itch.io

Thanks for the interesting write-up! The part about prerendering animated tiles for an area to improve the rendering performance will definitely be used in my games as well when I run into performance issues 😊

Looking forward to trying out the game when it’s ready! ✨

Ok by sideloading using the Playdate website it runs. Must have been some error during download or copying then, sorry.

Yes, I received my playdate last week. It might be a series B playdate with the different chip, not sure about that. I sideloaded it using USB (unzipped onto the memory disk Games folder, which worked fine for the other games), but I’ll try it again via the PlayDate website.

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback!
We’re working improving the performance of the game on lower end machines.
We’ve got a new update going out in the next couple of days that should improve the performance a bit already.

Hi :) Unfortunately the game crashes for me on the newest PlayDate OS (2.0.3) during the initial game title animation.
It shows the error message below when I select “more detail”.
It seems there might be a typo in the font name (“Roobert10Bold”) or the font is no longer available on newer versions of the Playdate OS?

Alert.lua:128: attempt to index a nil value (field 'Roobert10Bold')
Alert.lua:128: in upvalue 'prerenderMessage'
Alert.lua:244: in field 'prep'
Intro.lua:330: in field 'render'
scenes/Stars.lua:90: in method 'update'
libraries/noble/Noble.lua:348: in function <libraries/noble/Noble.lua:340>

Thanks for the in-depth feedback! I’ll add a mouse sensitivity slider to the settings. Currently it probably depends on your mouse DPI, and mine is set quite high.

The item pickup issue has been addressed already and will be fixed in the next patch as well.

We’ll look into your comments on the combat, although that will probably take a bit longer to adjust.

I’ve tested it on Linux and they should work - it’s just that most actions are quite contextual and there is a mana limit, both if which isn’t particularly well communicated in the jam version. We’ll update the game with highlighted tiles and better UX after the review period.

Pretty amazing what you managed to pull off in such a short time frame! The game is a lot of fun and plays well. Only thing that I noticed would be nice to have is a pause button (at least Esc, P or Space didn’t work for it).

Kudos! :)

Thanks, we’ll look into it :)

The patterns you can create are quite beautiful! I think you could expand on the concept quite a bit, for now it seems the one butterfly enemy is quite easy to take care of though. Good job!

Cool concept for the game! I liked how the town NPCs reacted to having your sword drawn and hitting them as well. I think the overworld would benefit from having more to do like collecting items, fighting smaller enemies, searching for treasure. Also the combat system was a bit clunky, I found it hard to dodge enemy attacks once I found a dungeon, and there isn’t much hit feedback to let you know that you’ve actually dealt damage to a ghoul.

Still promising, keep at it!

Interesting game! I like the aesthetics of the robots. I think it could be improved by adding camera controls so you can properly see where robots are looking. Also maybe having a way to run away, hide or fight when a robot spots you so it’s not an instant game over. Maybe you could give the robots a spot light attached to their head as well so the cone of vision is a bit more clear?

Thanks for the kind words :) We are using prefab rooms and joining them together, exactly. Seemed way simpler than potentially generating unplayable rooms.

We should probably have specified that, the goal is to go down as far as possible (4 times) where you can fight the boss.

New build out now, we managed to improve the performance a bit and applied some polish to many areas of the game. Hope you like it!

Thanks for playing our game! We’re currently working on optimizing it. A new build that should help a little will come out later today.

Thanks for the kind words! I’m going to pick this game up again and develop the mechanics a bit further when I get my actual Playdate. I’m in wave 5 of the preorder so it will probably take a while until that happens 😅

Are the Material Maker presets for the textures included?

Looks like a great asset pack in any case!

Thanks for the feedback! I think you were hitting the obstacles, you can jump over those with B or left arrow.

Also you don’t have to constantly crank, every rotation you complete with the crank increases/ decreases your speed depending on the direction. If you hit an obstacle your speed is decreased, so I think that’s why you had to ‘constantly crank’. I think we can explain these better and make the tutorial mandatory on the first run, which could alleviate some of these issues.

Also, we’re planning to make switching between lanes easier in the next update and allow you to adjust the length of your arm, so that hitting obstacles wouldn’t be as common anymore.

