
It's a neat concept having the NPCs following the cursor around in a train and using that to fight enemies. It was a bit grindy, since I spent a lot more time gathering than I did fighting. That could probably be fixed just by making things cheaper and giving units more health.
The 2-pixel-wide sprites were really cute.
The Spirited Away vibes were lovely! And the mechanics were fun and chaotic. At one point I tried grouping them together in the left corner to prevent them from stepping into the boiler, but by the end I was mostly picking up and throwing rocks as fast as I could and to pass them to closer boilermen.
I couldn't quite tell at first what the bar at the bottom of the screen meant, or if I wanted it higher or lower. If that's supposed to represent overheating, maybe it could change color as it gets warmer / cooler?
My high score:
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Fun, simple game. I liked the sound effects you used.
(Edit: won the game)
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The level design here is awesome! I love how well it tutorializes each mechanic before adding complexity. Got stuck at this level though, not sure what I'm missing here:
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I didn't look at the hint, but I did look again at the level and figured out a way to build the path I needed. Was cool the way you had to manage the lower half of the screen to make it work out.
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This is awesome! I've always wondered about rendering things using subpixels (outside text, which a lot of systems render at the subpixel level by default). It's neat to see that action. Almost like tiny, 1x3 pixel art. All the creatures moving smoothly across the screen creates an effect like I'm staring into the abyss of my computer screen, and seeing something that shouldn't exist.
The microtonal music is great. Using something less than a half-step totally fits with the vibe of using something less than a pixel, and the sound tickles my ear in just the right way.
Really one of the coolest things I've seen this jam.
The gameplay feels unique, but gets a little tedious once you're controlling all 10 characters. Othwerise, the story and characters are really adorable! I murdered them all at the end, and then replayed to get the good ending (although I'm not sure what happens if you split between the two endings).
Don't think I've ever played a checkers-adventure-strategy game before, but this was awesome (and challenging). I stocked up on egg pieces and loved seeing what came out each time. The line art and colors for the boards and pieces are gorgeous.
Before plants get added to the tank, some of the corpses are heavy enough to singlehandedly deplete aquarium health, and it made things a little confusing until I figured out the mechanics. Not sure how attached you are to having the biomass & corpse weight have a hidden relationship, but maybe the game could prevent overweight corpses from appearing for the first contract selection.
Otherwise, the idea of a secret aquarium body disposal agency is kind of brilliant. It was great watching the fish devour humans in under a second by the end of it.
The game has really great vibes. Terminal emulator port soon?
I didn't read the description beforehand, but the game got a lot more interesting once I realized that each bullet fired was another point. The best strategy I found was to rope the red and black (o o) into the middle and circle around them continuously to rack up bullets fired. And also make sure I never got too close to the edge so they wouldn't spawn on top of me.
The main obstacle was dodging the blue (o o) because they didn't move much, so roping them into the middle with the rest of the herd wasn't possible. In that sense, how good I did was somewhat tied to the ratio of blue to red (o o) I got in a given round.
Anyway, got second (⌐■_■)
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Neat game, I really loved the sound effect when he falls off the edge.
I like the concept a lot! Almost like a choose your own adventure: you choose what part of the story you want to see, and you don't get to see the rest of the field, but that's alright because that's part of the experience.
There wasn't a whole lot to see the bugs do to fill all 15:00 hours in game, so the hours probably could have been a bit shorter. But otherwise didn't feel like it needed much else than you put into it, and I enjoyed the experience.
Starting with names --
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Grug eating our Ox foreshadowed a pretty grisly journey ahead. We stopped at a town or two along the way. And then we came to the terrible realization that the world ahead had been gobbled up by some terrible force --
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We made camp a few times out there in the void. And then the human army reached us, and made sure we never saw civilization again.
Anyway, Oregon Trail but goblins is such a mood. I would like to call out the the movement mechanics for hunting -- the circular strafing felt really good to use, and I'm not sure I've seen anything like that before.
Between the shader effects and wild hand draw visuals, this is by far the prettiest game I've seen this jam. It was a magical moment when I got to the top of the hill, picked up the blob, started to walk down, but then started floating over the treetops. The boxy, lined sky is such a cool look.
The sound effects were a lot louder than the music, so I often had to adjust my volume before picking up one of the blobs. But otherwise the music was my kind of jam.
I placed the blue blob and purple blob (from the top of the hill) on the pedestals, but I never quite found the pink blob. Do you have any hints for that one?
This was awesome, and more tense than most horror games I've played (not that I play many horror games). Every time the "player" got the split-ball upgrade, I got a small adrenaline rush as the meteors started raining down.
Always felt like I had a path to dodge if I was fast/accurate enough, rather than feeling totally random. It was nice touch to have the paddle (almost) always stop a little before the ball gets there, to give the player a little time to adjust.
Got into a situation where it seemed like it might have been a soft lock (the ball was bouncing a few times in the same corner at the same angle), but there was enough randomization somewhere to break it out of the loop. Also had one situation where the ball swept across the top of the paddle, causing an un-dodge-able squish. Maybe it should only detect a squish when the paddle gets hit?
This one's a whole lot of fun, definitely my favorite game this jam so far.
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The game looks like it would be a twitchy action arcade game, but it plays more like a puzzle game the way it has you figure out the best selection of upgrades, as well as carefully choose the best place and time to use your attacks. I liked how the music got more upbeat every time you entered a level, and the puppets on a line of pixels, it created a neat vibe.
Got all 33 --
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Hey @galactical, that sounds a bit like the texture issue I was having before releasing the hotfix. Are you using the v1.1 update?
@galactical -- Also, I had a blast using Love2d. I've mostly used Godot before this, and always felt like I was fighting the way Godot wants to do things. Love2d feels much more flexible, and Lua has been a refreshing change of pace for me.
There should be a purple orb that shows up, and reaching that is what gets the checkmarks. If the orb's not there, then something's not right.
@tetrergeru -- Best I've ever gotten is 12, so I'm not actually sure if 16 is possible ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
I could definitely use shaders to speed things up (and run it on the GPU), but just learning love2d by itself was enough for one jam :)
@nicole-a -- It might not be possible to get all 16, but a couple hints are that sometimes you have to choose a character to sacrifice before other characters can succeed, and that the bricks can be useful tools.
@satless -- That's the opening screen, you should be able to continue by pressing any key on the keyboard (as long as the window is focused), but let me know if that's not working.
@satless -- Thanks so much! It's the first Ludum Dare (out of 4) I actually found the time to add music.
@henk -- The idea actually was for a top-down perspective originally, until I combined it with a different idea I had for the first-person perspective.
@wubbaduck -- Thank you so much! It certainly feels like a cool idea to explore and polish more, and there are some parts of the renderer I never got to use that could do some interesting things with perspective.
@oddballdave -- Thanks! I actually did manage to get all 16 on Wednesday ([pic](https://github.com/sudo-coffee/ld56/blob/main/submission/all_16.png)). But that single round took over an hour of intense solving. Not a puzzle for the faint of heart.
