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A jam submission

Helter SmelterView game page

A game about a plucky dwarf plumber trying maintain a forge's complex pipeworks
Submitted by overpressuregames — 1 hour, 7 minutes before the deadline
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Helter Smelter's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall#63.9123.912
Audio#74.0004.000
Theme#124.4764.476
Accessibility#133.3813.381
Fun#143.9523.952
Graphics#154.1434.143
Controls#313.6193.619
Originality#343.8103.810

Ranked from 21 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Godot Version
4.2.1

Wildcards Used
"Wah Wah Wah Waah" and " Pay attention, 007"

Game Description
A game about a plucky dwarf plumber trying maintain a forge's complex pipeworks

How does your game tie into the theme?
You must craft new pipes to maintain a forge

Source(s)
No

Discord Username(s)
ayayronr (alias on the server is "overpressue")

Participation Level (GWJ Only)
This is my first time

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Comments

Submitted

Graphics are really well done, great job. The gameplay was also nice, maybe it needed a little more strategy to make it more interesting. Good job on the submission!

Submitted(+1)

Hidden gem! I saw some initial dev screenshots on GWJ discord and wanted to find it. This game is such a complete polished package. I love the on-rails tutorial, and the light humor that goes into it. The UI is extremely readable and intuitive. The  gameplay mechanics is creative, simple to understand, and doesn't get stale even as the game scales. In fact, it gets really hectic at higher stages, in a good way. The graphics is charming and extremely on point for the theme. Music was good too, with the hammering SFX and looping background music.  Ran well with no bugs at all. Can see it doing well as a mobile game with frequently added puzzles.

Sublime entry! Well done!!!

Submitted(+1)

Awesome submission! Tutorial is great, art is great, music is great, my only feedback is until you get down the muscle memory of the anvil, it’s unforgiving. Maybe adding a wider hitbox for passes? All around super great game!

Submitted(+1)

What an absolutely lovely submission!

Charming art, great controls and sound design.

My personal favorite part is the blacksmithing mini-game (except for the metal pipe falling sound effect).

Submitted (1 edit)

Well made! Can see a lot of effort went into making this., and looks more like a finished game than a jam entry! The tutorial itself was excellent (That itself is amazing for a jam). Loved the humour. (Don't worry about what happened to the last feller... Can only guess. And the comments when I failed at the anvil made me smile, and the failure more bearable.) But couldn't proceed much beyond that, unfortunately. I just felt the difficulty curve was too steep for me. The timing of the leaks combined with the anvil game made the overall game difficult. The mechanics like the foam gun are good. Making pipes and putting them in place was very satisfying. Also appreciate the small touches like if there's an object on the floor you can still bump into it and it moves. Good work overall!

Developer(+1)

Really appreciate the feedback! Yea definitely wish I had more time to spend on balancing, or creating more levels to smooth out the difficulty curve. I've decided to go back and tweak it after the voting period if over, and I'll post in the discord when its ready! Thanks for playing!

Submitted(+1)

I had fun playing this game. It's a combination of time and reflex management which can be overwhelming at times. 

Submitted(+1)

Probably my favorite entry out of the ones I’ve played so far, well done! Especially liked the falling metal pipe sound effect

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

10/10 game, well done!

Developer(+1)

Wow, that's the highest score I've seen yet! I'll have to show it to my friend who was bragging about beating my PB earlier haha. Thanks for playing!

Submitted(+1)

Great game! I reckon I could beat your PB after a few tries! This was my first go. It's like the pipe missions in Deep Rock Galactic crossed with Overcooked. Love it. 

Submitted

I really loved this game! The attention to detail and thoroughness of the tutorial was really impressive. Thank you for taking the time to do all of that. It made the game extremely approachable and fun to pick up and just jump right in!

