itch.io

Fun little game. Great job on the difficulty curve, felt very natural in the mechanic progression and was well paced to learn then properly.

Only slight issue I had was the red and magenta mice being a little too similar visually which made me pause mid-action and reassess which was a little interrupting when you were in the "flow" of gameplay a bit. I was both glad and a little disappointed the magenta mice didn't show up on the final level for me! Good rng hah.

The art style is cute, and the music is very well made (if occasionally feeling a little out of place for a cutesy mouse game).

Overall a really fun entry, great work!

Yeh I ran out of time for the more significant optimisations I had planned had to stick with the most "safe" ones to avoid breaking anything just before deadline, sorry if the performance wasn't quite up to standard. I did add a windows build at one point in case people wanted to see it run better, but I wasn't sure if that was allowed after the deadline so I took it down. It was the exact same build as the web version with no new content etc. but yeh... wasn't sure.

Anyway, thanks for playing and leaving feedback!

Hmm, I'm starting to think this hitler fella might not be a very nice guy.

The colour->damage mechanic was really cool and unique, it could be hard to use effectively with the speed you needed to shoot but I really liked that.

Great portrait art and everything was visually clear, killing nazis is a video game classic, can't go wrong with that.

Fun entry, good job!

Really fun puzzler concept, very engrossing with the hypnotic music too. Quite difficult without becoming frustrating (except when you are 2 pixels off the end, BOUNCE FURTHER you little byte).

The only thing that didn't feel quite right was the friction when bouncing?  It felt like I lost horizontal velocity a bit too suddenly when hitting the ground with decent speed, was expecting them to go a bit further each time, especially the round byte

Overall a great entry, good job!

(aww I was hoping to come back and finish the last 2 levels later but now I see it doesn't save, it could have that too!)

Uh, you were the first person to comment on my game 3 days ago! I already rated and gave feedback on yours lol

Ohh I wasn't even thinking of adding more types, I think you have a good amount for a jam entry. I was more thinking it would be nice to have some level of discoverability/unlock feeling. Obviously at the start you can only make 2 types because you only have the green balls, so showing the other recipes is just sort of noise to the player that point. Then after your first run you have a new material type, and back at the cauldron it could show "hey you can make this guy now, here's what he does" etc. so you get a little extra dopamine unlock hit and can space out onboarding to better cement it.

Sorry I hope that clarifies, I wasn't trying to tell you you should have added more content or grow your scope!

Yay I quit my job!

Really fun concept, I enjoyed the game a lot. The only two negatives that stood out to me was sometimes the jumping felt a little clunky, or at least the jump recovery, it didn't always feel consistent when I was/wasn't allowed to jump again, dropping off a letter was also quite punishing with how long you had to wait before you could jump. Second was just the word/note variety, but that is really only a problem because I enjoyed playing it, I just wanted to type more stuff!

Oh and clippy, all my homies hate clippy, get lost clippy :(

Great job on the overall presentation, the art, sfx, and windows 98 interface really sold the theme you were trying to give and again the idea in general is very strong. Thanks for this one!

This was so cute. love my little guys, hate dinosaur guy, he slaughtered them mercilessly haha.

I liked the cooking, but for some reason it made me keep wanting to try and find new combinations which never seemed to work, would've been cool to have some little experimentation or progression with what units you could try to make.

The SFX and art were both spot on for the game and it was a lot of fun, the only real downside for me was how sudden the leap in difficulty was when the dinosaur boss guy started appearing. It went from almost too easy to almost too hard in an instant, a smoother difficulty/progression curve would feel a lot better I think. It was also slightly confusing getting offered upgrades for things I didn't have yet, like the tower, it made me think I was not understanding something about how to make it/use it and it wasn't until a wave or so later I had the correct fillions to build them.

2 minor gripes amongst a long list of positives, so overall a very very good entry!

It can be overwhelming yeh, honestly I probably overshot both the difficulty and progression curve for a game jam, it's quite hard to balance this kind of game without more playtesting and the developer is always going to be the worst playtester because I have more playtime than anyone in the world lol.

