Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → T C
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | π₯ | Pouring Rain | jam | 207 | 3.87 | 3.67 | 3.06 | 3.36 | 4.30 | 4.00 | 3.72 | 4.44 |
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | π₯ | Rain | jam | 242 | 3.70 | 3.30 | 3.31 | 3.68 | 3.77 | 3.27 | 3.03 | 3.92 |
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | π₯ | Worm Quest | jam | 441 | 3.55 | 3.31 | 3.85 | 3.81 | 3.34 | 2.58 | 2.63 | 3.03 |
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | π₯ | Tiny Creatures: A Nimkip Story | jam | 789 | 3.30 | 3.04 | 3.20 | 4.08 | 3.20 | 2.45 | 2.54 | 2.90 |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | π₯ | Inner Workings | jam | 785 | 3.40 | 2.85 | 2.90 | 3.74 | 3.61 | 2.81 | 2.98 | 3.24 |
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | π₯ | Afloat | jam | 903 | 3.17 | 2.98 | 3.17 | 3.46 | 3.57 | 2.95 | 2.53 | 3.14 |
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | π₯ | Delivering Better Worlds | jam | 915 | 3.25 | 3.30 | 3.33 | 3.16 | 3.25 | 2.94 | 2.55 | 2.96 |
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | π₯ | Nimkip! | jam | 177 | 3.84 | 3.81 | 3.41 | 4.22 | 3.54 | 3.17 | 3.46 | 3.52 |
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | π₯ | Chicken Golem! | jam | 675 | 3.43 | 3.36 | 3.15 | 4.01 | 3.01 | 2.71 | 3.46 | 2.82 |
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | π₯ | The Great Filter | jam | 725 | 3.50 | 3.20 | 3.37 | 3.67 | 3.52 | 3.08 | 2.70 | 3.38 |
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | π₯ | Unstable Pinball | jam | 1241 | 3.10 | 2.93 | 2.46 | 2.86 | 3.22 | 2.88 | 2.27 | 3.03 |
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | π₯ | In Search of Sigmund I | jam | 1404 | 3.23 | 2.93 | 2.73 | 3.74 | 3.08 | 3.12 | 2.37 | 3.23 |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | π₯ | Emberkeep | jam | 1693 | 3.28 | 3.08 | 3.13 | 4.01 | 3.08 | 2.60 | 3.03 |
Very good introduction to the game and the mechanics. Nice effects for getting to the next milestone on wood. Very much enjoy the shop, but would be nice to know that it pauses the timer before you head in there. Very good game!
Very nice! I enjoyed it a bunch!
Fun game, fun idea! I did get softlocked, though. I got to the merchant offering to sell you all of the relics, and didn't have enough gold for what he was selling. When I tried to say "that's outrageous" - it just looped the text and I couldn't get out.
Good job!
Very good game. Had no idea when certain ratings drop so hard, so some losses came out of nowhere. I appreciate it as a mechanic after playing though!
I like this take on the digging game. I really liked the museum portion. I had a bug where there were no fossils in dig site C. I checked the whole area with the ground scanner thing and nothing showed up. But I completed the other two. Good game!
I also had some trouble with dying, was tough to figure out how the squids attacked you, but I enjoyed the idea!
I took a philosophy course in college and it was basically playing this game. 10/10.
Great game! Love the music, art, and overall style. "hey, you're not a cactus!" - Lady, don't act like you know my life!
Game has a few bugs, though. Sometimes things you can click on (like the door you need a key for) won't let you click on them, and after you get access to the first computer, the game seems to get stuck in a loop by taking away your controls while the dialog happens, and then repeating the dialog infinitely.
Minus the couple of bugs though, I really like everything about this game, and think it's top notch for a game jam. Good job!
Very cool! Loved the idle and deckbuilder combo. Very straightforward deckbuilder but very fun nonetheless! This is a great idea.
I liked the story driven gameplay! Some of the questions I was sure I would get wrong, then the question was easy enough haha. But I liked the story you told and the idea of the game.
Cozy game. I enjoyed seeing all the areas you made.
Nice meme ending haha. Enjoyed it a bit. Had audio crackling in some parts, but overall I liked the game. I felt it played quite well. Good job!
Good game! Nice simple beat em up. Really dug the way the office changed as you went further in, some really neat artistic stuff there. Also liked the papercraft look. Good song, sound effects and controls. Nice work
Nice game! Liked the variety of shooting and platforming with the dash. Looks good too!
Really cool idea. Gotta echo the other comments saying love the atmosphere. Well done!
Very chill and pretty fun. I didn't know you had/could use the truck until level 3 but after that I had a good time trying to keep it on track. Nice game!
I like it! Was interesting to configure and choose what to place. Looks nice too, very zen!
Interesting idea. Not bad for a clicker. The upgrades were kind of downgrades (at least the first one) - and it was a little unclear as to how to win, but it was still pretty good overall!
I like what you did with the Unity Roguelike tutorial! Very creative addition to the start of that one =) I really would have liked some treasure after that last level, though =P
Cool game. Great theme, sound effects, art, and straightforward gameplay. I like how much you were able to put into the game in a short time, and I'm a sucker for point and clicks. Great work!
Had fun! Got all the upgrades and tried to go down as far as I could. Sad I didn't get to the molten core of the planet but had a fun time regardless! Good job!
Great sound great visuals! Controls were a bit unintuitive without being told what they are but I figured it out eventually. Good job on this, it's a fun idea!
Link works for me! I like the idea, it's interesting minimizing your turning to have enough fuel. I did think it was tough to react but I did get to the end and the thanks for playing screen. Good game!
Nice word game. Would definitely be driven crazy on hard mode, but I like being able to make any word. Was a bit confused when the game ended or didn't, but didn't take away from the fun of it. Good job!
Very good idea and concept. I wished there was something I could do about the crabs camping hallways, too often I found myself just trapped with no way to juke. But I really liked the style, the idea, the vision implementation, and the game overall!
I laughed, I cried, I learned so much about the struggles of being an eaten chip. What a journey! Was not expecting any of the style changes, enjoyed that a ton!
Most things encountered someone already mentioned issues with, so I won't repeat. But I really like the all-button, one unit tactics idea. Was quite fun!
Nice work! Liked the style, and the "twist" ending (assuming it's the ending, I got stuck afterwards) Was a great start
Visuals and Music were awesome. Game had a good balance of control vs. fun. Really liked how different each environment felt. Very well done!
For all the harsh comments you're getting, I'd like to say that I really didn't find the original version nearly as bad as the comments made me think it would be! Sure it was rough in a lot of spots but I honestly think that what you put out was fine for a game jam. It's a game jam after all, not something you had 3 years to work on!
I really liked the idea of collecting power ups that had charges, with different abilities. I think you could do a lot of really cool puzzles that could be solved in a number of different ways with this system.
You sure pulled some harsh critics, though =). Good job on the game
I got a little tripped up because the things you have to type in are case sensitive! But other than that I really liked the idea as well. Had some good atmosphere and a nice idea. Good job
Good stuff! Liked the feel you went for, and the gameplay was chaotic but fun! Really liked the game.
Nice! Tough to click so fast but I like the idea and it was pretty fun. Good job
Interesting aesthetic and music. Tricky freezing enemies with how fast they move, and I'm still not TOTALLY sure I know how I opened the doors, but I did manage to get to the end. Good start!
Congrats on your first game jam! Some things could have been a bit more clear (what is collectible and what can be dodged, and dying after hitting one asteroid) but the basics were all there. Fun little game, Good job!
I.... was not expecting the carts to stack that high! Very amusing. I like how the sound adjusts based on the speed of the cart
Nice simple mining game. While I agree asteroids are infrequent, I also thought it was pretty impossible to dodge them with how fast they come and how long it takes you to dig side to side. But, nice idea, really dig the art and especially the music!
I wouldn't mind having a health bar, or to not hit obstacles that look like they're past me, but I really did get a kick out of the theme and idea of the game! I got a good chuckle
Liked the art, sound effects and music. Controls were a little touchy but that added some charm to the game. Really liked the tunnel of infinitely falling cultists! Also liked how in the "escort mission" you didn't have to restart from the beginning every time. Fun little game!
Same
Cool, got to the end. Wasn't sure exactly what I had to do to have people not be suspicious of me, but I did make it out alive! Interesting idea. I like people coming back to you and having their own stories that unfold.
Agree with all the comments above. Pretty cool little game made far more addicting by not wanting the music to stop playing. Enemies were a bit too brutal but decent for the time frame given. Nice job
Anything I would have added to suggestions or remarks seem to have been covered already by other people. Played to the end (I assume, it just kicked me back to the beginning.) Good game!
Haha, awesome stuff! Very cool. I would have loved for something to happen different if you start up the game after beating it. Either way, the idea and execution were very good. Great game!
Fun. Was weird trying to figure out how to place a crate at first but I liked the idea, liked that you could just drop a crate on the egg in the planning phase and have it crack, haha. Honestly for what it was it was very fun, nice job!
Very nice game! I loved the puzzle elements and the cool tile building. I thought the collapse came REALLY really fast, so it was hard to really get more than like a third of the board filled, but I still enjoyed the game quite a bit. Good visuals, chill music, straightforward to learn mechanics, and decent variety in gameplay. Good job
Fun game! The first time I tried the spiders weren't spawning, but I retried and the game worked really well. I like the rumbling moving around the tables and areas you get ingredients
Also liked the idea! Nice work.
Looks good! Just missing a few platformer QOL things, like not slowing down if you're holding a direction while jumping up the face of a wall, and things not spawning directly on top of you. But I really liked the mechanic, Loved blowing up large chains of enemies, and liked that exploding in air gave you an extra bit to your jump. Good stuff!
Got to the end! Controls were a bit tricky, some blind falls and crazy momentum, but overall it controlled pretty well. Artwork and sound were top notch, good job!
Great idea, decent execution, pretty fun! Would have liked to see more shapes and weights of buildings, but for a game jam definitely had a solid base!
Hi. Looks cool, but I get a 404 when I follow your link
Cool game! I loved the art and music. The main issue I had was a lack of feedback if I was circling the guys right. I still don't fully understand the rules for getting them to convert, but I did manage to get to the end! (also, there was still 1 left when it gave me the victory screen) - Fun game!
Great job! Awesome art, interesting concept, pretty chill game. I enjoyed it.
Liked the art and sound. Definitely with being new to game jams (I still am myself) the biggest issue I had was a clear direction to start, and feedback that what you're doing is correct (like even having a small progress bar when you're standing on generators to charge them) - still though, cool idea, the blueprint was great, the song was very cool and atmospheric. Good job!
Fun basic platformer. I also liked the main mechanic. Edit: I just read the description in full. nevermind about the ending question haha
Game plays pretty well! relatively fun for the variety of enemies that exist. The ultimate was very satisfying to use =). Could use some more variety and cleanup, but great for a LD submission. Good work!
Nice game! Really enjoyed the world you built. Cool art and atmosphere in general. Was fun exploring. Good work!
Nice game! Fun running around interacting with stuff. I think you could go a really long way with a bit more variety, but loved keeping away while also doing everything else. Awesome theme too! Very distinct.
Great game, cool idea, good execution. Enjoyed the variety of upgrades and items. Would have liked more variety in skills from the get go. Well done!
Nice work! I like the art and the shadows.
I really like this entry. Gameplay is pretty simple but there's so much storytelling going on in what you chose to include as positive and negative thoughts. Like, family related things being positive.... for the most part! Oh and how large/small different positive thoughts are. I thought that was really cool, and was incredibly effective storytelling tied into mechanics. Tie all that into the general theme of the game and this game is overflowing with Theme and Mood. Really cool entry, glad I played it!
Nice game! Great music and graphics. Controls were a little tough to get used to, but they worked for the levels built. The one thing I didn't get is when/how my ghost would get locked horizontally. But fun game, and good level design!
Nice job! It's funny how much trickier the green arrows get when the orange arrows make it on screen. Tried twice, got to 288! Could have made it further but I hesitated on an orange one. Fun game, awesome soundtrack!
Fun game! I like the combo of resource harvesting and tower defense! I struggled getting towers to place, but other than that controlled really well.
Nice game! Nothing crazy new to report from everyone elses. On my third playthrough, I decided to see how far I could get before the game froze.... and I think I actually am pretty close to being ahead of the curve? Last run I froze at 28, but this time I'm going strong at 38 and no enemies have entered my maze yet =). Either way the game was fun enough for me to want to try to get to this point, and I love building mazes in tower defense games so you got me hooked. Nice job!
Edit: nevermind. Enemies got stuck on each other and started piling up so the game eventually slowed to a crawl, but I got to day 52 at 100% base health before giving up =).
Nice game! I thought the atmosphere was top notch! Struggled understanding when villagers would help me or not, and rarely had enough health to see if I could win a fight or not, or if I haven't interacted with enough things. Enemies seemed to die randomly, or live forever and do far more damage than I could block heal. Made it to the third fight. Fun game, would love to get more feedback as the player to know how the things I'm doing/questions I'm answering help. Good job!
finally got to the end! Liked the music and graphics. Gameplay got a little stale and had some bugs, but nothing major. Still pretty fun, good job!
Really appreciate the mood of the game. Had fun launching milk out of the back of the truck, getting flipped over, etc. Could use some camera/controls polish, but was pretty fun! Good job
Dang, what a great platformer! The momentum physics really kicked your butt but I got the hang of it (mostly!) by the end! I agree that some of the hardest levels were in the beginning, and levels where you had to kind of "guess" your timing and had to start far away were overly difficult. But made it to the end! Great job!
Hekkin good game. Great sound, great effects, very polished gameplay, very fun! Bullet multi-ball is surprisingly fun to play around with.
Same as other commenters. Can't get the game to work. Wouldn't mind an update letting me know if it gets fixed!
I came back to this one randomly. I did not realize you could move. Then I read a comment about a tutorial, so I rewatched it, and didn't realize you could upgrade either. So I was trying to win without upgrades and without moving, and thought the game was just impossible. Still took me a few tries, and took me a bit to figure out what button bought upgrades / how to buy upgrades, but I had way more fun with the game with those two things haha. Nice work!
Great game! Made the first half way harder on myself because I forgot double jumping was a thing! Once I got used to warping forward, attacking, and double jumping, the game was super fun to play! Never did use the warp back mechanic, but oh well! Really, really cool idea, and good implementation!
Great game! Had a limited number of cards to work with, but even with a few cards made a couple of really cool combos. I really also liked how you get to the "end" =) Good touch to finish off the game. Really solid submission overall!
After like.... 10 tries I *got* it. Not winning, just... it clicked. And woah. Super cool moment when that happens! I think a little bit of pushing the player to charge in a direction might be good, but it was a very cool "aha" moment for me, followed immediately by another one when wondering how the heck you can get past bullets spaced only 3 apart. Cool submission!
Nice game! I also had the same issue where I couldn't resize so the very bottom line of the letter got cut off, so sometimes arranging words got really difficult. The writing the letter portion was really interesting, and the atmosphere was pretty incredible!
Nice game! I'm always fond of the [spoilers] meta style games. I liked this one. Some critiques: the slide delay is odd to get used to. The pipes are harder to see than they need to be. For a game with a lot of text, it would definitely be nice to be able to left click while it's displaying to jump to the end. Made going through the whole game much, much slower. You did a very good job with the effects, and I appreciate the refresh as a mechanic. Overall nice work!
Haha, fun game! I like the almost rhythm game feel of the money falling. I also managed to get the "infinite" by having my speed set to 1048576 with no trash. But the game was complete, playable, and pretty amusing! Nice work.
Nice game! Echoing the sentiments of other people who have already commented. I think the game would have benefitted greatly from a checkpoint system. But the art and sound were fantastic, and the game was huge, challenging, and the variety of areas was very impressive. Good job!
Nice entry. Nothing new to add that other commenters didn't already say. The art mix was great. I was hoping that maybe there'd be a secret ending for (torch destruction) completion but if there was one I couldn't find it. Either way, nice work!
Nice entry! Definitely a bit rough with a keyboard and mouse! Also some sections seemed overly difficult or easy to get lost in. But I liked the setting and ideas!
Nice game! Was hoping there was some super secret attack you could do by charging up over your meter, or that there was something you'd get for going over 100 =). Gameplay got a little long but that banger of a song kept me really invested! Good job!
I finally, truly understand what it was like to be a dinosaur.
Great game! Loved the building/collecting. Lots of space for more/new stuff! Would have liked to know where some of the other resources came from, but I figured it out eventually =). Also, some indicator of what/how many of each resource you're missing to build new turrets could be nice. But fun game overall, really enjoyed it!
Nice game! I really liked being able to build bridges, and blow stuff up. It was really satisfying throwing the thing into boxes to destroy them as well. Some of the slow traveling to get back to the pit was a bit much, and some extra direction on what exactly I was doing would be nice, but didn't stop me from having fun exploring! Good job
Just reiterating what others have said. Super clean game, everything works really well. Abilities chained together in interesting ways and were interesting picks. Well done!
Liked the game, liked the variety of attacks you were given. Really easy to follow game and pretty fun!
