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Thank you for playing the game! Hope you have a good time with the rest of it.

Hello! The trick is to lower your vertical velocity to avoid triggering a deadly fall. You need to start your fall below the icy tile ground level (it involves wall sliding). There are two main methods: one is slower but safer and it involves regenerating the icy platform after stepping on it once. Let me know if this helps, I didn't want to be too direct with the solution!

Hello! Many thanks for the very encouraging words. It makes me happy when some design intentions get through, the idea behind the early rooms was to provide blocking obstacles that could only be overcome with the new tools (room 1 - learn about fall damage, room 2 - breaking platforms, room 3 wall sliding, room 5 - combine wall sliding with breaking platforms to prevent fall damage --- so on and so forth). This probably didn't mesh too well with wanting to create e bite-sized metroidvania. Although there is a little bit of backtracking, the small size of the world makes it feel pretty much linear.

Totally agree with the need for an extra checkpoint in the wall slide room, splitting the challenge in half. It was a bit rushed.

Cheers

Hi, thanks for taking a chance with the game. The wall slide room definitely warrants a slight redesign to improve the onbaording, it's a bit too rough. I also improved the controls a little bit and I will patch the game once the jam is done. Sliding on the wall will only require to hold jump without the direction, so jumping off walls will require less confusing inputs. I am glad you still had a good time with it.

Cheers

Absolutely, we all know the pain of killing our darlings in order to deliver!

Cheers

Such a polished little gem. I enjoyed the gameplay loop, exploring with the cute character and finding new items. I also liked the little dialgoues. The character controller was a bit janky, but it didn't really detract from the experience. The sound design was delicious all around, but OMG whoever sang the intro song, that was so beautiful, with all the harmonies! Huge congrats!

Very well done, great work!

Wow, outstanding entry. Great production value, but most of all a very enjoyable and compact twist on racing games. It felt good to maneuver the trolley and I especially liked the 90° turns. Great sound design, so many nice tracks and fitting sounds. Everything felt very polished. It also feels like there's design space for more elements (e.g. a bonus for passing very close to other passengers without hitting them, like Crazy Taxi's "crazy through" bonus) , which is always intriguing. I must admit I had no idea what a "passport bro" is and i had to look it up. That's a quite unique premise.

Great work team, keep it up!

Very rich entry, congrats! So many systems and such a great sound design. I enjoyed roaming around the beautiful woods looking for different butterflies and also the character writing was nice. It's easy to see a lot of work went into this one.

Well done!

Solid puzzle! I particularly liked the limits on tile placement to prevent analysis paralysis. The art and sound were also very good, especially the characters. I also liked that there were multiple solutions in a few cases, it might enable some design space with extra challenges rewarding the use of a minimum set of pieces. Lining up multikills with the dart was fun.

Good job on the game, keep it up!

Excellent entry! The game looks, sounds, reads and plays great. The premise of the story is extremely interesting, and the tension is very well communicated. I don't have a lot of constructive criticism to add on top of what the other jammers already stated (gone characters appearing in camp scenes and other small bugs).

Please keep creating things, very well done!

Superb production value! As many others have already stated, the art, sound and animations feel super polished. I also wished for an end state or generally slightly more involved mechanics (I personally love the concept of building a team for a task), but we all know there's only so much we can do with limited time. That being said, I think having people longing for more is still a great success!

Congrats!

So much to say about this game! First of all, I love it! I really really like the concept of strategically building teams and performing tasks and I have attempted it myself a few times.

My first game experience I had no idea what was going on. I did stuff randomly and my team kept leveling up. Sonia Cabrera died pretty early, but her sister Angelica picked up where she left and became a powerhouse. At some point I lost the good Oliver Meza quite late into the game and I had a sudden realization: you can hover on tasks and the tooltip will tell you what kind of requirements it has. I was only relying on can success/will fail at that point. Perhaps that info should be directly visible? Maybe cutting of some the character visualization space on the left side. Anyways, I got to 92% or something on the World progress bar and I had 2 missions left: the air carrier on the left and blackmailing the president. For some reason, clicking on the air carrier did nothing. I could not bring up the mission UI. For the president, I didn't have the right stats neither in my team/available hires nor I could get them through items so I gave up.

But with my newfound knowledge I came back for more! I now paid attention to task stat requirements and tried to match and possibly exceed them with items and thoughtful hires. Nothing could stop me. Except all my spies died at the very first mission, often leaving me unable to hire another one. Repeat this for 4 or 5 more runs. Then I gave up.

Anyway, it was very cool to play. The art is fantastic, the sounds are fun, UI/UX could use improvements (but very few jam games can afford not having this issue) and I'm biased to love this concept. I really wanted to complete it, but I could not manage to, as I couldn't quite figure out the numbers.

Well done, please make more? :D

I always admire people who can pull off puzzles! This one is solid all around. I enjoyed the game, level 6 (the first of them, the 7th is also labeled 6) was definitely a tough yet satisfying one. I liked the little character animations too.

Very well done!