There was countless balance tweaks throughout, but I only had 2 playtesters aside from myself, I did have to make things significantly easier after their feedback but probably still not enough sorry about that! I put a lot of work into the run director too :(( beacons are handled differently and it purposely tries to apply more pressure, but with certain limits (specifically it isn't allowed to spawn more than 2 spiky snake enemies, and the chance of them spawning at all is lowered a fair bit) then eases off after completion so you get a bit of a breather.

Thanks for playing and your kind words! Haven't done many games no, I did another jam a couple weeks before this one and prior to that hadn't touched game dev since about 10 years ago when I did a few 48 hour jams. I've been in software development for almost 20 years though so I think it would be a bit misleading if I claimed to be new...

Very nice aesthetic, I liked being able to change the colours at the end, would've been cool to see them changing during the game too. Also, It's crying out for some calm ambient music and SFX!

Decent entry, would like to see more!

Fun little game, I like the progression, does it go indefinitely or is there an ending I need to come back and fight for?

The art is basic but aesthetically pleasing and the little touches for each class really stand out. Gameplay is simple, but quite hard at first, the upgraded units make a big difference and are satisfying to use, especially my ranger and tank carries. SFX hit nicely and the music was chill.

Solid entry, good job!

Did you submit this by mistake? It doesn't seem to be made for or during the brainless jam

Fun little game!

I really liked the character art, and the small details like the weapon moving from his back when you swing facing upwards.

It was hard, but mainly due to the hitboxes feeling a little unfair and the attack swing being so close to the body, sometimes felt like I shouldn't be getting hit when trading, I think having the attack stretch out a bit further would've made it feel a bit better, attacking up or down especially seemed like a bad idea.

The car made me laugh so I don't even care that it got stuck to me lol

Good entry, keep it up!

Haha, better believe it bud! (I "work" from home and spent at least 100+ hours on this game lmao)

Glad you liked the music, handel's sarabande was the primary inspiration for the narrative in general and when I found that guy on pixabay who made all the electronic version of dope classical pieces I knew I had to use them, they're so good.

Fully with you on the intro, I had the vision and spent ages trying to make it work and tweaking the timings of everything for hours trying to cut it down without losing the main beats I wanted, but agree it drags a little still. I did make it so once you've seen it you (should) never get shown it again, assuming you don't clear the save or something doesn't go wrong at least.

There is an ending sequence too I'm not sure if anyone has actually managed to see yet (after you beat the boss). It's not quite as visually fun, but I spent just as much time on it and is where I actually used Sarabande (original arrangement, not a remix)... that sequence started at 1m50 and I managed to cut it down to 45ish lol, I get too overexcited with narrative stuff.

That's such a good idea for the clumpy boys, damn I wish I had thought of that. I added it as a rare drop to them quite early on when I hadn't got around to balancing the node spawns yet, it was too annoying to find the deposits and I just wanted more ways to get materials. I left it in even after balancing the chunk generation better because it's a fun extra.

Thank you so much for playing and your feedback!

Really fun idea, and an impressive concept to put together for a jam.

I liked the art, but felt it was a bit too disrespected by the shaders you were using, the scanline chromatic aberration one made my eyes strain after a while it would've been nice to have the option to disable it, so I could enjoy the art more too.

The combat gameplay was a complete surprise, I was not expecting a rhythm game! It was fun but quite tricky to get the hang of, and I think you might be being sabotaged a little in the web version by a slight audio latency? It felt like it wasn't quite accurate (but maybe I'm just bad lol). It also was sometimes a little unclear what the outcome of a round was, like I would attack the game tells me I'm doing 300 damage, the enemy is attacking and not guarding, but takes no damage.

Audio was great of course, would've been nice to have a little variation during the combat so you weren't always playing the same riff per action but I appreciate that is quite a lot of work for a jam game.

I completely stunk up the final performance haha, it was so fast! I hope the dogs hated it.

Great entry, especially for a first jam, keep it up!

Super fun game, goddam those critters and their complete lack of basic self-preservation sense. If they weren't so cute they'd be in big trouble

I liked the little narrative you laid out, and the gameplay explanation started off really well with the "here's a guy, fling him around!" that's perfect. Unfortunately, the rest of the explanation sort of just became a wall as you know, I think just continuing how you started by letting the player have a go and introducing the mechanics/hazards one at a time with the brief explanation at that point instead of up-front would do wonders here.