@samuli -- Original idea was to start with one blob, and then have a cloning device (or something) in the level to generate all the other blobs. Didn't quite make the cut though ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
@captaindreamcast -- Thank you so much! The experience of having to wrap your brain around 16 different perspectives was my main interest here, so I'm glad people enjoy that part. I plopped the boxes down as a way to "desync" the blobs, but they're not easy to use for anything practical. More advanced strategies also require paying attention to how far every blob is from the lava.
@nrankin13 -- Wow, thank you so much! This is certainly closest I've come in a jam to turning the jumbled thoughts in my brain into something tangible. I have more ideas for the concept, so I might consider expanding it sometime.
@milq -- Thank you! I actually used Linux (EndeavorOS/Arch) almost exclusively to make the game, but love2d only comes with a method to distribute binaries for Windows. Other systems have to install love2d and run the ".love" fine, or else use something like Wine.
After a few tries, I finally had a single survivor:
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I think it's really cool that all mechanics are hidden from the player. It makes this experience feel colder, just because you don't know when you'll succumb to the cold or hunger, or what your limits are. I had that one fly remaining, for the last 15 seconds or so. It felt really tense, and I felt more connection to that fly than I do in the majority of games I play.
Honestly one of my top games this jam so far, easily 5/5.
3D is a cool look for a game jam, but definitely a lot of work :) The thing you did release is great though. The flea noises, music, and paper theme really give it a mood.
I played through all the levels, and I think the second to last level (where it has walls of vines you have to weave between) was my favorite. The last level was fun too -- I only had 10 followers most of it, so I had to be cautious about keeping just enough distance so that they lined up between obstacles. Not being able to see most of your followers creates an interesting dynamic where you have to predict where your followers are and move accordingly.
The art and music create a really wild atmosphere, I like what they're doing.
Tried speedrunning, got under 30 :)
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This is a lovely little game, the different yells were really cute, and the jokes are on point (or on comma). There was a nice difficulty curve to the aiming, especially once you had to start aiming between lines.
Also, I see someone has an opinion on the Oxford comma ;)
The art here is lovely! I got to the win screen, and everybody got food, but especially cat :)
I loved the sound effects, they were hilarious! Someone mentioned balance, but I wonder if it would help to have a score aside from just a win-lose condition? That way you could have a secondary condition where you have to find the best strategy to make the most points.
I tried playing through the game with chickens-only, pigs-only, cows-only (plus two pigs), and a mixed strategy:
- An all-chicken strategy doesn't work at all. The 2 net blood doesn't deliver nearly fast enough to keep up with the gradual suspicious increase. However, the Chickens seem potentially useful for maxing out the early game, when you can't fill all the pins with pigs or cows.
- The all-pig strategy just barely worked. I bought the two upgrades, and made sure not to replant my pigs when the suspicion got around 80%, and I won with about 96% suspicion.
- The all-cow strategy (plus two pigs to pay for the cow) worked a lot better than all-pigs. I bought all three upgrades, and ended the game with only around 75% suspicion.
- For the mixed strategy, I was able to get the suspicion level down to 68% for the win, by starting with a pair of pigs, then a second pair of pigs, then adding cows as fast as I could (and also buying one upgrade). Ended the game with one cow and a pig to just barely reach 500 blood.
Seems like the ideal strategy for lowest suspicion is to start with pigs, transition early to cows, and then use some mix at the very end to reach 100% blood with as little margin as possible. Not sure if there's a different strategy you'd use if you're going for speed rather than suspicion, maybe all-pigs?
I guess all that to say, the game was balanced enough to have possible reasons you'd use each of the animals (maybe excepting the chicken).
I thought the visuals were awesome. All the attacks had their own epic look to them, and it added a lot to the feel of the game. I just barely made it through alive (or at least one human did) --
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I liked the visual style, and the game was fun, although I'm a relatively fast typist so it was pretty easy. Some of the levels had obstacles like puddles, did you have gameplay for those in mind, or were they just meant to be visual?
I finished the game, but the mechanics were really tricky. Part of it was that I never figured out how to consistently make the creatures transform in mid-air. Often they would stop in the air, but fail to transform and then keep falling.
The other part was that accidentally throwing a creature on a ledge usually meant restarting the level. This wasn't a huge issue for the levels you made, since they were really short. But you might be able to make it more forgiving with some sloped surfaces to get the creatures back to the player (mini-golf style).
Otherwise though, it's a fun concept! Throwing and seeing the creatures roll around the room was really satisfying, and I liked visually how they all jumbled together in the player's backpack.
I had a little trouble figuring out the controls at first, because I tried grabbing the bugs by holding space, and releasing the bugs by releasing space (instead of pressing space again). Maybe there could be more indication to show when you're holding a bug? The game could also use a difficulty ramp of some sort.
Otherwise though, the game is oozing with style! I love the beat, the fabric cutout monster, and the dynamic face.
I never figured out what any of the cards did, and the only game I won was when I just used the left-most card every turn. The most mysterious thing, I think, is probably what happens between turns (like how meat gets increased on any of the objects, or what "opponent" "attack" "guard" and "buff" mean, or what the in-game-total is).
Otherwise it's neat getting a random selection of cards and having to figure out the best path forward, and the art style is awesome.
I've never played a steeblike before (I only play stevelikes), so I certainly didn't expect steeb to look like that from the thumbnail at the top of the page. It was fun controlling all the characters at the same time and figuring out how to get them where they needed to go.
I thought the earlier stages were stronger than the later stages. First several introduced new concepts to solve one at a time, while the later stages mostly reused the same concepts without introducing new puzzles. Still fun to drag steebs around the room either way.
Only played a few of the songs, but I liked the beats and vibes. ~~I'd suggest adding a bit of leeway to hit a note before it reaches the bar (even just shifting the music over by a few milliseconds). Otherwise hitting the note exactly in time with the music has a 50/50 chance of causing a miss.~~
Edit: Tried it again, and I think maybe it does have some leeway built in. Maybe it felt odd since there's a whole note of leeway after the beat, but almost no leeway before the beat. Otherwise the maps felt good to play though.
This was fun! I played through the "harder" difficulty, and there were a few fairly distinct sections of the game with their own feel to them:
- The first five minutes of the game, I almost didn't level up at all. I think because of the higher difficulty, the enemies were grouping together and shielding the enemies I'd already damaged, so it was very rare that I actually killed one. I just circled around the map, making sure I kept enough distance from the cluster. Eventually there were so many enemies, the game was skipping every other frame (which made the movement slightly wonky).
- Around minute five, I made it to level 3 and got the explosion powerup. Then for the following minute I just started blowing up enemies in groups, and leveled up about 20 more times until the giant cluster of them was gone. It felt kind of epic.
- The last four minutes got progressively more hectic as the enemy rate increased, so there was a lot more dodging and a lot less circling the map.
- Last 15 seconds were the final boss, but he was quickly desposed of.
Didn't get hit once (though there were a few close calls).
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I like the visual idea. I gained energy for a little while, but nothing happened. Is there a win condition?
Really challenging to wrap my brain around, but once I got the hang of things, it started to make more sense how to move things around. I ended up mostly going for every other column (since the shorter columns are easier to fill), but that probably lost me some points:
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Since the game is randomly generated, I'd be curious if there's always a solution for every column, or if there are cases where you're forced to sacrifice a column. Is the generation fully random?
