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Lanyard

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A member registered May 07, 2017 · View creator page →

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Really nice. I love the cute theme and styling, the thick lines of the artwork is just right, and the music especially is a perfect fit for meditative puzzling, really nailed that. Main thing that stands out to me at this point would be achieving a smooth difficulty curve, it seems to spike and dip a bit, and I think could generally increase a bit faster overall. My favorite puzzle in this demo's collection was the one where you have to drop Magnus down onto the switch, his reaction really seals it too. Overall, I am excited to pick up and play the full release (and hear your thoughts about the end of this development journey).

no need to rub it in.

love it. like a fast-paced darkest dungeon. crazy polished for 72 hours.

in case anybody else needs to hear this track after this like me, I'll just leave this here

bruh. just take a minute and set up speed dial. 😂

innovative gimmick! finally my blender-honed numpad skills can be put to use. love the music!

love your work. keep pursuing what it is you are after

Skin-crawling subnautica vibes out there in the dark water. real glad to see the fuses were all in working order for once 😅

Murder Corridor is a classic strategy. I'm partial to a Spiral of Doom myself, but there's no wrong answers. Yeah, I would like to develop further as this title gets significantly more plays than any of my others, but I think that may be a genre thing, tower defense being a good match for a browser game. It's always tempting to return to this one though. :)

Thank you! Yeah, although I'd like to expand this into more of a full ARPG Diablo Vampire Survivors thing, I find I just keep working on the visuals and gameplay. Fun comes first, I suppose!

Nice work! I really liked the hand-drawn aesthetic, are you illustrating this all yourself? I also really appreciated your dialogue system, nice and robust. One minor tweak to consider is that when players read really fast like myself, they tend to click through dialogue rapidly. In your game, the "Next" button occupies the same location as the dialogue choices. This led to me accidentally choosing a random dialog option a few times because I was clicking quickly and anticipating another "Next" button.

You could alter this several ways, one would be clicking anywhere in the dialog box advances the text, another would be just a slight hold of the mouse button to select a dialog option. Anyhow, that's just a minor UX suggestion. I couldn't go to the windmill on the map, but maybe you haven't gotten that far along yet. I did return the birds though. I also liked the sandal pair characters, they were my favorite. All in all, it's a promising start!

Nice game, obviously lots of content here. I liked exploring under the water. You could use a Post-Processing Volume to give the underwater sections a little more atmosphere, tint the screen blue, add some caustics effects, etc. Some music would go a long way to help build atmosphere too. When I exited the water, my controls bugged out and the direction keys did nothing so I couldn't play anymore! But I enjoyed what I saw until then and I collected a bunch of pearls.

Thanks Harlekin! I'm glad you dug the weapon switching, as that was my idea for a unique gameplay hook here. I just updated the game with a patch that rebalanced some of the difficulty in the AI, and fixed a bunch of other issues as well. ✌️

Thanks for playing, Jango! Ideally I wanted it so that the player could find and swap out weapons (as well as components) as the game went on, but I did not have time to build all of that and give the game more of a distinct identity.

Competently-executed demake. I thought the original Superliminal was pretty brilliant when it first debuted, must have been fun to recreate. I've been wanting to get my hands on Viewfinder too, similarly mind-bending concept to it. Anyhow, this was pretty fun and I was surprised to see this style of game built in Unreal Engine. Performance did start to really chug on the 2nd level for me, and my controls got all wonked out when I knocked over a painting/mirror and then stepped into it, so I could not progress to the end. But what I liked what I saw!

Felt pretty good sneaking through that gap there at the end. Is this part of the Turnip Boy multiverse? I smell a franchise...

I think the controls here felt just about right, I liked the forgiveness of the floaty aspect. Cute character design too, and a nice main track 🎵 Nice entry!

Thank you! A store! That's very kind. It's tempting to push it further and try that, but man also... what a competitive genre. I'd need some kind of unique and compelling twist to make it stand a chance, I think. Of course I had dozens of ideas that ended up getting cut, I just made a little post in your thread about that. Thanks for playing!

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Ah man, I wasn't even sure how far I was gonna get with my game. I tried to build it in a way where I could drop more things in as time went on. Here's a few features that got cut that each would have made a significant gameplay difference:

  • Exploding Barrels. It's a FPS for crying out loud.
  • Special Abilities for Weapons. Sniper Rounds that pass through enemies. Exploding shotgun bursts that cause splash damage. Arcing bolts of electricity and lingering fire damage over time. More weapon variety would have made those upgrades both more compelling and strategic.
  • Enemies spawning in over time. More enemies, coming for all sides, would have significantly upped the paranoia, tension, and difficulty.
  • More enemies types. Enemies that shoot at you, stationary turrets, and enemies which move faster than you do and rush in, they all didn't have time to get made and implemented, but would have significantly rounded out the enemy roster.
  • Roguelike elements to boost player movement mechanics, like double jump, dash, wall-running, etc. Plus speed upgrades, health boosts, etc. There'd be periodic terminals with choices. You'd have to choose between these more defensively-oriented upgrades and your weapon upgrades. And if you die, it'd be back to square one. But that wouldn't be so bad because...
  • More levels, so every run was different. And you'd find a different assortment of weapons each time. With dozens more unique taunts from your adversary as well, of course.