The gameplay itself is super engaging, like herding cats trying to keep my critters alive and the hazards get more and more frantic. It would've been cool to get some interaction between hazards, since you can kind of "aim" the sawblade things I kept wanting to shoot the yellow guys with them, that would be a fun addition if you plan to work on it more.

Big fan of the art style and the music was fitting, would've liked a few sound effects (especially for my little critters as they bounced around), but it is space so technically accurate silence haha. Also, a bit too much default godot in UI components/fonts.

Overall this is a really strong entry and a fun game, keep it up!

I'm not really sure what to do! My cute little tony turnip guy grew up and is walking around, but there doesn't seem to be anything else happening and the "f2 to see all turnips at war" doesn't seem to do anything for me?

Not a huge fan of this type of game so I'll try not to judge based on that.

Gameplay-wise, I though the first section was good. Maybe a little tighter hitboxes  would've made it less  frustrating, but I think that's the point of the game so I assume that is on purpose, I did really like using the "poke" mechanic to control momentum in the air to get past certain points.

The bomb section I really don't know what the game wants me to do, it says "to get through" or something and I tried reaching multiple paths on the other side of the screen but I couldn't find where to leave or really understand what the goal was so I didn't see if there was anything past that point.

Other than that just some music would be nice for presentation. I'm not sure why my player sprite kept changing, but I kind of liked seeing what I got next! A few more little variations per death/run like that would be really cool.

Overall, a decent entry, good job!

This is a pretty cool idea and quite fun once you get past the wall of not knowing what is going on.

The first problem is the area/path select screen, it's really not clear at first what the game wants you to do here and I spent a while trying to click on things before realising what it was. The combat is a bit easier to figure out but could be a lot smoother by giving more information, you don't know at first which enemy is named what, I think having the target selection be the actual enemy sprite would work a little better.

It also felt slightly buggy/random in terms of what projectiles/how many would be fired at you. For example, pinchy + 2 dragons I was expecting pinchy attacks and some fire/the wind(?) attacks, but it would just be fire or wind on their own, and pinchy attacks wouldn't show up until I killed both dragons.

The little grey skull bullets were brutal and very scary, especially on the boss which felt particularly unbalanced. the blue hand locks you into quite a small window of evasion making it impossible to dodge many of the skull bullets, but killing the blue and right hands first means you get 10x as many skull bullets fired at  you!

What I did really enjoy was sort of trying to group my units together to squeeze them through tight dodges, that was very satisfying and a unique mechanic.

I think this could be an extremely fun game with some polish and better player guidance. Great entry!

Super cool idea and very polished presentation for a jam entry.

I wish the combat timing windows was a little more obvious/had more grace though, it was a little tricky trying to get combos off and not being fully sure what/why they had failed (I think just timing with the attacks triggering before I finished the full input, and then waiting for the activation/cooldown). I loved the combo system but it was a little tricky to use because of this while also trying to keep an eye on the quite subtle parry indicators, eventually my most effective strategy ending up being just spamming the attack keys while watching the parry indicators instead of trying to do specific combos. This worked but I would love to be more deliberate with the attacks. Perhaps some time slow would work and could be visually fun. Or maybe I just need more practice!

Also wasn't sure how to add a name to the leaderboard, it didn't seem to ask but I may have just missed it.

Overall a fantastic jam entry and probably my favourite so far. Fantastic job, take all of my stars!

Some really cool ideas in here, the phone GPS was a  cute touch. Making minigames with completely different mechanics is a bold choice for a jam, can relate to how tough that can be from the previous jam I did, great job! The last one took me a little to realise I could pan left/right though, maybe some indicator arrows would've been nice there.

The overall theme was a little creepy, it struck me as being based on real life experience with "gnomes" lol, I wish whoever wrote it much luck avoiding such gnomes in the future.

Great entry overall!

Thanks for playing and your feedback!

Sorry to hear about your flying laptop. Was the performance noticeably bad? I did a bit of a rush job on the optimising in all honesty. It's the crowd solver hammering frames, realistically it needs to be refactored with a spatial broadphase, I just ran out of time!

I suppose I could upload a windows build just in case people want a bit better perf

Were you aiming for a polka-ish style? It kinda gives me that vibe, definitely works well for gnomey, great job!

Great job! I liked the art, the player walk animation was very cute. Solid music, decent sized map and well designed little area puzzles.

