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What a fun idea! You have to build the level around the character and make it work with the game elements you’re given, and this dynamically changes as you progress through the world. I think it works quite well, especially in the initial introduction bit where you have to build a bridge out of blocks that are clearly initially out of place. The main thing I struggled with was the lack of direction in the level. At times I’m not sure where I am supposed to take the AFK playtester and it sometimes led to a bit of frustration… accentuated by the few times I got softlocked at a checkpoint. If you moved a block to the wrong position, then respawning at a checkpoint with the button still won’t let you reach it, and you get completely stuck. I do like that the world doesn’t reset on death, so you can keep working on your masterpiece of a level, so instead I would opt for an option to un-get the last checkpoint. Or maybe a voluntary world reset while keeping checkpoint progress. Thankfully, restarting the game was an okay workaround, though I did not get to the later levels. I liked the way you control blocks by just using WASD, and can move multiple things at once. It led to creative solutions such as slowly moving a stop sign from in front of the player to slow down their movement while traversing a particularly tricky chasm, or moving a bouncy block under the player and encasing them with bricks to prevent them from bouncing away. One small nitpick is that it looks like the player’s collision is changing with their animation of scaling up and down. This causes the camera to move slightly when it should be idle, which was a bit confusing to me.

I will keep trying as I did not get very far (just past the first gravity block), but wanted to write down my fresh thoughts. Congrats on completing & submitting your game!

Hi! Make sure you have the game focused in the browser window (we can’t capture system-wide input). Pressing Enter/Return should toggle the pause menu. (Left) shift causes the selected bird to fly out, and from there you should be able to play. Let me know if it still does not work!

Thank you for playing! Glad you had fun and got along with the controls. ✨

Thank you!! From the moment we added crows, I knew we had to call it something with “murder” :D There’s meant to be some input hints (the key you can press is shown above the crow), but it seems they didn’t render on the web version sadly. It only works on the Linux build, I think because of differences in itch’s web implementation of OpenGL. Hope it didn’t stand too much in the way of gameplay!

Happy you liked it! I think I’m on the murder’s side here; they bring a balancing force to keep the farmer from overworking themself. Or maybe I’ve just been won over by the crow’s cuteness, too! Here’s an early crow we left in as an easter egg. We moved away from this more myurderous look to the cute crow you see ingame, but they’re still internally called 🔪 myurderers.

Thanks for playing! :)

Thanks for your in-depth feedback! I agree that using the mouse we could simplify the controls a lot… gotta refresh my matrix math but it’d be worth it. Sorry about the freeze! It’s a custom engine and some parts are a bit rough around the edges, but freezing was not meant to be a feature! If it happens again, I would really appreciate if you can get a stack trace (just expand the error message in the browser console). This will allow me to find the code path that’s crashing and patch it up. :)

Yay, thank you! It’s completely stuck in my head after debugging this game so much! 🎶🌱

Thank you! Learned a lot with this year’s engine compared to our previous entries… namely aiming to write ravioli code rather than spaghetti code. Glad I could push web support in time as well, since OpenGL is really iffy on browsers, but hey it works and only the button prompts got borked. I agree on the controls, it got a bit out of hand with all the binds. I might rewrite it in the future to support mouse input to fly out to peck a crop, so we get rid of WASD, Space, and Shift all in one go.

Good to hear you had fun! 🌽🌽🌽

maybe chaos was your plan all along

Let’s say it was that :) Glad you enjoyed it!

Happy to hear it was worth it! Thanks :D

Thanks for your feedback! Getting the numbers right for the corn economy was a challenge, so I’m happy to hear it worked out well. I actually wrote mouse support in my engine just for this game (you can see the camera pans to follow your mouse), but we found targeting the corn with the mouse would have been quite challenging math (it goes through a bunch of transformations to achieve the parallax 3D-ish effect), so we left it as a stretch goal… and there it stayed. Looking back, I agree it would have been a better way to control than what we have now.

Thanks for playing! Learned a lot from this one about how fast keybinds can grow out of control… hope it doesn’t stand too much in the way of enjoying :)

Happy to hear you enjoyed the game! Controls seem to be a weak point for us haha, though thankfully this time we had time to add them in the pause menu (you can check it during gameplay!).

Thank you! The controls are indeed a bit convoluted… note taken for next jam. You can check the controls at any time in the pause menu, but admittedly it can be hard to resort to while in the heat of pillaging this poor guy’s farm.

Thanks! Glad you got used to the controls; we got a bit carried away there 😅

Thanks for your feedback! We added controls hints above the selected crow (to show what action you can perform), but I think the rendering for those did not work on the web version. This will be corrected post-jam, as it really is an issue!

