itch.io

I didn't participate in this jam, but when I was debating it 'Rusty Blade' stuck out as the cart I would work on. What you did with the concept took it it to a whole new level. I am avoiding details so the game isn't spoiled, but I played through without really reading through the messages, mostly because I didn't grok the interface at first. Even without that context, the game feels like a whole work and an amazing short story. In my second play-through, because I HAD to play again, the additional story through the messages took it so much deeper then I anticipated. It made me rethink what I've been doing with game-development.

To players: this game deserves your time!!!

I did enjoy it :). 

Mechanically, it's missing some things to make it engaging. There's no apparent win condition (not that there has to be!), combat didn't seem to work at all in the first build, enemies can be avoided entirely by jumping but the grounding-check is unreliable (another thing that I have often had trouble with so I avoided jumping at all in my jam entry XD). But the level chunks do feel like they're reliably implemented and even though they're all in the same style right now I didn't feel like I was seeing the same piece over and over which is great. 

I think where your entry really shines is in the overall thematic feel. I felt like I was Charlie Chaplin, strolling through a silent film dreamscape and bopping people with my trusty cane. The music choice feels perfect, and you did a really good job of managing the differentiation between background and foreground which people often fumble even when they have a full color palette. That swirling  perlin fog effect was particularly good at defining the atmosphere of the game; I'm assuming it's a movie-texture and if so, bravo for implementing it in a way that didn't exponentially bloat the file-size.

Ya... XD. The hammer duckies quite frequently get caught in that dance of impudent aggression which I didn't really intend. As I was getting ready to post, my boyfriend somehow managed to get three interlocked into a triangle. There's an even worse bug where duckies will sometimes try to kill a weapon instead of pick it up. Excellent points on the need for ammo UI and sound variety. Those in particular were things I had to chop on the last day of the jam but will implement if I take this farther. Thanks for playing! :D

I'm no fan of voxel-art, but the t-rex's are super cute XD. The game itself is simple but kind of reminded me of a 3D centipede game at first in a good way. I don't know what tool or method you used, but the map was larger and more detailed then I expected at first. If you can refine your mechanics and use that world-building in an asynchronously-loaded way I could easily see you doing some good level design.

edit: changed the last sentence for clarity, it was getting a little late for me when I posted >. <

Purely technical question... does the Itch.io.app.thingy recognize .rar so long as it's tagged for the right OS? <.<

This game is very unforgiving, which isn't a bad thing. Without having given it more time, it seems the most important thing is choosing your first upgrades as not having the sword-length increased at least once is pretty hard and I didn't get far enough to see how difficulty increases relative to future upgrades over time. 

Am I correct in assuming the game is Souls-Bourne inspired even though I hate that term XD? The mention of it being a 'place of kings' kind of struck that note, with the obvious satire of the balls being majestic good fun. Either way, this feels mechanically strong and I should really spend more time getting to know it. <3

There's a lot of potential for a fun procedural shooter here but there's also a lot of issues to work out first. 

Obviously sound and weapon-fire diversity needs to be implemented even though they have different stats, I feel that the game could greatly benefit in having some kind of customization-station available between floors. There's a lot of customization and weapon differentiation that can't be appreciated without resetting the game, which would probably work fine in a full release but most other jammer's might not play through more then a cycle or so to appreciate it. Related to that, I had suffered confusion on the "Exit" door, not knowing that I could use it to reset to the customization table while keeping my loot. 

There's also something wonky going on with the lighting on the weapon's themselves at the customization-table, I assume pre-baked lighting/occlusion that makes an entire side of the weapon go black and shading on the game-scene-walls is also pretty dark. There's no feedback for when a weapon is assigned to a slot, and almost more importantly, there's no consistency of the equipped weapon from a previous floor being the chosen weapon on the next; i.e. it always resets to the slot-1 weapon. None of this is really ruins the game, just takes time to acquaint with,  and it's more then forgivable for a jam.

Generally I don't like most voxel art but you did some pretty fun and interesting things with the chests and enemies. The Scruffers especially were friggen' fantastic. I'd watched 'Stephen King's It' during the jam and debated adding some of that creepiness in my own game; I assume it inspired the Scruffers but either way, GREAT work there!

Overall I really liked what you did and hope you keep at it! :D

Edit: Forgot to mention that your title screen was amazing. <3

The physics in this game are real wonky, and I don't envy the situation you're in with them as I've had endless trouble getting Unity's physic systems to work how I want them to. Whether using 3D (Havok) or 2D (Box2D) in Unity, getting them to work right is far more art-form then most programmers like to admit. There's a really great lecture on the finer aspects of managing either physics engine in Unity at https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021921/Designing-with-Physics-Bend-the.

