itch.io

Looks interesting! Although idk what the rules would be, which element's "powers" would be prioritized? And again I think that such a small board may be too limiting to develop interesting strategies. But I'd definitely want to try this out!

Physics-based games are always finnicky and require special attention to keep fun. Things like: the starting elevator being elevated one pixel and having to jump to get back in; the frozen person sometimes toppling over and sometimes getting back up depending on very subtle differences; the ceiling being one pixel too high for you to pass through and having to restart. Don't get me wrong, it's very fun when it works – but your job as a developer is to try to make it work as often as possible.

I also felt that the whole game was a bit too fast, all the animations and physics. But I guess that's just personal taste. And the jittery camera, which I'm sure you're aware of and just couldn't figure out how to fix it in time.

WOW this game is so clever! Having ice blocks double as health? Being able to kill the attacking slime? And I can only hope that if it turns a spike into an ice block, you can collect it to restore your health. The only things I think this game are missing are more levels (obviously) plus probably more minigames or even just stuff to switch up the existing minigames, such as more enemies in the chase section, and maybe just a barebones story/intro cutscene to complete the experience. In terms of gameplay, though, this is quite perfect.

Well, it was super fun until I got to the part with a 2x2 pixel hole that I couldn't get into. I tried fiddling with diagonal+horizontal moves to inch my torch to the correct position but I just gave up in the end because I didn't know what was helping and what was hindering me. I think this concept is fantastic but the level design should focus more on learning to use the movement intuitively (e.g. timed events, moving platforms that drag the head of the torch with it, maybe some puzzle elements?) rather than requiring a precise position to move on; even if it's in the perfect spot when you playtest the game, it doesn't mean it will be for everyone else.

Actually a really good and surprisingly innovative endless runner. Although you should probably explain the mechanics better. When you said that jumping out gave you "more air" I thought you meant more oxygen, that you could run out of it if you're in the water too long; just say "you can jump higher". As for "not running into danger", I'd describe it rather as "don't run into an ice block, or ice spikes underwater" (or whatever they are). Something that was actually quite confusing to me was that I could fall from a level-1 ice block into ice spikes and die, I thought they were a form of "level-0 ice blocks".

Anyway, once I actually got it, I must say it was refreshing in its uniqueness and quite fun, although I'd give the player just a bit more time to react. And ofc add powerups, coins, a shop with upgrades, yadda yadda, to make it hook the player for longer. Then it could be a seriously great game.

I'm so glad you had fun! The "ball with teeth" is an in-game marker of the secret buttons. One pixel lights up for each one you press. I'll definitely have to make it clearer in the full version.

WOW, thank you so much! I never expected that anyone could think more of this game than "Huh, interesting concept". Well, I'll try extra hard to make the full version just as good then!

Heard of Flashpoint? Very useful lil thing

Bruh you didn't even check if I won the alphabet game. That's the part I spent the most time on and I was forced to ""lose"" at the end anyway.

For the text, I suggest you break the lines at spaces, or at the very least use those connec-

ting lines that they teach you in pri-

mary school, instead of just cutting at whateve

r letter was out of reach, it's super annoying to read. I think you could also afford an extra line of characters. If you're making a text adventure, you best make sure that the text and reading part is done well!

Hi! If this is your first time putting a game on itch.io, know that people prefer if you package your game as a .zip file (GameMaker lets you choose when you press export). Even for my commercial games, 2 or 3 people (compared to 60ish) used the installer instead of the zip.

If you're making a game at a low resolution like this, it's a good idea to scale the window up so players aren't staring at a little spot on the screen. For pixel-perfect scaling like for this jam, use window_resize(84*6, 48*6) at Game Start, replacing 6 with whatever scale factor you want to use. (I also suggest adding alarm[0] = 1 and putting window_center() in Alarm 0, to, well, center the window after scaling it.) I believe GM has a minimum window size and that's why it's scaled with an imperfect aspect ratio.

3 from what I know. Malor rising you back up, climbing the wall yourself, and using the teleportation by bringing a guy in the underground 10 souls.