Glad you enjoyed it! I love the music, too; was so happy when we got permission to use it.

Sorry to hear the engine crashed on you! If it happens again, could you please get the stack trace (expand the error message shown in the browser console, you’ll see a list of C++ function calls)? I can try to debug the crash in my engine with this information, as I was unable to reproduce it myself.

Crow games really do rock. What do you mean by a pause in the feedback? All controls should have immediate feedback, but with long animations meant to encourage growing your murder to use multiple crows at once.

Thank you for playing! The controls are viewable in the pause screen (enter) as a reminder :)

Really pretty and visually polished game! I liked that dice that I missed a throw on could be used to link with two others and do a lot of damage. However, I missed throws a lot. Maybe I don't fully understand the throwing mechanic, but I kept either overshooting or undershooting throws when flicking a die with my mouse. Despite that, I got pretty far thanks to the linking mechanic and got to see all the different enemies. They're all so cute! The sounds they make are adorable.

Really good idea! The level you have to play changes depending on the initial die roll. I played the two levels a couple times to get a feel for how they change, though I felt different die rolls didn't affect how I ended up playing each of them very much. I think with some more levels and sound, this would be a really solid game! Congrats on submitting :)

eyy thanks! I'm so happy it seems to run without issues for everyone!

You may be sending humans holding dynamite, or wearing a eye-covered shirt, down to the planet. It's shown in the intro screen that dynamite is considered a "bad" trait, but I would agree that it could be more clearly defined. 

Thanks for the feedback! I agree that the dynamite does not look very alien... we tried to show it in the intro screen (alien side is holding dynamite) but it wasn't communicated enough. Great job on figuring it out though, and getting that amazing score! I can't even get to 100, heh

Thanks for playing! Nice to hear you enjoyed our game!

Wow, well done! You beat my high score haha. Thanks for playing!

Neat idea! I really liked how the landscape changes as you play due to the explosive weapons. I found the controls a bit hard to use (it's easy to get stuck in a hole, and be consequently unable to aim at other dice), but the weapons' aim assist helped alleviate it a lot. The art is cute and makes the levels fun to explore and navigate, and I enjoyed the music as well! Congrats on submitting!

I beat the boss! That was a lot of fun. The character you play as is adorable, and all music tracks are a jam to listen to. After remembering I had access to the rick click attack, the enemies were manageable while still being challenging, and none felt unfair to beat, though I did find myself staying as far away as possible from the green bug enemies and killing them from afar, as I could not seem to dodge their projectiles. The devlog was an awesome look into how this game came to be, and I really appreciated the voiced introduction. I loved all the small jokes (I felt called out by the "it's not a bug: it's a feature" one!) and the bossfight was challenging enough that it took me a couple of tries to beat. I'd have loved to see a death animation for it, but given the time constraint of the jam it understandably just despawns.

I didn't have any mechanical problems with the game, save the issue mentioned in other comments where the reverse controls apply while the die is rolling, but I just went behind a wall for the duration of the die roll and made it through fine. I did have trouble running the game on Linux, but the WebGL build worked without issues.

Overall, amazing entry, and congrats to all of you for submitting such a fun game! I'm looking forward to playing the post-jam timed mode SaadTheGlad mentioned to me 👀

I'm happy you enjoyed it, and thanks for playing! Nice score, you made it to both endings!

Yes, this is made in my own game engine (written before the jam, and used in our game for last year). You can find the source code on my GitHub page. :)

Within the jam's time limit, 2FoamBoards spent a large amount of the time and effort drawing each of the five options we have for each of the five "layers" you can change. Sadly, the 3,125 possible combinations still exhibit visual repeats within the time limit! The human brain is too good at this! I think if we were to remake this game with more time, we could do something similar to the Mii Maker, where you can move elements around as well as changing them. However, I don't know how we would encourage the player to spend time customizing them with the current time limit and goal of getting as many humans on earth as possible... Good criticism, though I'm not sure how we could address it. 😅

eyy you found the placeholder images! We used them to make sure my layered sprite rendering code was working well, and I agree with you that they are too adorable to remove haha. The banana even made it into the final build!

Great game! After going through the well-presented, non-overwhelming tutorial, I understood the game mechanics well enough to complete the first level... on the second try. I don't know why I was so focused on melee attacks, as the enemy knight could always attack me back. After that, I started using ranged attacks exclusively, and was able to beat every level on the first try. With some rebalancing of the attacks (I found myself using explosion and lightning strike almost exclusively, with the occasional heal, so maybe melee could be buffed a bit), this is a deep and interesting turn-based strategy game that excels at its goal and sets a strong atmosphere in each level. Well done!

