itch.io

Hi, your game has really cool mechanics. Congratulations on your first jam! I really like the idea of transferring object properties to others. It's a fun idea, and you should definitely keep it in mind for future projects.

I struggled with the controls at first, and I noticed other people had the same issue.

At the main menu, my instinct was to click the buttons with my mouse. I quickly realized it was arrow controls. I also had to cycle through universal key-binds for confirmation, like Z and shift. Listing controls for the menu would've been really helpful and have avoided any initial confusion.

For the actual game, the controls also felt a bit unintuitive. For mouse controls, the norm is usually to pair it with WASD for movement. This makes it easier to press other keys and feels more balanced (so you don't have to juggle to the controls from the arrow keys). Also, it would make a lot of sense to use right and left clicks for extract/insert, as those are actions mostly paired with moving the mouse.

With the 1 key especially, it felt like I was moving my hands all over my keyboard.

Also, indicators would help the player experience a lot. The focus of the game should be the interesting mechanics, not trying to figure out what's a wall and what's an entrance. For telling people where a new room is present, you could use subtle indicators like hanging ledges, particles, a change in color, or anything else you can think of. And for the attachment mechanic, try using a hook to tell players they can latch onto it.

I also got soft-locked several times. Once in the main menu credits, and another time when I was trying to cross the bridge and accidentally extracted the object below me. It didn't go back into my inventory, so I was just stuck. Play testers would have helped a lot in this regard, as they can be notorious for finding the most bizarre bugs you could never think of.

Genuinely though, you had amazing ideas for this project. It seems like you bit off more than you could chew, but you did a lot as a solo developer! With more time, you probably could have made a friendlier player experience too.

Try to focus on the player next time, as the player is what enables the experience.

Anyways, good luck with your future game jams!

Love the sticker art and how the camera bobs slightly up and down. Also, the syringe is a really cool mechanic.

fun game :) My turtle ate the entire map

I love the idea of this game. It's the first game I've played where you aren't allowed to touch people with your hands. Very fun and unique. The dithering is cool as well. Game deserves more ratings, honestly. Played it all the way to the end.

Glad I was able to help out! Good luck on your next games :)

Phew, okay. I got through them all.

If anyone else has a game, please know I might not be able to review it before the jam ends. But if you just want feedback, feel free to post here anyways. I'll get to it eventually. I honestly love just analyzing game design. And if it helps someone out, that's a plus!

Hi, since you did the music, I'll try to focus on that as well.

Music

You did a really good job on the music! It all feels like it fits into the game and the atmospheres of the different settings.

The title music brings imminent energy and genuinely has a really catchy melody. Exactly what you would want for a game with such a fun and chaotic concept. The yard music is more toned down and calming. It feels thoughtful, complimenting how the player would be strategizing for the next race. The racing music is upbeat: feels like it's building up in anticipation for the finish line. And finally, the race completion. Heightened cheeriness which leads to a calm, silly, ragtime-y feeling. It contains the mood but acknowledges that the race is over.

All-in-all, the music was really good at encapsulating the feelings of all the environments, masterfully done.

Now for sound design as a whole: the game would really benefit from having sound effects. They don't have to overpower the music, but they can work hand-in-hand with it to make the game feel more alive. Menu buttons, environment, running, mutations, or anything else.

The rest of the game

I really like the gameplay: it reminds me of a mix of Umamusume and Duck Life. 

The charming interfaces, music, character names, and pixel art really adds to the simple, cheery vibe. It makes me smile. Cheetah Champ is genuinely such a champ lol.

The buttons could be more interactive. Sound effects and motions are the answer. The motions don't have to be too fancy and could even be a static animation, but anything to make the game feel more interactive. The menus could subtly appear too rather than instantaneously. Motion helps bring attention to the fact that something changed. Sound effects reinforce it.

I also feel like the buttons should be consistent, and the Start Race button shouldn't be hidden under View Racers: it should be it's own button. Like the Experiment button turns into a Return button, so I expected that the View Racers button would do the same.

But still, really lovable game! I'd love to see what projects y'all work on in the future!

