itch.io

Congrats on finishing your game! This is a pretty unique game.

It too me a moment to figure out what I was supposed to do, but once I figured out "turret defense + action boss" I could really see the potential in this design. It felt really good to be able to swap to a new bud moments before getting trampled. Getting a good spread and seeing the barrage of seeds felt pretty good, too. 

I think I would have liked to see a more clear indicator of ammunition refill. It feels like each new seed you get is on a brief timer or cooldown? It wasn't clear why I would sometimes fire 3-4 or just 1 at a time. 

The boss fight also felt like it dragged on a little bit too long, especially phase 2 where it moves faster and receives fewer hits as a result. 

But still a really enjoyable game. Well done, team! Keep making games!

Oh yeah, and the art is super cool! 

And thanks for playing! I appreciate it!

Ooh, I like this idea. It gives you a little more information, but then you also need to decide if it's worth picking into another element to be better against one or keep focusing

Congrats on finishing your game! This all looks and feels very polished.

I love me a twist on a match-3 game. And this has some really cool potential. But I don't know if it's the puzzle design or just the mechanic, but it felt incredibly unintuitive. I played through 6 levels but I'm not sure I understood how or why I found the solution each time. I sort of used trial & error picking different combinations until something just "worked". I'm still confused on it.

I'm not sure if there's a good solve for that other than just... more time with the game, both developing puzzles as the developer and playing the game on my side. 

A great little jam game though. And clearly a lot of polish went into making it look and play solidly. Well done. Keep making games!

The art in this project is incredible. Y'all knocked it out of the park. It gives the whole game this sort of retro feeling with the large, detailed sprites and text banner. I like it.

The core idea here is really fun, but it felt a bit pulled in opposite directions. Pretending to be different NPCs to help your NPC child be less-NPC feels like a novel take. And the game feels part sim/management and part mini-game collection. So the platforming elements to jump into a chimney feels a bit out of place. And going to the weapon blacksmith feels a bit frustrating since you can't jump on the roof directly like the shieldsmith's building. Of course you only had 48 hours, but it feels like there could have been a pivot from platformer to this or some competing ideas during development. 

Still, you all made a game in 48 hours which is a huge accomplishment, every time you do it. Congrats and submitting, especially something with solid art and animations. 

Keep making games! :)

Thank you for the kind words! I really appreciate it :)

I've got a post-jam version with the bug fixed at the very least. My goal this year has always been to polish up whatever I make to publish to android, too. 

I'll do my best to find and ping you when I have more updates, but a follow would make sure you don't miss it. 

Thanks again!

Super, super agree lol. Thanks for playing!

Congrats on your entry! 

So I wasn't immediately sure what to do. But I started clicking around and it sort of made sense? But my favorite moment was trying to completely surround the chest and seeing your wall placement system come to life. That immediately struck me as a really cool thing that also could have been super time consuming to create, especially in such a short jam. But dang is it cool. Nicely done.

Ultimately, the controls just feel a little awkward. The topdown style and tile placement make me want more broad RTS controls with faster movement or moving the camera by pushing the edges of the screen with the mouse. And I can see why you made the "player" delete tiles. It might be too easy to create something where you can easily trap a hero in a back and forth loop. But the solution feels a bit too clunky to be fun. 

Still, this has a lot of potential to be a cool thing. I haven't seen something quite like this - the active building elements especially. Bring back the RTS!

Good job finishing your game in 48 hours. Keep making games!

Congrats on finishing your game! Well done!

I liked the double puzzle of completing the route, but also making sure you have enough room to catch yourself. And the AI skeletons in part 1 add a little wrinkle, too. That concept has some cool potential. 

I think the game plays a little too slow in this current version. The delay between moving and the other "team" moving feels super long, especially when you're trying to solve some of the puzzles with trial and error. For example, the first puzzle with two skeletons that requires you to "bait" the far one to go over the top route. It's not intuitive how the skeletons will move or what the solution will be, and trying a handful of times to figure it all out takes a super long time with the delays between moves. 

But you still made a whole game in 48 hours which is a huge accomplishment. Great job :)

Keep making games!

Congrats on finishing your entry! Well done :)

Obviously a very ambitious idea for 48 hours, but you got your point across. I even beat hardcore mode without dying once! 

Again, in 48 hours you can only do so much, but it would have been nice to see the idea explored a little more or just a little more content. The idea has a lot of potential, especially if you're working with more than two machines. It could offer some pretty wild puzzles. 

Great job on your submission. Keep making games and learning! 

Very amusing, well done! This looks pretty well made for the 48 hours you had, too.

You leaned into the weirdness and comedy of the theme and it works well. It's fun to create complete nonsense quests and see their reactions. It's even better to get the slow creep in as you get the game over. Making game overs fun is not easy, either. 

However, I think the characters were a little hard to figure out. For a jam game, I think you would have been just as well off making the adventurers more clearly fall into an archetype. I couldn't finish a day without losing because I couldn't tell what would please the half naked player in front of me. 

