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Really got a kick out of this! Happy to have backed it.

Small bits of unsolicited feedback. You probably know about most of these, but just in case:

• I swapped QE/AD after starting the game and it didn’t seem to work. It worked fine when I tried swapping them before starting a new game.

• On my second playthrough I jumped through all the intro sequences and found myself unable to actually play until the title introductions went away, even though it looked like I was “in game”. It seems like if you skip too fast you can end up softlocked on “helper.exe”. Easy enough to fix by quitting out and restarting from the autosave.

• (Spoiler) I was surprised that my dollar got eaten when I played in the lunchroom. It said, “Happy Birthday to Me”, like at the end when there’s a card. I didn’t actually end up getting a drink out of it, but the dollar did disappear.

Still, outstanding work. Excited to play the full version.

Thanks for the feedback. <3

Good point about the exit doors! I had them despawn after the player has discovered all the areas, but you’re right. It would be good to be able to quickly get to ritual circles like that.

I also like the idea that destroying the vacuum will drop random items.

If the collar isn’t restoring a person’s capacity, that’s a bug. Oops. :x

There’s a guide in the downloads that should tell you what to do if you get stuck. More fun to figure it out, though. :)

Honestly, fair.

It made more sense when it was still in the lab and gated progress, but you’re right that it’s kinda wasted now. Perhaps it could become a way to enlarge the player’s bust in addition to their speed and stamina.

Thank you! <3 That’s actually exactly what I’m working on for the next game!

Keys let you open up the side rooms to get to purgation rituals.

It does not. ._. I had thought I’d make enemies that hunted and attacked based on sound, but it wasn’t fun.

🤦That’s my fault. Three endings, four ways to inflate. I edited it and mixed them up.

Everything in the guide? ;)

Oh no. D: What are your computer specs? What OS? What kind of GPU?

Yikes. I’m sorry to hear that. Could I trouble you for some details on your computer? What kind of GPU do you have, what OS are you running, what CPU do you have, and how much ram do you have?

I’ve added Guide.md to the downloads. One kingdom, please!

Hint: what are some other meanings of the word ‘note’?

There’s very much a way to make it happen without a game over. Don’t even have to grind! :) As another hint, bordering spoiler, have you figured out what to do with the note?

I realize now that there’s no in-game hint for the first access card. Here’s a clue, bordering spoiler: if you can tire out the tree…

Probably a few small ones and bugfixes, but I’ve been at this for a year and want to spend a little while working on some other projects.

There are three endings and four ways to inflate. :) You’ll need to find at least two of them for the good endings.

If anyone happens to be running this on Wine with Linux, you can use Peazip as a stand-in. 7zip gave me some mild problems.

That was a lot of fun!

It is not, right now. I didn’t get that done in time for the jam and didn’t think to add it afterwards. There’s probably not enough late-game content to really merit saving, but if I add more I’ll have to consider it.

:’) I’ll find the balance eventually.

Congrats everybody! 🥳 Lots of really good submissions and lots of tough competition. Well done to everyone who submitted a game.

I’m older than the internet. I get it. In fact, I’ll admit I still harbor some resentment over the switch from Flash to HTML5 games.

It’s certainly not vital if someone is making a standalone game or already has a reputation or fanbase. If I know I want to play a game because I saw someone online doing a Let’s Play, that could drive me to push through an installer and some light troubleshooting and and and…

If, however, a person’s game is one of hundreds, then they need to outcompete for people’s limited attention. Each pain point is a spot where you can lose people that will play and might enjoy your game. In another jam I did, people with web builds received an average of 5 ratings and many more plays. People without received an average of 1.

I wouldn’t want to play a triple-A game in the browser. I don’t even like playing most games in the browser. But for a jam where I don’t know anything about the games and need to get through 25 of them, I like to be able to preview them like I would an asset pack before I download them.

Great suggestions. Thank you.

I had the gas stations cost money at first and it was a little annoying/unfair. Maybe once I rebalance the RNG for the competitions I can put it back. The grand challenges could be fun.

Appreciate it. The RNG for this release is pretty vicious. I have it tweaked but didn’t push out the changes before the window closed. Same with the pill price, which I patched to be between $100 and $500, but I guess I didn’t merge that change in time. Same with extra events. I don’t think the one where the player gets stuck on the way out of an event made it into the jam build.

I like those ending ideas. Might have to experiment with them later.

I’ll have to give that a fix. The downside is it means there will be a cap on how fat the character can be.

I appreciate it. Thank you for the feedback and for playing. The feedback is actionable and well motivated.

Good effort. I feel like RPG Maker might have gotten in the way of what you were trying to build.

Copy/Paste of Rubric:

1. Fun: I found the control input to be frustrating. The latency between clicking on something and the laser coming out was distracting and the gameplay felt more like learning the counterintuitive quirks of a system than gaining mastering over the actual game mechanics. -1
2. Creativity: Lots of original art. Gameplay reminds me of Tempest. I’m leaning +1 because of the amount of creative content, even if the gameplay hurts it.
3. Fetish Factor: The concept is alluring, and I like the mild panic from the partner.
4. Theme: I suppose travelling into someone’s body counts. +0

Subs on the Subway!