The art is really good, similar vibes (and color scheme) to your last game. Also, the 3x3 version in your logo is super cute.
The way the text skews is really effective at creating that wrenching feeling -- it actually feels like I have to skew my eyes to see correctly. And I've had my share of medical visits where I go away feeling like something's wrong but nothing's been solved, so I feel some part of what it's trying to say (even if I've never had the exact symptoms).
Only critique I can think of: sometimes text buttons would randomly get placed behind other text buttons, so I couldn't read what it said. Not sure if that's intentional, but maybe hovering over an option could bring it to the front?
Otherwise it was a pretty interesting experience. Thanks for sharing your story like this.
Really polished puzzle game / experience! It's cool how much puzzle variety you got out of just changing the starting pieces. And it was an epic moment when the mirror-cracking tower broke all the boundaries for the first time.
I thought the game did a really good job at tutorializing how it works without explicitly describing it. It felt cool to figure all of that out for myself, but was gradual enough that it never felt frustrating.
Mostly my fault, but for much of the game, I didn't understand what the left example pics meant. Instead, I just figured out what spaces needed to be "building" or "grass" by trial and error.
Music and art were lovely. The buildings were just asymmetrical enough to make it obvious they were mirrored, but still blended well with each other and the scene.
Hey! Tried this out, and I really like what's going on visually, feels like I'm exploring some giant cavern. Reminds me a bit of marble games, the way you move and almost roll through different passages.
Just to start -- the 3D environment, text consoles, and atmospheric sounds are the most stylish thing I've seen so far this jam! I really, really dig the vibes there.
The thought experiment was interesting. The takeaway wasn't "what does this person deserve" but more "what do I think the devil who hired me thinks this person deserves", since he's the one hiring and firing me (and I'd otherwise disagree with the devil here over a lot of it). It's a lot like Paper's Please in that regard (in a good way).
Main change I'd suggest is letting the player restart later in the run. I got fired at the end of day three, and it takes a while to get back to where you were.
The secret ending was pretty great :)
Quick working my way through a few more games before the rating period is over, so didn't reach the end (got up to the mummy level). But the game has some intense vibes! The controls take some getting used to, but it's satisfying to learn how things work, and it introduces things gradually enough that it's never frustrating.
The soundtrack is awesome! I love how it fades through subtly different tracks and sections (and silence). It helps it feel like something in the air is always changing, even though it's the same staircase. Some of it reminds me of the soundtrack to This War of Mine.
It's cool seeing what people do with control limitations, and the range of movement you get out of one button here is pretty impressive. The character feels good to control, although the map itself feels a little random -- since you can't see very far around you, reflexes aren't always good enough to respond to what's happening, so mostly I timed button presses around how fast I was moving, and avoided holding for speedups (moving faster sideways made it easier to get around most obstacles). I wonder if reaching the skill ceiling requires memorizing a lot of the map?
Otherwise, I love the dithered shadows and the silly character sprite, and it's cool hearing the music change as you go deeper. It was fun to try to beat your high score (spoiler, I failed).
My best score:
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I kind of love games that let you explore without any particular goal, just to see what you can find. The different dithering patterns on every surface are cool, it's a bizarre look and kind of awesome.
Made to the end screen --
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The physic-sy puzzles were a lot of fun to solve. The dialogue is hilarious, and putting it above the above the mouse cursor was a cool addition. Made it so the text is always in front of you while you're working on the puzzle.
Only feedback -- it would be neat if you could see how close you got to the perfect line (not sure how you calculated that in game).
The voiceovers and hand drawn visuals are as hilarious as always! Battles were a little too easy to mash through, though that's kind of funny itself. I love the reference to Guilty Gear "Hell or Hell" xD
Speedrun world record maybe? (ouch my hands, the "a" and "enter" mashing through dialogue strategy)
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Also running on Flycast:
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I thought this was a really lovely way to tell a story! Playing through all of the different boards Wyatt throws you I think made it feel a little more personal than you could get with just a film or short story -- shows how interactive art is kind of its own medium. And the game didn't care whether or not you won or lost the chess game, that was part of the story too (sometimes you'd win against Wyatt, and sometimes not).
Played version 0.6, and I never got to add abilities to my own pieces, all that shows up on my screen between matches were the new powers and "skip" but not my own pieces:
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I'm running it via Wine on Linux, so could be a problem on my end. But honestly, it didn't detract from the story at all, so not a big deal, just meant I lost some of the later matches to Wyatt's insane armies.
The subtle art and music changes were lovely, and the narration was really good. The whole experience gave me The Beginner's Guide vibes (one of my favorite games). Thanks for making this!
The level design here is really, really excellent! I love how all the areas interconnect, it feels like a proper puzzle adventure game. It does a great job tutorializing (like learning how to manage jump height). The mechanics extend really well, you can figure out ways to skip earlier levels from mechanics you learn later in the game. And the art and colors are lovely, especially the final descent at the end through all the level colors.
Honestly don't have any negative feedback, probably one of my favorites so far this jam!
I like the understated guitar chords in the background, it really sells the vibe of the game. The camera was a bit hard to deal with when the frog would get hidden by another platform, and I never figured out how to deal with the eyeball monster, but I thought it was fun exploring the physics and moving around the scene with the double jump.
The bloodshot eyes exploding from the frog when he lands too hard was a great touch.
The puzzle design is pretty tight! Always felt like there was a solution in mind, and the subtle stories you told through the puzzles were great (especially the giant school of sharks).
I've been a bit sick this week, so only went down to 40m, but it was kind of a (ahem) breathtaking experience. There's not much happening, but seeing the infinite darkness on screen as you descend and run out of oxygen in real life was surreal. The way the piano fades into bubbles, and then fades back in as you find relief at the top is perfect.
Feels like a relatively unexplored art: games that require some kind of good faith interaction on the user's end. A lot of Wii games were like this (sure you could waggle the remote, but you'd be missing out on whatever experience the developers intended).
Can't say there's anything I found lacking with the game, it's kind of a standout experience this jam.
The pixel art is really stylish! I couldn't get past floor 4, the bats got me both times I tried, but the dynamic of having to both dodge and aim your attack with the same keys made for some interesting gameplay.
This was pretty awesome! Character creation screen, hidden messages in the ground, it was just fun exploring and finding easter eggs (It's 4:49 A.M. :3). The art and dialogue are adorable.
The battles are challenging in mostly a good way. Most random part was defeating the tiny demons, because they move around a lot faster than you can aim with your dig tool. I enjoyed fighting the larger bosses, dodging attacks is rewarding with the limited movement you have. The game's really forgiving, it's nice that the only downside to losing HP is having to walk a bit.
Almost got 100%?
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I love the idea of 3D minesweeper. Seems like the 3D makes it a harder to rule out which spaces have a mine, so it might be more luck-based than 2D minesweeper, but it was kind of trippy trying to solve with the added depth.
Camera was a bit janky, so I mostly kept it in the same place, but the Dwarf Fortress style layer toggle worked pretty well.