Overall, pretty cool take on the theme, even if it tows the line between game and activity. And it's good for a laugh, and that's always good. Keep making games!

This is quite a gem. Super weird art and cool gameplay. I love it. 

The abilities all felt novel and useful which is great. Seeing new ones got me excited to see what y'all had come up with, too. 

I think the puzzles and gameplay end up feeling a little slow and clunky though. They're not quite intuitive and felt a lot more trial and error, especially the one with the frog and truck where you've got to get everything to the bottom layer. That took awhile to even figure out what to do and then to have to redo it because I didn't get all the pieces down just felt more like a chore than clever. 

But it's a 48 hour jam! And you all made a really weird and unique game and should be proud. Well done. Keep making cool games!

Straightforward and well implemented. A great little jam game!

I think the weakest piece is the mid- to late-game pacing in that I was leveling up so fast that the ability popups began to feel obnoxious. While most of them felt good, I think the overall power curve could be flattened considerably in favor of fewer, less frequent, but more powerful choices. Near the end, with a wall of bats shielding my yeti horde, I think the game was all but done, but I still had to click through a bunch of power popups to be able to actually win which didn't feel great. 

But aside from that, the core loop itself is satisfying. It takes a bit to ramp up but when you get going, those specialized choices start to feel more meaningful and it's nice to see your army slowly overwhelm the enemy. 

It turns out that "reverse vampire survivors" was a popular choice, but I can see why. It's a good game with a clear path for development and the games are almost always fun to play. Well done!

Great job on your game. It's an huge achievement for 48 hours. Keep making games!

Thanks for checking it out!

Yeah, I have stopped physically recoiling every time I think about someone playing my game and it not working, but it's still painful knowing that bug got into the submission build. 

I'm really excited to keep developing this one. I had a handful of cool card ideas (including abilities/rules text!) that I just didn't have time for. Who knew card games required so much infrastructure to work??

Thank you so much for all the kind words and detailed feedback. I truly appreciate it. 

I'm glad to see that so many of the things you suggested were ideas that I didn't have time to get around to. I ended up not having enough time for balancing the card distribution other than "pick 3 cards randomly from all cards to offer" which obviously introduces a wild amount of variance. And that idea might have even been a little more acceptable had I gotten around to cards with abilities! 

I like the dual-element suggestion; that hadn't made it onto my brainstorming list! 

And to your final point - yes, I absolutely agree about it not feeling like there's a lot of room for skill or expression. Hopefully it will feel better after updates to card distribution, finer encounter tuning, and a dynamic decklist during battle that helps you better understand what's left to be played.

My plan was always to take whatever I made for this jam and develop it for a full android release just to get the practice of selfpublishing, so I expect I will be able to achieve all this! 

Thank you again so much for the feedback. Truly appreciated. Jam on!

Fair feedback! I spent way more time on the infrastructure of the game than I had anticipated and didn't leave enough time to properly give player feedback.

The idea is that you decide which enemy you guide ("attack") first, but your deck is played randomly until that spirit's power is reduced to zero. So the strategy was intended to be about sculpting your deck and then choosing battles that favor your deck's elements. Then once in a battle, it becomes a decision of playing the odds. If you know you have a bunch of fire cards in your deck, do you go for the fire spirit first and hope to get a match and spend fewer cards? Something like that. But it clearly isn't conveyed well!

Obviously you don't owe me more feedback, but if you have the time (and if the above makes more sense), what would you have liked to see to help convey that?

Thanks again for playing! I appreciate it!

For as novel of an idea as this is, my favorite part is the music. I walked away humming this tune when I took a break to make dinner. Well done!

Solid game and excellent take on the Sokoban genre. Some of those puzzles really ramp up in difficulty. And/or I'm having a hard time retraining my brain to think about these puzzles in a new way. Either way, super cool. 

I enjoyed my time with this game, but the main character did lean a little close to some unfavorable stereotypes about mental health, especially with the SFX. Not exactly offensive, but still playing their habits for comedy isn't great. 

Overall, cool game and great job to the whole team. Keep making cool games!

Hey Brohmyr! Glad to see another submission from you!

As always, your character illustrations are gorgeous. The heroes are great and their portraits are so full of life. 

And I can see you went with a super ambitious game, too! Great to see that it's all working in 48 hours. I think I figured out the core loop, but I desperately needed just more information. It was really hard to remember which type of quest matched up to which stats, or even where to find a stat or a button to progress. 

Is there a reason for there to be 3 separate job boards to manage? There doesn't seem to be a reason to act quickly or anything, so the room could be much smaller to save time and confusion walking from place to place. 

Still, quite the spectacle for the short period. Well done! Keep making games!

Best way to get someone to play your game is to play theirs and leave a feedback comment. The jam page comments even automatically link your entry so people can find it more easily. 

