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Thanks! Yours was great too

Thanks for playing. We actually even had the idea to rotate the reels to create arbitrary tetris shapes and a bunch of other things for the theme. But we cut down on scope In hindsight it might've been better to spend some time to get the reel spinning animation working.

Really good audiovisual synthesis to create something that's more than the sum of the parts. Really like the level completion when you trigger the "spin to win" win condition.

https://itch.io/jam/theveryseriousjuniperdevgamejam/rate/4699057

Would appreciate feedback. Gonna check out your game in a bit.

10/10 contract would sign again.

Yeah, that's definitely planned.  We had to cut some features to save time. Maybe in a post jam version!

Thanks. Yeah it's challenging to balance. We aimed for something like Slice and Dice where randomness is embraced but you're given the tools to play around it. 

Regarding the  draw issue, there are hand size upgrades later on but a spell for drawing at the cost of mana would be good.

The mechanics definitely have a lot of potential and maybe I'll revisit this mechnanic from a different lens in the future. Perhaps the deck part is unnecessary.

Breakcore beats to make cakes to.  Very fun and polished.

Thanks for playing We were struggling a bit with the reel visuals and how to make it work with weapons.  We chose a simpler slots animation to save time but in hindsight it would've been better to  use a spinning animation

There is a fullscreen button on the webGL build on the botrom right.

Thanks for playing! Tutorials got pushed to last minute, so sorry about that.

There should be a build with tutorials up now.

Thanks for playing, 

I agree about the controls. I'll be reworking the controls in future version and add an option for visual indicators for all directions,

The box thing is a bug but making it a proper mechanic is an interesting idea. Thank you for the suggestion.

Thanks a lot for playing.

A bit unsure about what you mean about clicking on a specific side of the fold. You can click directly on it or left/right of it with some leniency.  I'll try to see if I can make the detection range more generous.

The funny thing about lv 16 is that it used to be where the steam demo ended. I've gotten some feedback about people wanting to see a bit more mechanics in the demo so I extended it. Will  think about this further.

Once again, thank you for your detailed feedback. I hope you'll continue to try out my games.

This improved a lot from when I last played it.

The core gameplay loop is fun as always. The wind still feels a bit unfair. Some of the reviewers mentioned that the wind direction is forecasted but I'm unsure. It did feel like there was a delay between wind line vfx appearing and the actual wind but I never got to used to the timing. Perhaps you can show the line for forecasting and then increase+speeedup the line when the actual wind is blowing. This would let the player  get used to the timing.

The visual polish and death animations are great.

I can see this being a fun party game with more content variety. Overall great job!

Thanks for playing. 

I don't quite understand what you mean by switching right hands between space and the mouse. Generally with WASD you'd keep the thumb on space. So there is no reason to use another hand for jumping unless you are using a different keyboard layout. Let me know if you meant something different.

Regarding controller support., yes it's planned.

Thanks for playing again. Agree that the controls are inconsistent. Positive and negative are indeed relative to screen(down and left are negative, up and right are positive) I initially did have everything relative to the cat but that meant shift direction flipping after each shift. But I've gotten a lot of feedback on the controls and will rethink it.

That's understandable. If you're still interested in trying the rest of the game,

You can solve that level by pushing the block down and using the ceiling to activate both levels. It seems that could be a difficulty spike at this point of the game. I  will rethink it.

Thanks for playing. Really appreciate you uploading a video. To answer your question, Level 14 is definitely solvable. But maybe there is a difficulty spike there. I'll reconsider the level order to balance the difficulty.

Thank you  for the detailed feedback and wishlisting the game. Sorry about the level select bug. I'll push an update to fix it

Yeah that'd be a great addition.

Really wild mashup of fruit ninja  and papers please. Maximizing chains is very fun.
Only gameplay suggestion would to make the paper grabbing be on a separate button. Sometimes when starting a swipe it misinterprets it  as a grab which breaks the flow. 

Lastly the music is really great ! It that sets the vibe perfectly. Graphics are polished too.
Great job!

Thanks for playing. I wanted it to feel seamless when you loop around platforms. But the always physical direction approach might be less error prone. It's a good idea. I'll add it as an additional control scheme ina post jam ver.

Thanks. Yeah, I planned to add an indicator for the shift directions but had to cut it due to time constraints.

