Thank you for taking the time to play and give feedback :) I agree - I feel like there is still untapped potential in the hooping mechanic! And seeing other peoples entrys, I don't feel like my idea was quite as tricky, with some games I'm just amazed what people are able to accomplish in 96 hours!
Thanks for taking the time and giving feedback! I agree with everything you said. The physics are indeed a bit frustrating and I've found it quite challenging to balance physics, input and playability. I don't just want to hide behind "it's meant to be frustrating" :)
Yeah I can see what you mean about the buzzer. I've added it quite late to the game and maybe it would've needed more testing to realize it actually gets really annyoing, especially since you often miss alot of notes when the hoop falls down.
Thanks for taking the time to play! I can only imagine that playing the game as someone with real musical knwoledge probably must be infuriating - but I tried my best :D :( The game runs on an internal clock and the note events are quantized to the bpm and beats/bars, but I probably messed something up implementing the difficulty scaling, since the scaling effectively increases/decreases the bpm on the fly.
In the end the whole procedural music generation was only an means to an end and gave me quite the hassle, and at one point I was even ready to just give up. At first I thought I could just import MIDI files and be on my merry way, but it turns out Unreal Engine needs a plugin for that and I didn't want to dish out 150$ to do so. So I needed another way to generate the notes and ended up doing it this way, and trying to incorporate all the musical theory needed for this in the timeframe... I'm not surprised I messed it up quite a bit.
Maybe I'll take the time and try to improve on it! Thanks for the feedback :)
Nomlet is very cute, especially when he gets excited about his food! But I'm ashamed to admit I tried seeing what happens when I let him go hungry. Good job!
Quite lovely! I was already intrigued by the title, since Schlonk just has a ring to it :D The sprites and artwork are super nice, especially the characters/monsters. Something didn't feel 100% cohesive with the ground texture, but I'm not quite sure what it was. Music/Sounds in themself were also great, maybe the music just needed a bit more of variety, since the intensity was pretty high all of the time. Gameplay was very enjoyable and easy to grasp, just the enemy hitboxes felt quite finicky sometimes, especially while using the tongue attacks.
Nice work! Seems like you implemented a lot of different things as a solo developer. Maybe I'm just too afraid of doing UI stuff, but everytime I see a game in a jam, with proper menu and UI I am thoroughly impressed :D
Did you use the project to try out stuff like GAS for the spells and upgrades?
Nice work and always good to see fellow Unreal developers entering a jam like this :)
Fun and simple idea, and nicely executed! Also in some ways brings back childhood memories of playing snake, even though the gameplay is different :) Movement feels good, although a bit too slow at the start though for my liking! I was kind of ready to move on once I reached about 300pts because I felt there wasn't much changing, but at like 700pts or so it became really fun because you were more in control and more active a lot of time instead of just waiting. I'd say you could easily bump up the starting speed to emphasize the strengths of your gameplay :)
When I came up with the idea I wasn't sure if it would be too easy or not, since I thought people are used to Keyboard + Mouse - but oh boy, the first version used 5 different keyboard keys and I pretty much instantly changed it to 3, because 5 was just impossible :D
I'd really love to improve the hooping some more, I've found it quite challenging balancing physics, input and playability, sometimes the hoop behaves in mysterious ways... :)
I really like the idea at it's core! Seeing your To-Do list show that you put some thought behind it, and the ideas all seem sensible. Two suggestions from my side - make it much clearer which defender is currently being controlled by the player. Things can get hectic really quickly, and by just color-coding it in green for example it would be much easier to figure it out, since the antenna is quite small! I'd also suggest indicating some sort of progress bar or something similar. At the moment I'm not quite sure if the game has a set goal or finish state or if it just runs endlessly. Since I always failed I assume there is an end and I'm just bad :)
Funny concept! It's very deceptive. On one hand it seems easy, but on the other hand I don't like to admit how often I killed myself, lol. Took some time to figure everything out, especially the double jump, but then it kinda clicked.
Really cool concept. The idea immediately clicked for me and I had a lot of fun. Impressive work for a jam. The jump in difficulty on Level 3 was quite harsh though, but very cool to see the possibilities this idea offers.
Have you tried spawning more than 1 crystal at a time? Travel times could be quite long, but I can also see why you chose to spawn only one, since moving around the map is the main mechanic.
Anyways, really cool game and to see someone else joining the jam with Unreal Engine. Always feels like we are at a disadvantage :D
Very nice idea! I liked this game way more than I anticipated. Placing the blocks was intuitive and fun and I think it's a really nice mechanic and felt very engaging. One thing that surprised me though and I would be interested to know - when resetting to a checkpoint or restarting the level the order of the available blocks changed. From my intuition I would've expected every level to have a fixed order of blocks. Was this an intentional decision?
Contrary to previous comments I felt the player control was perfectly fine :) Great job! Congrats!