Fun game! Got a 3500, it gets REALLY tough when it starts getting faster, and I'm pretty sure there's a time where you take one of the 3 colors and have a drought of like 15 =) It makes the game work and stops you from likely being able to keep the board entirely clear. I like it, good work!
Fun! The game got much, much better when I realized you have to HOLD the suck blood button (left click) to get any blood at all. I kept trying to tap it! The game scales over time quite well. There's a bit of wonkiness to summons and enemies shoving each other without attacking, but overall the game played well enough. Good job!
I feel my individual level times were super fast. Got all but 1 on the first loop, with being able to hold right most of the time. But the game ticks up even when you're experimenting, so my final score was a 4:58:16, with most levels being completed in 5-15 seconds. Fun game! A couple minor gripes with bouncing when you hit the ground stopping you from being able to jump, and some weird heights being really tricky to jump over, but I really liked the submission!
Tough to control, and a couple of places where you could get stuck, and have to wait for very long periods of time to even be able to backtrack, but the lighting and rotating world were cool, and found my way to the end eventually! Good job!
Super fun game! Really liked the premise, like it enough that even when I thought I hit the end cause I got the same enemy configuration 3 times in a row, I kept going. My biggest issue was the lack of feedback when things happened (took me a bit to figure out that enemies attack when one dies.) Also my hand started hurting after awhile =) - wouldn't mind being able to hotkey cards, but maybe that would let you play too fast.
Would love to more! More cards, more upgrades, more enemies (I know it's a game jam, though!) - the enemies that had meta-attacks were super cool, I liked the upgrade that rewarded trying to get 4 attacks in a row. I got to a point where I didn't think I could outheal pretty much any damage I took. Anyways, cool game!
Good game! Have to echo some of the other things said. Would be nice if there was a bit more time to react to/understand attack patterns. Tried beating the game legitimately but I'm VERY bad at it haha! Got the win cheesing it by being invulnerable. Nice style, nice idea!
Nice idea! I kept accidentally pressing dash too many times and having my computer ask me if I want to turn sticky keys on haha. Was fun, liked punching walls and finding shelter.
Loved the concept and execution. Disagree with other comments about other clues and art style, I felt it was just enough to make it work while still making it very interesting. Sure if the game were a full release, there'd need to be more, and there are plenty of ways you can expand on this concept, but for a game jam game I think the idea was realized incredibly well, and was very fun to boot! Good work!
Nice game. Platforming was really fun, I like the idea of a fraud path.
Nice game! The creature art was super well done, and even something like just seeing them all walk around made the waiting no problem. Catchy song too
I get this error when trying to run your game from this page:
"Uh oh! If you're seeing this error, it means I can't find your index.html file.
This usually means you created your .zip file by zipping the entire folder, and index.html is somewhere like MyGame/index.html. If you recreate your .zip with index.html file in the root, this error should go away.
See the embedding guide for more details. ludumdare.com/resources/guides/embedding/
404 Not Found"
Let me know if I'm doing something wrong?
Had a bunch of fun with this one. Really liked the mood you set, and how well each of the areas presented themselves!
Ended up getting high enough level? cog upgrade? that I could just hit continue and it would up the level counter (and keep me on the shop screen, so I could do this infinitely, and no levels would spawn!) So I ended up getting to around level 500 before I got tired of clicking haha. Very fun game! Cog upgrades busted. Would be nice with more enemy/item varieties. Theme 10/10.
I liked the game! I like the idea of rolling dice, and using them to cast spells. The red circles and dice were a bit confusing, but other than that cool idea!
Nice work! Had an issue where my clones kept closing the darn door where you needed 2! Didn't notice the reset button, so just started over, but was super fun, really liked the variety in the puzzles. Good work!
Loved the atmosphere in this one, and the intro is top notch. Good work!
Great game! Took me a sec to realize how to pick your speed since it builds up so fast, and the control doesn't say to hold - And also it was really good only having to hover the left and right zones, not click on em. The level design is great, interestingly laid out and a challenge to do well on for the player. Good job!
Fun game. I loved getting max cannon upgrades and a handful of attack speed upgrades, sailing into the middle of a huge fleet of enemy ships, and just spinning in circles as a whirling death machine as I watched everyone nearby disappear! I appreciated being able to turn really quick with wasd. Also found the ships that ended up on the shore to be quite amusing. Had to stop cause there's no auto fire, and my hand was starting to hurt haha. Good work!
really great submission! Super polished, gameplay was very fun. I loved the second path through each level that was tougher than the first. Getting the super jump consistently was super fun, as was the ice mechanics. Well done!
Really enjoyed this game's style and mood. I don't know anything about tea so guessing what to put in drinks was a bit of a mystery, but I had fun nonetheless! Only issue I ran into was sometimes not being able to scroll down far enough to see the options (this always happened after a character portrait spawned, but not every time) - but I was still able to hover to the very bottom of the screen and select the top option to continue. I really liked being able to collect ingredients, and felt having more options to be able to help different kinds of problems was interesting. The characters you run into are all very unique as well, definitely felt like a lot of time was put into them. Well done!
Nice one! It took awhile for me to get the hang of the game, but when I did it was pretty fun! I wouldn't have minded a smaller deck to start, so there's less stuff to read and try to understand. Also sometimes a single tile could go from a fully fortified town (0 souls per harvest) to completely destroyed in 1 turn, which I still don't quite understand why. I wouldn't have minded the defense stat instead show how many souls you'll harvest, or how close you are to harvesting, etc. But I love strategy games like this and I felt this worked quite well, good job!
Interesting game. Very moody. Took a bit but had an "aha!" moment with how the mechanics work and how to not get overrun by the slimes. Felt it was a bit strange that even when you were at 100%, you still had to replace one more time, but that makes sense cause that's the harvest. Was just spooky cause you have nowhere to run once it happens! Got the bunny party at the end. Good job!
Agree with most other comments here. However, the music was bangin' and the art was great and I had a good time beating your game. Good job!
Fun game! Super satisfying using your enemies as minions, I really liked the model for your summons. Broke through the gate multiple times, but kept getting the message saying the only way to find out is to try again. I wonder if I missed anything? Tried exploring the whole area but couldn't find anything special. Nice submission
@antti-haavikko I never thought to do that with the text. If I have time I usually try to use the TextGeneration class to figure out how much width you'd need for words, then set things up beforehand to prevent the wrapping and line movement, but it's far easier to just have all the text out, and just change the color with the color tag to be transparent for a substring! Way faster, same result. Thanks, great idea! Also appreciate all the rest of the feedback. It was a tough one for us for sure.
@tycoonbelle thank you very much for the honor! It's the same I feel when I'm playtesting games, I know I like it if I finish it!
@slantyoj haha, we did have plenty of extra ideas that just couldn't make it in the final game, the rocket ship would be a cool minion to have, hah! Yep, enemy AI was super tricky, and most of my time was spent just getting them to move =(.
@maymay Agree. There's definitely a lot of tweaking to be done for enemies, the player, and your Nimkips to really get that level of polish we were missing. The level came together REALLY late in development, so it's not very fine tuned. I think a minimap is a great idea
@chompdev Thanks for the kind words! We really liked this game idea, and we put a lot of work into it, so I'm glad people appreciate it. It's still super rough around the edges, but hey what can you do, it's a game jam!
@nekuake Thanks for the kind words and for playing!
@tomate-salat Definitely agree that combat-feedback is very important, and is missing in our game! Unfortunately, we were heads down the last like... 20 hours, and it worked "enough" that we had to leave it as is. But I think healthbars on enemies is 100% necessary! And yeah, I wanted to make the level pretty easily beatable, so people could just... explore what we had, so I tried to make as little combat necessary as possible. I see that most people then just skip the combats, which I admit I'd probably do too haha. Maybe I went a little too far there! We also had plans to make enemies have another resource you need, but that didn't make it in either. Thanks for playing and for the feedback!
@beats Thanks for playing! Taking down enemies is really satisfying when you have a full squad, but I agree that the best way to a reliable victory is to skip fighting when you can. Maybe better enemy/resource/terrain placement could change that a bit.
@nvrskipgameday your username is excellent! Thanks for playing the game and the kind words.
@gubidubi @thunderchief Death animations were something we had, but had to get cut cause of the crunch! It's very jarring the way it is now, I definitely agree. Some things- like the tutorial- were so last-minute that I had to just hope people read them in the description haha. Lucky nimkip type selection not necessary to complete the game!
@piko yeah, we tried multiple times to get Nimkips to not get pushed into the terrain, it used to be much worse! But it can still happen, sorry about that!
@marton technologies were definitely high on our list of features to add! There's so much cool stuff you could do with an upgrade system and I agree, it wouldn't have been too hard. It's a shame we couldn't get to it.
Thanks all for the compliments and for playing!
@jamesboink Thanks for the nice words! It's tough trying to get them to not get stuck in the terrain. We did add some features to at least make it so you could still give commands when others were stuck (it used to softlock your ability to command stuff!) but couldn't nail down all the ways they could get stuck and preventing them.
@hfsevans Definitely! I tried to kind of give a similar feel to maps you'd find in Pikmin, but I think that game having a much wider camera angle, and destructible terrain really makes it work. I tried to make the current map still relatively straightforward, but I never had the ability to play it without having made it, so it I always knew where everything was haha. Maybe something a minimap could fix. Thanks for playing!
@tristan-doell Thanks for playing our completely original idea! Hah yeah there definitely were some bugs. We were fighting a lot of them during development. Environmental things were also high on the list of things to add, so each Nimkip felt more distinct. Originally we had it so yellows could only harvest, and reds could only attack, but I changed that before having the first level done so people wouldn't get stuck. Now those two colors are just way better at those jobs. It's not the greatest design but based on what we had it was as much variety as we had time for. Being able to only have certain types navigate certain areas like in the original, or have elemental attacks, would have been neat to implement and I agree that would definitely improve the game! Thanks for playing.
@hulya I agree, it's so satisfying and cute to see them follow you around! @jackofcups did a great job on them! But they do get lazy sometimes! It's DEFINITELY not the fault of the programmers, haha. Thanks for playing!
@substain Yeah, that bug was tough to track down, we didn't have time for it. Same with balancing/completing enemies. Thanks for the kind words!
@fullheartgames Absolutely! Enemy attack/health/dealing damage feedback I think is absolutely necessary for combat, and its absence is VERY noticeable. Thanks for playing!
@harmofish Thanks! It appeals a bunch to me too, so I'm glad to see others enjoy it.
@ninnec Thanks for the nice comment on the character design. We tried to get a lot in, definitely gave ourselves a ton of work with this project haha. Always too ambitious.
@hayricakir Nice work! Those plant enemies are really broken, and need a ton of adjustment to be fair. Good job being able to win despite attacking them! Thanks for playing.
@frozenfire92 haha that is excellent! Thanks for sharing that story, and for the kind words!
great work! I really enjoyed the art and the puzzles. The vortex things that spawn were cool. Went through it twice because I misclicked an answer at the end, just to see the good ending. Had fun playing it! Only critique was not knowing what was clickable on the motorcycle screen. Thought I almost got softlocked for a second! Good submission
Really appreciated the level design. There was enough there that was out of reach that really inspired me to keep pushing upgrades. The physics was top notch. The wall clinging was insanely satisfying. Minor nitpick, I wouldn't mind there being a bit more leniency in picking up smaller objects. They can get really tough to grab, even though you're clearly rolling over them.
That being said, I did max out on upgrades. I found secret waterfalls, and climbed them. I climbed the highest summits, found meat treasures other hedgehogs could only dream of, and obtained a mass so large I became one with the universe. Had a great time, good work!
What an absurd game, I love it! Despite being really bad with a lot of rhythm games when playing on PC, I found this to be very straightforward and very easy to sight read. The dancing tanuki was as ridiculous as it was delightful. The music was great to boot. Good job!
Fun minigame based game! The individual games were fun, even if the eggplant totally cheated on the button mashing segment!!!!!!!! I'll get 'em next time for sure! Great humor, great art, really well put together submission. Great work
Exactly like being in Ohio!
Is the current linked build functional? I can build buildings, but when I click on them and expand the menu for that building, there never is anything there, like in your screenshots. There are references to farmers in the text when events happen, but never any farmer images in the farm, and nothing that is clickable. I can't click to sell wheat in the market, the farms, barracks, and main shelter are empty all the time. Let me know if I'm missing something, I love this layout and love dice rolling, so I'm very interested in trying this one!
@joe-eric interesting! When I was playing beforehand, no farmers were showing up in the shelter. Now that I have rebooted, they are showing up. I wonder what I did haha. Thanks for the response
Relaxing game, very zen! I like the idea of having farmers and being able to level them up and send them out each month for tasks. Once I could actually see them, it worked quite well. A few critiques:
One of the boons makes a farmer's level level 5, even if they're already level 12, so it's very demoralizing haha. Repairing the Shelter costs way more than advertised. Events don't scale, so thief stealing 50 coins when you have 20,000 is no big deal. I wouldn't mind there being an end game condition, or more to do with your gold and how to spend it.
Good submission! I love games with dice and workers and such.
Nice game! I really liked the aspect of letting go to not waste energy and letting momentum carry you to where you needed to go. Also I really appreciated the levels where the two were different sizes/shapes/speeds. Made for interesting levels.
Can't echo enough what other people have said. Good game, fun core gameplay, extinction mechanic is neat, sound effects are great, and could probably play infinitely with how fast populations replenish. Overall very solid entry!
Nice game! Very ambitious with the events and the tech tree! There were a handful of things that didn't work the way I expect them, like the explorers always finding nothing, and the mines not destroying the hostile creatures, but it was pretty fun once I got the hang of the energy and then mineral mining. Super unique idea!
Great entry! After way too long I had to give up on the Intersection level. My brain just couldn't handle it. I think it might have been easier if I understood the couple of levels before it better, but I think the way I "solved" the levels was incorrect, but good enough for a level complete. Fun concept, though a bit tougher to wrap your head around than your last entry. Music was a bop, game was very complete, great work!
Interesting game. I liked the audio cutting out on a miss, but agree with others that more to do would have been good. Either way, good job!
Came back to this one after a handful of frustrating deaths, this time I beat it. Nice final liver ending =). Agree with other comments here about the crazy amount of backtracking. There were also issues of like.... running when you intend to stop, blind falls into acid, and having acid pits on the same level as you, so when you're trying to run to get the biggest jump possible, your toe touches the acid and you instantly die. I also randomly found the jump that gets you extra height? And had no idea why that worked, but hey at least I eventually found it :sunglasses:
Good game. A little rough overall, and definitely could use some player Quality of Life stuff, but the art was very nice, and really liked the setting of this one (and liked it enough to come back a second time and finish it.) Good job
Can't add much other people have said. I did start getting weird eye/brain strain watching the sidewalk, I think it was just the perspective was a little too sharp or something? And I wouldn't mind the mailbox/cone sounds punch lining up with the beats instead of their animation, although I can see why it is the way it is! Really liked the audio you chose, and the game was quite fun, all 4 levels had decent variety. Nice work!
Really liked the music change when in the bathrooms. Gameplay loop was fine, nothing too crazy but it worked for this game. Definitely did a good job feeling like you're being hunted down, the guard is daunting! Good work
I usually have trouble with a lot of momentum based games, but this one was surprisingly logical. I figured out pretty quick how to go different angles, so definitely good work on that. Some levels were a bit rough due to not knowing which way to go, and having multiple options, but it wasn't too much of a hassle overall. I like the walls of the level being tied to the animals. Nice work!
Great game, well executed, pretty fun. Really liked all the companions and upgrades, felt it really put the game over the top. It was clean and complete. Only critique I could have is maybe having the red/green for buy/sell more distinct, and the icons a little bigger so it's easy to see what/who is selling and buying. But I got a pretty lucky run my first time, and got Sugar to buy 1, sell 5, right next to each other with only 1 time in between, and managed to turn a bleak looking run into a win! Very well done!
Just to echo what everyone else said, super impressive, great game!
Fun little physics based game! Really like the name, and like how satisfying it was to jump while pushing into another box to make it on top. Some things felt a little off, like how difficult it was to hit the switch on the wall in level 2, and the sound effects when you moved, but I liked the game overall, and it had good variety. Nice work!
Interesting game. Love the design, but there is a LOT to take in to start. It would be nice if there was a mini-version of the game with guided steps to onboard you, but I do know the difficulty of doing so for a game jam. Either way, cozy, neat game!
@grizwhirl that was all @crimoudin! I thought it was super clever too! =) thanks for playing.
@the-neon-shark if you saw that the levels had variety, you were probably pretty close to the end! We tried to keep it short with only 4 levels. Thanks for playing!
@bo-dangles Yeah, we also tried leaning into the color matching aspect instead of getting full lines to make it a bit less tetris-like, which could have been a good or bad thing. Glad it was fun!
@gabriele-marconi Yeah, we had a live guitar riff played! It was recorded on a phone though so the quality isn't the best, but I liked it! We're a fan of making intro text crawls like that for that very reason. Thanks for the comment!