Wow, definitely 5 stars for innovation! Using slow acceleration speeds as a game mechanic, and "spikes" that drain your timer faster instead of killing you outright, very clever design. Although I do think you could embrace that idea more by removing the bottomless pits and putting the spike-floor instead – that would require a change  of some of the levels, but it could lead to fun situations where you have to climb back up from the ground and you just barely make it. On a side note, I feel the current timer is waaay too lenient. It would be best to design a timer that's different for each level, and focus on hitting the "flow" region – not too easy, not too hard. Maybe you could have medals and make this a speedrunning-focused game? I certainly see the potential.

One lil detail: I noticed you have coyote time for jumping after stepping off a ledge, big plus; I'd also add coyote time for pressing the jump button before hitting the ground.

It's a pretty good idea, I used a similar one before, but I think you should work more on the balancing: movement speed, gravity force, jump height, bullet speed, etc. At the moment, I get the feeling that I need to stop the bullets at the exact right height, which is finnicky and somewhat random (you yourself said it's "trial and error", which doesn't sound like a fun game concept to me), which is why I'd leave more leeway by increasing jump height and slowing down bullet speed. The high gravity makes it very punishing, which I guess could be a good thing if you're making a rage game, but this feels more like a puzzle platformer to me, so I think it would benefit from more accessible (i.e. easy) skill-based elements and harder/more complex puzzle elements (horizontal bullets, enemies flying back and forth, freezing crates in mid-air?)

Interesting, what was the frustration caused by? Falling and having to get back up? Falling because of not seeing a platform or wall?

Hah, there actually is sub-pixel movement. The character collision shape is actually a small triangle (to help with jumping up 1-block gaps) - maybe I could make it a pentagon to help with falling down too, I haven't thought of that.

Wow, a Nokia horror game. Well done, I was almost scared. Could've added more content tho, dragged out the scares. Would've been nice. The flashlight stayed on even after I lost all my battery though... and you used some strange filter (first drawing everything with anti-aliasing and then clamping the colors of the pixels, maybe?) that made some stuff very jittery when you moved past. Idk how you managed it but it's really the only star I'm taking away from 15.

Amazing... very fun. Always love these kind of games like "There is no game". Is it meant to be an inside joke that the phrase is actually "cops and robbers" and I didn't get it until I looked it up?

Although I must say, some more polish in the gameplay sections would be nice. It's clearly meant to be a game about making choices rather than having mad skillz. The dancing section is what got me the first time, because I assumed it would be like DDR, without moving left and right, just pressing different-direction arrows. And at the very least I'd expect the arrows to disappear once I did them, so that I know I didn't miss any. The second time I was really unsure of whether I had done it right.

As for the error the other guy posted about, some people get it when playing Godot games on Firefox (including me), so I had to get Chromium (ugh). It'd be nice if you also uploaded a downloadable version.

Very cool, love the attention to detail – although the game barely changes in difficulty. The pace of the second level is so close to that I was long out of my "flow" zone. I think if you made the levels longer but have faster animations, block dropping speeds etc. it could be more engaging.

Hey. This is a unique strategy game concept that I haven't seen before. It's fun, but only once you get it, otherwise it feels like one of those bootleg games that no matter what you do, you always lose (especially since a draw is also called "defeat"). Such games benefit especially from explanations with pictures and examples: two snowflakes next to each other, and text explaining which one will win. I'll be honest – in my early dev days it also baffled me how bad other people can be at understanding your tutorials, and confusion is never fun.

From a game design perspective: I think you could rework the way the snowflakes look, maybe make them black/white instead of circle/cross, just because it's hard to count the number of pixels in a corner especially when they're in the grid and you have a 1-pixel-wide line separating them, it just muddles the whole thing. You could also experiment with maybe having the snowflakes "attack" each other along the sides instead of the corners, or using a hexagonal grid. I feel that could really increase the potential for strategies. Or even just have a bigger grid. At the moment, it feels very dependent on luck of what pieces your opponent has, and it's deterministic in the same way that Tic Tac Toe is – if both players are sufficiently good, it will always lead to a draw. It only starts to get interesting when you have a bigger grid and have to put 5 in a row, for example.