Thank you.  The audio was done by Twitchywhalez who has some amazing tracks on his yt channel. I recommend checking them out:

https://www.youtube.com/@twitchywhalez

Ah it seems Narnia went public domain a few years ago. Wasn't aware of it but now I feel old.

Thanks. I plan on making a post jam version with undo

Thank you!

It clicked for me after I erased the "winding" part of the sentence and the river changed. It reminded me of Baba is You with words affecting reality. It is a bit buggy but that's understandable.

I quite like the level design. It was fun to smash through the traps. I also saw some platforms on the side of the jump maze area before entering and that gave me the feeling of "Ok this game is bigger than it seems"

I think the biggest factor in it feeling like a proper game vs a jam game with janky mechanics is the lack pf polish and focus on the core/most interesting mechanics in the game.  In jams, you don't have a lot of time. So in order to make the best game you can under those circumstances, you focus on the unique aspects of the game and explore what's interesting about them succinctly.

In this case, that'd be the word manipulation mechanic. I think, rather than implementing a lot of different powerups, It might be better to focus on making lots of unlockable words and give them a lot of interesting/unique/useful effects. 

UX wise there was also some room to polish the mechanic. Ex: I feel that erasing/restoring UX was a bit unclear. It took me a while to realize that the words were getting lighter colored after dragging. It might require some shader/vfx work to convey the erasing. Rather than focusing on making the dragging perfect, it might be better to just erase/restore the words on click. Highlighting the words on hover would also help convey that they are interactable. 

You can also look at other successful jam/short games on itch and analyze what they did to make a polished games. Zacchary Richman gave a talk regarding their team's gam jam strategy which might be of use to you:

His team has consistently performed well in GMTK by making polished, unique and appealing games in GMTK jam. So I think it's worth listening to him.

Anyways, I hope this was helpful to you. Overall, it's a very interesting concept that you can expand with more words, interactions etc. I'm interested in seeing where you go next.

It was a nice surprise to see this game again. The devotion of sonic fans knows no bounds haha.

Movement feels great. Good job with the animations. 

Camera movement has improved greatly from last time. I had to adjust the camera speed a little but it felt good to use afterwards.

The only complaint is that grabbing and carrying keys is a bit cumbersome. I feel like it slows the gameplay down. Maybe you can simplify to just have keys be auto collect and auto use. 

My other suggestion would be to have a tutorial area to show off the moves. Not everyone is a sonic player and it took me a while to remember that knuckles can wall climb and glide.

I also really like the whole playground vibe/open level structure. I like the freedom to choose which platforming challenge your want to tackle.

Overall, great job and want to see where you take this next.

What genre do you think the game is?
Probably a party game. 

How fun is the game on a scale of 1-5?

Quite fun. I spent quite some time just messing around

How balanced is the difficulty on a scale of 1-5?

I think the difficulty is too high. Whenever I got more than 10 secs I feel like it was more due to luck than skill. Thought that's not necessarily a bad thing for party games.

You can only control the board to move the ingredients. But jumping to avoid the hose will require movements that would send the ingredients falling. Perhaps that could use some balancing. You could add some anticipation/predictability by stopping the hose movement to foreshadow that it's gonna shoot.

Is power-up collection clear and enjoyable?

It wasn't clear what the powerups did or how to use them.

Would you replay the level to improve your time score?

Maybe for a bit. But I'm typically the type to never bother with highscores.

What one change would improve the game most?

Maybe adding lives so that you aren't killed immediately after a mistake. Could also be a powerup

 Other notes:

Artstyle is nice and goofy. A good fit for the game.

I guess this is unrelated but I would play a bullet hell/bossrush game with each stage being a cooking step. The hose/ chopping knife combo would make for a fun attack pattern in a game with more precise controls.

Overall, good job. I think it has potential as a party game if you work out the issues.

The art is quite pretty. I especially like the portraits. The artstyle and the cryptic atmosphere reminds me of Nier which is a plus.

Though the sprites are great, I find the attack animation a bit odd. It looks like she flails her arm and the sword moves independently. Maybe you can add a strongly posed  keyframe at the end where she grips the sword after the swipe.

Combat wise, hitting things is fun  but I think the game needs more verbs. I quit at the boss because you have no defensive options like dodging and some of the attacks do not have a long enough animation for the player to see and avoid. Maybe you're supposed to out level the boss or grind for heals. However, I can't recommend making grinding a requirement if you want people  to play for  the story. Additionally, I would like to be able to attack mid-air/directionally like hollow knight.