1. Fun: It’s fine. There aren’t glaring control or input issues. +0
2. Creativity: It’s a catch-drops game. The graphics look okay, not just the ones from the Forks pack, but the drawn ones. +0
3. Fetish Factor: This really didn’t come together in my mind. It’s gating the art instead of adding to it. I need to throw a -1 at this or ‘creativity’ so I think it’s landing here. The mechanics are detached.
4. Theme: -1 It’s on a subway, yes, but it doesn’t really work together or motivate the concept at all. It feels bolted on. Bonus point for having a web build.

If any of the games were real viruses we might not know until well after the jam was over and someone had a malware attack on their machine. Viruses are more sneaky than flashy these days. I think it’s more likely that someone’s antiviral software will signal a false-positive and everyone will dogpile on it because Lycos went bonkers over a PDB file in it. It happened twice already. Two games got flagged as viruses by people’s malware only to be cleared by virustotal.

I’m not sure if I’m coherent, but the point I’m trying to make is web builds avoid these problems entirely because the browser is sandboxed and you don’t have to download anything to try it. I like having both because I can play the game to see if I like it and then download it to keep it if I do.

Bite size upgrade was planned, but I didn’t get it in time. Shopping is a really good idea. I’ll have to do that. Maybe every city.

Not just you.

This is very charming. Bummer about the graphics. The cutscene is deeply amusing.

Good feedback. I need to make point #3 in the intro clearer. If you’re less than 100% full you won’t get stunned. The farther over 100% are, the more likely you’ll get stunned and the worse it will be. I probably need an ‘overfull’ meter below the regular fill meter.

And yeah, the RNG is brutal. I have some fixed but was worried I’d break it if I uploaded just before the jam ended. :’)

Is it saying “this file may harm your computer” or actually that there’s a virus? My guess is that Opera is being paranoid because there’s an EXE in it. I haven’t run it yet, but I’m not worried. Firefox throws up that message all the time, too.

It’s coming up clean for 60 of the scanners on VirusTotal. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file-analysis/MWM3YTcyODdjZWYxZDg0MjY5YWRjNjUyMDk4YzFjNzU6MTc1NTQ2NTE3NA== I’m gonna yolo it. I ain’t scared of no things.

What does your antivirus software say it is? Which of the files? And which antivirus tool are you using? There are lots of false positives and I bet it’s triggering on the PDB notes in the build.

I appreciate that and agree. I’ve got a patch to make things easier but I’m reluctant to do that before the jam is up because I’m worried about breaking things. I’ll patch it when judging is over.

This is really good. It’s nice when gameplay choices actually impact story outcomes. The art is cute and the story is quite well written! I really like this game. I also like that the controls are rebindable at the start. That makes a big difference.

A minor gripe is that sometimes interact and jump seem to have their usage swapped. Sometimes hitting interact will select a thing or dialog option and sometimes jump will do that. I haven’t tried binding interact and jump to the same button yet.

Copy/Paste of Rubric:

1. Fun: I think this deserves a +1, since the platforming aspects are well polished and the level design is pretty clever, given the revisiting aspects.
2. Creativity: A story platformer isn’t what I would consider groundbreaking, but between the art and story and content I’d like to give this +1.
3. Fetish Factor: The writing is really top notch and goes well with the art. I’m torn between an +1 and a +2. It’s one of the hotter entries in the jam in my mind. I think I have to go to +1.
4. Theme: The theme was reasonably integrated. It was part of the story, yes (the friend’s travel and your own island ‘vacation’). I don’t know if I can go +1 since it didn’t interact mechanically.
   Bonus point for accessibility and an all-around good experience. I liked this.

I keep refreshing and want to add a balance patch but I’m worried I’ll break everything forever.

There’s some good content here, and a lot, given the time frame. There are a few rough edges, notably around the controls. I found hitting enter worked about 10% of the time, which just led to me mashing it repeatedly until it worked.

As far as each game is concerned, they were all functional and worked. I liked the level randomization for the breakout clone. That was nice. I don’t know whether the acceleration on the bread was a good or bad thing. It felt a tad floaty, but it would probably have been hard to control without it.

It’s a bit of a rough edge to have to hit enter to start the game, then switch to the mouse to press the pay button, then exit out and hit enter again to restart, especially with enter not working a good chunk of the time.

Overall, a really nice effort.

Copy/Paste of Judging Rubric:

1. Fun: Each game was fun enough though the controls didn’t feel great. I felt myself going through the motions for a lot of the minigames. (-1)
2. Creativity: There were certainly a lot of assets created for this. The minigames didn’t feel like departures from established norms to me or add variance to existing themes, but the effort that went in to the number of things in the world feels like it deserves a +1.
3. Fetish Factor: The handful of gain events felt disjoint from the rest of the game. On the one hand, having that be a reward makes sense, but it really feels more like the games are a barrier to content than integrated. (+0)
4. Theme: As a way of setting how often the player can get juice it makes sense. Might be slightly above average in terms of integration. +1 for this.

FYI, this is marked as having a Linux and MacOS build, but the zip file only has a Windows build in it.