Hello and thank you for trying the game! Yeah, that part is rough. There isn't actual proper wall jumping, you can only drop from the wall horizontally while sliding by pressing the opposite direction at the right time. It will give a few frames of being unaffected by gravity, but the window to pull of many of those drops is probably too tight. I definitely need to improve the controls and the way players can get to learn them! Perhaps a short optional tutorial level where everything is quickly unlocked and tested before diving into the real expedition.

Cheers

UFO 50 has to be the best thing coming out last year and is a game design & development masterclass. Absolutely, let's keep in touch!

Hi! Warning, incoming wall of text, no offense taken should you skip all of this:

The irony! I wanted to make a data driven event based game not too different from the amazing one you created for this jam, but I chickened out because it felt overly ambitious for the time frame! I resorted to a bite sized metroidvania, which is something I wanted to attempt for a long time. The initial design was inspired by Cinematronics' Freeze from 1984 (a pretty mediocre game I had fond memories of), but I wanted to give it a slight touch of Another World/Heart of Darkness/Oddworld kind of games. The game ended up being heavier on the platforming side compared to combat because the production cost of combat enemies was way higher (sprites+animations, AI code, sounds) compared to creating more platforming based challenges. If you're interested in this kind of games, let's make one some day :D or if you have any questions concerning the making of this one, feel free to hit me up, although from your work I can tell you are very competent already!

Anyways, I'm glad that some of my design intentions were perceived through the levels. The game is definitely more catered toward a niche audience (of more experienced videogame players), but I think it would have been a better design decision to redistribute the challenge between main path and optional paths with the goal of making it more widely enjoyable while staying true to the original vision and intended audience.

Thank you so much for your time. Your words are really encouraging and kind. I hope you will also keep making interesting and well crafted things!

Cheers

Delicious entry! Impressive effort, the game looks and sounds amazing from a production value standpoint. Very solid, consistent, polished and beautiful. After spending a month on the beach on a crab meat diet, I expanded my ambitions meeting the grim reaper 11 times and losing a lifetime of savings. I grinded my way out of poverty killing wildlife and slowly grew my arsenal, discovered misterious places and items and farmed desert spirits until I maxed out my character way before time. With the underworld emptied of desert spirits, I slain and disemboweled the beast. Wearing a suit made of spirits, now extinct, I faced the final trial storming the pyramid. Best 130 days of my life. 10/10 would visit the shipwreck and find the Giant Crab on day one again.

I was hungry for this kind of exploration/adventure games given the theme and yours went above and beyond simply delivering. Well done!

Hello! Great job, thank you for playing the game to completion (I deeply appreciate the dedication and patience) and the feedback. That beginning/ending screen is badly designed, it's a 10/10 samples in my heart! Completely agree, the early areas need a redesign as the difficulty curve is all over the place. The wall slides/jumps ended up being the most difficult thing in the game, but also in my head it made sense for that to be the first upgrade as the jetpack would render it obsolete in many situations (although not all of them, as it's a lot harder to control). Originally the jetpack/flamer were designed to have a fuel resource which I had to cut (more for level design concerns than feasibility). The game even had a functional wall jump unlock which got cut to streamline level design. Looking back, perhaps a better order could have been flamethrower -> slide -> jetpack. Sorry for the rant, I enjoy discussing design quite a bit.

Cheers

Very solid entry, I enjoy the simple yet satisfying gameplay loop. The game also looks cool and I appreciated the sound design, it suited the game well. The background pulse effect was also a nice touch. Those light blue enemies are KILLERS! Well crafted jam game, good job!

I did have a few reports, I will add a known bugs section to the page. I'll fix it as soon as the jam is done. Thanks for the bug report!

Wow, as many others I am in awe, your teams artists are really stealing the show here. Great work, congrats, the the characters are especially pretty. The movement is pretty janky, very janky. The character gets stuck in most steps/slopes, don't know if you're using a CharacterBody3D and if the character is a capsule. Also there's a bunch of invisible walls that make navigating the world a bit puzzling at times. Nothing major though, the experience still is very enjoyable. Initially I had no idea about what to do, but after playing around with what I had I quickly figured it out and put the pieces together. 3 was my favorite pose (I only knew because of the comments). Here's my mandatory screenshot.

Very well done, great work team! The artists and animators are PRO! Gotta follow them all. The sound design was also very very pleasant.

It's okay, you did great! We're the playtesters :D

Wow that's great! Well done and thank you for giving it a second shot. That's an annoying bug I thought I had fixed, but it appears I have in fact did not. I will look into it, thanks for reporting it.

Awww, those are some very kind words! Thank you so much! I also wish I had made the main path of the game less challenging and leaving the "hairy" jumps (as @h00g3 defined them, I loved that wording) for the optional collectibles only, but I came to that realization only after the game was out, as no one else but me playtested it. I hope to adjust it based on all the precious feedback I received and perhaps you might enjoy the post-jam version. I am glad you liked what you got to see!

Cheers

Very nice entry! I liked the concept a lot and I wished it had more content, which is great, being left wanting more is awlays a good sign for a game I think! I know time is scarce and I understand cutting content very well though. I liked the little map, but as it is I didn't figure out if there were any differences between different nodes. I went for an imprecise machine gun build (I just love attack speed so much in these games) and cleared the game first try.