Thanks! We’ll work on more mechanics like different ground types, extending your arm length and more polished graphics after the voting period :D

The difficulty options were a last hour addition, glad you liked them. It was too hard for some while too easy to others so that seemed like a good way to solve that. Doesn’t affect score yet but we might have separate high scores for the difficulties.

Thanks for the input! Some of these are addressed in the tutorial, but we’ll put them on the game page as well and make the tutorial more thorough post-jam.

UFOs make you invulnerable (might not work in the jam version), give you points for each full crank you complete while they are active and give you more speed for each crank.

Hurdles slow you down and deduct points. You can jump over them by pressing left arrow or B.

Hi! Reaching out on Discord

That clip sounds great! Reaching out on Discord…

Really like your music, would love to have you on our team! We’re a game designer/ artist and programmer now and could definitely use a composer or sound designer. Sending a friend request on Discord…

Nice game, well done! The mechanics were quite confusing at first, but doing the tutorial definitely helped ^^
Sometimes objects like the soup got stuck in unusual locations (on the counter when trying to serve it in this case). Also there could be more feedback that the tomatoes need to be chopped before putting them in the soup.

Super cool, one of the best submissions I've played! Congrats on making this.
Only thing I found a bit confusing/ finicky was the jump mechanics, I think there probably needs to bit of coyote time when you jump from one box to another.

Thank you so much for these kind words 😊

We are actually planning to add more story - we had scripted dialog for the cutscenes but we didn't finish the implementation of that until the jam deadline. So I guess look forward to a future update after the voting period 😉

Thank you! Initially we planned to have the owls in the shelter at night as well for some more interesting diversions but didn't get that done in time.

Thanks a lot :) Yes, it's fine and enjoying all the acorns and nuts it could ever want 🐿️🥜

Thank you! Yeah, we did consider that but didn't get it done in time. Basically the gameplay loop came together on the last day of the jam xD
I think we'll add the option to use the mouse wheel to turn objects, or freeze them until you are done placing them and allow you to turn it with arrows...

Thank you :) Definitely agree, will make the game significantly easier at the start after the review period is over.

Hi! I'm a game developer primarily working in Godot Engine. Would be happy to join you two if you still have some space in the team 😅

Very cute game! I didn't manage to figure out how to submit the created potions... I mixed all of them and put them on the tables but the counter didn't go down. Putting them in the recycling bin didn't do it neither ^^ Maybe add some arrows when you're holding a correct potion so the player knows where to put it.

Also I think it would help the graphics a lot to enable anti-aliasing and maybe some shading (either baked, runtime or SSAO, but that only works on better graphics cards). Also some height fog could be nice :)

Awesome game, the sprites look great and the gameplay is well executed!
Since I wasted my resources at the start when trying to get out of a hole I dug myself I wasn't able to get over the first hurdle, maybe place some more resources at the start to make that more forgiving.

Very cool game, nice job! I think the game would benefit a lot from increasing the height of the respawn plane with successfully reached checkpoints. Otherwise you always end up hitting scene geometry on the way down and have to manually jump off to get back to where you were before.
One time I even hit a checkpoint right at the start when that happened, so basically all of my progress was reset.

Also I climbed the vine at the start and kept pressing W, the game applied a constant force pushing me upwards so I was able to skip a decent chunk of the starting area. Maybe add an area around the vine, once you exit that you stop the character moving upwards...

Very cute art style. I think it could benefit with some kind of tutorial, for instance I only figured out that you can double jump after quite a bit. Also the game over came quite unexpected, I think there is a timer? Would be good to show that as a TextureProgress somewhere in the UI.

Nice game! I think your game's visuals could benefit from a constant pixel scale, which is achievable by adjusting the viewport/ window settings (and import settings for your images).

Thank you for the feedback! Yes, we did make it a bit hard for the first night. Once we add the owl as a danger to the night, just having wind or maybe one lightning would be viable (because otherwise you don't take damage).

Yeah the lightning is perhaps configured a bit strong... We can decrease the force it emits and the area size a bit I would say.