Wow, really cool idea! I agree with previous comments, that I would've found it better to have the countdown timer integrated to the UI - personally I would even feel, that this would help your intention to create more stress, because I would always try to gather as much resources as possible now and come back at the last possible second. Now I'd rather return early and safely, since there is no penalty for that. I was also surprised to see that upgrades don't carry over the levels. All in all I feel this is a very unique and cool idea, which could be elevated by a few tweaks in game- and leveldesign. Great work, especially considering 48 hrs. Congrats! :)
Ah damn, sorry to hear that. I didn't have the time to make a native Linux build, as I've never done that before, so I wasn't really sure what it would take to do that. But I will absolutely look into that in the future, as for personal reasons I also want to try it on my SteamDeck. Thank you so much for looking into it anyways, and sorry again :)
I think the idea of a snowball growing in size is a great one! I agree that with HandsomeLads, that this isn't really well communicated to the player. Also I didn't really feel in control of what was going on. I'm not even sure what my goal was - was my goal to reach the hiker, or is it to stay alive for as long as possible? I would've assumed it's to stay alive as long as possible, but then a distance metric would be the more efficient way of telling the player that instead of time. I hope this doesn't come across to negative, because I genuinely think you can make a lot out of the idea of a growing snowball. :) Congrats on the good work! :)
How dare you make me kill all those cute little froggies in the name of capitalism? And I did it anyways. So what does this say about me? I don't know, but great work anyways! :D
Wow, maybe it's only my lack of experience, but this felt super ambitious for a 96 hrs jam. Excellent work. Also you really showed me, why I didn't become an engineer :D
The idea is great - but holy moly it's difficult and unforgiving. Even seeing the gifs you provided of the exact parts I was struggling with didn't really help me, so it's 100% also a skill issue :D But very nice work, congrats!
Interesting to hear that feedback - most people have been reporting otherwise so far. Do you mind me asking what resolution your monitor has? I'm not 100% sure if the function I used to get the mouse input is dependent on the resolution or not, so that would be very interesting to know. And thank you so much for your feedback - I'm glad you liked the idea. Will be checking out your submission later on :)
Thank you so much for the feedback <3 I agree, should've been more clear on how the controls work. Maybe I'll add it on the itch page - the whole intro stuff was made in a rush towards the end, and I was just happy it worked and I didn't brick anything :D
Regarding filesize - yeah I was pleasently surprised. I watched a tutorial on that, but there wasn't really anthing new to learn there - strip all unneeded plugins, don't package Starter Content, only package whitelisted maps etc. - what also helped me certainly, is that my biggest assets were like 96kb wav files, since I only used basic engine shapes etc. :D
I really liked the style of the game! The mix of 3D and pixelation works really well for me. I agree with the criticism of the UI though. Also I wished there was some mure juice like hit flashes, camera shakes - I think that would add a lot to the whole franticness. Will surely play a few more rounds to see what the best tactic is. Great work!
Nice work! I feel it could've used some more levels, just as I was getting into the groove it was over. Also I don't know if I did anything wrong, but the solution for the final level felt somewhat cheesy.
Yeah... the connection to musical scales is a bit, lets say, shallow at best, as in the notes all are supposed to be in one scale :D But in the motivational messages I explicitly said I don't know much about music and not to @ me ;P
Wow, probably my favourite game in the jam so far! Everything here works so well. The idea is great, such a cute and fun style, the music is straight up boppin and the game is so simple and fun. Great job everyone! Will definetly play this a lot :)
What a great idea! I love games that involve the player in this way. The uncertainty if you will become hero or boss also adds a nice layer of thinking about the whole thing. Favourite moment was me being so proud of the level design, then proceeding to press the wrong button, make the boss a tiny ant with light speed, and then frantically trying to escape him. :D
What a neat idea! I really love that the mechanic wasn't gimmicky but was essential to solve the puzzles/confrontations! Great job! Also you owe me a pair of pants, because I **** myself when the first enemy appeared :D
I reeeeeally like this idea and the concept. I think you can make a greate game out of this with a bit of tweaking! Right now I think it's a bit too random which makes it frustrating (or maybe I'm not getting something) - but without knowing where enemies will spawn and the random amount of defense cards it feels like its basically pure chance if I'm able to win a round or not. I also agree with earlier comments - I feel this could work really well with deck building!
I love it! Easy to grasp, the puzzles all had a intuitive solution. Perfect jam game! Although I beat Level 10 in a way that wasn't intended :) Congrats, well done!
Really cool concept! The idea of combining those two is great and I see a lot of potential here. I felt the physics could've been a bit snappier, and the shot mechanic didn't feel really satisfying to me. Maybe look at other pool games? A projected trajectory of the red balls would also be really helpful. Had to stop playing after hole 2 because the camera made me feel a bit wobbly in the head. I hope this doesn't sound too negative, because I really think you have a great idea and with a little bit of polish this could be great! Congrats! :)
I think the idea sounds super interesting, being able to construct and customize your own towers. Sadly though I somehow managed to crash the game during the build phase every single time I tried to play it :( After finishing 2 towers besides the first one, somehow even though I didn't click it at all, the first tower would automatically convert down to a single tile "Heat Tower" and after that the game crashed for me when I clicked anything. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? Anyway, the idea sounds great :)