Minor things I didn't like (while still enjoying the overall game very much, let me be clear):

- I think enemy bullets should have better contrast for visual clarity, either through different color, or an outline or both

- I felt like everything moved a tad bit too fast (character/camera and enemies), but this might just be personal taste or old age

Congrats and thanks for creating this nice little game! Keep up the good work!

I think you need to pick up a chest in the map after winner winner shows up?

Don't worry! I was indeed playing at 1440p, should have mentioned that. The workaround does it, I should have thought of it myself, thank you. 43 expeditions later I was able to complete the game with 1 vampire slain, 1 bandit camp razed and many hilarious expedition names :D

Such a gorgeous game! Great palette, extremely beautiful pixel art and delicious sound design. I clicked my way through the first three locations, but I have to admit that if I didn't read other comments I would have not figured out there were items. It still took me a little bit to find where to buy them even with the knowledge. I guess the stats are rock-paper-scissors and there's some contributing and some subtracting from the success rate? With that (potentially wrong) realization and items on my side, I went to end the demon straight away. I condemned to death 3 of my heroes by drugging them and doubling their stats, while turning the only surviving one (with bad stats for the task) into a chaos imp, the only survivor incapable of telling the tale of the heroic sacrifice of their companions. Grim!

Impressive work, well done! @Kaishido, I'm now a fan.

What a nice entry! I appreciate alternative control systems like this one. I had a good time exploring the depths and you nailed the 1-bit look, very cool art. Too bad for the audio, it would have been a great addition, but it's a pain we all know.

Well done!

No problem, it wasn't that bad. Being rushed is arguably the most unifying experience in game jams! Thank you for making the game :)

It took me 4 or 5 tries on normal difficulty, but I managed to lead my gang to commit heinous crimes. The morale wasn't great and the hull might have a breach or two, but it's alright. They looked very cute in their ship. I enjoyed my time with the "runner" game and the small events introducing a welcome change here and there.

The only slightly negative thing I encountered while playing was that there was something (probably the mouse? It mostly happened after events where I clicked) was eating my first input and I could not move. Costed me a few runs but I got to play more, so no big deal!

Congrats on your entry, well done!

Hi! It is rough indeed. Do you mean the very first screen? If that's the case, try to avoid jumping and drop down the shortest paths in order to avoid building too much vertical velocity thus incurring into a deadly fall, should you give it another go.

But anyways, thank you very much for playing it and for your comment!

Cheers

Don't know about good, but definitely rough! I will try and improve the difficulty curve and the controls once the jam is concluded. Thanks for playing it and for your feedback though, it is very much appreciated!

Hello and congratulations! Many many thanks for taking the time to finish the game and also for the very thorough and insightful feedback. It is extremely valuable. I agree with your take on the wall slide. I need to give the possibility of assigning it its own key (and implementing input remapping as suggested by other kind jammers). It should also suffice to just hold the key without the direction, I added the direction requirement because it was misbehaving but it was probably my fault (using is_on_wall BEFORE move_and_slide). I need to make it more robust and relying on a single key hold.

To think that I spent about 1 hour to have the physics keep simulating after dying before triggering the respawn because I thought it was a little bit hilarious!! But I can understand it being annoying after a couple times. It's easy to add a button press to force the respawn or have a toggle option to fast forward it.

Again, thank you very much for the kind words and I am glad you had a good time with the game despite its rough edges.

Cheers

Thank you for the reply! Yes that is an annoying bug :( that was supposed to trigger a dedicated freezing death animation, but I was so rushed that it remained on the to-do list! Anyway your suggestion is still very valid and good: it's very easy to add a pause menu button to go to the most recent checkpoint, especially since I didn't manage to implement game saves. I will do so after the jam is done!

I love this game so much! Yeah, it looks a bit rough, but the concept is exactly whay I was hoping to find with this jam's theme and I think you nailed it! I really enjoyed the writing. The possibility of naming each expedition was also a very small touch that made the experience so much better for me. Unfortunately I seem to have an issue when playing, It feels like there might be more things on the left side, behind the UI? I cannot get past the forest on the left when planning. Let me know if there's any fix for this, I'd love to finish the game. I'll attach a screenshot.

Great great work, very well done! 

Very enjoyable game! I admire people who are capable of designing puzzle games. I played it with my brother who is way better than me at this kind of game and we enjoyed racking our brains although I have mixed feelings about making sacrificical pyres with wild animals in order to reach our goal. It felt like a necessary evil though.

Great work, congrats!

You are indeed a master platformer and definitely made my day! Amazing performance, thanks for sticking with it! Do you remember your timing?

Cheers

"A capella" must be the best wildcard ever. I loooooved the jump, and I enjoyed my time with the game, exploring the fantastic environment. Keep making art!

Wow! Just wow! I am so impressed, this is so unhinged in the best way. Powerful nostalgia trigger for older fellas like me. I loved the prerendered art, it reminded me of Myst and even more so those machinery heavy games that were inspired by it like RHEM. The animations were also super good, sound design also very spot on. I am in awe, crazy production value for a game jam! Congrats!