@braveskin still a great score! Thanks, I think it's a decent twist on the tetromino stuff too!
@vectrex28 Thanks! I honestly cut down the number of levels just so people wouldn't think it took too long...... but I guess I should also consider people who like the gameplay! haha, whoops! Thanks for playing!
@pouny Thanks for the kind words!
@claybro2021 Hah, we definitely could take the page graphics and make a game styled around them! I was thinking maybe letting you place blocks underneath, since it's a big feature in Tetris, but figured I'd say it added to the challenge, so you didn't have to start manually placing pieces instead of dropping them. It'd be interesting to try to make a version where you could.
@adam-gaskins We definitely tried to make the color matching more important, just to have a different twist on this style of game. Thanks for playing!
@csimpson Thanks for the kind words! Glad you had fun.
@peterfiftyfour Agreed, seems like there's lots of ways you could take the Tetris base and expand on it. Thanks for playing!
@tobiasd Thanks for the kind words! I agree, better feedback on good scores overall, and when you place a block, would really make the game feel that much better to play.
@legingergamer Yeah I think knowing Tetris well almost hurts you a little playing this, because the lack of being able to tuck under and things like that. Glad it did manage to click eventually, hopefully that meant it wasn't too far off base. Big improvement on scores!
@pralista Yep! We tried to make something similar, but different enough to feel distinct. Thanks for playing.
@oradimi Wow, very impressive score! Thanks for playing!
@obe-dot Thanks for playing! Seems a lot of people liked the opening menu!
@100th-coin Wow, I'm on T.V.!!! HI MOM!!! :) Thanks for the recording, that kind of feedback is always useful for seeing how new people experience it. Funny you get so wrapped up in your own ideas and time constraints that it's easy to gloss over making sure the player knows the basics! I wasn't sure on putting too much focus on traditional Tetris "mechanics" - with going for full rows, but honestly I don't see why not. Also, thought I recognized the LD name... I played your last LD submission with the harvest festival, and the blockbuster one. Great stuff!
@zerovirus Nice score! Yeah, it's funny how a small change or two really forces you to change up your priorities from regular tetris. Nice strategy. Thanks for playing.
@shiiro-10psi Solid score! Yeah, I found balancing score matching to fitting as much as you can in was pretty interesting, and a fun twist. Thanks for the kind words!
@paulsams :sweat: geez, looks like we came up short in pretty much every aspect for you, huh? :sweat_smile: Oh well, thanks for playing!
@eharp Yeah... we need to be better about having a small in-game playable tutorial to help out. Glad it eventually clicked! Also agreed, loading things up for delivery and the actual act of delivery are two different things, and we hope people aren't too critical of that distinction, but definitely understood! Thanks for playing.
@phoenix-fireflower Thanks for the feedback! I definitely noticed a bit too late how picky the clicking on pieces was, I agree that's a big thing to fix.
@asfdfdfd Thanks for playing!
@dzugaru Thanks for playing and the kind words! I also thought the color matching turned out pretty neat. Also nice hat pun!
@sylf Yeah, without reading the opening crawl, or the main page, we didn't really do a very good job of having in-game instructions. Definitely a huge oversight on our part. Interesting with the controls feeling laggy, I didn't notice but I'll play it again with that in mind and see what went wrong there. Thanks for playing!
@jelch Hah, it is surprisingly tough to switch mindsets after playing enough Tetris! Someone else suggested maybe also having a completed row bonus, I think that would help ease people comfortable with Tetris into the game better. Thanks for playing!
@flying-dog-fish Thanks for playing!
Great game! I really like the idea of the track building, spend money to explore and go to new places. The track generation was neat visually, the quest icons were really good in helping figure out where new places are, music and art were very good. Very fun!
Will echo what a lot of other people said already: Game looks great, plays and controls super well, and was good fun. Nice job!
Nice submission! Some things were a bit awkward, like "3" and "three" both being on there, and text not lining up until after you type most of the words... but the art, music, and overall feel of the game were great! My fingers hurt a little after this one haha. Good work
Super charming game, nice variety of minigames!
Fun game! The driving controls were a little rough. Many times I would be driving forward, and wanted to go in reverse, but even the reverse button would accelerate forward. I think I had to go to a complete stop for the reverse button to actually back me up? But driving around despite that was fun, the pre-game menu and sounds were great, and I found even just driving around the town to see what you built was pretty fun too. Good job!
Interesting one! Pretty funny. Definitely a unique concept, I don't think any other people thought of something like this! Good work
Very interesting game! Mood was spot on, music and art were really good. The ads were funny. I had a game over on level 7? where you have one car go to 3 different houses. Otherwise good job!
Nice work. Sick art!
I hate making comparisons to other games, but this really reminds me of playing Solar Winds back when I was a kid. Love the feel of just roaming through space, you did a really good job of capturing that feeling! Really enjoyed the fire effect too, simple and effective. Aiming is very precise, controls are snappy. Only critique is that the squids are maybe a little too few and far between. Really liked this one, good job!
I really enjoyed the combining of cards. Never got higher than a C, but it didn't matter, the game itself was very well done!
That act 2 is exactly where I guessed this game would go. Perfectly logical next step. Really liked the humor in this one, well done!
Echoing what other people said here, really really cool take on this style of game. Had a blast going through each one, but did wish for a little bit more variety in the puzzles, as some felt like exact copies of each other. Either way, super neat idea and very well executed, great job!
Got to old age! Interesting concept. I liked being able to re-drag things already placed, and found the idea of healing specific spots that take damage interesting, as well as cells losing health for running into the enemy. Made the game an interesting placement puzzle. Nice work!
Nice game! Got to the end screen. Noticed a bug where if you switched from left to right real quick, you'd stay going left instead of switching direction. Other than that was a solid entry!
The physics were wild and I'm here for it. Sometimes the camera was a little tough to deal with, as it would be really low when there's nothing you can hook onto, and that last level was tough! But it was a cool concept, good job!
I like this idea a lot! Having the mouse be your weapon was a neat idea! The game was a little tough at times with how many enemies spawned, and getting caught in a death loop, but it was forgiving enough that you could make it through anyways. The tutorial was also very good! Good work
Took me a handful of tries, but I got it detached and got a 0m distance. Had to play again and drop off target to make sure it was displaying correctly :laughing: Good work, especially for a first time game jam! Momentum based physics games are always tricky for players, this one was done quite well though. Good work!
Got to the end! Very, very tough to control, tough to shoot, tough to see. But the game came together pretty well! I got lost after delivering the 3rd bar, didn't know if that was the end or if there was more, took me awhile to find the ceiling that opened up. Maybe an indicator of where things are opening up might be good since it's all off screen? Also, I had 0 credits the whole time, and I didn't know how to get more. Either way, for a first time game it came together very well, and the game as a whole was a very well designed and complete! Good work
Great entry, super atmospheric! Only downside was some pacing issues while backtracking, but fun, great checkpoint system, and very good delivery. Nice work!
Solid entry, enjoyed the minigames I got. Some were a little rough around the edges, but that's to be expected on a game jam game. Cool take on the theme. Nice work!
Interesting idea! I liked the second camera showing what is below you, interesting take when you can't tilt the camera up and down. Shooting was a bit wonky, but did manage to take down a drone. Some feedback on when you're going out of bounds would be nice. But the game looked pretty good, good work!
Nice work! The art is incredible and the music was fun. The boat moved a little slow, though. I liked the entries in the book, added a lot of character. Well done!
Very moody game. I love the idea of the game style where you can't let resources drop to zero being combined with a text adventure! Great work!
Nice game! Have to agree with other people and comment on how great the art is. Got to a point where I don't think you walk fast enough to actually fill the orders in time, but hey, the game has to end sometime right? :laughing: Good work!
Tough game! Had a lot of problems getting far, because it's so tough to fly far away and bring anything back, but fun nonetheless!
Good game! I really liked the way the attack worked, with a bunch of particles in a spray. Always fun getting 5 times the damage by being close to enemies. A bit of variety in attacks or powerups or enemies would be nice, but for the length of the game what you had was decent. Nice job.
Super creative! Really like the idea of being tethered to things like how you did it. Found the mechanic of the zones intersecting a bit confusing, but managed to make it through the whole game anyways. I would have liked a better wall jump, it was very tough to control. But the levels were neat with a nice variety, and it was a great time. Good job!
I learned from this game that if you're in a cop car and you hit a wall enough times you try to pull the wall over.
this is basically how I studied for finals so I was a pro at this =) Actually did pretty poorly the first couple but after I got the hang of it, aced the last 4. really unique take on the theme! I do not miss my days in school. At all.
Who gave you permission to make music so good??!?!?! Should be illegal. Game was great, flowed really well, was very interesting, fit the theme well, did everything right. My highest rated this time around, very well done! Or ... "eh, good enough" as your name suggests. Following you in hopes you make more absolute bangers in future jams.
Great job! Really well built, complete game. Puzzles were good, there was enough variety that it never felt repetitive. The click and drag to move instead of arrows/wasd is.. interesting, but it worked fine enough! The game fit the theme really well, and plays great. Nice game! 11:55 time 15 deaths 429 steps 8/8 apples
Great game! The mechanics were very well executed and the levels were very interesting. Got a bit stuck on the last one, and trying to reposition the ladder while holding it was a bit rough, but I made it all the way through and had a great time. Well done!
Nice game! Have to agree with the initial package spawn rate, would have liked that much higher. Got to around $1100 before I stopped, and I did notice the timer going down but 4.5 seconds per package is still plenty to be way ahead of the timer. There was an interesting input bug: if you press up then right one almost right after the other, the cursor jumps. Threw me off a bit trying to have snappy inputs. Also would be neat if multiple packages spawn or there's multiple shaped packages besides the 2 (like all tetronimos, e.g.) - but I do know this is a game jam. Great sound/art. Good job
Really liked the art and sound, as others have mentioned. I would have liked the pace of the game to be a bit faster, and felt like it took too long to get going. But I like where it was headed and how much you could do with it. Good luck getting 20 votes!
As always, great seeing what you make! This game is no exception. Very well drawn, music very relaxing, puzzles very well build. All around great job!
Well done! Liked the drawing of spells and the way the game progresses. Made it to the end! I agree with wanting easier ways to determine where you start drawing from, as backtracking to the first candle just to cancel and start somewhere else was a bit tedious, but not a huge problem. Also ran into a problem where I cast the cloud spell and there was nowhere to put it? So I kind of just had to sit there until the wind blew some other clouds away. Also having to click/drag the spell list was a bit off, but not a dealbreaker. Overall good work!
Really enjoyed this one. It's put together very well: the pushback of the gun, collecting coins, the and AI all felt fun, even if the game overall might have been a bit too easy (better that than too tough for a game jam!) Liked the map variety. Nice game!
Nice work! Interesting concept on the bullet hell genre mixed in with the theme. Done really well, getting hit carries over into other levels. Neat!
I can't say enough good things about this one! Really enjoyed my time playing it. Very engaging, very captivating, super cool twists. Great submission! This really stood out.
Nice game! Art was fantastic. Really enjoyed the ideas put here. The bubble limiting the area you can move in, and it shrinking as you're attacking was very cool. Also your attack speed being tied to how small your bubble was, also very neat. Made for some tough challenges. Although in a bullet hell style game, being brutally difficult is a good thing, I'd say for a game jam it'd be nice to be able to continue at the boss you last left off at, instead of starting over from the very beginning each time, just to let players experience all that you put in without making it a large grind. On that note, had a blast playing, and it was very well done. Good job!
Fun game! interesting puzzle trying to figure out what to do to win. A little rough having to go through all the dialog again when you retry, but didn't deter me from finishing the game. Very entertaining!
Fun game! Nice choice of music and sound effects haha. Got the "thing" that happens where "things" besides people having to go to the bathroom spawn, and made it to around 55 dollars before the game crashed. Oh well, good job on the game!
Nice work. Liked the idea of needing pirates for looting towns and getting gold, and needing cannonballs for other pirate ships, and having to resupply after you loot enough towns. Cannonballs were too sparse to survive for long, so I felt like I met an inevitable doom pretty early, but I got the idea of the game well enough with what was there. Good luck getting 20 ratings!
What a game! Glad I stumbled on this one. Very interesting idea. I loved a lot of the dialog, very creative! Especially with Disco the dog. Good work, I got it right!
@chompdev Thanks for the kind words! Appreciate it, this one was tough to put together so glad it at least works :smile:
@epa Thanks!
@noobgeek this was all drawn by @jackofcups ! The yellow resource wasn't to spend, but the "victory condition" - I didn't have time to really code any use in, or more explanation, or an end goal of how much you need to win, so it being there is a bit confusing, I agree. Jellyfish attack the island and your buildings, breaking the ground so you have less room to build, and possibly destroying temples. Thanks for playing!
@bigal thanks for playing! Didn't start off as a tower defense but definitely resembled one at the end for sure :sweat_smile:
@magnanix Thanks for playing to the end, and the nice comment about the art!
@digital-bacon yeah sorry about that one! As usual with these I was scrambling to put everything together for an actual game up until the last minute. I was hoping the tutorial popup would be enough but there can definitely be tons of improvement on getting info to the player. Thanks for playing!
@nadia-pixel The cracks on the ground destroy the ground, so you have less space to build. And in theory you would want as much space as possible to build temples, if we implemented a win condition based on Favor. Jellyfish only attack ground spaces, and will damage buildings/you if you're under it while they attack. Thanks for the kind words!
@bromeon Thanks for playing! Yeah the arrow towers initially did a ton of damage, so I guess I over-nerfed their damage too much! Didn't want you to be able to build 1 and forget about that area entirely, but I guess their limited range kind of does that enough already.
@themixedmaster Yeah, after getting all the art in place, the islands built, and a lot of the build/harvest mechanics, there wasn't much time left to actually put the game together.... most of the actual game was built in the last couple of hours, so it's definitely incomplete. Thanks for playing!
@gamedevjeroen Right, I think even just giving the player a goal of how much favor you want to have by the end could have done wonders for peoples' impression of the game. Something to think about for next time for sure!
@leelith The jellyfish damage the land tiles and buildings you've built. If land tiles are destroyed, you can no longer build there, and the goal was supposed to be to get as much favor as you can, so less tiles means less shrines (the only way to get favor) you can build. Definitely didn't have time to work that information into the game though! :frowning2: Thanks for playing.
@gamedevtraum Definitely! If I wasn't scrambling so hard to get the game together before the deadline, I think that would have been the best thing to add for player experience. Thanks for playing!
@hora-timer Nice!!
@tankou Thanks for the kind words!
@kanity I'm sure you did fine! I think there might be a timer bug where it jumps to 0 before you have time left? But I didn't have time to test it out and fix it. Surprised no one else mentioned it yet. Thanks for playing!
@arivaneverdingen Yeah, unfortunately an end-goal is important to show to the player, but it was a huge time crunch just getting the game together. Appreciate you playing and rating, thanks!
@deadjolly honestly, it wasn't *really* inspired by Bastion? But that's very high praise, so we'll take it for sure! We just put a bunch of ideas randomly together and it somehow came up to this, but I absolutely see the connection you made and agree 100%. Definitely agree. We have a problem with trying to make a game "fun" by adding too many mechanics, and things like sfx get pushed aside too easily. Maybe one day!!!!! Thanks for the feedback and for playing!
@dan-str thanks for playing!
@aucguy Definitely true, a game like this needs a few more things to even feel that "game-y." You can attack the enemies with spacebar and damage them, but since they're floating it doesn't always line up as expected. That and towers and you can at least hold off areas for a time, but yeah with the timer and amount of space, you aren't expected to be able to clear the whole map at all times. Thanks for the nice comments on the theme and art, appreciate it!
Nice work! I was not as much a fan of the heating mechanic as other people were. The drilling pace, the enemy speed, and how many levels there were was enough to make the game not need another aspect that increased how long the game would take. Enemies were really tough to predict, where sometimes you'd get chased from like, halfway across the screen, and other times they'd just leave you even though you're right next to them. Interesting idea, good execution, pretty fun, nice game!
Very nice work! Really appreciated the different aquatic life and scenes you put in this one. Also really liked the ending. Good game!
Very interesting game! Great art, fun concept once you get it, and the characters had a good variety. I would have liked if, when its your next character's turn, that it would "auto hover" them, so you know what the active character's moves are. Also some way to have what the specials do be more clear/prevalent on characters would be nice. But I liked the idea quite a bit, good work!
Nice job! Very interesting setting. Didn't know you could scroll with wasd so I was super confused how to get to the surface. And with so many tunnels it would have taken forever to get there. But got a pretty decent ant/food cap. very relaxing and fun game!
Awesome work! Super creative mechanic, and managed to use it in a bunch of non-trivial, non-repetitive ways. Glad I ran across this one on the games list!
Interesting take on the theme and on tetris! Lots of rules and things to learn to jump in. Didn't fully understand it but got a couple games going decently. Nice job!
rating to get you out of the danger zone. Nice game. Out of nowhere all of my crew died and I didn't know why but I was doing well until then haha. I like the way you did pathing, it's clever and works well, although visually a little strange. Nice game!