I loved how you weaved the music into all the stages -- there was always that distant, atmospheric note in the background, and you brought in melodies above it at just the right moment. The synced audio for the undertale boss was really cool. The whole thing felt like someone's haunted memories of video game's they'd played in the past, it was a great vibe!
I really like tank-style controls, I think there are a lot of gameplay things you can do with the limitations it imposes. Some space games will give the character more momentum, so that it's possible to go a large distance on a small amount of fuel, if you're good at conserving movement. This game has less of that (because of the ship's high friction), but it's still fun flying around and dodging the asteroids.
The synthy music is cool, especially the menu theme.
Honestly had a lot of fun playing this one, the music was kind of awesome, and you even had multiple death sounds. Better than mid IMO. Especially for such a short amount of time! Short and sweet is kind of the best for a game jam.
The gameplay here is neat, and pretty challenging! There's a lot to pay attention to at the same time. Dodging usually seemed like a better bet than trying to shoot the bullets out of the air. Or, ideally, I'd be able to hit the bullets while shooting at the submarines. Otherwise I'd tend to spend all my bullets as counters, and not hit any of the submarines.
I played on keyboard (with the space key in your new version), and I thought it was pretty intuitive, but it definitely felt like a game that'd work best with shoulder buttons.
Having to manage movable space (that's not hit with an explosion) was a pretty neat dynamic. I'd be curious what the skill ceiling is. Is there a difficulty curve to how many submarines show up over time?
Also, my scores:
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The pixel art here is good, especially the main area with the wells and stone pillars. If there's one thing I'd recommend, it's that some of the UI elements could use more detail to help the player understand the game state. For example, greying out the abilities if one has already been used this turn, or adding symbols next to the health and defense bars to make it clearer what they represent.
Otherwise, it's neat trying to balance health and defense on both my character and the enemy. The cinematic text scenes are a nice touch.
Tried at first without looking at the solution, and I think there are enough good looking layer-orders that you'd probably want to use logical checks instead of direct lists (say, pass the player if "mountain" is behind "cat", "logo" is in front of "river", etc.). Otherwise, the art is a lot of fun to mess around with, and the dialogue is great, especially how it addresses us, the people playing through Ludum Dare games :)
The tropical island surrounded by lava in a giant asteroid was an insane mood, I kind of loved it. The music was really hip (I recognized Thriller, not sure about the others). It definitely helped having headphones, stereo was kind of required for navigating the game. Also I couldn't tell, but was it using any kind of spatial audio, or was it just panning left/right?
The upload bar getting slower towards the end was a hilarious little touch.
@clintor24 -- Howdy! I meant to add some better tutorializing to the beginning of the game but ran out of time. If you place your character on the light gray circle and then dig down, you should see something new:
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@gargantuan-janitor -- Thank you so much!! Collisions are a bit wonky, kind of an artifact of using pixel data as collision data, which makes it hard to implement wall-slides. I have ideas for more layers (each layer runs its own set of code), so I might make an expanded version at some point.
@hubol -- Thanks for playing! I hadn't thought about it, but cool to know both games share an identity like that.
@jovialknoll -- I've seen other people with the same issue (carving their character in before trying to move). I can think of a few ways to fix, easiest being to add some movable space on the "gray" layer under where the player spawns. Glad you liked it!
@bubblewandgames -- Thank you!! Yep, the music adds a new instrument each layer you descend. In order -- concertina, recorder, spoons, spamjo, and ???.
@polymathld -- I needed to block the player from ascending to the top layer and descending to any point in the maze, and that was the easiest solution that fit the gatekeeping system. But it certainly had some downsides. Glad you enjoyed it, it was a lot of fun to put together!
@molpe -- Wow, thank you so much for playing! It's awesome getting to see people play through it in real time. The dig tool is definitely a little slow, although there is a balance there, since it has to be slow enough that you don't overshoot. I'm glad you enjoyed the game!
Gameplay is pretty simple, but I love the solid pastel colors, it creates an interesting vibe along with the music and crazy spinning cow.
This game is super stylish! It's awesome the way it starts with something that seems to be a sound effect, and then morphs into a soundtrack as you dig deeper. Lighting up each segment was pretty satisfying.
I didn't really find an optimal number of boxes to place per mine (probably could have timed it to figure something out). I started out grouping some of them together so it'd be faster to walk by and empty all the boxes at once, but it started to miss some crystals around the edge, so I had to backtrack and place extras.
I used the cart a little, but it didn't seem to save all that much time, since I spent most of my time walking past boxes anyway. Might be more useful if I were speed-running.
There were a handful of control related bugs (in particular I lost a lot of crystals accidentally re-buying power grids), but I think they've all been mentioned. Otherwise just some quality of life things, like a shortcut to get out of the menu, or key controls for both hands on the keyboard (I often used WASD with the left hand while rapid clicking E with the right hand).
It definitely scratched my automation itch. The game only had a couple levels of automation, but it feels like there's a lot of room for more mechanics you could add.
Overall awesome entry! My time:
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Hey, this was a pretty incredible experience. I love how the pitch starts to shift a half step each floor, then two half steps, then three, until the very last drop with the minor sixth. And the mix uses such a wide range of pitches, that there's always something new to hear every floor. I also really dig the 1-bit vector art.
Interesting to note that every play-through is a little bit different, since the floors are randomized.
This was pretty cute! It was like tetris the puzzle-adventure game. I liked how there were always paths to jump back up to higher levels if you forgot to bring something with you.
I love how this fits the theme, you're playing golf but the ball is already in the hole :)
Everything's procedurally generated, but it would be cool if there were more types of slopes and shapes, to give some extra variety to how you move the ball around the stage. Otherwise though, it's neat having to balance getting the most coins for the least amount of strokes.
I've been using LÖVE since late last year, and it's been a joy to work with. Gives me a lot more flexibility to code things my way than other engines I've used.
Can't say I know the flash game series it references, but your game is a fun trip. I really like the glass backgrounds. It kinds of strips away any information about where you are, and just leaves the vibes.
This game has some really interesting concepts! It was a bit tricky with a laptop trackpad, but eventually made it to the top:
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It was a little confusing at first when you fall through all the platforms, and it took a bit to figure out what was going on or what the goal was. But once I figured it out, it was neat having to dodge and build platforms in realtime. The pixel art is really lovely!
I love the soundtrack, gives it good vibes. If ldjam.com had spoiler tags, I'd have suggested putting your description above in spoilers. Otherwise, I already know the surprise going into the game.
This is pretty neat, and has a lot of nice visual polish! The goals are pretty open ended, so I went for a beat-in-fewest-number-of-days goal.
First thought was that if I could plan to beat the game with fewer tools, that would save me time mining crystals for the cost of those tools. Started trying to go for just the laser upgrades since Laser #2 + Laser #5 is a huge combo, but I had trouble getting Blue Gem #3 with just lasers (and Alchemy #1, since it's practically free and gives plus temperament).
Second plan was to get all laser and alchemy upgrades, since Alchemy #3 and #5 are the only durability tools in the game. Alchemy #3 helped me get the Blue Gem #3 and Red Gem #3 I needed to purchase Laser #5 and Alchemy #5, respectively. Then three days later I had all #5 gems and beat the game.
