Sometimes it be like that. We had a stronger tie-in, but had to trim back in order to get it done. But theme is just one component of a jam - making something is the real goal.
bitDecay Games
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I really enjoy the mix of 3D and 2D assets. You get the freedom of the third dimension while keeping the crispness of the 2D hand-pixeled art. They go together wonderfully. Music is great (I’m a fan of your work outside of jams, as well), I didn’t expect unique tracks for each level! The SFX are solid, as well, but I felt that there was some ambiance missing during the missions. I’d have loved a slightly more filled out soundscape. Gameplay is entertaining, and I enjoyed the throwbacks/homage to games of the 90s like Starfox and Metal Gear. Overall a seriously solid entry with a staggering amount of polish.
Visually very cool, and audio was very fitting and gave a nice zen/chill feel to the game. The boss seemed very difficult at first, but the hitboxes are very forgiving so it turned out alright. The colors and vfx on the ship are a really nice touch. I ended up just upgrading bullets/energy the whole time as I killed myself with the dash more than I helped myself XD. Cool game with a surprising amount of polish in such a small package.
Our team was trying to come up with a game based on orbits, but gave up because we couldn’t figure out how to visually represent it at GB restrictions. This game did fantastic with the idea! Very cool game. Graphics are great, audio fits well, though for how long the game/levels are, it can get a bit repetitive.
I ran into a bug after losing on “Quick Turns” where I kept spawning with one extra set of sun/moon as I died. Needless to say, it was impossible to beat after that as they were all out of sync with each other.
I didn’t finish it, sadly. I tried Big Galaxy for quite some time, but only managed to get across the big gap once. I’d love to see some kind of checkpoint system, maybe even along the lines of Shovel Knight where they are optional (maybe they lock in the checkpoint for a +10 second penalty or something?). Having to start all the way from the beginning of the longer levels is brutal. I was pretty consistently getting just outside of bronze medal times. I’d love to see some dev runs at this to see what gold runs look like.
Well done d-(^.^)z
Really enjoyable game here. Clearly influenced by the ever-addicting infinite jumper craze of the late 2000s. I cannot for the life of me beat this game… I’ve gotten to seeing the word “playing” aaaaaalmost to the end, but haven’t gotten back up there.
There were two things that kept tripping me up: 1) Jumping in 8 directions really felt counter intuitive to me (having played lots of infinite jumpers). I just really wanted to jump upward and move left, but just shot straight left and into enemies. and 2) the hitboxes seemed brutal on the way up. I felt like I should slip by enemies and would get hit.
Overall this game was very pleasant. The colors fit super well, and the audio vibes fit the graphics very nicely. I easily played for like 20 minutes, but alas…. never beat it. Great entry!
Oh… and it looks like you have the ‘大’ kanji in the title (big), but meant to have 犬
(dog). It took me a minute to figure out what the title of the game was until I saw it written in English.
Cool puzzler. I like the idea of interacting with the board indirectly (as opposed to games like Tetris Attack), which forces you to think out your combos/clears more in advanced. I got to level 6, but level 6 is hard! My best score so far is 38,470.
I got a single full clear, and was very happy to be rewarded for it! I’d love to see some extra mechanics to help keep the board ‘active’, maybe some things like wind gusts that shift rows occasionally, or a ‘water flower’ that the player can create it the bottom row that breaks when a flower lands on it. Just shooting from the hip here - the game feels pretty good already, but I think a little extra can push this game in an even more engaging direction. I say this as once your board gets to a certain point of disorganization, it feels unsavable and you watch your slow impending doom creep in. Solid work here.
I would have loved a better indicator of the lifespan of the character. I found myself messing up many times purely because I didn’t know how much time I had left, or when my earlier self was going to do something. As others have mentioned, the audio is suuuuuuper quiet, which I’m assuming was unintentional. But overall the mechanic is interesting, I’ve played similar takes on this style, but never at this resolution. It reads well, and the levels are quite good for how little screen real estate you have to work with.
This game is brutal! I managed to finish, but never found all 10 in the same run. I got 8. The rockets really make it hard to think clearly. I like the art and effects here. Visibility is decent, but I wish the game was like… 96x64 or something so I could see a little further ahead of my dude when I got going full speed. I frequently found myself running into frozen rockets. Fun game, though – had a very unique feel to it.