Definitely agree with the music, it's bangin'! Had some troubles with the platformer controls, though. You're so tall, and some spaces are so claustrophobic! Really tough to get through, bumped my skull on a lot of things. But the idea of finding random collectibles to keep the platforms up was a neat idea, and executed well. Nice work!
Interesting stuff! Really like the idea of this one, super creative, really good use of theme. Have to echo some of the critiques of others here. Controls were a bit wonky. I don't mind not being able to place on a floor covered by water, but not having to be on the same row was tough. Also, there was a thing where I couldn't build on the highest floor until the timer was at a certain level? Odd. Finally, can you just stay in the water and just jump the whole time :laughing: ? Either way, really like the concept. well done!
When I click on the download I get a "Not found" page. :frowning2:
Neat game! A little rough around the edges but the idea was executed quite well, Jumping felt great, pushing and pulling blocks: not so much. Also had some troubles with clipping on things that I shouldn't have. The levels were very interesting and explored the mechanics well. There were some points where you had to spam switch, and that felt a bit tedious, but mostly very fun to play. Cool idea, nice work!
Nice job! I liked the story, and having to make the choice. Felt impactful. Really liked the setting. Good work!
Great job! The game was super ambitious, which I appreciate a lot for a game jam. The art style was incredible, have to say! The dialog system and such were great. The driving part was a bit rough, some visual indicators as to where you need to go would be nice, as fuel was so limited. Also couldn't figure out how to shoot, and got stuck inside the lake somehow. But bugs like that I think are definitely going to happen when you have a game this scope. Managing to have that many people on a team and being able to put everything together the way it was put together is no small feat!
@pabloabraham Cool, checked out all the rest of the content I missed. Thanks for the update!
Very creative, super nice story, easy to play and a great experience. Fun game, nice job!
Interesting game! Very tough to get your head around the motion, but pretty satisfying when things go well. Tried the last level and only 1 piece couldn't fit, but it counted as a loss anyways :( - oh well! Good work!
Nice work! I really liked the idea of the two separate things working together, and enjoyed how many mechanics you managed to work into the Pixie. I do wish the game were a *tad* bit brighter, though, sometimes it was just a bit too frustratingly dark. Also the jump physics could definitely use some fine tuning. But overall good entry!
Nice work, fun game. I liked the matching on a timer. I did get to a point where I don't think anything else gets added, so decided to stop, but fun nonetheless. Did you accidentally make it so you couldn't random 7 on the knobs? They never needed a 7th click :laughing: ! Fun submission, really liked the walking once they were free. How did none of them warn the next person what was happening!!!
Nice game! I liked the idea of having to fit the pieces in the small space, while paying for them in a minigame. The fishing minigame was a bit frustrating at times, though. when the fish can move faster than your cursor, sometimes there's literally nothing you can do but sit and watch as it moves away from you and there is literally no way to catch it. Having the fishing cursor move faster and accelerate a little more chaotically might achieve a similar effect without having it feel so bad when a fish decides to be uncatchable for 4 whole seconds. was confused by the scoring until I read the description. I like the scoring conditions, and think it was a good idea that would add to the tetris part a lot. Also the art on the fishing minigame is superb! Good job
Interesting one. Mowing down a ton of zombies was very fun. Eventually ended up winning, felt like I had a ton of space, though. But the zombie hoards at night certainly fixed that issue. Good work and good luck on getting 20 ratings!
Tough game to wrap your head around! Pretty interesting mechanic, haven't seen that before too much. Like some other comments this was complex enough that I couldn't have survived much longer, or with another planet, so balanced pretty well. Nice work!
Nice work! Game is scoped well for a game jam. I liked the responsiveness of the controls, losses felt like my fault for sure. I think tweaking the speed that you lose space and the importance of having more space would improve the game a bit. Right now I think it's perfectly fine to just dodge ghosts and ignore candy once it gets too fast. But I don't think that's a bad thing, the game plays nicely as is. The music and atmosphere were great. Good game!
Nice idea and good execution. Would have liked a bit more enemy variety, or for enemies to "persist" when outside of the window, as just shooting in mostly 1 direction basically despawned all of them. But the idea was very good and on theme. Next time rate more games yourself to not be in the "Danger" category with only 1 day left!
The sunglasses were a great touch. Never before has a penguin been SO COOL.
Interesting game! The movement is really bouncy, the rotation a bit slow, and the books re-rotate really easily when you touch the shelf, making this a very difficult game to control. On that note it was pretty interesting, and very challenging. Good luck getting 20 ratings!
Echo what everyone else said here. A very satisfying game!
Neat game! Fits the theme well, controls well, quite fun. I lost basically every run to the tiny laser that is hard to see and goes much faster than the circle bullets, so those were a bit frustrating, but really liked the parry mechanic and everything else, really. Overall very good game, Good job!
Cool game! Pretty satisfying laser/mining mechanic. Also tethering to things faster than you was pretty neat, felt like you could explore off of them a lot. Agree with the first couple of comments, the W key alone seemed like the best way to get your ship to behave the way you wanted with the way it was programmed. Took awhile but like everyone else I figured it out. Good job!
Nice game! Really liked the art and atmosphere of this one. It was tricky to understand that you could (and had to) summon a platform to get out of the tutorial area. Some kind of indicator to summon the first plant would be nice. The summons were interesting, collecting their requirements was a neat touch. I wouldn't mind the game showing you exactly how to use each summon you get once, so you don't mess up and accidentally use an elephant when you needed a penguin, like I did at the end of the last level, then have to start over. Music and effects worked really well with the art. Finally, I wouldn't mind if there was some way to activate the platforms instead of having them on cycles. Sometimes I ended up having to wait around for 10ish seconds for a platform to show up. Cool entry, really like the take on the theme here.
As always, excellent game. Humor and audio are top notch. Game has that 100th-coin charm.
This one was a tough one to get my head around. Really appreciate the creativity of being able to move the platforms, just something didn't click with my brain and moving them in the space given. As always, great art style and music. Cool entry, nice work!
Always a pleasure playing the games you submit! My tiniest critique is that if you press 'r' when it says press any key to continue, it restarts the level. Don't ask me why I pressed r I'm tired ok. hah, anyways! Look forward to your next game
Cool game! I like the music, the sound quality is a bit rough but the songs themselves are bangers. I enjoyed the art. I like the concept of having orders and fulfilling them. My biggest gripe is the speed of the game. It definitely has that sluggish "game jam feel" to it. I'd love for it to be faster. Either way, fun entry. Good work!
@accordaquo thanks for playing! It was a tough one to put together so I hope you enjoyed.
@comigor Yeah.... I was super pressed for time. I was tempted to make enemies aggro from much further, but be slower than you, but I didn't want people to run past them all straight to the goal. But I feel like if I had more time I could have struck a better balance. Thanks for playing!
@brucezoom Thanks for playing! Chickens I think are the most logical mechanical summon. :laughing:
@coolasjake :chicken: :clock:
@poboy Indeed. We were a bit concerned that maybe the average LD player wouldn't have a sophisticated enough palette to appreciate the chicken sprite. I'm glad to be proven wrong!
@nathmate Glad you liked the spritework! The getting stuck should be fixed, had a weird error on my part. The summoning health/mana I agree is kind of busywork. Especially when you're out of combat, and can just spam health summons. It was meant to be more of a combat-only thing, but ran out of time to really get those mechanics in a non-busywork place. It lets you get through the level though no matter how it has gone, so I kept it in so people could progress. Definitely too slow there, though! Thanks for playing!
@popertots this should be fixed if you wanted to give it another try. Thanks for the feedback!
@baluj Yeahhh, definitely the health/mana systems could have used a bit of work. Thanks for playing!
@blackcat508 Definitely! Throughout development I kept having to move things off that layer so it wouldn't stop you from being able to click.... and somehow completely missed it for the player :( Thanks for playing!
@letssnack :chicken: Thanks for the kind words!
@troggzor56 Yeah, I wanted for people to be able to beat the game, and getting stuck with no health/mana but having a bunch of enemies still left could easily happen without. So I added that mechanic. Ideally it would be a faster process, so it doesn't take so much time, but I was working until the very end just trying to get the game out. Definitely a spot that needs improvement! Thanks for the feedback.
@goddoesplaydice Thanks! We've had issues with tutorials being really lackluster (or not existent) for our submissions in the past, so getting a tutorial in game was one of the first things I did once the systems were in place, before building real levels. I'm glad someone appreciated it! :sweat_smile: Thanks for playing!
@themixedmaster Thanks for all the feedback! Definitely agree with it. The clock tower has a bug where it thinks the wrong target is the closest, and will mostly pick the wrong target if multiple are in range. :( an easy fix but something I missed. I also wanted to do the mana over time, but felt sitting around and waiting for your mana to replenish would be worse than you being able to summon extra mana, since at least you're doing something while waiting. But with the way I implemented it, definitely neither seems like they would have hit the mark. It does need a rework to be fun for sure! Thanks for playing.
@sodagummy Yeah, many people have issues with summoning mana. I think it needs an adjustment for sure! I like the idea of having to stand still to cast, much like Diablo games... although I think it would have ended up being more fun if you were faster than the enemies you encounter, not slower. Thanks for playing!
@meranolean Thanks for the kind words! I wanted to make it so you couldn't get permanently stunlocked, so I put a cooldown on it. Apparently though you can just run through the whole thing after! Oh well. Definitely a visual indicator for cooldowns would be a huge help. Thanks for playing.
@linus-lindberg Yeah, the pathing and level building took quite awhile, so couldn't make the gameplay too complex, unfortunately. I don't know the reason for enemies ignoring you. I'm guessing they incorrectly think there's always a wall in the way. The whole reason for making this game (programming wise) was because I wanted to make my own "intelligent" pathing system. So click to move was something I really wanted to do. Just like Diablo games! It would have been sooooooo much easier if I did WASD to move :sweat_smile: Thanks for the kind words on the art, that's all @jackofcups! Also after many Ludum Dares in a row, tutorials and endings are high priority! Now if only I could make enough time to add sounds effects to that list :laughing: Thanks for the feedback!
Nice one. Very bizarre, but in a good way! #TeamPigeon. The boss themes go way too hard. I liked the boss variety as well. The radio was a bit much for me, maybe just because I'm tired. A little too chaotic for everything else that was going on. I couldn't focus on it all. Either way, great submission as usual!
I really enjoyed the lack of cooldown on fireballs, and that both clicks would spawn them. As a button masher, I actually had the opposite opinion of others on the difficulty, I felt like I couldn't take damage! :laughing: Very satisfying to have that kind of power level.
Cool game! I agree with the previous comments, a job well done. I like the movement and the idea behind the summons. It'd be nice if there was some better visual clarity between your allies and your enemies. Also, it kept appearing I lost, but my healthbar was still almost full? So definitely spending some time in future games working on player feedback would be good! The draw to summon mechanic was really neat. I struggled with any summons besides just a single straight line, though. Overall very neat! Good scaling difficulty, and nice risk reward going further from the oasis to spread more vegetation. Good work!
As others have mentioned, the game is pretty twitchy and has some movement bugs. With that said, I'm still impressed with what you managed to accomplish. Setting new terrain you circle around, handing jumps and jump direction, etc., were all well done for a game jam. I really liked the title and theme of this one, good work!
Neat game! Love the style of it all. It was fun to play through it and see where the story went.
Nice one! I like the implementation, and the progression. Spawning waves of minions that collect and protect for you is a really neat idea. Had a couple issues with how big the screen is displayed on the itch page, I couldn't see my materials and buttons to summon at the same time. Also sometimes my minions would fumble over themselves and get stuck in a giant cluster. And at some points, protectors seemed to fail to do their job (understandable, seems like that's the hardest to program) and even though I'd build like 30-40 of them, no enemies would perish. Either way, was a very satisfying game to play, I enjoyed it.
@mr-mustachio here is what it looks like on the itch.io page.
[Sprite-0002.png](///raw/a3c/c2/z/63ac0.png)
I wonder if there's an option to add a fullscreen button to the display so it doesn't get cropped off?
Managed to play through it with the full screen button. It's interesting! I liked the balance of how much charge you had with how many enemies would spawn. At first I thought maybe I "broke" it by holding down the space bar at all times, but after losing to a million spawns it clicked :laughing: - I also like that you made the first enemies that spawn the fastest, but the more charge you have you summon more, but slower, enemies. A neat push/pull. The slip physics on the player was an interesting choice. It didn't make it too much harder to hit enemies but it felt weird. Also maybe just an issue with the web player but I was able to walk out of bounds. Finally, enemies that are dead but not removed still have their hitboxes, so sometimes my projectiles disappeared in what looked like thin air. Altogether a nice game, good work!
Good stuff! The programming was a little tricky to get used to, but by the end I felt I was pretty comfortable with the mechanics. I was scared of a solution where you'd have to summon 2 in a single chain, but luckily that never came. There's a TON of text, and I'd love to read it all, but I'm so tired right now from trying to push out my own game that I just couldn't. But I really liked how your level design matched the story that you told. The last 2 levels were great from a storytelling perspective. Overall, nice work!
Man you had some rough initial comments! I thought this game was very neat! Super interesting puzzle trying to make everything fit, and really liked the same-color-attaching mechanic. Made things VERY tricky. On that note I did think the puzzles ramped up maybe a bit too quick. I got stuck on level 4 and after about 15 minutes on it gave up. But I thought this was a really neat submission and very cool concept. Great work!
Can't agree more with what everyone else said. Atmosphere is top notch here. Game was fun but simple, loved the premise, great work! Had a small bug where I went to sleep before making it to the final area, then there was me sleeping in the bed still, but also active at the top. But a minor thing. Great job!
Good game! Interesting overall flow of the game. Endless enemies, balance moving to the exit with defending yourself and attacking enemies. This one had a bug or two, there were some times where I would click on someone, click off of them because I wanted to use someone else, and that would count as my movement. There is an undo, but if you don't realize that happening and take the rest of your turn, it gets a bit messy. A bit less content than your last submission, but definitely nailed the mood and setting and characters in this one. Good work!
Also, all of your previous submission links are returning 404 errors now :frowning:
As always, great work! The rabbit platforms were particularly impressive. Lots of creativity allowed here. One thing I'd like (or if it was there, didn't know about it) is a level reset button. I believe I softlocked myself. I'm sure I'll come back to it later at some point to finish it. Great humor and music as always!
I couldn't let @tsaot have a higher score than I. Corner to corner, baby! Sprite-0002.png
Hey there, good submission! Had a couple of issues I'll go over just for general feedback. I did not really read/remember that the c key opened something up, so I was completely lost trying out combinations....for a very long time. I had to go back to this page twice and reread everything to see if I was missing something because nothing was working. Then, even after finding it, and having 2 rows of items, I couldn't make anything. Maybe giving you small objectives first, or a couple of small freebies to get you going, could help the overwhelming initial task of figuring stuff out. I didn't have the patience to continue, and didn't make a single tiny creature :(
I will say I really dug the art, and thought the idea of differing hitbox sizes/timings added an interesting variety, and was implemented well. Good job, despite my failure at playing the game! :laughing:
Neat game! I really struggled with the controls on this one. It was super satisfying when I could get it to work, but for the most part I didn't really know why gliding worked the way it did, or the L key outside of being on posts, or how to properly use posts. The art style was great, and the music very mesmerizing. Good job!
I am fascinated with this submission. I love seeing the size varieties, how clustered/spread out species get, how far or little they move over time. Was really rooting for my clustered tiny friends minding their own business on the edge of the circle, completely surrounded by food, but hyperactive tailed yellow boxes came in and ruined their vibe. Oh well maybe next time, little friends! The sim does start to lag after awhile, but it's super fun to see what pops up and what gets made. Super neat design, excellent work behind the scenes making this function!
Echoing what everyone else said: art was nice, atmosphere too. Puzzles had a nice variety and made you really look at your environment and talk to everyone. Well done!
As always, great entry! Always fun to play the games you submit.
Great art, great sound, and fun design! Good job
Great game! Tough, and tough on my hand, but fun. Nice job, good variety! Art and music were excellent.
I'll echo a lot of what others have already said. I don't think I have any "new" feedback to give. So I'll just say despite it all I had a great time playing and managed to win on my 4th or 5th attempt. Nice work!
Camera work was great, difficulty was tough but not too difficult, narration was funny, gameplay was very fun. Great game all around!
@dougt do you remember what the last thing that happened in the combat before the softlock? I've done a lot of battles and haven't gotten any in awhile, but know it can happen so I'd like to see where I messed up.
@nehe can you elaborate a little? What didn't load? Did the screen turn black, freeze, or what? That's a weird bug!
@raymond-bourke thanks for the comment and thanks for playing! I like the way the animations and sound (what little we had) came together on this one.
@dougt a shame! I've not been able to replicate the bug but if you have any feedback on how you got softlocked, I've love to know for future reference. Thanks for checking out the game!
@hangovergames Thanks for playing! Yet another game where the concept felt great but the realization didn't really feel like it came together until the final hours.