Ended up using every laser and alchemy tool except Laser #3 (and Laser #1 was only useful as an early game stall). It never felt like the progress meter was a problem to fill, more often then not I had to slow down to give myself time to fill the quality meter.
For most of the game I had a loop of *Stall -> Laser #4 / Alchemy #1 -> Laser #2*, which got me to Gem #3 consistently (and zero broken gems). Last three days had a loop more like *Stall -> Stall -> Laser #4 / Alchemy #1 -> Laser #5 -> Laser #2*.
Spent 8 days mining gems for tools, 17 days mining gems to sell, 3 days mining gems to collect, and won on day 29. Is that a record?
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Just a couple notes on balance:
- The general gameplay loop was pretty consistent for most of the game, and I wonder if it'd make sense to add more randomness to the values (to create more of a risk/reward dynamic).
- It didn't feel like the ore defense system affected my strategy much past the first few turns of the game. I wonder if it'd make sense to buff the ore defense and/or weaken Alchemy #4 (maybe have it last only a few turns).
Generally though, I think the game has a really unique flow! It was a lot of fun exploring what mechanics do, how they interact with each other, and finding optimal ways to go about mining for different gem types.
Hope I don't seem too obsessed, but I got a day 15 win --
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In theory I think that's the best you can do. I can get Gem II consistently after Laser II, Gem IV consistently after Alchemical III (when used twice), and Gem V consistently after Laser IV (as a stall to let me use Alchemical III a third time).
| Day | Gem Sold | Tool Bought | Gold Left | | Gem Collected | | --- | -------- | ---------------------- | --------- | --- | ------------- | | 1 | | | 0 | | Any I | | 2 | Any I | | 100 | | Blue I | | 3 | | | 100 | | Any I | | 4 | Any I | Laser II | 0 | | Any II | | 5 | Any II | Drill I / Alchemical I | 800 | | Any II | | 6 | Any II | | 1800 | | Red I | | 7 | | Alchemical II | 1600 | | Red II | | 8 | | Alchemical III | 100 | | Any IV | | 9 | Any IV | | 4100 | | Any II | | 10 | Any II | | 5100 | | Blue II | | 11 | | Laser III | 3600 | | Blue II | | 12 | | Laser IV | 600 | | Any V | | 13 | | | 600 | | Any V | | 14 | | | 600 | | Any V | | 15 | | | 600 | | |
Won with -114988. Don't know what it means, but it was a trippy experience!
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Tried on my Linux laptop, and it crashed before I could get the gun (ran out of memory and my OS closed it). So retried on my PC and it worked great there.
Also love the terminal output, it's insane and wonderful and I strive to make my terminal output as wonderful as yours.
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I enjoyed this, it has some great old-school adventure game vibes. I found all the objects, and it was nice how every object had just a little more detail than the environments, but still blended well with the scene.
My main feedback would be to add more navigation cues. Something like having the cursor change, or having the red outlines/arrows change color when you hover over them. That would make it a bit more intuitive to navigate from place to place.
Pretty awesome that you made your own editor for the game, was it all just using JavaScript / TypeScript?
I love the art and music of all your games! It's such a painterly vibe, and the way objects and buttons move around the screen has this extra polish that always feels so natural.
The game starts out priming you to think you'll be solving a bunch of puzzles with the door out front. Then you're given this mysterious box you have no idea how to solve. It's fun when games hit you with a sense of confusion, or that feeling that you're lost but you're not sure why.
The punchline was great! I sometimes enjoy going back to games I've finished, breaking them, and looking at all the weird nooks and crannies I wasn't meant to see (like adding a no-clip hack to the Stanley Parable and spending time just flying around and looking at things). But it does break whatever magic the game was trying to achieve. It's hilarious how this game has you do that intentionally, and then laughs at you for destroying the treasure you were looking for all along.
I totally get barely getting something out, I spent most of this jam just wrangling a new framework into doing what I needed. This was a neat puzzle though! I like how you have to plan ahead around the number of glyphs you remove so you get the right count at the end. And the pixel art is really gorgeous.
One thing that would be nice is a rewind or undo button. It's hard to keep track of where everything's aligned, so it's easy to accidentally remove more rows than you planned to. Granted, rewind features aren't necessarily straightforward to implement in a crunch.
Finished all the puzzles (last one was pretty challenging!):
puzzle.png
At the start, I almost thought the game froze, but then the stars slowly faded in, and it panned over the city vista, and the view was really quite lovely. The pixel art here is gorgeous.
I didn't ride very far (button mashing is pretty hard on the wrists), but I made it just under 0.4 miles.
This is a cute adventure game! I enjoyed revealing the map little by little while I explored, and the fog helped to make sure I always knew which huts I'd seen already. The king's comment about deforestation was exactly what was going through my head all game :)
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Opened up the game, and the first thing that hit me was the kind of epic soundtrack. The smooth bass with the eastern instruments made for a cool combo, and the pitch shifts were deranged and awesome.
The art is adorable, and I love how the collection pot seems to have a mind of its own. The only visual thing that was a little off was that sometimes it was a bit hard to tell which dice were selected or not. Sometimes the dice ended up in the wrong place vertically, but that might just be because the game lagged some on my elderly laptop.
Game reminds me of a roguelike version of something like Yahtzee or Farkle. It was neat having to plan out each attack based on the dice I had available. I think I got really lucky with the draws, because for most of the game I didn't know why the enemies weren't attacking me. Not until I got to the final boss and ran out of free re-rolls. Then I had an "ah!" moment where I had to lose health to re-roll, and the boss whacked me with his sword (ouch!).
Ended the game with four dice, a heal on 6, and a heal on 8, and plenty of ways to attack, so by the end it was pretty easy to guarantee that I'd never lose too much health.
I've never made a deck-building-roguelike-adjacent game like this before, so I have no idea how you're supposed to balance things like it. I'm sure it's weird having to weigh not overpowering the player, and also preventing the player from running into unwinnable scenarios. Maybe it'd help here to have less slots available to the player (maybe offset by a way to replace the items in each slot)?
Overall this was a fun, vibey experience! I haven't really played a lot of games in the genre, but it definitely scratched that itch if there was one.
Pretty awesome entry (especially just for five hours)! Feels polished, the mechanic is unique, and the puzzles are deceptively challenging. Especially the last two, I had to experiment with a lot of paths before I found the correct order.
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It's amazingly hysterical hearing your voiceovers and stories! I think I got the world record (looking at you @bad-fetus)?
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Wondering if there's anything in particular you use for Dreamcast development? I found this [wiki page](https://dreamcast.wiki/Getting_Started_with_Dreamcast_development) from a quick Google search.
@captaindreamcast Woah thanks for all the info! I've used WSL quite a bit (mostly because Windows is a pain to do certain kinds of development with), I guess it makes sense a niche development tool would mainly support Linux development.
I've only played a real Dreamcast like once (there's an arcade nearby with a Dreamcast console, although they replaced the disc reader with a hard drive). Sometime if I get a hold of a console I'll have to try burning a disc and testing it out (I have a lot of blank burnable CDs, so many CDs).