At first I thought I spawned next to a wall… so I ran out into the void like 3 times before realizing the “wall” was just the start of the city. After a few attempts, I was able to get up to 68, but never beat it. Some of the people run as fast as the snake and if you chase one for too long, you die before you can find another human.
The visuals are cool, this perspective works better than I would have expected at 64x64. The little people are adorable. I also like that the lumps travel down your body after eating them.
https://itch.io/jam/lowrezjam-2023/rate/2198076
Looking to rate a few this evening, figured those sharing theirs with the community get first go! Here’s mine
The controls here are a bit awkward. I’d have loved to have more ‘standard’ modifiers than Ctrl and Alt. I feel like I got the hang of the controls after a bit of tooling around. I got ~10 minutes up the river, but eventually got to a part where no matter how fast I got going, it would just push me backwards. Not sure where to go from there. I’d also love for the camera to stay a bit ahead of the character. Multiple times, I’d have good speed, only to have a rock or tree pop out right in front of me and kill all of my momentum. Overall, this has a lot of potential for a fun QWOP-like experience with a few QOL tweaks.
It took me a bit to figure out where I was supposed to go. Didn’t realize those were doors at first XD. The coordinates seemed more like flavor than a requirement – or I just got lucky and found where I was supposed to go on my first try. The atmosphere here is great, but I’d have loved to see a teeny bit more regarding gameplay. Audio and visuals really made the vibe here creepy and mysterious. The slow controls also contribute a great deal to the uneasy feeling. Great game and already on the path to be an excellent horror game if you had plans to continue working on it and building out the world.
I was definitely confused at first by what the control options were (other than ‘mov lft’ and ‘mov rht’), but it made sense once I saw what I was shooting. A cool take on the… “program planning” genre(?). Feels like an invaders meets RoboRally game. The music is good, but I wish the song was a little longer before it repeated. Otherwise, it played nicely.
Quite a fun little RTS game. First time through I didn’t know how to do anything… but I scrolled down and saw your explanation. Second time through I managed to win. Pretty fun seeing your massive army of 2-pixel warriors stampede around the map. Surprisingly readable game given the pixel restriction. I’d have loved a little more audio juice in here, but the game is great.
Most jams ask that you do not work on game assets prior to the jam starting. I’d recommend not as it is generally unfair to the other participants. Plus, you don’t know what the themes are until the jam starts.
But by all means, get some practice in before the jam starts, especially if you’re using new tools or processes.
Thanks for all the candid feedback! We didn’t have time to get a proper tutorial in, so the game definitely starts all at once. It didn’t occur to us to be more explicit about being able to swap pieces outside of just listing the controls on the page (relying on things outside the game is obviously not ideal).
I completely agree about the ‘wrong connection’ sound effect. It was one of those things that we thought would be helpful before playtesting, and we never got around to cleaning that up. You are correct about the pathing logic being complicated. We had some bugs that took up whole last day of the jam, which is why some of the other stuff didn’t get polished/balanced as much as we would have liked.
Color mixing doesn’t have any mechanical purpose, but we found in early prototyping that without some indication of what the pipes are connected to, it was very hard for the player to keep track of the board. We had some other ideas on how to represent connections, but Color was the easiest to implement. Mixing the colors was the only way we had during the jam to make it obvious that multiple shapes connected to it. Any shape/color connected to the pipe should succeed when connected to a matching output regardless of how many colors feed into the pipe.
I plan on making another pass to clean up a good handful of things, but specifically want to tackle: how the connections are visualized and cleaned up, how points work, and pacing/piece distribution. This is our team’s first attempt at a puzzler like this, and we underestimated how much effort it takes to balance the gameplay itself once the actual ‘game’ is built underneath it. I’m quite happy with how it came out, though.
Thanks for playing! We got a bit hung up on some of the logic (which ended up more complex than we anticipated) and lost some time we could have spent on the conveyance of how the message scoring happened. Some better indication of why you are receiving points is some post-jam polish we’ll try to put in. Once you mix pipes, you are still able to deliver messages of any color within the pipe.
Scoring is based on number of messages delivered at the same time. The more things you connect, the more points you receive. Almost all blocks can be swapped if you have swaps remaining to help build pipes to the receivers. The unmovable tiles should spawn in the first or last column.
Lastly, I’m not sure what your question about “game time” is exactly aimed at. New pieces are generated based on clock time. Basing that on number of moves might be interesting – that thought honestly didn’t cross our minds.