itch.io

Hello - I'm Alex 'Tid' Knowles.

This is a release announcement for a series of games, which I hope is ok and doesn't break the rules for this forum too much.  They are very small and 3 of them already exist. Well, about 8 of them already exist, but you'll have to keep reading to see what I mean by this.

I have started to take game development more seriously, and as a result, I am going to be making lots of small games.

I am now only at my real job for shorter bursts of time each month. On the other days, where I am "free", I am endeavoring to create brand new tiny games.

As in, a new game, on each of those free days.

In the morning I get given a one-word prompt. I have to, over the course of a single day, design and build a game based on that prompt. It's like a game jam.

My work schedule is complicated, but broadly speaking, this will look like about x10 games each month.

Warnings:

• Often I will break the rules and spend a bit of extra time on the game if I think it deserves it.
• I will also not always upload the new game to Itch.io on time.
• Sometimes things may happen that mean I don't make a brand new game when I am supposed to at all.
• If I really don't like a game I make I might not share it here at all.
• I actually started this project at the end of last year and have already made my first month's worth of games, so I secretly already know this project is a success.

Games:
I have uploaded three of these tiny games so far. They deliberately do not have much in the way of description or marketing on the page, because I want very much for each game to speak for itself as one of the design goals of my project.

You can play the first one here.

It doesn't look very good because I ran out of time to do graphical polish.
The second (much better) one is also already available.
I won't include a screenshot of that one because I already fear I am pushing the boundaries of what is supposed to be posted on this forum. The third one is available too, as of yesterday, but even a link might be getting a bit much at this point...
Nonetheless, if you follow my creator page, you'll get a notification when I upload each one of these.

P.S.

For games that have a scoring mechanic, I'll do my best to keep the itch.io game page up to date with the best scores I've seen. Let me know if you break a record. 

Yep, it's definitely intentional that you can tackle the puzzles/worlds in a lot of different orders. Not totally ANY order due to how the map works, but I wanted players to be able to get stuck on a puzzle or mechanic and go try some other puzzles while they let the solution to the first one simmer. I absolutely should have made it more prominent that it was intentional though LOL, definitely agree you can go the whole game without even noticing the worlds have numbers.

Thanks so much for the kind words and checking out my game :)
I actually totally agree it's too long (now that I've had 3 years of hindsight since release haha). I think the game is too long and a little too hard for what it is. I'm pretty happy with the base concept and largely the difficulty curve but I think I could have done more to cull down to only my very best puzzle ideas. I'm really glad you enjoyed it enough to do all of the optional puzzles though! I'm especially proud of how some of those turned out. 

Thanks again!

Thanks so much for bringing this to my attention. I've just fixed the issue and replaced the version of the game here on Itch with a fully featured one. Please redownload and let me know if you continue to have any issues.

Best Regards,

Alex

https://captaintid.itch.io/limiter

Hey I'll follow you so that if you ever put out a fully realised version I'll get to check it out!

This was so fun and also funny! I really liked the total chaos that was just controllable enough, genuinely so fun to scramble around trying to keep everything where I wanted it, and having an AI take over to ruin my systems was brilliant. Super funny ending screen.

Def gonna keep this one on my computer to play occasionally for the hell of it.

Hey, I couldn't get this one to run. You're missing your UnityPlayer.dll as well as the data folder that unity games need to load their assets.

This was absolutely fantastic.  Fantastic puzzle design, you did so much with really simple self explanatory mechanics. Even the graphics being as simple as they were were pretty nice!

Huge fan of this one. Can I get a version with save files soon please!

I liked this concept heaps! A shame there aren't more levels but that's a 48 hr jam for you!

Something I'm sure you're already aware of is that it'd be cool to have a way to just reset the platforms and start over. 

That blood splatter effect owns! Really cool.

I feel like this is a really neat idea held back by a couple of things.

The terrain doesn't really seem to generate in a way conducive to the game's progression. There were a few times that a green square was in a little room on its own that was totally unreachable as far as I could tell.

I think as well that by the time you can see the purple and which direction it's moving, it's often impossible to navigate the maze in a way that lets you avoid it.

The Out of Control mechanic itself was AWESOME. I really liked the exact amount of control you had over your character and feeling the heartbeat speed up was super cool. Maybe a neat idea would be if when you grabbed a green square it actually deflected the purple back in the opposite direction, so you could riskily grab a green just in time to save you from the purple that's about to overcome it?

Was actually a super fun way to be out of control! The sense of speed and momentum was really cool and I had a great time.

I got 380 points and won. I'm not sure I got the point of the anomalies? Otherwise really cool, thanks for making this! I'd love to play an endless version or a version with set out waves.

I TOTALLY loved this. Got really addicted to trying to beat it. I finally cleared it at 33.29, is that a good time?

I would love to see more levels. Reminded me of the Donkey Kong platformer minigame from Nintendoland for the Wii U. The physics were really fun, and I would enjoy doing speedrun attempts in this game engine. Might I recommend a quick restart button? Or at least a way to, using the keyboard, hit the restart button that pops up on death?

I'm not sure I really felt or got the full impact of the 'out of control' component, but the going prone slide on your back thing was the sickest coolest thing of all time and I felt like an action hero sliding around rooms shooting dudes, incredible fun. If only it were longer!

I also encountered a weird collision detection issue where if I jumped into the roof I snapped down to the floor. Otherwise great!

This was super hectic and fun! Really cool timewaster. No complaints here, it's pretty hard to play properly but that's absolutely part of the point of the game, so I dig it! No pun intended.

I got 47980.