I've had limited success in 3D with forcing manual movement calculations into a Rigidbody.Moveposition() in a FixedUpdate() while having Rigidbody components with fricton-less physical materials and in worst case scenarios making their velocity Vector.zero every FixedUpdate, but that's not a great fix. XD

Edit: A sidenote as I had an issue with it, make sure that if you're using physics to move your player character that you also have any fancy-smoothed camera movement also happen in FixedUpdate() to prevent the character jittering. Update and LateUpdate won't sync quite right. Sorry if I'm being redundant or unhelpful. xD

I had a surprising amount of fun with this! To anyone playing, I highly recommend that you read through the game's main page as there's a lot of mechanical depth that I missed out on by playing blind at first. The art's not super-fancy, but feels cohesive for the project. My only real complaints are that the upgrade notifications crowd the screen while also being hard to read while action is going on (maybe switch to an icon system?) and the font used for score/materials collected is interesting but also hard to read at a quick glance.

 Player movement and firing have a nice feel; though using my unreliable mouse-wheel button for the rockets is a pain but that might entirely be a problem on my side, not relying on middle-mouse as an actiony input might be something to look into.

Overall Trashcan Man's got potential and I could really feel the effort put into it.

If you get a chance to post a fixed download, even if it breaks the rules of the jam and you can't be rated, I'd like to see what you built :).

I assumed you had watched that video because you even included the bit of weapon pushback when firing, but it's no easy feat to include all of that feedback/polish and make it work within the constraints of a game Jam. As I mentioned before, well executed!

I've also been on a bit of a Rami binge, in part because of your entry. He very recently gave a small talk at an Illinois university on the etymology of mechanics, though none of his slides made it into the broadcast and the audio is wonky. 

I think this was a very well executed riff on Super Crate Box and the art is friggen' adorable. Even when the screen is being absolutely littered with little particulate bullets, it all runs super smooth and the rocket fish made me chuckle. XD

I loved this and it's my favorite of the jam! The mechanical concept is so simple but works perfectly. It's like Where's Waldo but with a living scene. Everything feels very polished and the tips between scenes were very entertaining. I think the mechanical concept is perfectly executed and there's a lot you could to expand it in the future.

'Find the object' type games are a surprisingly popular genre and you have the roots to make one that could be interesting and engaging for people that otherwise wouldn't give the genre a second glance. Having to accurately target your objective after you've found him adds a whole extra layer of tension, and you could make the failure to execute that cause the scene to become more hectic. You could also add different tools that somehow interact with the scene to illicit reactions from your target.

Overall, great job!

For some reason, I can't get this game to play. I'm on Windows 7x64 and when running the exe, I get "Error: Couldn't load game path '.'

You all did some amazing work! The concept art looks absolutely adorable and the supplied models totally capture that charm. The music feels pretty exceptional and very developed, especially for only having a couple of weeks or so to tweak. The village theme especially feels like it would be at home in any good old fashioned JPRG village made by a top-end studio. It's a shame we can't see the coding and animation work from Ørjan, but I am intimately familiar with scope exceeding time and have little doubt that what was made was also spot-on. I hope you guys have fun and wish you great luck on your gamedev journey together! <3

This seemed almost too slow and obtuse at first, but playing it through totally paid off. There were moments in the middle where learning the timing  allowed me to preemptively create blocks that would last just long enough to catch negative emotions while letting positive ones shortly after pass through. I don't know if that was intentional or not but it gives a nice mechanic-based metaphor of recognizing and preparing for negativity as an inevitability, but whether or not you accept it is a preventable choice. I didn't expect it at first, but this game made me think, thank you!

I wish I could play or understand more of this. The concept of using a card system to represent primal emotions as an interface for a visual novel seems original and engaging for me, but because the story crashes at the second draw I can't really tell how it's all implemented. The character art seems pretty good; the proportions aren't out of wack, lines look clean, and for a non-shaded style the colors and forms don't make me second guess what they represent. The itch.io App also doesn't recognize the download as something that can be autoplayed, possibly because it wasn't flagged as Windows compatible?

The concept seems like it could be an engaging and refreshing take on visual novels, despite some issues with the protype, so I hope you guys don't write off the idea. Good work!

Just, wow. It's so polished and gives a lot of great audio/visual feedback without feeling cluttered. The mechanics feel unique, really make you think, and have a smooth difficulty incline as far as I played just now. I got up to where some clam-shell enemies spawned and I intend to play some more when I get a chance. Great work!

Exactly! My brain stopped working entirely as I got to the deadline. Not the best time to for me to learn how to upload. 

Here's what I had, thanks for taking a look!  https://boarfrog.itch.io/blobman

I just missed the deadline because I couldn't figure out how to upload the project. Good luck to everyone who made it!