@sirblazealot thanks for the kind words! Yeah It's tough making a jrpg system feel like what you do matters, I'm glad this actually has some of that feel. Nice name and profile pic :smile:
@kilig Thanks! The combat system was interesting to try to put together and make it feel like it has some unique elements. Music,sound, and tutorials always get neglected in our games until the last minute, since it took up until the last 15 minutes before submission for the programming part to be done :laughing: ! Maybe next jam!
@sviborg Yeah, I liked how connected the two games ended up being. Though it's tough to see, entertainment/hunger/hygiene all change how good your creatures are in combat! And the limited gold in between makes you have to prioritize. Definitely agree with the lacking of audio, and some more variety. Only had so much time to add interesting enemy effects before the game just had to be made! Thanks for the comment and the kind words.
@beeb-gamecodecompany Hey thanks for playing! I appreciate knowing people out there try to finish games. It's my go-to, but some games I just can't finish! :sweat: But I definitely try each one. Thanks for putting in the effort! Definitely agree on the music.
@kadokta Thanks for playing! Each type of creature has an element, and the special skills you can use depend on how many of each element you have. So what skills you have available and how many times you can use them depend on which creatures you have. Hope that helps!
@koolruz A hud is a great idea! I did want some information to be not-100%-clear to the player, but there certainly were many times where knowing more information helps a lot! Thanks for playing and for the kind words.
@kanity Definitely making them dots helped move the game along :laughing: - they were originally a placeholder, but we kept them in for time purposes. Same, unfortunately, with the no music. Definitely feel it would have been better with. When you use special attacks, they just turn a less-bright color :) They're still there and contributing and healthy! Yes, the tutorial on the in-between-battles was a little tough to figure out. You could buy items from the shop that would appear in the feed/play/clean tabs. Say you buy an apple from the store. Click on the Feed tab to see all of your food. Click and drag the apple to the ground and nearby creatures will eat! Thanks for all the feedback and taking the time to write so much. It's greatly appreciated!
@skleembof Luckily, you don't lose any creatures when exhausted. They still contribute to all damage, just not 100%. Maybe closer to 80%. So the damage is less, but not totally less. And your next basic attack brings some of them back from exhaustion, so it's a bit of a cycle of what you use and when. So I think not fearing to use what abilities you have available will help :) Also, you charge up your ultimate move by exhausting then restoring your creatures, so you get a great finishing move for doing so! -----Thank you very much for trying to recreate the softlock! No one on the team has been able to, so it's really tough to figure out why it's happening. So all information is appreciated! The teams that you're offered are just different arrangements of elements. Each time all 3 are randomly generated, but you can kind of guess what color is the majority, and what color is barely there or missing, since that's how they're built. Thanks for the feedback and taking the time to write all that, it's appreciated!
@sodagummy Nice strategy! With the way the game is balanced at the moment, having a bunch of one type seems like the best! Yes, viewing stats is definitely a popular request. Although I did initially want the concept of the "tiny" creatures being that you couldn't know each individual's stats, cause they're a small blob, I think more information in combat is necessary! Also, money balancing was a bit tough. I agree that having more money for items, or more items in general, might be good for the feel of accomplishment tomogatchi games give. Definitely also missing the music, but only so much we can do :) Thanks for the long feedback and kind words, it's appreciated.
@zoglu Thanks for playing and for the kind words!
@dropmania Thanks! Music is definitely the biggest thing we couldn't fit in for sure. The music never got made so we could focus on getting as much in as we did :) Thanks for checking the game out!
@saumon Right, we kind of just drop you in without a tutorial to ease you in. Definitely could have done that part better. But thanks for sticking with it and figuring it out. Thanks for playing!
@daniel-finch yes, definitely agree with the music and sounds. A very important aspect of any game! Thanks for playing.
@eranot Thanks for playing!
@mavvy One of my most fond memories is staying up late one night making butter noodles watching my brother play Wind Waker. Being brought back to memories like that is always nice :). Definitely agree on the battle art part, but that would have taken significantly more time than what we had, sadly. Definitely the game feels barren without many sounds or any music. Sadly common for games we make for these jams. Thanks for taking the time to play and write up your thoughts. It is much appreciated!
Respect the mouse only controls. Really dig the idea of a "swarm" of tiny creatures that you control, super well implemented. Biggest gripe was really having no clue visually when the large beams were done attacking, as there still is some significant visual display for a small bit after it is completed, and having no idea when a large beam would move. But concept was great, execution was great, had a very good time playing. Nice work!
Hey there, nice submission! Agree with a lot of the previous comments. One major thing I'd add for Quality of life: Having some kind of delay on when you can take damage. Having the boss slowly waddle in to you and you die from full health cause you're stuck in an attack animation is brutal. Canceling the attack, damaging you once, and giving you some immunity so you can flee would certainly make the times you do make mistakes feel better. Also found it humorous that you could still attack on the You Died screen :laughing: But I thought the references to the other games were great, the sound and music added to the amusement and overall feel you were going with on the game, so it came together really well. Good work!
The couple of ideas I saw were great, but unfortunately I didn't know if there was much else to moving the creatures around and flicking them at nothing. Some help for the player would be nice, even if just on your Ludum Dare page! Nice work on what you did have, though!
I'm glad I came back and revisited this page, because after reading what @skleembof wrote I decided to give it another go to see if I could find out what I was missing. ... I did not know you could pan the camera around with WASD! I didn't even think to try based on the description saying it was all flick controls! And I also found you could increase/decrease the command radius with mouse wheel up/down. But I replayed the game and finished it. Here are my new thoughts:
I really like the left click / right click controls and drawing you tiny creatures to your mouse cursor. Although I liked the flicking, I felt it could use a little something. The predictive lines helped guide but it was really tough to figure out how far they'd actually go. And which creature was selected was a bit odd. Especially when walking to your cursor they'd clip the water and disappear and I'd have no one to flick. But it was cool nonetheless, and really satisfying crossing island to island.
I also really liked the respawn mechanism. Makes the game possible :) I ran into an issue with the tunnel? The thing on the left center side of the map that warps your guys between it and the other tunnel. If I flung a creature all the way on it, the creature would just respawn at the beginning and not go in the tunnel. I had to aim it perfectly so the creature would JUST stay on the land but not go into the tunnel, to drag it into the tunnel. THEN, when they went in the tunnel, they'd just keep going in and out of the same tunnel over and over. Luckily they were still flickable even though not on the screen half the time.
But besides those bugs, the game was neat, and I enjoyed the ending screen :) Good work!
Great entry! Found the spin mechanic really cool, and liked the health / shield management. There was a time closer to the end where I was going onto treasure spaces but nothing happened :laughing: But oh well, still managed to win! Very neat concept, good job!
Here's my result.Sprite-0002.png . Super interesting concept for a game, it's great! And the fact that each set of choices is a different creature is very impressive. I really dig the style of your games, and look forward to more in the future!
Also based on the hint you gave on the twitch stream I was able to find the combination for the secret ending :). Even knowing the first 2 it still took me 3 tries to get it right. Very neat!
Fun game! Good overall game flow. The game didn't overstay its welcome. I would have liked the magnifying glass to feel a bit stronger, but still fun regardless. Good work.
Interesting take on the controls! Really gets you into the game. Music and art were quite good. Great job!
Hey there! Glad you were able to finish the game despite the stress. It's tough! I liked the dig mechanic. It worked really well with no errors. Your frog names were top tier, even though after getting my second frog, both of them had the same name but that's fine :laughing: The egg defense was interesting, and movement also worked really well. But there was definitely a little lack of clarity on what was going on. The game stopped progressing after day 3. But cool ideas and theme. Good work!
Agree with the other comments here. A lot of cool concepts, audio was great, but controls and some design decisions were a bit rough around the edges. Either way, enjoyed what you had and the mechanics enough that I finished the game, so good work!
Great stuff! Game played well, was decently challenging, and had great art and sound. Some sound effects carried over a bit too long, or into other tries, but not a huge deal. The fights were varied and fun. Nice work!
Nice submission! Dig the theme, simple controls, and straightforward gameplay. I'd have liked some kind of indication where seagulls that were successfully eating actually were, and some way to accelerate the end of the game when there are only a handful of turtles left and they're all as far away from the shore as possible. But the sound effects were great and same with the turtles reaching the water. The first time I played, the message I got at the end seemed to think I did quite a poor job, so I had to go back and play again for redemption. And then one final time to get my foot score up as high as possible. That's the goal of the game, right?
I like checking out all the games you submit. I feel they're super well made and polished. I see that there's a lot here, but I felt like the upgrade system and the gameplay in the very beginning held me back from enjoying this one and exploring it in full. It felt like I was playing a very basic version of breakout for a good 20 minutes with no sign of anything interesting happening. The pace of the beginning was too slow, and killed my motivation to actually explore all the cool stuff I know is in the game. Still as always great work, and look forward to the next one.
Interesting game! Made it to the end. With how much I was getting hit on floor one, didn't think there was any way I'd survive 50+ enemies, but I made it somehow. I liked the snappy controls. The music was good and varied. I know how tricky enemy variety can be, but it would have been nice to have some other enemies. Overall nice work!
Great submission as always. I... uh.... didn't know you could jump. So getting that gem in the top right was really tedious. I had to look up to see if anyone said anything about it, only to watch the video of someone doing it and jumping, and THEN I thought to use the spacebar.... :cry: As is standard, you do quite interesting things with your games, the pieces combining and being able to burrow through them was quite impressive. Humor and audio always top notch. Good stuff!
Interesting game! Figured out kind of what to do at the start, then accidentally dug when I tried to pick up a book, and discovered the digging mechanic. Had no idea what to do with it, and dug a really deep hole. Didn't really know what the goal or purpose was, but really dug the mood. Good work!
Nice game! Art and sound were top notch. The game was full of style. I wish the camera were a bit more stable, the constant acceleration and deceleration was a little much. You already mentioned a bit of jank and it's definitely there, but it didn't stop me from beating the game and enjoying it. Good work!
Gotta echo the sentiment here, you nailed the atmosphere. And as many said, maybe a bit more to do would have been nice, but you're definitely VERY good at setting the mood of the game. Nice work!
Great game, super cool style and fun mechanic! I really liked being able to see a small preview of the level below you. I think there is a bug or two in your score code, as I was able to collect a single orb on floor 1, let the time run out, then have a score of 49. I tried it a couple more times to see if it was because floors weren't changing when I hit retry, but they were still 49 per. Then when I did another run after, there were an insanely large amount of orbs to pick up on the first like 10 levels, almost like they didn't reset. That allowed me to get an insanely high score. Just figured I'd let you know. Really had fun with this one, super good arcade-style game!
As always, a well made, designed, and polished entry! The click and drag of stones but single click to move fish tripped me up a bit, but it's very minor. Great music and art. I look forward to the next one!
Your art style is distinct and I'm always happy to see the games you make. Loved the atmosphere and I think you did quite a good job on the rope physics. A bit less waiting for platforms and a bit more variety of challenge would have been nice, but a great submission nonetheless!
Nice work! I enjoy dungeon crawls. Liked the foundation you're working on here.
@runningopenloop Thanks for playing! We had a great time designing ways to make the puzzle work. We had some bugs we tried smoothing out, but placing the tiles down needed a complete overhaul if it was to be fixed :( oh well! Yeah, we knew very early that we'd need a reset button haha.
@jhonny111 Yeah, we tried making the game more of a platformer in the initial design, but it became more puzzle based as we went on, but there's a mix of both for sure. Especially as you make it to the halfway point, and can unlock jumping.
@mackain Thanks!
@bjornstenlund Haha, if you got to the point where you got backpack upgrades, you could carry 2 and 3 tiles, and the filled backpack is like... your size and more when totally filled. Since it was in stages, we didn't want it to be too big a difference each time. But you're right, there should have been SOMETHING to say how much you can hold to start. Maybe even starting yourself off with 0, and getting a backpack upgrade or something. I like the other ideas for indicators you had as well. I think those suggestions would go a long way in making the game more readable. The tile spawning rules were really tricky. It pretty much tries spawning on the space in front of you, or on top of you if that one is blocked. But there are some ways around it, and I Didn't have time to fix it. And the first level is so .... packed with things needing tutorial text, that it was too tough to ease people into that information. Oh well! Thanks for playing and thanks for all the feedback!
@gifarre I certainly would not call it a skill issue! The game is really tough! We thought it might be too easy when making it, and even we had trouble beating it, knowing everything about it going in. Not enough time left in the jam to ease things up a bit, unfortunately. But Appreciate you playing. There ARE checkpoints, but only when you go from stage to stage. We didn't want to make mid-level checkpoints, and potentially let the player get in a softlocked state and not know it. Thanks for playing!
@larsievl Thanks for the compliments! Yeah, the bug where you get stuck under dirt you spawn was REALLY hard to figure out, and even though I've tried fixing it many times, it always shows up :(. I always overscope, so music and SFX are usually cut out, oh well. Thanks for playing!
@toreskovic Right. This is a ... very different take on platforming too, as for the first half you can't even jump. We also were making the levels really late in the process, although I like the puzzles we came up with. Not eveyone's cup of tea for sure! Thanks for playing even though it's not a genre you're a fan of.
@googlefrog Right. the dashing, jumping, and puzzles can be a bit too much. Thanks for giving it a shot though and leaving a comment! If you struggled with screen 2, be glad you didn't try screen 3 :laughing:
@teist ABSOLUTELY! One thing I noticed almost instantly was how little room I had to even cram tutorial text in the opening window. There's just so much you're given at the absolute very beginning. Definitely we could have done quite a lot with a bit more time and smoothing out the levels. Hopefully you find the fun if you try it out again!
@floppynub Yeah, audio sliders and button mapping is something I usually try to add, and didn't have time for this time around. If I used WASD to move, the Z X C controls were almost impossible to use. Had to use the arrow keys haha. Thanks for playing!
@tsaot :bread: :french_bread:
@helloimbenjamin Thanks for the kind words, and thanks for playing!
@sarah-upton Thanks for playing! I'm not much of an artist myself, so I can't really recognize cohesion between colors :laughing: . Any tips or resources you can point me to to learn more about it?
@koolruz wow, thanks for playing and beating the game! Based on our impressions, and ESPECIALLY after the difficulty feedback from most comments, we figured it'd likely go unbeaten because we made the levels way too tough. Adding in a couple of programming bugs that were really hard to squash on top of it and it's certainly (and understandably) not a game many will put the time to get all the way through in the rating process, so it's really appreciated!
100% agree with the zoom out. The levels were built being able to see the whole thing, so I think that really skewed what challenges were put in and why, without the player's experience in mind. And I think just having a zoom out function would have been something completely manageable, easy to implement fast, and a huge fix! I wish I would have thought of that :cry: - but there's only so much you can do in the time given, and I was in panic mode the entire last day haha. Also the collectibles idea makes a lot of sense to fix this issue, both great points for future designs!
Was there an issue with dropping dirt on that enemy from where you're standing? Any time you drop dirt, it should drop from the air to the first ground tile it sees, and any enemy in the dirt dropping path should get squashed. You can then fall on and re-pick-up the dirt tile you dropped. I realize that there's so much crammed into the first part of the first level, that this might not seem like knowledge the average player will be familiar enough with for where it was implemented.
Right. In the final hour before the deadline, there was a huge issue where you wouldn't get the appropriate number of air dashes. I had to change the grounded check state like 20 times before coming up with something that would actually prevent the counter from not resetting, and it likely messed up some other jump-allowed state condition. Super weird, we didn't run into that one but it's certainly worth looking into!
Thanks for the solid feedback all around and for playing the game all the way through. It's very appreciated!
I like playing and getting to the end of your games each jam. I was concerned that there was no way I could beat the final level. I ended up making it, but was terrified that there would be more, even more difficult levels :laughing: . I like the design of the game for sure, it's very clean. I had an issue with diving. Sometimes it felt like I would press down, hold down, press down 100 times midair, and I just would not dive. That tripped me up a lot. But other than that things were well designed and fun to play. Good work!
@koolruz AHHHHH, that's the deal. I thought you had to have Z held down and then press down, and for some reason (maybe my keyboard not being able to handle it really well?) - it doesn't work super consistent for me. But trying it out while pressing Z and down at the same time each time worked 100% consistently. Cool!
This game.... frustrated the heck out of me haha. I think if I just didn't try to beat the 3 skull path I would have been fine, but there's so much stuff in that course that feels genuinely unfair. There feel like random momentum spikes directly into rocks when currents and whirpools overlap, and it's hard to read where currents will pull you. But I had fun nonetheless despite all my complaining! :laughing: , and played for way too long. Finally got to the end of the 3 skull course with 3 boats, but it still said I beat the BRONZE. :cry: Nice work!
Made it to the end where I was super powered up and interacted with the final console. The baby was everything I hoped and more. A tough game to figure out, maybe a bit more guidance on what controls are, and how to know to push with LMB and how to interact, would go a long way. Either way, nice work!