Thanks for the feedback! I agree that the explosions are a bit loud for when humans explode. They were originally supposed to be staggered randomly over a second or so; when I had to remove that feature due to C++ pointer jank it caused all the explosion sounds to play at once and stack the volume... whoops! Definitely something I will fix post-jam!

The penalty, which is about 1/3 of the humans, was indeed chosen to prevent spamming. In my testing, spamming the UFO with this penalty always leaves you with one or zero humans left, which was my aim so as to clearly communicate that the strategy wouldn't work. However I do agree it can be quite harsh when you have a lot of humans on the planet, so maybe making it a constant number (around 10 humans) could work better to make it less frustrating to shoot for a high score.

Anyways, super happy you enjoyed the concept and the art! Also, congrats on beating my high score :)

Fun twist on the dice-roll-decides your weapon mechanic! Each weapon feels unique to use , and has benefits and disadvantages depending on the situation you end up on. This game gives you the ability to pick what type of weapon you want, which both makes sure you get something relevant and also lowers the chances of a frustrating scenario where you rolled an inept weapon for the task, while still forcing you to adapt on-the-fly to whatever you got. Great implementation! My main note would be increasing the contrast between foreground and background sprites—it was often hard to read text over the background or discern incoming bullets. I also had some trouble aiming with the mouse as I kept losing track of it. Showing a crosshair in the direction of aim could help alleviate this.

Overall, I had fun and enjoyed the soundtrack! I got up to round 7 after a couple attempts. :)

The controls are very creative! You have to balance making progress forwards by holding W, and not rolling the die too much to keep the cat safe, which is also caused by the same action! I got pretty far, but was having some rendering issues unfortunately (all textures were grey). Judging by the screenshots though, the game has a really neat artstyle. The setting is fun (love navigating spaces where you see regular objects from unusual perspectives, such as the player being really small), and the cat is really cute. Congrats on submitting!

I won't dock any points for my rendering issues as it may be caused by the game not supporting Linux. I'd love to play a native build post-jam, if possible!

THE OBJECTS BLUSH WHEN YOU COMPLIMENT THEM AAA

Really funny game! I loved trying out everything to see all the different interactions. The sound effects add to the punch of each action, and the art works quite well. I played through it twice (ran into the disappearing post-game die bug, but hey it's a game jam game, bugs are pretty much mandatory) and enjoyed both attempts, though I never got the weirdness meter to max. I'm too good at getting a raise!

Awesome game, congrats to the team :)

Thank you! Good luck to you as well :)

Love the thumbnail! Sadly, the game shows a grey screen after selecting play... This may be caused by my platform, so I won't leave a rating as Linux support was not a jam requirement. I'd love to play it if you release a Linux export post-jam!

This game looks super neat, but unfortunately I can't rate it! It fails to install while trying to get one of the UE dependencies for Windows. I would love to play it post-jam if you can export for Linux!

Really neat game! The presentation is excellent, with a succinct tutorial level that leaves way for the interesting puzzles to come. Every puzzle felt different, and it was really satisfying when I got the top number to finally match the tile and make it through the obstacle. I did find at times I would end up spinning in a circle (well, square I guess) to try to get the right number, but that was often clearly not the solution and just me being bad at puzzles 😅. Regardless, it's fun to figure out the solution and the sounds your die makes as you move it add to that as well. Great job on the game, and thanks for sharing it!

From the moment you launch the game and it hits you with its cute start screen and music, to the moment of panic dodging a knife storm (!!), this game exudes care and polish throughout. I never memorized what each die roll means, but the simple indicators that appear (such as the progress bars for the events) made it easy to read. The character is adorable, and I liked how small bits of rice fall off when you double jump. I got as far as 120M before succumbing to the consequences of my slightly aggressive playstyle, but it rarely felt unfair.

One thing I'd have liked to see is an option to duck under chopsticks, though it would complicate the otherwise really simple controls, I missed having an option to dodge other than trying to make the tight jump over them. I also didn't see myself using the double jump to save a fall often, though that may be due to my playstyle of trying to rush forwards.

One of my other highlights from this game is the excellent sound design. The restaurant ambiance track combined with the parallax background gives it the right atmosphere, while the soundtrack itself morphs dynamically to what is going on ingame, making it feel like a very cohesive experience as you jump from floating plate to floating cup behind the safety of a floating soda can. Overall, amazing and polished entry, good job to the both of you!