It's kind of awesome you have your own set of tools to work with. I've been interested in retro console dev for a while (is Dreamcast a retro console at this point?), but just haven't leapt down that rabbit hole quite yet.
Also it's hilarious how the Simulant home-page casually lists Dreamcast as though it's just one of the four standard operating systems ╮(￣～￣)╭
@bad-fetus Had no luck a few days ago, but just tried again now and got 29 on my first try :)
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Some combination of luck and sleep maybe?
Windows version is missing, but I've enjoyed the other things I've tried of yours, so I downloaded the Godot project to try it out. It's stylish, and the gameplay is really smooth, especially for something made on a 12:00 hour budget.
I liked the single "energy" bar working as both a time limit and health counter. Seemed like the best strategy was to leave as many souls on screen as I could to collect later, since you don't get anything if you max out on "energy". Although in practice that also made the game a lot harder, so there's a neat tradeoff there. I got to 80 after a few tries:
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This was a really unique challenge! I loved how everything was communicated clearly despite it all being in alien text. The puzzles were tricky, and there was always an "aha!" moment for each one when I figured out what I needed to do.
Only thing that's missing is that it'd be cool if there were a way to view all the stamps after you've collected them (the artwork is gorgeous).
stamp.png
As someone who knows basically no math, I kind of love fractals, and thought this was entrancing. It felt like I was learning a new language -- I'd mess with the positions and rotations in each puzzle little by little, and get almost an intuitive understanding of how my changes affected the shape.
I was able to complete all of them without hints except for the last two (I had to show solution).
fractals.png
This was hilarious, especially when you realize you can't slow down fast enough and go splat into the wall. It also has some real [Library of Babel](https://libraryofbabel.info/) vibes. It gives me a kind of otherworldly feeling scrolling through hundreds or thousands of trophy shelves, knowing I'll be spending an eternity traveling back and forth to fill them.
@akuta -- Hey! By status page do you mean this pic?
titlescreen.png
You should be able to start the game by pressing space, enter, escape, or left-click. I meant it to be a kind of title screen, but I should have made that clearer (I forgot that loading screens exist ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯).
@akuta-zehy -- Game works for me on Linux and Windows 10, but just tried on Windows 11 and it's broken there (same thing you mentioned). Looks like the following two config lines are responsible (in [conf.lua](https://github.com/sudo-coffee/ld58/blob/1c0da2a321333c81a7f62b606a90f6fae7755ebf/main/conf.lua)):
``` t.window.width = 0 t.window.height = 0 ```
It works if I remove those lines, however, then the game renders at the default height/width of 800x800. I'll have to do some digging to see if I can find a workaround. Thanks for catching!
Just a note -- was a bit MIA last week, but I've got time this week to review games / reply to comments if you've got any questions.
I finally have a fix for Windows 11 (see v1.1 in the downloads). For some reason, the game only freezes if the game resolution is exactly the same as the screen resolution. I ended up adding [SDL3](https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/FrontPage) as a dependency just to find the screen resolution, so I could set the game resolution to 1 pixel wider than the screen.
Seems to work now, but let me know (anyone) if the bug shows up again.
Hey @captaindreamcast -- Thanks so much for playing!! You always reset to the top after a few seconds, the only exception is after you get the final orb. It's kind of my favorite kind of experience, just getting thrown into something weird and unusual where you have to figure out the rules as you go.
@ugly-robot -- Glad you enjoyed it. The effect is just to render each group of objects onto its own canvas, and then overlay the canvases on top of eachother. It definitely messes with your sense of perspective though!
Hey @vidarn -- Thanks for stopping by! Interesting experience is pretty much my favorite genre ╮(￣_￣)╭. Wasn't sure how many people would actually find the ending, but seems like everyone that's tried found it eventually.
@energon -- Hi! Left click and space actually do the same thing (just added that to my controls).
Originally I had reasons you'd want to throw your "glasses", and I just didn't get to that part before the deadline. It's definitely too easy to lose your glasses that way though (it's always possible to get them back, just difficult).
@blazerker -- Hey, thanks for the feedback! It's good feedback, and I think there's an important balance to be had between making the game accessible to different audiences, while also not making players feel like they're being spoon fed the gameplay.
For this game in particular though, I will disagree and say the game would have been worse off if it explicitly told the player what the goal is. That's just the kind of experience I was going for this jam. Think old-school adventure games like Myst, where you're thrown into the game with no instruction and spend most of the game figuring out what your goals are.
@sevansevan -- Thanks for playing! You can actually recover from any game state without restarting, but I could have made that more clear (and some states are harder to recover from than they should be). A small hint below if you need one:
!> Falling isn't the end of the game, if you wait for a moment after falling.
@alex-mulkerrin -- Glad you liked it! I could definitely see puzzles being made around the overlapping objects effect.
Originally, I planned to give each sphere it's own unique camera effect, to the point where having too many camera effects would have made it basically impossible to navigate (which is where the throwing mechanic would have been useful). But I only had time for the one effect, so it just became an interesting visual thing, rather a mechanical thing.
@bad-fetus -- Thanks! Yeah, the menu glitching is partly why I added the epilepsy note. No idea why it does that, except that the menu gets rendered in 3D space, and the triangles are drawn from coordinates (pass:polygon in [this file](https://github.com/sudo-coffee/ld58/blob/main/main/main.lua)).
!> Yep, that's the end! I enjoy the challenge of making games without any words (I've done that for the last three Ludum Dares), but it does make it tricky to communicate when the game is over. Giving the player a win/gameover screen is the most obvious, but also the least interesting, so I like to experiment with alternatives.
!> Collecting the last cube doesn't even end the game, technically. You can still throw your cubes away and the geometry will go back to normal (if you can find it).
@dock-frankenstein -- Thank you so much! Figuring out what's going on is kind of the main puzzle of the game, so it's nice to hear when people enjoy that about it.
I developed the whole thing on a Linux laptop, but I was using KDE Plasma (on Wayland), so I'm not sure what the window or mouse issues are about (I didn't have those issues on my machine). But it's awesome seeing people try it out on other Linux devices!
Also (theoretically) z-fighting shouldn't be possible the way it's rendered, unless you mean the overlapping objects effect or the glitchy menu screen bug?
@someone -- Thanks for playing! Yeah, the no-depth-test effect was on purpose. It actually renders each color of geometry to a separate canvas (with depth testing enabled), and then overlays each of those canvases to the screen in a specific order.
Originally each cube was going to have its own (usually disorienting) visual effect, and while holding cubes would be necessary to progress, the more cubes you had the more disorienting it would be to navigate, and so you'd need to balance what orbs you were holding at any one time. Of course, I never got that far, so the only real effect I have in the game is the depth test.
Yep, the green cube is the ending! Didn't necessarily want to fade to an end screen, but the ending was added at the last minute and could have been made a bit more clear.
@bentglasstube -- Thanks for playing! A note about falling in spoilers:
!> If you reached the last green sphere, that's the end of the game, and it disables the looping mechanic. But there is a bug where if you reset the game after winning, the loop will still be disabled and you'll fall forever. Could be you ran into that bug?