Nice work! I appreciated all the neat things you added in, like the arms and how they move, the minimap, the sonar, the way you had light bend. I would have liked the game to be a bit faster, even though it's "only" 15 minutes, it's still paced pretty slow and can be a bit repetitive. That being said I did finish the whole thing, so I'd say you did a fine job.
Have to echo what other people are saying, the atmosphere in this game is top notch. Didn't really understand the purpose, and the phone call was hard to hear, but .... clicking on a lot of things eventually I made it to the bottom. Wish there was a bit more direction, but I was still amused. Made it to the bottom. Really like the final scene :laughing: Good work!
Nice work! Most of the feedback I could give is just a rehash of what was already said. You made a fun little world to explore.
Liked the atmosphere and the really nice characterization of the people buying potions. Good work!
Link is not working for me either. If you get the link fixed and mention me in a comment, I'll come back and try it out!
I really like programming games. Sending out the bots and having them explore what you told them was really interesting. Having some kind of free-roam camera on rooms you've already explored would be really convenient. I see how much work you put into the programming aspect, being able to click and backspace and insert things was intuitive and super easy to control. I also really liked being able to change cameras, and swapping the main camera to a smaller window. I noticed that my bots would only return home if they bonked, so bots that I sent out that just.... finished their orders but didn't collide with anything, didn't come back home. Either way, I really like this as a foundation you can build upon. It's really solid and really well assembled. Good work!
Nice work! Took a minute to figure out what was going on but managed to spam the heal button faster than I lost health so made it to the end.
Interesting stuff! I liked the layer switching. Felt like I had to guess a lot to figure out which layer to jump to, but without too many, and with the game being relatively friendly, it wasn't bad. Nice atmosphere and great concept!
Have nothing to add that other people haven't already said. Very interesting, asthetic, and tricky! I made it all the way through. Nice work!
Nice game. Also had a lot of fun making it through the game, and also enjoyed the extra two final levels.... although I had to start from the level before the first final level... because I got stuck :cry: Sprite-0001.png wedged in there and no button would move me. But the game was very fun all the way through. Controlled really smoothly, exactly how I'd expect a game like this to control, after playing a lot of similar games, like Super Monkey Ball.
I was wondering, why have the camera auto-scroll? Not saying it was a horrible thing, but it certainly limited when you could do things, and how fast you could try to go, simply because you could not see far enough in front of you.
Either way, great job! Super fun game!
I liked a lot of this game. Movement felt fast and fun when running around in the beginning. Wall jumping is always super appealing, slide jumping is very satisfying. Exploring the area was pretty neat, and there were a lot of good "aha!" moments in the game. That being said, there were some relatively frustrating parts, too. The pipe-corner @le-don mentioned was very odd. The game went from a run-around fast kind of game to a very.. find the right spot to jump from and only do half-jumps part, which was an odd change of pace. Not saying it was unwelcome, but overshooting jumps and trying to short jump was a bit tough to adapt to.
I made it to the final door, but struggled A LOT with the final climb. Even though the 2 ledges seem like they should be the route up, I tried jumping from one corner platform to the other I'd say a good 30 times to no avail. I had to try so many different things to finally find something that worked consistently (I ended up starting and wall jumping basically pressed up against the wall) - but it was very satisfying to make it to the end, and I'm glad I stuck with it. Overall really well done, you know how to make the game feel very satisfying to move in.
Nice game! I played all the way through, even tried to catch all the *things* in one day to make sure it didn't trigger some kind of ending. I like the game and mechanics, and the bit of worldbuilding with the paper was a fun time. Good stuff!
Nice work! Always fun messing around with movement games. The music was excellent, even though it was a short-ish loop, had absolutely no problems listening to it for 15 minutes straight :laughing: . The flap animation was quite good, it worked really well. The additional weight for picking stuff up was, I feel, a bit too excessive. Especially for how many times you have to press space to gain elevation afterwards. Maybe only the highest value objects should have that much of an impact? Some variety would be nice, and I also feel maybe 10 minutes was a bit too long. But I had fun exploring the world you built and got a (very modest) 80 something score, with a few things dropped because I didn't quite understand the nests' hitboxes. Well done!
Great music selections, super well polished. Pretty fun to mess around with for a good 15 minutes or so. Exploring the bonuses was quite interesting. Doing the multitasker spam made me lose the chill in the game, but was SO good for money. Nice variety! Well done!
Nice game! Solid atmosphere, good music, good art, neat idea. The movement is definitely a bit clunky, ceilings tend to be too low, so you head bonk a lot. Combat is a bit clunky as well, and sometimes you attack after spamming the attack button even if you haven't pressed it in a few seconds. But running around the area you made and seeing all the places put in was super satisfying, and I played through it twice to see if there's a secret ending I missed. Didn't find it though :smile: Nice work!
@matthieu-riboulot I did see that ending. I was just exploring, looking to see if there was something else hidden in the world :) Thanks for letting me know!
Neat game! I liked the interface and interactions. The typing took me way too long to figure out how it worked :laughing: - but it was neat. I liked your interpretation of the theme. I'm not sure if there was a bug but I was around 85% of the way done with the total text and one message stayed on the screen, and I was unable to respond. It would be a neat point to just ... stop and reflect, so that might have been intentional. Either way, great job!
Neat game! I liked the ability to eat the tutorial text :laughing: - Also the "aha!" moment when you see your tail coming from the other side. My biggest complaint was the steering, but with the planet so small, it wasn't bad going around the long way. Good job!
Interesting game! Made it past the 3 elites on the third try. Finally figured out what everything did enough to make a successful deck. I like the idea that you HAVE to take things that are bad for you, and the purge event is near required. I also found the heal event being that you heal for damage done is really neat. Enemies not attacking, but taking damage on drawing cards, and having effects that amplify it were all very clever takes on a deckbuilder.
All that being said, playing the game was still pretty hard to follow. Almost every card does some kind of multiple chain, with the information displayed on what they do only after you pick the card, so following along and really understanding definitely takes a few runs. Even the deck I won with, half the time I'm just like "ok, something happened and I don't remember or know why, but it's working so :shrug: .
Neat submission! You are clearly enjoyers of deck building games, and have created something with a lot of very neat ideas that I have not seen explored elsewhere. Very good work!
@ckane144 Thanks for playing!
@toppervideogames Yeah, we tried to, specifically for the theme "Collector" - make it a single thing you collected, that had some effect on gameplay/progression, so having a category of things that grew as you collected them was what we were going for. I was actually a bit worried we put too many locks and keys in, so glad you found some freedom in when you could collect things. The Interrogation in the manor was really fun to design/write. Thanks for playing and the kind words!
@katastudios We actually do have a decent amount more of the general plot already mapped out, from an idea had years ago, that we adjusted a decent bit to make this game work for the jam. So technically, part 2's can be on the way :laughing: - I don't quite understand your question. I'd gladly answer it if I knew what you were asking!
@syphorce Thanks! Gotta love spooky season! We tried a lot this time around to work on atmosphere, as it tends to be on the backburner when we do Ludum Dares in the past. Glad it was noticeable!
@braulio-jg Congrats on finishing the game! When you're designing the puzzles, you have no idea how straightforward or difficult things end up being, so I'm glad they didn't end up too obscure!
@anderson-job-loeffler Thanks for the kind words! The conversation sound effects I ended up making from scratch :laughing: All from recordings of sounds I made. It was fun to learn how to do, even though other things got cut for it. I wish I had more time to clean them up/do more/do another for narration text, but alas, only so much time to get the game out! Thanks for playing.
@nolamosoft Interesting! You know, having played a few other point and click/narrative adventure games and seeing them use this space for text, I didn't even second guess if this was the right call. I guess I'm just so used to it I didn't even think twice. Do you think the right hand side would have been better? Somewhere else entirely?
@blazerker Yep, of course! That's the main inspiration (minus the extremely obtuse puzzles) - there's actually a niche community still making them professionally, if you enjoyed them back in the day, there are plenty of "new" ones that I think are quite fantastic!
@slurp Glad you found the way we tried incorporating the theme interesting! We were initially going to have you Collect sounds that you could mimic, but the way we wanted to progress made that concept a bit too obtuse, so we swapped it halfway through.
@borealteuthidia Thanks for the kind words! We actually had a decent amount of the story idea in our heads from some jam sessions beforehand, but putting it in a game and seeing it realized was a super satisfying thing for this jam! There are plenty of places to go and things to learn about in this world :smile:
@liumeishan Thanks! The sound effects were really enjoyable to make! I watched a bunch of tutorials on sound effect creation in general over a year ago, and it was nice to see how much I remembered, and how I could put those things into practice. It's super fun, I love making them. Thanks for playing!
@matthieu-riboulot Thanks for playing! I'm glad not many people said they needed the guide. I wrote it just in case what was made was a bit too confusing, tough to tell when you know the answers beforehand!
@eugenik Thanks! Appreicate the kind words.
@bobap A fantastic idea! I know a lot of point and click games have that, but I had it initially as a 'nice to have' - the further in the game you go, though, the more it's obvious how much it's needed for quality of life!
@theparticularpixel Thanks for playing! We worked hard (relative to our other games) on atmosphere and mood this time around, glad it showed.
@ira-baciu definitely! I was in a panic trying to scrap the game together during the submission period, then afterwards.... I just forgot. :laughing: whoops!
@gonulgaye Thanks for the kind words! Glad you liked it.
@floata3 :laughing: yep, the voice sounds are pretty goofy. Had a good time making them. Glad you liked em, and the game!
@rol Thanks! Luckily, the genre not being super code-intensive gives me a lot of room to work/care about polish. Something I don't usually get to do, and has always been one of our biggest weaknesses. I totally flubbed the UI, though. For some reason, I didn't think to actually anchor and scale it to the camera :face_palm: - so I think that's why some people have issues with it. Whoops!
@tardis2snej Thanks for playing and for the kind words! We had a lot of fun making this one, and designing the world around it!
@liu-qinying Glad you enjoyed it!
@phoenix-fireflower Nice, I'm happy people are generally able to make it to the end without much help. I've designed a few games where it's been way too easy for me, because I'm making the game, but it's very difficult for people rating the game, so I wanted to at least try to make this one so people don't get stuck. The cricket is just a little too far out of the way, though, so it is hard to spot!
@kazuren Thanks! Definitely glad the guide wasn't needed. Playing a bunch of point and clicks myself, I know how easy it can be to get stuck on certain puzzles. The projection mechanic was a way we found we could tie in the story and your role, with the theme this time around. It was initially going to be collecting sounds you can mimic, but we ran into too many issues with that making sense, so we switched it to projection. Thanks for playing!
@local-minimum Great video! The feedback in video playthroughs is invaluable. I found it telling, just how quickly you were able to pick up on basically everything we didn't implement due to time: handling audio better, forgetting to show which dialog options you already chose, not having fun astral project responses for the goofy combinations, the door not actually opening in the final scene. And it's apparent JUST how impactful the 'showing already chosen options' was in your playthrough. How it's easy to skip past an option thinking you already selected it, and not seeing new ones as they pop up. ALSO, I tried so many random things for spoiler tagging before I realized I was going to be late hitting submit, so I just gave up :laughing: - thanks for letting me know. Really appreciate you going through the time to record yourself playing!
@surf-croc Thanks for playing! Yeah, definitely the text displays needed some work! Which is funny... figuring the game is like 80% text.. :laughing:
@koolruz Appreciate you playing the game all the way through! We've had.... difficulty issues in the past, where it's either no challenge at all or way harder than expected, so I'm glad this one wasn't too frustrating. DEFINITELY on the capture essence! I was even thinking of some kind of idea where there's an indicator of "how much" information you have on the thing to essence capture, so you can see if you're close or not. You actually don't learn enough about the officer early on to capture his essence, though! You have to learn more about him from your conversation with Pearl before. So maybe also adding visual tidbits of knowledge gained when you're reading dialog, so you can see that you learned more about him from a certain dialog option.
However, even just changing the button to show you have enough information is a great solution that could have been completely reasonable for the game jam time frame.
Ahh man, I've wanted to make/use different fonts for awhile now. I never get around to doing it :cry: I guess on a point and click, that becomes far more of a pain point.
Thanks for the comment and taking the time to play the game, much appreciated!
@tomssuli Uh oh.... pressure's on to make a sequel now! :laughing: Thanks for playing and for the kind words.
@ginger-kyoko To be honest, we felt like this one might not have had enough! We tend to get bogged down in really complicated things that don't really show to the player in our jams, this one was much simpler than what we tend to do programming wise, but was definitely a lot for art/writing! Glad you enjoyed that aspect. We actually have had ideas/expansions for this story before the jam happened, so there is plenty more! But we had to do a lot of repurposing of what we had to get this to fit in the game jam setting. Glad you liked it. And you definitely nailed the atmosphere in your game, it's great!
Always a blast seeing and playing what you make for each jam. My biggest feedback would be to highlight whichever octopus? thing you'd try to latch onto if you pressed the z button. Oftentimes I found I would press the button, hoping to target one, but instead try to grab one that seemed completely random. And although I know these are momentum based games, with how crazy different of arcs and speeds you get based on how close/far you are from the target when you press z, having the grab process maybe be faster could help a bit in feeling like you have a bit more control.
Sprite-0001.png
All that said, your games are always super fun, look great, sound great, and play very well. I look forward to seeing what you come up with next LD!
@koolruz Funny, the same thing happened to me this game jam. Something I put in that's central to the game, I just didn't think about adjusting it almost at all. And it's the biggest point of criticism. Didn't even think to change it when making the game :laughing: It just goes that way sometimes!
Yeah, getting targeting logic that's THAT smooth is a huge task indeed! For someone like me, you'd almost need to get an eye tracker and just always target the one I'm looking at, because I'm all over the place in what I expect/hope haha.
Nice game! I had fun running around and exploring the world. I liked the tutorial being a watch, and I genuinely stopped and laughed when I was kind of driving around randomly in the beginning, and the menu showing you what you had to do to get out of the car just kept growing and zooming in on the button I had to press. :laughing: Messing around with the grapple was fun, and I was motivated enough to get them all, so good work! Maybe it was the motivation watch I picked up early on.....
I don't have a lot new to add from what other people said. Love the concept, The humor is spot on, especially with just the idea of hoarding items in RPGs in general. And the notifications did go on a bit too long. But I enjoyed the idea and the ending. I was hoping that you'd get some kind of reward in ealier fights for keeping potions, but I don't know why I was under that impression. I figured it out that it wasn't the case by the 3rd battle :laughing: Well done!
I really like this entry. There wasn't too much to do controls wise, but you made a game that explored what you had and didn't outstay its welcome. Collection was fun and interesting, and despite you not moving very fast, and being able to only move left-right and climb, it never felt tedious, which is something that I find happens in game jams often (ESPECIALLY in the games I make :laughing:).
You implemented the theme in the way I felt does it best... where collecting has a noticeable impact on the game. Each collection felt interesting, some had a noticeable impact on gameplay or visuals, others just worldbuilding by reading their entry in the book, but both worked to keep me engaged. The ambiance and environment did a fantastic job setting the stage and making you want to explore the game more, telling their own little story.
Great game! It's obvious the game is personal, and it comes across very well. I like the way the gameplay flowed: having the same options, but ultimately everything ending up the same. Well executed storytelling!
Nice game! I was thrown off by the typing minigames, but really enjoyed this submission. Atmosphere was top notch. Causes of death were very well written. Sound design was very good, and I also appreciated the attention to detail in making the world.
Like what others have posted, the link is not working Sprite-0001-export.png is what the itch link is showing.
@ckane144 @martianmangka @stlrain @anciententity @andy-wang @b0guslaw @d-demetori @bumble @theoratkin Looks like the link is fixed!
Nice little runner game! I liked the aesthetic, art and sound were quite good. The pacing was a little off, usually you stay on the left hand side of the screen a bit more so you can have a bit more time to react. Also some hitboxes were a bit strange. But overall nice work! I liked that you could jump to get a speed boost instead of just running.
Have to echo what other people said on this one. Nice little platformer, very neat storytelling, and enjoyed it enough to get both endings. Good work!
Nice game! The art is great, the sounds were very nice, and I got a good chuckle out of the night phase the first time I played it.
Some issues with the fixed version: I would love more onboarding, as knowing exactly what to do was pretty tough, and the font was very small so it was tough to read. When I crafted things from the book, I didn't know where to go. Also, having a minimum range on the shotgun means if something gets to close to you, you cannot recover, which hwas rough. But I know time is short on these game jams, and focusing on just having a playable, completable game is priority #1, and you definitely did that!
All that said, I really like the idea of this game, and applaud the ambition! Really solid game loop, had a lot of fun with this one. Good job!
Nice entry! I randomly learned how to play Farkle earlier this year, so I picked this one up pretty quick. The tab sheet was extremely helpful. The bonuses were interesting, although I found myself basically never taking some of them after trying them once. I ended up getting to level 9, but the requirement of over 6k points to get to the next level was just a bit too much for me. Stacking multiple bonus die that make taking a 1 give extra points meant I was often taking single 1's as much as I could, so I'd get 400 points for it. Quite fun, well done!