Interesting idea. As the others have said I think it'd be improved greatly by a shorter simpler first level to make sure the player is really comfortable with the mechanics and what their aim is. Definitely cool and creative though.

ah cool, okay i get it. awesome! when i get home i'll take this newfound knowledge and see if i cant beat your score!

absolutely! I always try to give every game the time and attention i'd want other people to give mine :)

cool, looking forward to playing a polished version!

Simple idea but fun to try and get a high score. I made it to 1:13!
I wish the keyboard indicator on the right hand side would change graphically to show you what your new keys were. I think when you only have 1 health point and there are so many obstacles, it's a bit much to not only adjust to the new control scheme, but also have to actually find out what the keys are by testing them.

I really liked the ship rotating, that was neat!

It's not an easy game! It's also very short (technically infinite but after 4 levels the patterns just start looping) so I'm glad it's enough of a challenge to keep you playing for 30 tries! I hope you make it to the next round :)

The speed boost doesn't kill enemies but it does make you invincible for a moment, so in a tight spot you can use it to dash past them. I hope that's enough to at least help save your day :)

Thank you so much! That's really kind. The most feedback I'm getting is that the game itself doesn't do a good enough job of showing you what everything does and how it works, so I'm definitely taking that feedback on board for next jam!

I really like this concept!

The first level I found that the piece (I chose black) was too dark against the dark squares, and since the identifying silhouette of a chess piece is in the top half, if I was ever standing in a white square, it was kinda hard to see what piece I had turned into. Otherwise really neat! I'm sure there's a full game that can be made out of this.

This is absolutely brilliant, so immediately a cool idea with heaps of potential as an arcade survival game. Totally loved the frantic moments it created and how much room there was for quick thinking and strategising.

Also, it's totally gorgeous. Great art style, well realised.

Nice! Cool simple concept, fun timewaster. I really liked the letter keys becoming arrow keys suddenly, because I totally wasn't expecting it. I'd love to see that taken even further, suddenly snapping to the mouse or something crazy as the controller would be cool, or even using key combos that aren't in traditional WASD formation.

I also didn't really like how sometimes my controls would snap change in midair above an enemy, kinda felt like a scenario where there wasn't anything I could have done differently to not die in those situations. Maybe if there was some kind of visual feedback to indicate that my controls are about to change, or what they're about to change to, it could be a cool microgame of managing and preparing when it was safe to make dangerous plays like jumping over enemies.

I'll be honest I had a pretty hard time playing it but it certainly was out of control and I really liked the bull himself

Great implementation of the theme and honestly really fun physics to play around in! Genuinely a really hard game but it totally felt like something I could master. I'll keep this one as a fun timewaster!

Cool, this was surprisingly fun and interesting for such a simple idea. Definitely a lot of room to play with this mechanic and make cool levels and puzzles with it.

Yeah, took me a few goes to get into it, but I really like it now that I get it!

There are heaps of cool consequences of the design, you made really great choices. I like how the dash getting faster and longer and more out of control also is what enables you to continue playing successfully even as the game itself speeds up.

Really cool vibes and atmosphere, I really like how well you captured a dreamlike experience with the movement of the camera and character. Very choppy and weird and cinematic and cool.

Something that I thought was cool (not sure if it was intentional or not) that you could really lean into, is that the light radius of the torches kinda looked like the light radius of the enemies, and it was really neat seeing the corner of one and not really being sure if an enemy was there or not. Would totally play a version with more content!

Really cool idea! I had a bit of trouble discerning what was going on, I'd like the little robots that join you to become a bit more obviously yours, maybe with some visual feedback. But I really love the idea and it was pretty fun!

Cool concept! I think you should have introduced the green orb sooner, it was definitely a moment where I got to be like 'oh cool, I see what works about this design' when I realised there'd be multiple things in the level to avoid with the red cubes. I wish the instructions had been a liiiiiitlle clearer, it made it pretty hard to work out what I was doing on the first level. 

Also I wish the music didn't restart its loop each time I died!

Thank you, that's an extremely kind thing to tell me :)

thanks! i hope you decide to give it another go :)

Thank you! They do have little faces but it's very hard to see, I definitely should have worked on more clearly marking them as the enemies, and providing more detailed visually clear instructions in the game. I'm glad you liked the concept so much!

Pretty fun game, had to play it a couple times to figure out exactly what I was doing vs when the game was altering the character. Might be helpful to have a clearer differentiation between the effect of the potion and the random switching. Overall, a fun idea, definitely made me want to get better at it!

Hey, I couldn't get this one to run! I got errors about missing files even after redownloading and reextracting the .rar . Missing the unityplayer.dll, and if I try to import my own, it still doesn't work because of missing resource/data files.

I beat it! This is a concept that just works super well for heaps of reasons. I really like all the implicit advantages and disadvantages to having more bullets on screen, and making them act as your score multiplier was legit the most genius idea to make the most of that mechanic. Really cool arcade shooter, as a full game with a bunch of upgrades and enemies and content I'd totally pay for this.

My first 5 star overall rating. Great aesthetics and presentation all around, really cute character, and then on top of that the puzzle solving was really fun and satisfying. Frantic but lots of nice little design decisions that make it easy to just keep trying. Loved it.

This was so fun! I really liked solving the puzzle of what was happening with my controls, and it was really fun and panicked to have to stop and zoom in and try and figure out what a word was before grabbing the box.

Also the maze I did was really cool! I don't really know what triggered it or what it did but it was a cool extra challenge that synergised with the hard controls really well.

Not sure what my main guy was meant to be but I like him a lot