I love the management challenge of this! There was always something going on and immediately calling my attention. The game was really well designed and created the perfect amount of chaos! Amazing work because that's no easy feat! I'm sure it took a lot of tweaks to get right. The game felt really nice to play and control

That being said, the difficulty for completing the level itself seems quite steep. Like, I really felt like I was doing pretty well. You can't completely avoid leaks, right? It's part of the game. I had a little bit of down time where I was fixing things, but overall felt like I was pretty on top of things. And somehow I only got 46/100! It felt like it would be impossible for me to do > 200% better so I stopped after that level. Noob player feedback: I wanted to be able to complete level 1 pretty much no matter how bad I played as I was learning.

This doesn't really affect my review mind you, still extremely impressive and a joy to play! Love all the sounds, the art is fantastic, and the different mechanics and mini game is really neat. Awesome work!!

Developer(+1)

Really appreciate the detailed feedback! And as far as I know, there isn't a way to fully stop leaks, which was expected, and why I set the pass bar at 50/100. I probably could've reduced the amount of lava you needed to collect each level, and I was going to implement a ranking system based on how much you collected, but sadly scrapped for time

Submitted(+1)

Oh maybe I missed that! I was thinking I had to get 100/100 to win. I'll definitely go back to give it another go then if I was that close to passing :)

Developer

Oh yea, its in a dialogue box but after all the tutorial stuff it was probably pretty easy to skip through. Probably could've added a UI element to make it a bit clearer

Submitted(+1)

really love this one, it always feels like you have to be doing something and it flows nicely, also the humor of the tutorial guy gave the game alot more personality
very, very hard though, even the levels where i did succeed it was barely

Developer(+1)

Means alot, thank you! Minimizing down time was definitely a priority as I really didn't want players just waiting around at stations, but I think that definitely drove the difficulty up to unmanageable at points. I tried to add some under the hood balancing (like the time till next burst increasing based on the number of already burst pipes there are) but I didn't have enough time to get it right I think. 

Submitted(+1)

yeah thats just how jams are unfortunately, i often find myself focusing on polish so much that balancing kinda gets forgotten

Developer

Well the polish on your submission was close to a full fledged release and really enhanced the experience, so I'd definitely say it was worth it

Submitted(+1)

you people are too nice :[ thank you

Submitted(+1)

So much work is put into this game, I can tell. The tutorial was nice, the animations were smooth, and there's even a mini game. I will say the anvil minigame is really tough! Great entry.

Developer (1 edit)

First time I've really attempted any animations, so that's really encouraging to hear you liked them!

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

After I wrote my initial comment, I decided to give it a few more tries (failed the first few more). I was finally able to get past the tutorial make some progress. I love the concept, the art is great. The game is well done, but dang is that anvil hard to manage. I end up spending more time redoing my ingots than anything else, forget the leaky pipes haha

Developer

Wow, really appreciate you putting some time into it! Yea definitely could've upped the timing window on it, or added a difficulty setting. 

Submitted(+1)

Awesome juiciness regarding the graphics and audio. Tutorial is very well told. It has quite a steep learning curve, though.

Submitted(+1)

Really enjoyed this, thanks for making it!

Submitted(+1)

Great game. I loved the mechanics, and the tutorial is flawless (I got a bit scared with what happened to the last feller). I found the hammer mini-game a bit challenging. Overall, the game is amazing, congratulations.

Developer

Glad you enjoyed it! Yea I typically suck at rhythm based games, so when I got it to where I could beat it most of the time I thought it was in a good spot. Forgot to take into account I probably played it hundreds of times during testing and had the timing ingrained at that point. Good reminder to collect more outside feedback!

Submitted(+1)

I got 182/300! This was a lot of fun! One of my favorites in the jam so far, great job.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing, and nice job!! 

Submitted(+1)

A lot of amazing features!!! I really started to role play being a dwarf plumber. Mission successful.

Submitted(+1)

Impressive project for solo jam!  I can see this idea being taken farther.  Good job!

Submitted(+1)

I enjoyed the game.
one thing i didn't like is that the rhythm mechanic is a little unforgiving
but overall good job

Developer(+1)

Appreciate the feedback! I was planning on adding a difficulty setting to adjust things like that, the burst timing, etc. but ran out of time :( Might tack it on in the future!