Hah, will take that into consideration. Happy you and your son enjoyed it!

What a lovely game! Just taking care of my fishes! :)

The fish swim very smoothly, I like how they propel themselves and gradually slow down, like how one would expect a fish to move.

I genuinely just had a really fun time playing this game. It's one of my favorites so far. I quite enjoyed the chaos of spawning as many fish as humanly possible and becoming incredulously rich.

Fun surprises too! Like I did not expect a cat paw to come out of the middle of nowhere and abduct one of my poor fish

Kind of wish my fish visibly showed what their mutations were, but it's absolutely understandable if you didn't have enough time to incorporate that.

Sound design's really good too. The occasional bubble sounds, the fish splashing into the water, the muted menu sounds; it all adds to the immersion that I'm just watching fish in an aquarium. It's pretty relaxing.

I love the pixel art and UI! The hand animation is really cool lol. I know the cards are premade assets, but you incorporated them well into the atmosphere of your game.

The gameplay is well-thought-out and unique: I've never thought of a roguelike card game with mutations! Really creative!

Bonus points for having a tutorial for your combat system. It was slightly wordy though; I believe it would benefit from incorporating a show-not-tell mentality, where the player is guided through the game in a more-so visual manner. Think of PowerPoint presentations. The good ones balance their information with visual aid which helps maintain their audience's attention.

And try to make the tutorial re-playable too; it's a lot of information to remember!

Other areas of the game could benefit from a tutorial too. The high-or-lows act as their own tutorial, so those are fine.

I like the premise of your game; it's one of the most unique ones I've seen. I didn't expect to be deciphering Yiddish pronunciations for this game jam, haha.

For me, the difficulty stems from the lack of a tutorial. For one, it's not immediately understood that the words are written backwards as opposed to English. I feel like that should be explained first. It's also hard to find some of the symbols because they are hidden behind the menus of other symbols. The button in the bottom-left which changes how the symbols look could be explained as well (I have no idea what it means, but it helped me figure out the words easier).

Your audience is mostly going to be people who don't understand Yiddish, so taking the perspective of one who knows nothing about it would be a good approach for accessibility. 

Good job on your first game! It has a really charming aesthetic and the game design is unique and fun.

The Gameplay

The resting mechanic is a nice limitation, although I felt it was a bit slow when the turtle could only move one tile at a time. This could be counteracted by having the turn automatically finish when the turtle uses up all their moves. But, I do like the option to skip your turn strategically.

Since most of the game is controlled on the keyboard, I feel like the Next Turn feature could have a key-bind as well. It would feel quicker and more intuitive than having to switch to the mouse.

With the amount of enemies, you could try to have them move faster. The skip button was a great time-saver, but the game should feel playable without having to skip as well.

(Really nice tutorial btw. Learning the controls wasn't hard for me at all)

Graphics

The flat tiles and textures fit the game's simple top-down style perfectly.

For consistency, you could try giving the pizza a black outline, as all the other important objects have one as well (the turtle and the robots). This would help symbolize that the pizza is important as well and make it stand out from background objects which have a less defined outline.

Music & Sound Design

The music does a nice job in matching the game's charm. It's an enjoyable melody, however, it's a little short. This can cause it to feel repetitive after a while, which can be a problem since it's the main backing track. You can try to fix this by patterning the melody into multiple motifs. There's a video that goes into depth about what makes Mario music sound catchy, and it might be a valuable watch if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x1kn0-HIO8

There could be a lot more sound effects too. Interface, environment, level completion, etc. As long as they fit into the game, they will add to the feeling of immersion.

Last thing

Please take my feedback with a grain of salt and do anything you would feel help your game better. It is only my subjective opinion after all. I'm looking forward to seeing more games from you and everyone else who worked on the project!

I had a lot of fun playing this game, it's a very original idea! I've never thought about merging radioactive colors and feeding them to customers in an RV before lol. My final time is 16:13 if anyone can beat it.