Only negative I had the entire game was the shop r ight at the start, it wasn't clear how to leave and my attempts at figuring it out made me spend all my money on healing when I was max health haha! 

Cool idea, very satisfying to work through.

It could have been a bit clearer how certain buttons work, I was never really sure which I had to stay on and which I could leave after pressing once.

Overall, a good entry!

Chill vibes, I enjoyed being a cloud, I don't know why I was a cloud, I don't know why I had shoes, but I'm in.

This is a great start for your first game! I did feel the movement/platforming felt a little off, I often didn't jump when I was expecting to be able to jump, can't quite put my finger on it maybe the "can jump" flag being a little delayed when landing while holding directions? A bit of coyote time is always welcome in platformers too.

Keep it up, look forward to seeing your future games!

Gorgeous art, and the controls felt good. Shame there wasn't more of it!

I have to ask, why is there an option to turn the graphics off? I don't know why I pressed it, or why I was surprised that the graphics turn off.

Charming nonsense, would bread again.

G. G. G.

Whermst free dog regret?

Fun little game, loved the music especially, and the beefcake gnome.

Aw the art is so cute, and really well made. I especially liked the upgrade icons. I wish there was some adorable little bunny noises and musical whimsy!

Simple and fun, great entry.

This is great for your first game. The movement felt very satisfying and the big doors and plant pots make me feel like a little guy so I think you accidentally hit the theme anyway haha.

There are a few easy/cheap ways you could add some extra polish and game feel to your next one. Normal maps on those big high quality textures would make them look less flat and some SFX variation (randomly change the pitch/volume within a range for repetitive sfx like your jump noise). On the  topic of SFX there is some quite noticeable clipping from spamming jump and the sound cutting into the previous one, take a look at sound pools and polyphony in godot to deal with this.

Look forward to seeing your next game, keep creating!

Thanks for playing! Yeh I might have gone a little overboard...

Reverse sweep is indeed very strong, I suspect needle drone with a few upgrades (twin needle + piercing is OP) at least comes close. Wish I had time to add a damage break down to the end of runs to find out!

Thank you for taking that journey with my game! And for your kind words, much appreciated (also I love your game).

I greatly enjoyed this. Lovely whimsical little game. Excellent art (I love your style!) and perfect choice of music.

The core mechanics felt surprisingly good, I've never been on a unicycle or a jester but it felt exactly how my brain thinks it should. The increasing difficulty and confusion was perfectly curved too. I liked the little touches, like one of the guards collapsing when you drop a ball on the throne room stage (I didn't notice any others but maybe there were more?)

PS. get rekt nerd etc.

The scene is called Sanctuary! Thanks for playing, I'm glad you enjoyed it. They already "escaped" (it was an open-air sanctuary), and they are on their way back to the village to make sure the other villagers aren't sad! That is my head canon, and I guess the actual canon because I wrote it.

Sometimes a happy ending is the least expected! I'm glad you enjoyed it, thanks for playing,

Appreciate the feedback. Deciding to make 6 minigames with different gameplay mechanics and then trying to design them to make sense with the specific animals/position in the village made me hate myself, so I added the 7th at the end too. I don't know what's wrong with me.

Awesome atmosphere, very spooky. The aesthetic works well for this kind of game and I didn't mind the torch mechanic because it added to the fear. Sound is also used very well, especially for prompting about which enemy is chasing you.

My only issue is balancing really, the game seems basically impossible if the blind monkey decides to just exist near a key, there's no way to progress from there without restarting. Some way of shaking him off from chasing you or having him roam more would be very welcome. There were also a few cases where I just couldn't "stop" making noise, despite being completely still and doing nothing.

It's a really good start at a horror game though, you got the atmosphere down which is the main step.

Very cute, loved the art!

Can't say I have played this sort of game before, but I'm sure it is a prime example of the genre. Only slight issue I had was I failed the first "type" of minigame each time due to not knowing what it was expecting me to do. Which I suppose taught me how to do it for the next times it came up, but locks you out of the perfect ending on your first run. Maybe that is intended and normal for this type of game? I have no idea, but apart from the areas that I assume you just ran out of time for (the poor uncoloured souls) it's really the only thing I picked up on as being off.

Wheel done! All ROUND great effort.