@endurion -- Nope, that doesn't sound right! I don't know how to reproduce though, as I haven't seen that issue on any computer I've tested it on. It might be an engine related bug (I've had a lot of issues with the framework I used this jam).
The mechanics were fun to figure out, especially the first level. At first I was trying to hop back and forth between the two platforms, and it was a neat moment when I realized I could strafe along the blue platform sideways while shooting the targets on the other platform.
Not a sharpshooter by any means, but I'm happy with the scores I got:
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Opened up the game, and the first thing I noticed was how cool the color palette was. It gives the game a pretty unique vibe along with the smooth artwork.
I missed out reading the controls above (my fault), so at first it was a bit confusing because I didn't know you could zoom out or move around the screen. It is nice to see controls listed in-game, but it's not like I end up doing that for most of my games either ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
When it changed to the night cycle, the music and lighting transition felt kind of magical. Like everything slowed down and relaxed. Not that my workers relaxed, can't have anyone sleeping on the job >:) My only critique about the day-night cycle is that it was a bit hard to see buildings at night.
I started out making a three of each production building and a few storehouses. Spent a bit of time optimizing where I placed my gatherers to maximize output. And then kept building more stuff until I was sending out all three expeditions as soon as they arrived. The skull icon was pretty foreboding, but it seems like all my ships made it back in one piece.
expedition.png
It'd be cool if there were a way to see stats about how I did at the end (like resources gathered, or time spent), so I could try for better times or more optimal builds. It took about 41 seconds for a ship to leave and get back, so I guess you'd have to generate just over 2 ships worth of materials each minute for an optimal run.
Overall it was a really chill experience! I enjoyed sitting back and watching the civilization I'd built send out its fleet and gather my forgotten relics (and maybe something from the future??)
Pretty solid find-the-match game. I really like the design of the marbles, they strike a good balance between being different enough to spot on sight, but similar enough I still have to scan for them.
My score:
marbles.png
I've only played the single player so far, but it's pretty fun just packing the machines and auto-crafters together for score.
My single player high score so far (Amethyst Ring + Gamejam + Game + Music):
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Managed to get the score a bit higher (Amethyst Ring + Gamejam + Game + Acid + Beer + Stone + Wood + Fruit):
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Tried to fit in Music in the lower right corner, but I ran out of space, so just added the extra Stone and Wood instead. I think the theoretical maximum score for single player is 5535, with Amethyst Ring, Gamejam, Game, Music, Acid, 2x Beer, Fruit, and Wood. But you'd have to do some crazy wizardry to manage that.
This was an awesome little story!
The interaction was pretty intuitive. First thing when I opened the game, it took me a second to figure out where to drag the character (I kept trying to drag him the top-left), but I also forgot to read the description, so kind of my fault.
The way the two screens move around eachother (and change aspect ratio) is clever, and the visuals and music are lovely.
This was really tough. I was able to solve up through four colors (without losing signal), but I gave up after the third try on five colors. Maybe the time limit was a bit steep, or I just got unlucky with how complicated the patterns were. My strategy for most of it was just to make one line at a time, and hope that the other lines fit around it. Not sure if there's a better strategy for solving.
It was satisfying to make the patterns, though. It's sort of a game about training your brain to trace the lines themselves, rather than the tiles (since each type of tile has so many different skins).
I love games with funky control schemes like this. It's always like I get to relearn how to walk, and it makes every accomplishment pretty satisfying.
The art is nice (the angled dithered gradients in the background are a neat touch), and I especially love the sound effects. Every bonk, jump, door, etc. is just a little different, and I think it does a lot to make the game feel alive.
Possibly world record?
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It took me a while to figure out that the game is actually a sort of painting game? Like, you set the pattern you want with the arrows / dragging the emitter around (or placing the ear to intercept), click the "heartbeat" button, and then press "x" when you want to clear.
The audio design was awesome. Didn't figure out what all the numbers meant, but it was really cool just experimenting and trying things and learning piece by piece how the game worked.
Took me quite a few tries (landed twice at 1s 0s 200ms, just short of 100th Coin's record), but I think I got first sub one minute?
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Speedrun strats: - **Level 1** - You need to leave the top platform before the meter is filled (so it finishes while walking back). I could probably save a half second or so by making that margin tighter. - **Level 2** - Here I jump right before the end, so I have maximum downward velocity once "News" appears. - **Level 3** - The left side is fastest, but it requires some offscreen platforming (and a well timed bullet) to jump from the top-left platform to the top-right platform (where the guy was standing). Same as Level 2, I jump right before the end for maximum downward velocity. - **Level 4** - Definitely the hardest in the game. Requires a couple mid-air shots, some relatively tight platforming, and a pretty precise jump into the spikes at the end. Then you just keep jumping (the highest platform doesn't have the highest signal) while not moving (since that sends you immediately into the spikes). The last jump needs to be timed right before the end (while also dodging bullets) so you land on "News" as soon as it shows up. - **Level 5** - There's some bullet dodging at the top, but no time pressure once you're up there, so actually kind of the easiest level in the game for speedrunning. You just knock down the guards and wait where "News" shows up.
This was extremely cool! There are a few UI things that could be improved, and mostly people have mentioned those above, but it's really satisfying connecting the wires manually and seeing it all hanging across the screen. The game feels stylish, and the waveform mechanics are interesting to work with and (attempt to) wrap my brain around.
I managed to finish the last level without the 3rd source:
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This game was extremely cool! It felt like I had to relearn how to see the world from scratch, and it was satisfying seeing all the ways different materials interacted with the echoes. There were a lot of cool platform designs, like the thin platforms that you could only see one side of, or the platforms you had to jump and alternate at the same time. And the visuals were gorgeous with all the particle effects.
I don't really any critiques, it was just fun to explore the world you built.
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So I haven't read the other reviews for your game, but I saw your post on the front page, and wanted to say that I personally didn't find the game boring to play at any point. I thought it was lovely wanding around that barren, white wasteland looking for survivors. The lack of things moving just added to the sense that you're somewhere where life has a hard time existing (especially right after an avalanche).
It didn't take long to get used to the isometric controls, and I thought they worked just fine (I played it on a controller d-pad). The four-directional movement forces you to move across the map in horizontal and vertical lines, which could be a good or bad thing depending on the game. But I think it was a positive thing here; you have to be more methodical about the search, and it slowed me down in a way that made the world feel just a bit larger than it would have otherwise.
Figuring out you could climb up the mountain was a cool moment. The stereo audio was telling me I had to go right (even though there was obviously a wall blocking my way), so I just held right and I started climbing.
I like all the little touches, like the snow telling you where you've already explored, or the animal sounds muffling how well you can hear your detector. I went up real close to the wolves to hear them howl, felt like I got to join their pack for a moment. I wonder if the snow tracks were a too low contrast though; I only saw them if I was looking specifically for them, and someone with a worse monitor (or in bright light) might not be able to see them at all.