UI is stylish, However, I found the level up screen confusing. I could select a stat with arrows but couldn't actually level it up. I pressed every key in the keyboard to try and spend the currency but couldn't level up. I had 75 G and the level up screen said 30. So there's no reason to not be able to level up there. If it is a different currency then that should be communicated.

Level design wise, it has the "leap of faith issue" with spikes falling from places you can't see until you jump through. Both the spikes and the spiders blend in with the background. I don't know if that is intentional but combined with the lack of heals with repeated dialogue after death made the level design frustrating. 

I don't have any issue with respawning to a checkpoint after death. But repeating cutscenes after death feels punishing. You can integrate respawning into the narrative, have a skip button for seen dialogue or just put a save point at every cutscene.

The story setup feels interesting with the white room portions. The worldbuilding is good at dropping hints. The only complaint have is that the spider dad doesn't feel like an interesting boss storywise. If you're going with a world that contrasts with ours(it already has goblins), it'd be better to have a boss creatures that wouldn't exist in the normal world.

Overall,  good job. I think the story has potential if you manage to spice up the combat and improve the pacing.

Thanks for playing. 

I agree that it's hard to get a good idea about your and other object position in 3D. I'll try to improve the difficulty pacing for the 3D levels.

Hope to check out your game soon.

Thanks for playing and the suggestions.

Regarding needing more levels to grasp the concepts, there are more difficult/elaborate levels for each mechanic, but I omitted them from this build to get to the 3D levels quicker.

Undo is definitely planned.

I agree that there are too many modes. I'll try to simplify it.

lv16 is the "I" shaped level. lv15 is the level where you have to move around the unfoldable blocks in the 3rd dimension. I feel like that's a simpler level. But maybe it's hard to understand as both sides of lv15 look similar. I'll try to improve it.

Happy to see that you enjoyed the game. Hope to check out your game soon.

Not in the traditional sense I suppose. But I took a lot of inspiration in terms of visuals and atmosphere from ps1 inspired horror games.

Thanks for the suggestion. By "along the glitch" I meant "parallel to the glitch". I agree that the wording can be confusing here. I'll update the text and also add an optional hint in case people need more clarification.

Thanks. I forgot to add it in the controls section in the gamepage. I'll also add a button prompt in the HUD during interactions.

Thanks. The enemies changing allegiance results in a some emergent bullet patterns and it was fun to make it.

Quite fun.  I like how the game makes you utilize the unique properties of different blocks. I overall enjoyed the puzzles. 

Some suggestions:

I recommend making block retrieval a separate button. It's very easy to accidentally delete blocks while trying to place them. Additionally, making it so holding RMB retrieves all blocks would be great. Sometimes the block drops out of range requiring a full restart. Most games bind camera panning to other buttons(MMB or hold some button+ move mouse).

Some levels require you to place blocks after falling for a long time which is quite hard to time. You can try adding slow mo  while aiming. This'd also allow you to preview the whether you can actually place  the block there which would be great. To make the player not abuse the slow mo, you could add a limit to it and restore it when the player reaches ground again. But it is your choice since it might make the game a bit easy(and lower the barrier to infinite static box jumping).

Overall it's great with a lot of room for expanding in the future.

Thanks for playing through so many levels.

Glad to hear that you found 3d folds intuitive. I updated the tutorial for that many times last week since people kept having trouble with it.  Still got a long way to go.

Keeping 2d mode for 3d folds is a good suggestion. Once you're familiar with how the 3d folding works, 2d preview is actually all you need. 

Thanks for the bug report too.  I've never had that bug happen before.

Regarding level progress, the game does save in the pc ver. Saving in WebGL has issues. Also, the pause screen shows the level name.  

This is my first time playtesting the 3d levels so the difficulty curve there is a bit wonky. That level is solvable

Sln spoiler if you need it[decode via rot13]

Lbh arrq gb wbva gur pvephvgf sebz obgu jbeyqyvarf gb cbjre gur tngr.

Thanks for playing. I've seen some players struggle with that level. I'll try to make the level easier to understand. Thanks for reporting the bug as well.

Thanks for playing. Several people have brought up the MMB issue. I've updated it with a keyboard binding.

The game has a lower amount of early puzzles currently since I want people to get to the 3d parts quickly. I will make the initial level flow smoother in the future.

I'm still working on the visuals and plan on changing the fold blocker visuals in the future. 

That puzzle is also one of my favorite. Glad to know you enjoyed it.