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I think that's the wrong way to think about it. Prioritizing gameplay or story does not mean that the other needs to be an afterthought. It means that the other needs to support the thing you prioritize.

If the game is story-oriented, that doesn't mean you should settle for boring gameplay. It means that the gameplay, instead of being a fun activity of its own, should instead be a narrative tool for immersing the player in the game's universe, building attachment to the characters, and making them care about the plot. Players shouldn't think "I, the player, need to solve this stupid puzzle so I can see how the hero enters the castle and saves the princess". They should think "I, the hero, must solve this puzzle in order to enter the castle and save the princess". The puzzle may still be stupid, but they player shouldn't feel that it's just something that holds them from continuing the story.

Similarly - if the game is gameplay-oriented that doesn't mean the story should be boring. The story should provide meaning to the gameplay - prioritizing the gameplay simply means that the story can get stupid in order to explain some weird elements of the gameplay. Collectibles are a good example - finding them is a gameplay mechanic. The reason why you need to find them is usually not that important to the story - if it was a movie they'd be omitted, or, if it's a movie based on the game, it may show one item of one of the collectibles as a tribute.But a good game should still try to make that subplot interesting, make the player want to find out exactly what happens when it finishes a collection - and preferably not just show a wall of text that'd just be skipped. The story is still in support role here - doesn't mean it needs to be neglected.

Nice graphics and some pretty amazing technical stuff, but I'll admit I couldn't figure out how some of the puzzles work. For example the pipe things - how am I supposed to arrange them? A route from where to where?

My only complaint that the pencil being free makes all the levels trivial.

Have you considered RPG Maker? I haven't tried it myself, but it looks like you don't need programming to make a game with it as long as you are not trying to deviate from a standard JRPG, and the art style is kind of uniform so you shouldn't have much trouble finding tilesets that fit together. That leaves just the map building and the story - which, from what you describe, are things you should be able to do yourself.

You will need to learn JavaScript if you want to implement your own gameplay mechanics in it though.

I really hate these hills. They force you to constantly bunny-hop...

I'll admit I don't understand enough about music or music programming to tweak with the examples myself, but it does look nice. Does it "compose" the music on the fly, or is it pre-determined by functions like generate_kick_beat and generate_chords?

I'll have to admit - I don't really grasp what this plugin is useful for. I can imagine why one would want to track the path the player (or some NPC?) took, but what I don't get is:

• Why would you want that path representation to be a homology? I understand representations that don't care if that the player went somewhere if they came back to a place they were before, and I understand representations that care about places the player has been even if they came back, but I can't imagine how it'd be useful to represent that the player has been somewhere and came back IFF they took a different route when coming back.
• Wouldn't most path representation care more about areas than about points? That is - want to represent that the player has been in room A, then in room B, then in room C, and not that the player has circled point B twice and then circled point A in the other direction.

Of course, maybe I'm just biased because I didn't like Algebraic Topology when I took that class so many years ago...

In a more practical note - is a String really the best way to represent the path? Wouldn't it make more sense to provide an iterator over the points, and use a custom struct that will also tell you the orientation the entity circled around each point?

I understand that this is a jam and we should be expecting prototype-level projects, but there were still a few things that bothered me:

• The ball in the orbit's focal point. It's called (in the code) DebugCube. It's actually a sphere. It cannot be turned off.
• No way to make it orbit around an entity - which I believe is one of the main use cases of orbit cameras in games.
• No way to turn any of the keyboard controls off. At most I can set them to some (hopefully) unused KeyCode.
• Zoom is only controllable by the mouse - and active even with MouseControle::Disabled (although it is technically possible to "disable" it by setting min_zoom and max_zoom to the same number)
• No elevation control.

I never thought I'd see a typing game utilizing a physics engine...

I've finished my backlog, and got no reward. Kind of like in real life.

Nice try, Monika.

If jams would have tags, it'd be nice to be able to subscribe to certain tags and get notifications for jams that use them.