The thing about a game like Blitzkraft, it kind of can be scaled up or down as far as I can imagine... but in the end, a month is only 31 days, so I made my choices to deliver a package that feels more or less complete rather than a broken and incomplete mess. I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed developing in this genre though. I might be back someday...

Incredible graphics, top tier stuff here. Loved the parallax, the outlining, the snappiness, the tumbling animation, the effects, super solid visual package throughout.

However, the gameplay was too frustrating, for my taste at least. I simply couldn't judge well enough whether or not any given jump would "stick" the landing. This lead to me falling and repeating sections over and over and well, I guess that just isn't too fun for me. However, I think I already know the "rage" or "precision" platformer isn't really my genre, so I offer this with a hearty grain of salt.

I also really enjoyed the silly introduction to the world and the introduction of the Stakes. I for one would not want to face an army of shiny-domed bald men. No thank you. Those men have nothing to lose

Innovative and pleasing to the eye, but man, just so difficult to nail that timing. I wonder how this game would feel if the hitting the jump key just buffered the jump and waited until the beat hit to actually activate the jump? Or if you jumped every beat, period, and just had to use the direction keys to make life work? You've got me brainstorming, hm...

Some more buildup to the beat hitting might make it easier to time things for music-challenged fools such as me, like a synthy whooosh before the tong! of the beat hitting. I enjoyed the sparse melodic tunes and was compelled to keep pushing forward!

Cute fun, a game anyone could pick up and play. If you wanted the difficulty to scale up over time, you could eventually introduce Hard body parts that should not be touched or else risk dulling the descaling instrument, giving the player some boundaries to be careful of. Nice entry!

I'll take it!



Ah, the dream of just having to click on a sticky note to implement UI. Mmmm...

Haven't seen this take on the Scale theme yet! Jams within Jams, very clever. Loved the theming and style choices here, and I enjoyed the playfulness of simulating the stress of Jamtime nearing its end.

Unique and stylish, I had fun playing this!

Pew pew pew! That's my motto. Maybe I should have tutorialized the weapon cycling in game... but I kinda thought it was simple enough that players would get used to it soon enough. Thanks for mentioning the visual door bug, I have that fixed on my local machine, but for fairness' sake I won't be releasing any updates until this prolonged rating period is finally through. Thanks for playing!

Cool tunes, I like the environmental art and personally I liked that it was pretty forgiving if you couldn't really hit the notes because... I can't really hit the notes. Nice use of the theme with fish scales and music scales at once.

I was thinking that it'd be cool if when I pressed the key with the fish in its spot, if it would then play an appropriate tone for the song. This could either be tones already within the song but extracted or perhaps better an appropriate harmony. I think that that would make it easier for me personally to find the rhythm. Maybe some kind of additional little visual cue would help too, in Hi-Fi Rush for example, they often have two concentric circles and when the big one shrinks down to the same size of the little one, you know its time to hit the button. So if you had something like that, and I could see when the fish was within the ring or whatever instead of obscured by the key prompt, I could hone in on that perfect timing better. Just various types of training wheels that would help me to find the virtual groove here.

Just some perspective from someone who is not a genre aficionado. All in all, this is a well put together package and I enjoyed jamming out with the fishies.

Ah, okay. You really had me scratching my head with that one.

Just so happens that I also had to replace my keyboard while developing this title. The Right Arrow key didn't register input anymore, which once I understood what was happening, didn't seem like the hugest deal, but I found it made coding pretty much impossible.

Those are very strange movement and input bugs you described. No, none of that is intended and I haven't seen or heard about any of that behavior before. Honestly, I'm impressed you stuck with it, that sounds frustrating.

Were you playing in WebGL? That can cause some weird issues, especially with mouse sensitivity, because of how it buffers frames. I would recommend trying out the Windows build if you run Windows, this game is frankly just a bit too much for most Browsers, but I put it up there anyways for convenience sake.

Clean style, easy-to-understand design, addictive clickfest nature, very sleek little package you got here. I might suggest adding to the score with little particle effects every time the player clicks any of the + or - icons, that would encourage them to get a little crazy with it if they feel they're really in the flow. I agree with other comments that with a little more variety as time ticks on, this probably has a place on many people's phones. Well done!

That was quick! Cute dragon. ❤️


That's 50 fish in one turn baby!

Cool little deckbuilder. I liked how the damage carried over from one fish to the next. There was a good variety of cards always with new ones coming out, and they definitely scaled up in power. A few different obvious synergy routes seemed apparent, I went heavy on a Tweezers build, stacking up time as much as possible and then doubling my knife output for some massive fish-processing efficiency.

Thanks for the game, I enjoyed playing it!

Thanks for your kind words, Sparrow! I also really enjoyed your game. 😃

Thanks!

I love the art style here, the cute monkey and his Whiplash style instructor mercilessly hanging over him. Creative theme interpretation to make it about climbing the guitar scale. 