Awh thanks :)

I've never played Castlevania before, but difficult games are my cup of tea, and this game has fulfilled it. It was fun learning all of the enemies. I learned that the best way to deal with the skeletons was to make them jump into the void. And the best way to stay alive was to not jump into the void myself...

Appreciate it a lot!- and nice analysis! Programming the movements was probably the hardest part of this project for me. I wanted the items to feel unique, so I created classes for every single one. The downside was that I couldn't add as many attachments as I wanted to.

Of course!

The debuffs are a nice twist to the mutations, but they feel a bit too common if someone doesn't understand how they work. I figured it out after a while; the higher Mutant Blood you have, the better chance of getting good mutations. It's not immediately inherent, however.

Emphasizing clarity would lead to a better experience for new players. Your game would benefit a lot from having a simple tutorial or altering the description to explain the mutations better.

I enjoyed it a lot more once I realized what I was doing. It's genuinely fun to play and the spritework is really nice.

Just remember to emphasize accessibility next time; prioritize the experience, because people can't enjoy your game if they don't know how to play it.

It's hard to play everyone's games and give detailed advice at the same time. I'd love to, but it would literally take days to get through 278 games. 

So if anyone has a game in need of rating, I'd be happy to offer my time and honest feedback. Let me know if there's any particular areas you'd want me to look at too.

Hello! This is my game :) If you have any ideas how I could improve the battle system, I would greatly appreciate it. Anything else too.

https://itch.io/jam/godot-wild-jam-94/rate/4685313

Haha, cute game. I love the dialogues and the minigames. My favorite was probably the fight with the waiter. The small gestures were a nice way to signal what moves he would perform. Why is everyone freaking evil though lol. Even Mr. Turtle??? Game deserves more ratings, seriously.

The sprites are really cute! I noticed they were a bit blurry though, so I'd like to give some friendly advice.  try setting the texture filtering to nearest next time; your pixel art will look a lot sharper!

The idea is fun and definitely has potential. That being said, I was confused on what the customers wanted and the game felt too fast at first. A tutorial would go a long way, even a short one. Really good first game though. If you ever need play testers, the discord is full of people willing to help out

Thanks :D

This is really good for 12 hours! I really liked the cutscene and voice acting at the start. The bee-bunny mechanic is very unique too!

It was nice watching you play! Your stream was very fun and comforting to listen to in the background, you're a great host!

Appreciate your kind words! Thanks for noticing the little guy

Cool idea, takes me back to human bio lol. 

Fun game and I like how powerful the shooting feels. The recoil and shaking makes it feel very impactful. Also, the mutation system is a cool twist. Like Robots Go Boom! said, I think that holding down for shooting would feel a lot nicer than having to click each time, given most of the gameplay is shooting enemies

THE CHAMPIONS!!

Really love this game. Everything's done really well and I like how they bounce to the music

Thanks! It was my first time making music for a game jam, happy you liked it

That's awesome! glad you enjoyed!! I wanted to add more combinations, but I ran out of time lol

Discord: aturtl

Mecha Shells

This sounds fun. I'll try to join the livestream when it's up

Nice roguelike! I played it through all the way to wave 11. The upgrades for individual body parts are fun, especially the ones with abilities. I feel like freeze time would be more useful if it only froze the enemies instead of the player as well.

A nice and short game. Controls felt really intuitive and I liked the mutation factor too.

I'd suggest changing the Itch.io title if you want your game to stand out more. It would make more sense if it matched the name on the title screen

Cute story! Also really liked the charming atmosphere and music.

The game is challenging but in a fun way. I couldn't find the shop, however. Is it unlocked after you reach a certain distance?

I really like how the environment ties together with the gameplay. It all fits together in an atmosphere of eeriness and darkness. It looks really polished!

Hi, I'm the person with the similar idea. I like the interaction with the turtle; it's kind of like a tamagotchi. The cards are a neat touch too. Definitely makes the experience feel more personalized.

Thank you! I'm happy you enjoyed the game! It's crazy how similar our games were. And thanks for the feedback on the combat system. Beyblade was actually one of my inspirations

Everything about this game is smooooth. Truly well done. Also that ending caught me off guard lol