Similar suggestion from 5 years ago: https://itch.io/t/176920/category-opt-out-feature-for-game-jams

Premade third party assets are a controversial topic in game jams.

On the one hand, some teams (and individuals) don't have artists/composers that can dedicate themselves to the assets. Third party assets allow them to participate without sacrificing precious time on low quality art.

On the other hand, games are not judged on gameplay alone - visuals and sound are also important factors. It is not fair that artists and composers that labored on the assets during the jam's limited time have to compete with asset packages that made by non-participants who had much more time and leisure to work on them.

The suggested compromise is to allow these games to opt out of judgement criteria that they didn't make themselves. A jam's rules would specify that you can use third party assets, but you'll have to mark it when you submit your game to the jam so that during the ranking period, the relevant category for your game will be grayed out. That way teams without artists/composers could still participate, without having their third party visuals and audio compete with the visuals and audio of other games that were made by actual team members.

This, of course, requires support from the platform that host the jam - hence a feature request.

Hiding spikes inside the grass is pure evil.

I'm sorry, but the controls are ruining the game. Mouse does not work for platformers, and make it annoying (not hard though, since the pace is slow enough) to control the jump horizontally. Also, jumping seems a bit broken, and I was often finding myself randomly floating in the same altitude after a jump.

I'm too lazy to draw blocks, so I've just made them solid rectangles. You can think of them as 1x1.

I'm using https://bevyengine.org/  - an ECS engine written in Rust.

Just finished all the functionality I wanted to implement. Now I've got 5 days to do the levels and the "art".

I use Pixelorama, which is a pixel art editor, but I use tools like lines and circles and bucket fills rather editing individual pixels. Also, some of my sprites are 128x128 or even larger - while for pixel art 32x32 counts as "high resolution".

Does it still count as "pixel art", for the purpose of this jam, or should I remake my sprites?

Are the banana haters trying to destroy the bananas? Because if they just don't like to eat the bananas Barry should leave them alone and worry more about other banana lovers that compete with him over the available bananas.

You have to code it on a banana. As long as the engine works on bananas you should be fine.

Dear lord I have a gaming laptop but this still runs like a AAA game would on a potato. Good job!

Still better than Mega Man Battle Chip Challenge.

Having a badly configured jam fits the theme quite well, at least.

Try asking in https://itch.io/board/10023/questions-support

Was the struggle itself toward the heights enough to fill a your heart?

I've never hosted a jam so I wouldn't know, but I looked at the help page and the one setting that seems like a pitfall is the ranking criteria, because it seems like if you don't set any it would not be possible to vote. Did you set the criteria?

And I have a feeling they're all going to suck...

Didn't it die a decade ago?

I hear you about the level reset button. I see that many games add one, so it's probably a good idea for puzzle platformers (or puzzle games in general)

As for the not-visible-enough block - maybe I could solve this with a smarter camera controller? One that knows to focus on such entities (I'd have to mark it as a point of interest for the camera, of course) when the player is close enough to them?

Very nice! Many entries in game jams (and I admit to doing it myself) neglect the level design - this game is not one of them. It's clear that you walked the extra mile to make proper and fun levels.

An accurate depiction of real life cats.

Yup - that's the same bug I've encountered. I did not have time to properly solve it during the jam, so I tried to just put the platform a little farther away so that you won't be able to trigger it, but apparently you still can.

I've opened a ticket for myself: https://github.com/idanarye/bevy-tnua/issues/14

Thanks!

just_pressed is a problem for variable length jumps, but I should definitely fix Tnua to avoid repeat-jumping when you land and the button is still pressed.

As for the "stuck between two colliders" thing - this may be a bug in Tnua. I've already noticed one bug when you can do an unintentional wall-jump - is this the same thing, or did you discover a different bug?

Is the side-effect that the triangle enemies move when you use the sonar?

The difficulty is far too high. You need to match four (where 3 is usually the standard), and they have to be in a line - it's a bit too much.

Am I supposed to be unable to jump when the short side-effect in on? Because I got stuck in a room where it looks like I need get short and then jump over some obstacles...