However, I gotta say, it is very difficult with the punishing fail scenario of a few missed notes, I admit I could not get through one song. I'd suggest letting a player flail around for a bit and have the chance to get accustomed to the game without kicking them to the main menu, maybe with a percentage score at the end of the scale and an angry, disappointed, satisfied or beaming teacher at the end, accordingly.

All in all, love the creativity and keep going with your artwork!

Hey, this was really good! I was looking forward to a 3rd level to really test my skills when I was informed I had won. Having to balance so many different factors made this a bit of a brainteaser and my strategy evolved between the times when I was shoving workers into their elevators.

My hot tip would be giving the player something to do while all the elevators are in motion. Either something to look at (a camera view of elevators arriving at their floors?) or some mechanical advantage (click the doors close button on each floor arrival to gain a few seconds there), some silly banter to read among the waiting workers, or just some kind of automatic speed-up until an elevator is back on Ground Floor.

I also really liked the gray-toned graphical style and the elevator music is just spot on. Nice entry, I really enjoyed it.

Reminded me of Slime Rancher right away, probably because of the Slimes, but I can't be certain. :) I enjoyed boinging my way around these woods on the backs of these poor Slime bois. Really great art style here, that slight outlining really makes the scenery pop. Nice one!

Thanks Anders!

Oops.


Well, it was fun while it lasted.

I think the best part of your design is going for WSAD and Arrow keys for your whole control scheme because that makes this playable for most players both physically and mentally as those parts of the keyboard are pretty "mapped out" in players' muscle memory, even if they have to manage two characters which could get unwieldy quick.

I liked the cozy soundtrack here and the subtle squash and stretch animation for the jumping blocks, those details matter. Just enough mechanics with buttons, movable blocks, and colored forcefields to give the player something to put together in their mind without getting overly complex. A solid entry overall.

Have you checked out Neoway, also in this Jam? Rather a sibling game to your own. Take a look sometime if you haven't already.

Thanks Merphin. I always put special effort into my visuals, feedback, and polish, I think they matter WAY more to regular players than many devs account for and can overshadow other aspects of Games that  designers can tend to get hung up on. But before aesthetics, I try to follow the "Mario" principle of making sure movement feels good and spend a few days getting the character controller feeling more or less just right in a basically empty room with a few blocks to jump around on. Then I build the rest of the game around that movement. Thanks for playing!

Great tutorial, nice unique weapon anims for each weapon type, and loved the detail of those fantastic portraits on the walls. The masterstroke of the scaling mechanic being both useful for combat and for navigating those pesky traps is a great foundation for the game. Well done, I enjoyed my time with the Scaling Scotty Saga.

Thank you! Very kind 🙏

My all-in on Communism playthrough proved to be a disaster for all of Geckokind. May history forgive my ill-fated 4 day reign as supreme monarch of the Sky Geckos.

Thanks for the insightful comment. I think you've got a really good point about the level design. I kind of put myself in a bind because besides the weapon scaling, I wanted one of my uses of the theme to be "Scale"ing a tower, which meant upward movement in every level. I thought it'd be cute because Towers are such a game design staple, but it proved to have more thorny entanglements than I expected. Here's some.

  • The fact that you're always going up, and need to feel like you're always going up, does lead to a sense of sameyness. Unless you fall, most players will head downwards exactly twice in this whole game. Options become limited.
  • I felt that for the difficulty I wanted (welcoming), the exit or way forward should be in view, generally speaking. This dictated a certain openness, which of course opened up a lot of sightlines. This would have been way less of a problem if the exit was on the same level or lower than the entrance, but I couldn't give up that aspect of the theme.
  • Placing enemies at the tops of ramps proved a bit awkward because the player wouldn't be able to see them while heading up, so that limited my placement options
  • And importantly, while optimizing for WebGL, I found that if I had too many Agents active on the NavMesh at once, this throttled the FPS badly. I ended up deleting a good number of enemies and lowering their detection range in general, just so jammers could get to playing with ease on the Web. This did hurt the "horde" feeling I had earlier on in development, but without doing so, I think all these comments would probably read: "bad framerate makes this game unplayable."

I had a similar idea about a rising red forcefield to force the player to hurry on upwards, but I discarded it as potentially overdesigning. Like, is it really a problem that a player can take their time, as in a great many single-player games? That being said, I do like the idea of more robots being added to the room as time ticks on, maybe even increasingly difficult ones (offering increased rewards) but that's a significant change and would probably necessitate scrapping Web support. We'll have to see about that.

Thanks for the feedback, Xentios. Glad you found the game enjoyable.

If I woke up tomorrow and was assigned the role of Man In Charge for this game, I'd institute three changes:

-No more timer. It stresses me out. At least optional, or only in certain situations.
-The items must weigh if you can stack them in any way on the scale, not just if they touch the scale. Because gravity. Wacky, precarious piles are also probably more fun. It also lets you taunt the player with absurdly small scales.
-I'd give the player the ability to easily rotate items too, that should make things more feasible overall

But those are just some ideas of mine. I liked your game. I like its graphical style, the cozy palette and its sense of whimsy. A good implementation of the theme, achieved without any major hiccups. Nicely done.

I played this game for 15000 years and still can't get the boulder up the mountain. Does life have any meaning?