The coolest moment was the very last guy I found at the really tall pillar. Losing sight of the ground, with the wind bellowing, and nothing to see but me, the wall, and the sky. You lose any sense of scale or direction, and it gives the feeling like there's this infinite expanse between you and the ground below.
All that to say, I thought the game was awesome, and thanks for making it!
This was a cute, funny puzzle game! The banter between the two characters was perfect with the voice-over. The puzzles were simple but nice to solve. It was especially cool when I could control multiple moles at the same time, I wonder if there's more you could do with that mechanic?
Had a small problem on the second-to-last-level (on version 1.0.1) where I tried leaving before the mole, and fell into the void (so I had to restart).
Can I just say how much I love the music? The soft waves in the background and slightly wonky chords give it a peculiar and timeless vibe. It reminds me of playing Pokemon Snap and Hey You Pikachu on the N64 as a kid.
The dialogue is extremely cool, it put a huge smile on my face. It was hilarious crossing different conversations, and seeing the way different storylines fit together (in all the wrong ways). And I loved that you could go back and see what each person saw from their point of view at the end.
Found 25 endings (including seven different "cats"):
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@last-angle Thanks for playing! A lot of the level design was last minute, and some of it doesn't quite work as intended. But I added a hint in the description if you want a way to escape :)
@henk -- Thanks for trying it out! The system of ramps (and really most of the level design) was added in the last couple hours, and I just didn't get enough time to make that system work. That first short ramp is completely non-functional (which is why I added the hint about the hallway).
There are only six unique "places" (including the hallway and short ramp), one of which is completely inaccessible, so there's a good chance you've seen most of them.
@local-minimum -- Thanks for the video playthrough! The controls were implemented through Godot's input system, so either something's funky with the Linux build (I've only tested it on my own Linux system), or there's something with the VM preventing Godot from seeing the input. I didn't mention in the description, but you can also use the arrow keys as a fallback for camera control.
There is indeed no way to control the character while floating through space. But normally you should at least be able to look around (and see where the game is sending you).
@pkenney -- I've seen several people play this in person, and I think you're one of few people to figure out what's going on without hints (so congrats). And thanks for the screenshots! All three of those are stable configurations, although the last one is harder to land on. The sixth configuration is actually at an orb way out in the distance in your first pic:
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Not that it's possible to get there ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ (although I know of a bug that could get you pretty close).
---
@bonedaddy -- Glad you found it inspiring! Cinematic gravity is a pretty cool way to describe what's going.
Originally I had plans for invisible "anchors" (separate from the beacons) that would give me more control over gravity and how the player enters each area. There's still an [object](https://github.com/sudo-coffee/ld59/blob/main/hole.tscn) in the source for that. I had to scrap it part way through, though, because it would have taken a lot more play-testing than I had time for.
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@captaindreamcast -- Thanks for playing another one of my weird experiments! I originally had more goal-oriented ideas in mind for the game, but had to pivot at the last minute because most of the jam was spent wrangling with the gravity and movement mechanics. So I'm glad floating around space and watching the world reform itself is a neat experience for people (even if it's not a traditional sort of game).
If you've seen the starting hallway, the short ramp outside the hallway, the long curved ramp, the long flat runway, and the cube, then you've pretty much seen everything in the game.
---
@vidarn -- Thank you! Means a lot that you think my stuff has all been worth checking out. And that this game was such a cool experience.
You might be the first person to tell me a game I made is specifically *not* disorienting (although I did try to make movement and transitions here feel as seamless as I could make them). Not a bad thing, but just interesting that different people seem to experience my games in different ways, and it's hard to tell what that will be beforehand when I already know the game inside out.
Congrats on the working physics engine. Highest score I got was balancing a ball on top of this tower:
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Took quite a bit of experimentation (who's Mr. Quimbleton and why is he such a bad driver???), but I finally got the good ending. Seems you need just the right amount of exercise, research, and (the last thing I figured out) sleep to get there.
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The game does a great job making the capsule feel like a real place you could live and work in. Like, there's a small number of things to do, but you get to interact with everything in the room, and choose whatever you want to do on a particular day.
It says there's nothing to see outside the window, but I thought it was lovely getting to look out and see all the colorful stars. It's kind of neat how the nearest-neighbor scaling of the game in the browser naturally gives the stars a twinkling effect (it's even more pronounced if you zoom out to make the game smaller).
Ah, sorry! There wasn't any blur in game, but I took the screenshot and scaled it down in GIMP so it'd take up less space on the LDJam site, which is why it looks like that.
OS was Linux (with a 1440p monitor and 125% scaling) using Firefox though, if you're still wondering :)
The most fun part of the game is just scrolling through the frequencies (in level one) and seeing what sounds I can find. The sound design there is honestly really cool! Almost feels like a Where's Waldo for audio effects.
The second level took a minute to figure out, mostly because I didn't know you could zoom in with the mouse wheel. I'm not sure if that's mentioned anywhere, but if not, maybe it's something you could mention in the page description? Only other issue here is that I got the order of frequencies wrong the first try, but it might make sense for the order not to matter.
It was pretty cool getting to adjust the "frequency" of the image data in level three, and watching the patterns all shift around. Curious if the audio pattern matches up with the image in-game?
Pretty fun little mini-game! The graphics are simple, but kind of perfect for what it is. My high score:
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Reached the end! The visual style was kind of awesome. There were a lot of things that made the game pretty disorienting (in a cool way), between the slanted movement direction, the tall walls, and everything being displayed like a stack of pancakes.
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The atmosphere of this game was awesome! I didn't quite make it to the blue light (almost got there a couple times, but it was just out of reach). But I loved just exploring the insane architecture, and figuring out how to navigate from place to place.
Tried a few playthroughs, and it's a cool concept! It also has a pretty steep difficulty curve. I never got past the third round, but it did seem like the arrow was best to save until an enemy was pretty close to the archer (otherwise it tended to hit my own units as often as the enemy). And I'm not sure how much the positioning seemed to matter that early in the game, but it at least seemed to help to place the healer in the back.
Played through all 15 levels, it's a pretty neat set of mechanics! A lot of the levels have multiple ways to solve them, and it's cool how you get things like wall jumps pretty naturally from the boost signals. The physics are wonky, but in a good way. Only level where the physics got in the way was the coin on the no-gun level (I had to just hold z for a while until it sent me flying up to the coin). Otherwise all the levels were a lot of fun to explore.
A also love the plunky guitar track :)
I played the web version on the ldjam site, and it looks like maybe the level select screen is supposed to keep track of level times, but it doesn't seem to be working (I just get "--:--:--" for all levels).
This was a crazy experience. I played through it a second time just to dig more tunnels through the sun (and see if I could escape the implosion at the end, not sure if that's possible). Kind of my favorite sort of jam game, just something experimental and unpolished, but with cool ideas and an interesting vibe.
I don't normally play horror games, but this game is really intense! The audio and visuals do a really good job of making you feel like you're in the dark, never quite sure what's ahead or behind you (or where the monster is once its music plays), and running at full speed with the monster trailing three feet behind you is terrifying. I played a few times, and got to the tower the third time, but didn't find the exit to the south. I did find one of the dragon masks at the south fence in the open field though.