Edit: I completely forgot the rule where if you used all the dice you keep going. Now it's even more insane trying to beat level 10. But managed to get to like 43000.
@aqtun I consider that a challenge :laughing: now I wonder if 100k is possible, and what would happen if you reached it.........
edit... it *is* possible...... Sprite-0002.png
@aqtun ok. It turns out you CAN get past 100,000. Sprite-0001.png Now, to see what happens!
...... the game crashed when I hit score and pass. :cry:
@aqtun I figured it was an index out of bounds of array. Made the most sense to me :laughing: I like the idea of the custom score curve, but that's definitely something you don't necessarily think or plan for when doing game jams! I guess you'll have to stop making games that are fun enough to play so doofuses like me don't try for something nuts like this haha.
So, to ruin the "magic" - the strategy was to just get really lucky. I wish there was more to it, but the only thing that really gave a multiplier that could reach the goal is the Devil's Dice, and swinging for the fences. To get this score, I had to do some math in the calulator to figure out exactly how many of each dice that I had. But the score was almost entirely 1 roll:
6 6 6 5 5 1.
I had 3 devil's dice. I had 1 mirror. The rest were life savers so I could maximize number of times I could roll to get super lucky. So. the 3 6's start at 600. x6 x6 x6 = 129,600. the 5 mirrored it so it doubled to 259,200.
Have to echo what a lot of people have already said. The atmosphere and graphics are great, they work very well, I like the random generation and the traps. But, progression was definitely a bit too much. I did a handful of runs in a row, to have 1 brave potion and 3 keys, to try to really explore one level. I ended up barely surviving..... and got 33 gold back. So I lost 2 gold :cry: - but with some adjustments, I think there is a lot of fun to be had here. Nice work!
Interesting game! I like the concept behind it, the stealth and filling up an inventory, taking multiple trips, etc. The one major thing I'd say for sure is that your game is missing a lot of player feedback. It seems completely arbitrary if I can right click to open something or not. I have no idea how much health I have/have left at any time, I don't know that I need to have positive money, or that heading to the start zone clears out your inventory. I don't know where I can walk and where I can't, what I'll run into and what I won't. I think a lot of hassle on the players' side goes away with feedback like this. But I think what you have built is quite good, and I really like what you did with the theme. Good work!
Bird: adorable
Music: Super chill
Bounce Mechanic: Really Neat
Game Overall: Excellent
On those notes, though, I had some pain points. There's a lot of text here, but it's mostly nitpicks and things I think could be smoothed over with polish.
I struggled with the control of the game, and some design decisions. I made it to the part in world 3 where you have the anti-gravity-space tiles, but could not figure out how to get extra height to make it around the set of spikes. Like when you have the U shape of those tiles, and need to progress left past them? That part. It would have been nice if there was some way to introduce to the player the way you're supposed to get extra height out of those tiles. I could never make it over the spike wall. If you want to let me know what I'm supposed to do there, I'll finish the game up.
Also, I feel that some of the checkpoints are arbitrarily mean. 2 of them don't have ground you stand on, making respawns feel like they sometimes just waste your time. Some of them, like the one after you learn to glide, seem arbitrarily too far away. I do get that late deaths before checkpoints are supposed to send you back, but sometimes it just feels less like you're doing a series of tricks, and more like you're having to wait around for a minute before you can try that tough jump again. You have a bunch of ceiling and wall spikes that aren't exactly the obstacle you're supposed to get around, but can randomly kill you anyways, which was a bit rough.
I'm terrible with controls, so I tend to hold buttons down. If you hold down the glide button, and stick to a wall, even if you press up, you still slide down. This was super frustrating. I know in the game it says Down also glides, but in the version I played, my down key did not. So I get if I was pressing down, that it would make far more sense. But holding glide (a thing made to keep you upwards) then coming in contact with a wall while holding up (something also designed to gain you height) but plummeting to your death in some spikes was definitely unexpected.
Also, this feels like it is not meant for keyboard. How touchy the left-right movement is while bouncing makes hitting a small area very tough, which you required multiple times. And it's like, tough because it's possible to get into situations where I cannot possibly tap left for few enough frames that I can adjust to make it to where I need to be. Maybe this wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue on a controller, but there were many times I felt like I tapped the control and launched myself in a direction.
Then, there were some rough screen transitions. There were spikes waaaayyyy too close to where you enter a new screen for my liking. Arbitrary deaths cause you have no time to react were tough. Also, in the case where you're floating in the wind, having to swap between the top of the screen to the bottom, while mid flight, also caused similar problems.
But, these are all things that don't really take away much from the overall game. I really like what you had and the ideas you put into place. Also, the bird hanging on the wall, best drawn thing in the world. Despite the criticisms, I really did enjoy this game a lot. Nice work!
Super cool entry, loved just how unique the visuals and audio were, and how well it all came together. Interesting premise, solid execution. I love games that rely on audio for progression, and even moreso when they're done well. Sadly for me, hit home a bit too much. Reminded me of a family member with decaying health and hearing, who towards the end of their life started having some audio and visual hallucinations, and with major hearing loss. DESPISED the phone, with how many spam phone calls they got, and how little they could understand. Because of that, playing the game really hit hard, and left an impact. I can only imagine that this partially represented what life was like for them in some ways. Very well done, and really look forward to what you come up with next!
As always, polish is top notch on everything you create. Super impressive! The controls were great, the gameplay was smooth, and you built something that was genuinely cool to explore. Really liked the reveal mechanic, I think there's a ton you could do there. Nice work!
Wow, nice work! Having the reference in the middle of the screen definitely made this playable for me! I went through the campaign, and really liked the story that went with it, same with the codes you chose for the enemies. I got quite a chuckle. French Fries indeed! My biggest gripe was certain enemies taking paths that my radar could not target. One click of the mouse wheel up was too high, one click down then made it too low. I had to wait for awhile for them to get closer. However, that was it. The rest of the game was good fun. I liked the Airstrike mission a lot. Also really enjoyed the visual display when you send the signal, the light, shadows, stopped movement when the light goes dim, really cool effect! Fun game, good job!
Always a huge fan of your submissions. Love the amount of atmosphere you're able to cram into each game. Short and sweet. Art is (as always) top notch. Well done!
I learned a lot about both space exploration and bodybuilding by playing this game! Got to the game completion screen. Didn't know it existed, and had to start the game again after reading a comment here saying there's a victory condition. After I had 1-2 satellites on Saturn, I figured either there was something even further, or the game would have ended. Maybe some kind of indicator around each planet like "0/5" or something to telegraph what the end game condition is?
I thought the line drawing on the minimap was very well done, a near visual representation of the network. I also really liked the mechanic of delayed/dropped inputs based on the network signal. Both ideas were implemented very well, and I thought were pretty clever. Nice work!
Gotta echo what other people said here, you did a very good job with the game feel, the visuals, the controls, the camera movement, and especially the audio. I was always able to find the next place to go with the audio, so nailed that aspect of the game. I liked the rhytmic quieter sounds that accompanied each wisp too. The visuals work really well. Hopefully you have time to rate more games so you get your 20 required votes, I'll be curious to see how this does! Great work!
Same as other commenters here. The only input that appeared to work is Left mouse.
Here's what I learned messing with the game so far. You can only short or long tap the triangle in the middle. Both create a pulse: the longer one has a bigger radius.
There's a white bar at the top that shows you how long you have until you have to click the triangle before you lose.
PURE SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT
---------------
If that bar ticks down to nothing: the game ends, and you get a black screen with "[Signal Lost] Structural Failure. Silence"
If you hold out long enough: the game also ends, and you get "[System Error] Causal Loop Severed. ASCENSION"
---------------
In the beginning of the game, you get these messages randomly.
"[Coordinates Lost] Life support MANUAL Transmit"
"Your 3D structure tears"
"I observe"
"Why resist entropy"
I think it's just the thing that's referred to in this game's LD page description, reaching out to you.
---------------
The messages you get under the triangle are based on what you pressed, and if you haven't pressed for awhile, random messages like the above. Short taps give "Weak Peturbation" and "Insufficient" - Long taps give "Coherent Wave" and "Acceptable Feed". Although these changes based on where you're at in the game (described in the next section)
3 short taps in a row gives "[PARSE] Panic Logic"
3 long taps in a row gives "[OVERLOAD] Willpower Recognized"
---------------
At 2 points in the game, "events" happen. One at T-30 and one at T-60. The game ends at T-90. The first is
[WARNING] Gravity Well Approaching.
The second is
[CRIT] Event horizon breached. Physics obsolete.
After the first, the messages you get while waiting change, something like...
"Parse the despair"
"Light Cannot Escape"
"Mass Leaking. Give it!"
Not sure if some kind of hints, or just flavor text.
---------------
In the bottom right, there's a track of what pulses you most recently did. Short taps are "S", Long taps (no matter how long) are "L". So if it says something like "SLLL" your last for were short Long Long Long. Sometimes it resets, other times, it adds to the current chain. I don't see any way to have it go longer than 4 characters, and I have seen it reset after 3.
I'm guessing you're sending out Morse Code. I don't know what you'd have to send, or how to have a letter like "e" without it thinking its something else. But occasionally you get a "Syntax Learned" message, only after a successful morse code letter.
And obviously, as stated above with the 3 short taps and 3 long taps, "S" and "O" have a custom message.
I tried all the letters, and these were the only ones I found to be recognized
S - Short short short - "[PARSE] Panic Logic"
O- Long Long Long - "[OVERLOAD] Willpower Recognized"
X - Long Short Short Long - "[RES] Syntax Learned"
U - Short Short Long - "[RES] Syntax Learned"
R - Short Long Short - "[DECODE] No rescue here"
C - Long Short Long Short - "[DECODE] No rescue here"
--------------
If there's a third end-game condition, I have yet to figure out what inputs are required.
Any thoughts? @ me with em, I'd love to hear it! ... Even if by this point... I'm pretty sure there's no hidden ending....
Neat game! Awesome music. I ran into the same error as someone above: after installing one relay, every subsequent relay I tried to install took my 5000 credits, and then gave the error sound, and continued. This ended up happening for everything after the first install, I think I had one successful moon 20,000 credit upgrade happen, where magically it looked like 2 more ships had rebroadcasts? But I tried each other 20,000 credit upgrades, all with the error sound, and tried bribing 3 different planets, yes with enough credits, and all of them gave me the error sound, took my credits, and nothing changed. So unfortunately I just didn't know how to progress. But I think Enough worked for me to have a good idea of how the game plays, I like it!
@ditam gave it a quick replay. Nice work! The fixes definitely did it. The only things with the new version I kind of noticed were being able to try to buy the same relay twice on the same ship, (not sure if it took my credits, but the option was there) - not really seeing feedback for which planets you bribed (figured I'd see the dotted line around them turn white or something?) - and had an issue where the end of the game triggered before I even bribed the final planet :laughing: But not complaining! The % population before the final planet said something like 79%, so I was surprised that it ended the game.
But all small things. I really liked the idea of spending more to create more broadcasts, and the visual representation of doing so. The upgrades felt impactful and it was really neat seeing a network being built. Well realized, good game!
Interesting game! I really like the idea, the atmosphere, and the UI. I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to really progress outside of the things near Earth. I had no idea what fwd left right did as signals, or what determined the starting points of the signal emitters. A and D were DEFINITELY necessary, as spam pressing < > was very difficult, and only gave tiny adjustments. I liked the voice acting and some of the early messages, but got to a point to where none of my signals felt like they could travel far enough to make it further than the 2 plants I was near to, and I didn't have enough direction to keep progressing. Some more handholding in the beginning, for slower people like me, would go very far. But great work overall!
Great work! Atmosphere, art, style, all top notch! Gameplay was fun, only gripe is having at some points to memorize walk patterns, and some parts that are very unforgiving. But played it all the way through to the end, and enjoyed it a lot. Well done!
@katastudios Thanks for playing! That's super interesting. I tried it myself and couldn't get losing the correct hand signal to happen for me, I'm super curious what steps you took to have that happen? There is one incorrect hand signal that will disappear after you try it once, but that was a debug-test left in that I forgot to remove. :laughing: Anyways, appreciate you playing both!
@julia-nistel Thanks for the kind words! We included a spoiler log in the description in case anyone gets stuck and would just like to see the end. So if you're curious what happens next (you're most of the way to the end!) you can use that if you like.
@casualnothing Thanks for playing! A lot of the content this time around was put in last minute, so I'm glad it at least came together. Yeah, I think there was a bit of issues with telegraphing, but definitely that's what the spoiler log is for! :laughing:
@5n4k3 Thanks for the kind words! We definitely were going for vibes this time around, so I'm glad it worked for you.
@tanjou Ab-so-lutely. We ran into an issue with the scenes being in different perspectives, so sometimes the sprites needed to be scaled or positioned differently. Things to keep in mind for next time for sure! Glad you liked the mood.
@alvminum Yeah, that was definitely the trickiest part for sure. Creating puzzles like that, it's always tough knowing if it'll be too easy or tough. But you can always try brute force! It'll work eventually! :laughing: Also, the rain isn't *JUST* going upside-down in the final page, but also in the entire beach scene, and when you're in the 'other' cabin screen (you can see it going up through the window) - It was fun changing up a rain particle system to make it go backwards! Thanks for playing!
@tsaot Right, we were juggling back and forth with that puzzle being some kind of text code instead, but went with this just because it felt a bit more in world. Thanks for the kind words on the art and sound. I'm always very self-consious when it comes to putting compositions in games (maybe why I skip doing it so often :laughing: ) so glad you were able to enjoy it. Thanks for playing!
@viktor-kovachev Wow, thanks for the kind words! We definitely tried really hard on nailing the atmosphere/oddness of the whole thing. And also that the puzzles weren't too obsure/frustrating. It's a tough balance for a game jam: I've found you don't want players feeling stuck or frustrated, almost ever :shark: so it's a tight rope walk with point and click adventure puzzles. Thanks for playing!
@derek-glennon Thanks for playing! It was a fun one to make and build out for sure, and we continued our LD58 submission with this one... so who knows maybe we'll keep the story going for future LD games
@dan-whiffing Thanks! We hammered out art assets and getting everything in place, well before we had ANY content. It was a scramble at the end just to have things to do in basically every screen past the first. That's definitely what the walkthrough is for! Not all point and click puzzles work for everyone, so letting people pick how much or little time they want on anything before moving on I think is important for us to do. Appreciate the play and comment!
@mr-flower Yeah, definitely didn't try for much mechanical complexity. At some point we just had to take what we had already built and find ways to make puzzles with that, and I was panic-working putting stuff in up until exactly the deadline. I finally made time for sound, so glad you enjoyed! And YEAH, we continued the story of the first "Rain" we made for last Ludum Dare, (where you (unknowingly) played AS the shapeshifter) but integrating the shapeshifter in this game got tabled because of time. Definitely wanted a Shadow-Stergrane-Impostor walking around and doing weird things and causing trouble, but that idea had to get discarded. Thanks for playing!
@thatfirey Ok. I uploaded a downloadable version. let me know if that works for you!
@dmitriyci Thanks for playing and for the kind words!
@tosmaster Yeah, some of the puzzles definitely needed a bit more time to setup and explain for sure. Definitely put the spoiler log there for a reason! :laughing: Since most of the actual game came together pretty late, I had to just... hope that what I typed out telegraphed things enough, and definitely did not as much as I'd hoped! Glad you liked the atmosphere, that's what we focused on a LOT. Thanks for playing!
@alex-de-la-cour Glad you liked the atmosphere! It was fun to build and design for sure. Definitely that puzzle is super confusing. We had the idea of having to go through the alleyways in a certain order to progress, but it was a very quick/dirty "solution" we came up with to let the player even know that this was what we were trying to do, and also then give hints about it. Turns out, you can't just have the main character say out loud "this is like the Lost Woods in Ocarina of Time!" :laughing: Also, yeah the routes were supposed to be telegraphed by the phone poles, but I also completely missed out on adding something a lot of point-and-clicks do, which is let you press a key like 'alt' and it will show all the interactible objects. Thanks for the suggestions and for playing!
@hazzardt Glad you liked the style! Yeah, that puzzle in particular was definitely supposed to be the trickiest, but I think might have just not had enough to push the player naturally in the right direction. Thanks for playing!
@oddballdave Yeah, that back alley puzzle got a lot of people for sure. We wanted to leave it brute-forceable with visual indicators just in case, but next time definitely need to do a better job hinting to the player the correct solution. Thanks!
@thatfirey Thanks for giving the game a go after the upload! Definitely needed to give the player a bit more direction for the city navigation puzzle for sure. :laughing:
@rynti Wow, thanks! Luckily, from a programming standpoint, the point-and-clicks were actually the easiest genre to make a game jam game for. It did put a bunch more work on the art side of things, though.... which I did 0% of :laughing: So no problems for me there! Glad to know other people are fans of point and clicks!
@gdman Thanks for the kind words on the overall atmosphere! Definitely what we were focusing on for most of this one. Thanks for playing!