One more thing – I think you meant to randomize the map at start but it randomizes after every level won, so you don't make any progress. And most gamepads don't have an "O" button – did you use an Ouya? Cause then you'd have O and U, not X.

lmao don't worry about it, I'm thinking the same about my entry in comparison to others. You always do, unless you're a lil bitch and think you're the best.

And also: you'll become better. There's a reason I keep my old games on itch, just have a look at those piles of garbage

Thanks for the feedback! I had different jingles play depending on the type of powerup, but I'm thinking now I could also have a different direction of particles, or maybe have them show a sign like the buttons do.

Ye some of them are just jump height and movement speed so not really noticeable. I'll definitely have the upgrades more spread out in the full version so you "enjoy" them more, and as someone else suggested, have clearer signs on what each powerup does.

Interesting point. You can always refresh and be back at your last save point (before falling down), but I'll make sure to make the ending more obvious in the full version, thanks for suggesting that.

Ohhh... I see what I did wrong. There's a button on top of the "face" that unlocks a door to an upgrade that lets you get out. I myself forgot it was there, which says a lot about the readability of this room. Sorry!

Updated to hopefully make the button more visible and make it get pushed slightly faster.

Hi, thanks a ton for your feedback! (The game saved before you jumped off so you can search more if you feel like it.) This will be useful for the full version I'm planning, trying to decide whether or not to use a text tutorial but I'll probably do something like a) putting the first button in a very wide flat clearing so it stands out and b) putting 3-block steps before and around the first jump pickup so it's clearer what it does. Thanks again!

Thanks! Hoping to someday add more to this... when I decide to figure out how to get BL running on Linux lol

This is supposed to be the case in the levels before the ones where you program these keywords yourself.

The idea is that you make the "not" keyword without using this keyword (by reading and changing the bits one by one) and then you can start using it. Seems like I should make that clearer in the tutorials and manual 😅 or maybe I'll make them red and cause an error instead to show that these levels aren't supposed to be trivial.

But I do notice on the screenshot that the way the rectangles/UI is drawn is weird, thanks for showing me. I have a fix planned for that.

The AppImage file is to run the game on Linux, you don't need it.

Damn, I was tempted to give this a shot already, and this is looking super good, I love how well you designed the tutorial to teach the game without any text! Can't wait to actually practice this and work out strategies.

Well GameMaker finally decided to accept my Steam license again... so I uploaded an AppImage for Linux (and confirmed it works this time).

Want someone to help debug your code? Post it here, I'll try to help (and anyone else who happens to see it).

Noted. I shall certainly look into this.

As for the ###'s, GameMaker generates those error messages automatically, so it's their problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I can't change that debugging stuff because the game engine I used, GameMaker, compiles all that by itself. However, I will try to recompile the game with the newest version of GM soon, because I used that to recompile the new update for 1000-BIT and the game worked, so that should fix it.

Hah, I called this the "demo" because I was planning to make this an entire game with 6 chapters and lots of levels... I'd love to continue this, if I didn't have like 50 other games to work on... xD

Yeah, I think a proper tutorial showing how the game actually works could help a bit with the confusion (although part of it is intended). Thanks for playing!

Thanks! Although I don't think I'll be going into Steam yet, there's legal mumbo jumbo and tax stuff. We'll see when that happens.

Hi there! 2 years late, but I've set up my Stripe now, so you can buy the game... if you still want to :)

Regarding the EDIT part, I'm pretty sure you got a timeout error (the error name isn't in the screenshot), i.e. "PROGRAM TIMED OUT  -  TOO MANY STEPS". Is that correct?

I loved it! Super cool!

:) fun little game, I loved it!

Ehh... this is what happens when you get an inexperienced programmer making a program reader: a spaghetti mess that creates extremely unintuitive bugs. Thank you so much for your effort in tracking this down as far as you could. I will be working on ironing out the bugs now (working from a new GameMaker version introduced its own fair share of them... one of them is that I can't type the letter "i", although if I use the debugger to stop at a certain line of code, I can. Ugh.)

If you have any other complaints about game design and such, let me know please. It's nice to have such a dedicated community.

Does this still happen? Can you provide me with the full error message? Did it happen when you clicked on the task, or when you opened your solution?