@casualnothing Nothing like a good point and click every once in awhile! About a decade ago I rediscovered the genre after playing some as a kid and there are some pretty neat ones out there. Tough not to be inspired.
@johnnyalfonso Glad we could get a laugh or two out of people! :laughing: Definitely try to sneak in a bit of humor here and there, regardless of the submission/overall tone we're going for. Thanks for playing!
@kanity I had to overwrite my Itch page's part 1 to get part 2 uploaded, because during the Ludum Dare upload period, Itch was having issues where I couldn't see half the text on the page to upload a game, and some of the buttons were missing. BUT, to make it in time for the game jam deadline, I WAS able to overwrite one of my old updated games :rofl: so I overwrote the last game jam... that's why they're both the same! I should get around to fixing that... I'll dothat later today! Thanks for reminding me, and for the kind words on the game.
@kanity alright, the links should be fixed. The link for this game has been updated, and the old link on the first page now points back to the correct game.
I couldn't see an option to add a file to a Ludum Dare 58 page, so I put a download link on the itch page for the first game. Also, I didn't test it out, so if there's something not working on it let me know!
@kanity Spot on on your first guess! Have you considered a career path with the Inquisition? :laughing: That was indeed the original plan that some of the characters in the first game hatched, but things didn't quite go as they planned, which is why the events of the first game even took place!
So, the reason the first game had special abilities, and this one did not, is because
!> In the first game, you are an otherworldly impersonator, not the real inquisitor!
We tried making that something explored far more in part 2, but adding in the actual plot came together so late that we knew we had to scrap it. The only reason you had abilities in part one is because we struggled finding a way to tie the theme of "Collector" into the story we already had. But we knew we wanted to start with the base of the story that JackOfCups came up with, so you played as someone you don't quite expect!
And yes, we do have a decent amount of the full story at least outlined, and the structure a full point-and-click game would follow if we could design it and build it. I'm not totally sure if I'd like to keep making nothing but point and clicks in future jams, but it might be worth considering!
Finally, The text of the second game really did get cut short. Sadly, another thing that I think really got lost with the time constraints! We would have really enjoyed putting many more things in there. But alas...
Thanks for playing and for commenting. Much appreciated!
@andriybyelikov Thanks for the kind words! Appreciate them!
@local-minimum Thanks for the recording, and for the comment! Sorry about the font. Last jam our point and click got a criticism of the font being the default Unity one, and I was shown how to make your own.... so I did. And apparently I'm not very good at them! :laughing: - It's tough to make one that's both interesting and legible. I guess next time either just find a better premade font, or really try to understand what makes fonts legible and work on it. And we definitely didn't have a whole lot of time to make the puzzles better/have more signposting to the player. Hopefully if we make another, we'll put more effort into that aspect. Thanks for playing!
@local-minimum I also just fully watched your playthrough. It was interesting to see it in action. On the city screen where you get to the phone lines, I did not make it clear at all that the direction you came from was the bottom center of the screen, and that if you hovered over the bottom center of the screen, you could go back in the club. I TOTALLY understand why you thought the direction you came from was the left, as it looked less similar to the other locations. After you get lost once, and you go back inside the club, Pearl refers you to the bookshelf - so you can open up a map, which has a cryptic hint on how to progress. It talks about the 5 locations in the phone line, and you then could map the directions from the book to which alleyways you were supposed to go down, by following the phone lines in the right order.
I was amused at how close you were to brute forcing it on the very first try! So close!
And I see the same issue arose from the next screen, not really having a clear idea which "direction" you came from. Although in this case, you aren't meant to be able to return to the city, it still threw things off as to where you should go next if you were under the impression that you came from the left side. I definitely was running low on time getting to this screen, and I agree you should have been able to inspect far more things on the screen with the anglerfish statue. You also actually didn't really sequence break anything, although I can definitely see how the way the game was presented gave you that impression.
I also was amused at you getting the clue from the painting in the cabin immediately, before even making it to the beach. I think natural curiosity makes you want to go back and forth between cabin rooms and see the differences, and it definitely is not telegraphed well what "forward" is- at basically any point.
And since you got to the painting before talking to Coraline, things just made... even less sense than what they were supposed to :laughing: I'm happy that you at least got to speak with her before the ending, because you can indeed skip it! I also really liked that you instantly noticed the rain falling up. It was hard for even me to notice it visually when working in Unity's Editor.
And yes, finally I do agree that going back to the options list after a conversation would have been better than forcing you into the introduction text each time. Definitely something that should have been smoothed over, that didn't make the cut of things to get into the game.
Thanks again for playing, and for the video!
Totally nailed the atmosphere on this one. The ambient audio track and the window facing the sun, the task you're performing, all come together really well. Like what some others have mentioned, you definitely have a solid base to expand on here, and it would have been nice if, even one small time, for this game there was some choice in what you choose to send, and ahve it have even a tiny impact. Like even something as silly as a task to punch what fast food order you want, 1 2 3 or 4, and you get a "gift" of like a hamburger or fries or something :laughing: BUT! I feel like what you did you did very well, and really enjoyed playing through this game. Nice work!
Neat game, super unique style! The hand gestures thing was interesting, but my limited focus meant I couldn't really remember more than 2 spells at any given moment, and there was no way I'd remember that many hand signals and what letter they correspond to. So I just pushed my way through the game using only fireball and firewall. It worked, was more a timing and resource management game at that point. Clever idea, well done!
Very good game! Thought the theme integration was very cool, liked the art and sound and presentation. Have to echo what a lot of what other people have said, there are some issues that make the game feel unfair rather than tough. Your hurtbox extends past your sprite on some occasions (or some attacks do). Even if this isn't the case, you're heavily encouraged to get close to enemies (whip guy can be parried but then not hit until you get closer, zombie can start an attack from far away, messing up the timing, so you might want to get closer to feel like you can parry more consistently) so moving towards enemies being that punishing is really felt.
Some attack hurtboxes seem to exist on frames where the sprite isn't there yet. Projectiles can hit you in really weird situations and much further away from you than what you'd expect. I definitely think decoupling the hurtboxes of the player, enemies, and projectiles from their size that you use to determine their floor/wall collision would do wonders. The hurtboxes should be smaller in general, for sure.
Also, there are a couple other issues that can be pain points. Enemies can push each other? Making your (correct) spacing get you killed. The whip enemy can spend a frame or two moving forward in between attacks, meaning if you're too close they will just walk into you and you die that way. Also, the zombie and whip guy's red flashes require different timing? Which is odd, it's like you're taught to react one way, then immediately punished for it the next time.
Finally, I think the wall jumping could use some improvement. I'm not entirely sure how other games do it in a way that feels better, but I found I had to readjust the muscle memory I built playing other games, to the way this was programmed. Holding towards a wall to wall cling, then the second you hit jump, that direction thwarts your jump, tends to feel bad. Also you can clip on corners of ceilings, hovering infinitely. Just small corner case stuff.
I know I had a lot of criticisms, but know that I still had a good time and played it to the end! I think a bit more time on the little Q.O.L. things would have elevated this game a bunch, and what was there was already quite good. Nice work!
@alex-de-la-cour absolutely! As someone who has done 12 Ludum Dares before, I COMPLETELY understand that position! The amount of times I had to push out a game, with a list of things to fix or change being almost longer than what I started with, happens too often! :laughing: But I can see through those kinds of issues and really still found the fun in the game you made, so great work!
Nice work! Some games felt a bit tougher than others, but I think that is to be expected from a variety game like this, and things will be easier or tougher for different people. Really liked the atmosphere you set here, everything came together very nicely. The calls you had to right click were an interesting mechanic, and the indicators were varied enough that it felt like a fun thing to have to look for each call. Overall very good job.
Great work, you always create super unique games that do very neat things. I can feel how much attention you gave to all of the sensory details of the game. There's a very specific feeling you try to evoke from the visuals, sound, and poetry, and this game does a great job at getting that information across. I was a bit lost as to the combinations you needed to get, but can also understand why it exists the way it does with such a small time frame. But the dreams themselves were very neat, I really liked the sea monster? one, even the pacing of your words when reading the poems fits with everything else so naturally. I think it could be interesting as a player to be tasked with figuring out which color dream wave mapped to what emotion/theme. Would be a cool puzzle :) But After you showed in a comment which ones mapped to what, the dreams made a whole lot of sense, and I thought it was very neat to see why I got the dreams I got! Very creative game, look forward to seeing what you make next!
@kanity You know what, I totally missed the hint on the main screen until seeing it after I played it. I would not have picked up on those being the themes of the waves. But that didn't take away from the game! As for what I had in mind, after learning that the waves had distinct meanings, I imagined like, some kind of game-flow where you were introduced to the 5 waves, and had to deduce their scrambled meanings. So, you would take 3 waves, get a dream, and try to "assign" what words you thought could go to those waves. Then, you pick a different combo of 3 waves, get a different dream, then think what 3 words most likely go to that dream.
Then when you saw enough dreams, and knew which waves created those dreams, you could see if you can spot enough patterns to have a guess as to the meaning of each wave. Just something that kicked around in my head after learning about the meaning. I thought it could be neat to present 'figuring out the meanings' as a game mechanic specifically. But I know that is a lot of work!
Also, the waves, once you know their meanings, definitely have a strong visual correlation to their meaning, you are correct! My brain did not think to try to find that meaning, though. When they're flying around on screen and spinning, and you're focused on which ones you want to avoid, I did not find myself taking the time to really examine the art! :laughing: And who knows, maybe if I went in knowing specifically there were meanings to them - I would have figured them out on my playthrough. My brain interpreted "note the patterns" in the description less as "look at the patterns themselves" and more "remember the combinations you picked"! But I don't feel the way that it was took anything away from the game. Just a cool way you could tie some kind of mystery/learning puzzle into the game, through wave combinations and dreams.
Gotta echo what a lot of other people have said. Really dig the art style. Definitely what drew me in, and I think it fits super well with the game you made and the humor you added to it. The controls were a bit rough, but honestly nothing too unwieldy. Turning towards certain directions was a bit tricky on occasion, and never being able to just... place something you have down (or maybe you could? I only ever got left click to drop) made things like box-stacking much more difficult than it needed to be. But I liked the game, and made it to the end! Nice work!
btw... @katastudios !> the shark spits out an axe once fed!
. and then... !>You can use it to chop wood, and toss wood into the firepit thing
Maybe I'm just too tired from the post-game-jam brain, but I cannot figure out the first puzzle. I'll try again at a later date when my brain isn't so mush.
Alright, back at it. I finally figured it out. The first puzzle took me a good 20 minutes, and half of that was aimless wandering or trying the same things over and over. I was far too distracted with the !>Reflective sphere thing, assuming that something to do with the reflections on the spere was the key forward.... I was close! But then like, the 2 blades of grass making what looked like some kind of archway on the sphere, also kind of looked like a door...... I got so distracted with those thoughts
that I didn't explore as many options as I could have. Unfortunately, the thing that gave it away was less !>The reflection on the wall
and more !>The fact that there's a gap in the wall in the area where you're supposed to see the reflection
But I did end up making it through. The second room was interesting, I liked the idea of being pulled like that. I kind of figured in your question 2 (making it to the moon) you were hinting that
!> The plate could gain you infinite speed if you're looking up at an angle and you view it as you're falling. It pulls you back up and you keep your speed from falling
But looked like that was not the answer. And yes, I did
!>Jump all the way to the moon! And through it! And past it! I would have liked at some point for you to be in range of something that would have pulled you towards it, and for a place to land... butttt
it was really, really cool, with nice visuals.
Wow... so uh,.... I made it to the 3rd to last level, not knowing/remembering that you could attack.
I.... raged very hard at some level designs, because I forgot enemies could be killed.
Imagine trying to get past the level with the 10 waves of 3 enemies with just moving left/right and jumping....
yeah, I did that, somehow. And that's why I'm last on the leaderboard. It took forever.
Only by accident did I hit the left mouse button on the level where there are the two hallways with spikes, AND AN ENEMY IN THE MIDDLE OF THEM, and suddenly the levels became much easier.
Then went back to the tutorial after I beat it only to see that yep... it WAS explained! I just missed it.
On that note, very interesting game! The timing/signal thing was a bit odd to get used to, it's not like a necrodancer where the timer is on a consistent beat, but some actions have only a tiny recovery window. Sometimes if you die, the input isn't readily available, and it kind of throws you off a bit. Especially if you're trying to beat a certain level 1000 times because you aren't attacking.
Enemies could have also used a bit better aggro mechanic in general? I felt like a lot of the levels broke a little towards the end, cause every enemy that was supposed to be back there crept forward. But I think this is a quite impressive submission, and really did a lot of things quite well. Now, I need to chill out a bit, and maybe get my revenge on some of these levels later... by attacking!
Nice work! It was a little rough with the UI issus in web, but I made it to the end! The web link didn't work for me, it got stuck on "downloading data" - apparently trying again just now it went through, but don't know why. Either way, some clever ideas here. I really liked figuring out the last puzzle. For awhile, though I'd have to cheat the system some way haha. So despite having a massive bug that took a huge chunk of your time, the game came together pretty well. But it is rough around the edges because of it. But I see the vision! Anyways, well done!
Edit: There was a 1.0 updated with a minor fix it looks like, and most of my criticism is at least partially addressed by the interface.
I really like the idea behind this one. Jumping between towers, finding targets, and ordering commands is a cool mechanic and take on the theme. That being said, there are a few things I think that could make the game far more readable and playable.
I'd like there to be some kind of indication if you're in "targeting" or "ordering" mode. I often found myself just guessing which one I was in, and trying a second time if nothing happened. Maybe alternating the color of the spark when you hit space bar? Additionally, I think the zoom is very unforgiving. Oftentimes it felt like I had no other tower targets in my sight radius, so I had to blindly guess where to launch myself.
That being said, launching yourself is super satisfying, as is seeing your pawns mow down enemies. Getting them all working towards an objective is super satisfying. I like the style, and especially the effect on the spark.
I wasn't sure what actually triggered this, but I did get one successful repair in. I noticed one of my pawns holding something, and managed to move them back to the ship, which updated the progress. But I was not sure where to go/what to do to get more stuff used to repair. Some kind of tutorialization/feedback would have helped me here for sure.
Anyways, super cool seeing what you managed to assemble for this game jam! Cool idea and execution.
Really liked the mechanics in this one. Very clever, and programmed well. Bug free from my experience, even in weird corner cases where a racoon is halfway onto a new square. All worked exactly how I'd hope/expect. So, very good job.
Really dug the music, sound effects, and the effects in general when you're in the edit mode. Combined that really hit the sweet spot of satisfaction when playing a video game. I am jealous of how good this aspect of your game is.
Some levels felt cheesable, or that you only needed a couple of squares to work, but that kind of just added to the clever feeling you get when you reach the goal. I really dug the slow down mechanic. Don't really see how it fits the theme, but who cares, the game is very good. 48 hours too? Fantastic. Look forward to seeing if you do more ludum dares in the future. Cheers.
Solid submission! I recognized your style instantly, after last jam. Went into this one blind, got stuck and restarted once, but eventually figured out what to do. The signposting was a bit hard to follow, it took me entirely too long to figure out the purpose of the game, but I ended up making it there. Something really hits the spot when you read an email worded like the instructional email you wrote. The idea behind learning the ins and outs, and then figuring out who you need to subvert the rules for, is very neat. The game did have some other tougher spots, like the NPCs spam-talking to you when you're trying to access a computer, but other than that, no major hiccups. Good job!
Nice work! Really did a good job building up the atmosphere I think you were looking for. I tried maybe a good 15 times, but could never find the exit. I found the place in the first screenshot - but couldn't make it out of either of the slits of the cave. I found another couple of spots where you could go and get oxygen, although I don't think there were any walkable floors in those. Then I kept being lead to the huge room that has the anglerfish thingee, but there was so little light that I couldn't actually tell where (if anywhere) I was supposed to go in that room. Just seemed like it was empty and there was no exit. I tried a bunch of other passages, and they all basically lead to the same room, so unless there's a turn I kept missing and thought I did, I could not escape :( Nice work though, very cool idea!
Well, I tried again and this time tried listening for some kind of signal. I guess I am deaf because I don't hear anything, or any audio changing. I'd figure the sonar-beep style sound would get louder or quieter, but I don't seem to hear that wherever I go, or if so, it's imperceptible, And the only other sounds I hear are splashing going in the water, and some occasional rushing water sound I don't know when it happens. So trying to navigate the large room still felt aimless to me. I guess I'm just misunderstanding something.
Without realizing you had instructions laid out in the description, I ended up finding out how to play the game. I made it through a handful of letters, but did not know what the buttons did differently, didn't know the difference between the pidgeon and the other thing, but had fun deciphering messages and typing them out. I think there's a lot of really cool things you can do here for sure. I noticed that the monitor cannot display full messages, or if there's a way to "change pages", I did not know. So most of the messages I could only decipher up until the monitor stopped displaying it. Also, backspace didn't work :( so you had to type carefully! But I liked the content of the messages I deciphered, though it could tell a very interesting story, and enjoyed exploring what you put together. Very cool!