So to comment on my actual game page asking me to play yours without even indicating that you've tried mine or have feedback feels pretty disingenuous. 

The awkward part is that I already had your game on my list of games to play but hadn't gotten to it yet. 

Jams are great environments to learn and get feedback. They're less useful for guerilla marketing. If you put energy into giving feedback,  others will be more inclined to do the same for you. 

D'oh! 

I even remember reading that on your description, but I knew [space] was for launching, so I thought that's all it did!

If someone described "Punch Out with two health bars" I don't think I would be as interested in what you've actually done here. And it's pretty neat. Having one bar that always drains but refills when you land a hit? But landing a hit costs health from the enemy which you don't want to deplete? Well done. 

The game ultimately felt a little slow and sometimes maybe frustrating when enemies would constantly dash before throwing a wide punch. I got the gist of the game after the first fight, so speeding things up a bit might make for a more satisfying jam game experience. 

But overall, this is a pretty cool game, and it looks and plays very well for a jam game. Good job everyone! Keep making games!

Oooh pretty. And a sorta of physics puzzle/race game? Cool concept. 

Unfortunately, I just couldn't figure out the controls. I could get on the bridge, but I couldn't figure out how to come in at a better angle or do any sort of adjustment once on it, so I always shot off the end at a super hard downward angle and couldn't beat the 2nd level. Not sure what I was doing wrong :(

Still really pretty. Congrats on another game! 

Well done on your game!

This really makes you think about the game in a completely different way. Caring about *when* you find a bomb seems like a small question, but you've shown there's a lot to consider and explore there. 

Ultimately, it ends up playing nearly the same for better or for worse. But that extra little wrinkle to consider feels like a natural addition to the already classic formula. Good job!

Keep making games!

This game is a blast, pun intended. 

It took me a moment to figure out that it was actually a sokoban style game because it wasn't clear I was the dark mine pushing the light ones. But once that clicked, I was in. Maybe an extra line of tutorial like, "you're the black mine, you can push other mines into place" would help?

I'm still not sure my brain truly understands how to arrive at a solution, but your puzzle design allowed for straightforward deductions to help the solution to arrive eventually! 

Super well done, I'm very happy with this. And the retro presentation are incredible, even if the minesweeper I grew up with never had music :P

Yeah, I knew I was in trouble when I spent over an hour making one enemy lol.

I knew a card game was going to be a big task for 48 hours, but I didn't realize just how much of that time would be spent programming infrastructure. 

Thanks for checking it out, JC. I appreciate the feedback :)

... I am absolutely devastated

yep, sure enough. There's the bug. I know exactly when it happened and why. This morning as I was trying to get through as many items as possible. I updated how the match bonus was processed and replaced the actual power increase with the power increase to the text only. 

Well fk

Thanks for finding it. 

Heck yeah, good to focus on the positive. 

Seriously. That juice is beautiful lol. 

Thanks Daniel! Appreciate the feedback!

Yeah, player feedback and clarity was my biggest hurdle after getting out the prototype. I really wanted to emphasize pretty much everything more. 

Thanks for sticking with it and I'm glad you had an "Aha" moment! 

Hey Yollie and team! Good to see you in another jam! 

The presentation on this is pretty dang sparkly. Good camera shakes, impactful actions, lots of good player feedback all around.

I tried this in webGL first, then download and encountered the same issue. I kept getting hit by nothing and couldn't figure out why. I couldn't even complete the second objective. The bullets felt pretty hard to dodge as it was, but they seemed to hit me or damage me before even hitting me in some cases. I'm not sure what happened.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to see any abilities beyond he basic shooting enemy. And while helpful, the tutorial bit at the start of every run made restarting feel a little more time-consuming than I would have liked. 

Still a very nice looking game, especially for 48 hours. Well done team. Keep making games!

Oh, I get that thing about ambition. I missed the mark super hard on my goal this year lol. That's tough, but at least it works some of the time instead of being left on the cutting room floor? 

This is one JUICY game. Booms and shakes and pewpews and that mind-bending parallax background. Beautiful.

It took me a long time to figure out exactly what the mind swapping mechanic actually did. For awhile, I was being chased by an aggressive triangle with a shield and I just couldn't do anything. Then I finally found the mind-bind station, which was unfortunately awkward to use. I tried playing with it for a long time, but it just didn't click until I happened to open the menu with the triangle peeking out from behind the menu and noticed its eyes disappear. And I understand there should be some sort of limitation or restriction to the central power, but making it a physical object that you have to click on felt unwieldy. Did you get to try a keybind for that? Or a pickup or something? 

I might not have known what I was doing for a long time, but it was still satisfying to feel all those big explosions. 

Well done JC! Keep making games! I look forward to what you make next :)

Hi Daniel! Good to see you again for the jam!

Congrats to the whole team for your jam game. I always forget just how short 48 hours can be, and there's a lot of polish to be seen here. Well done. 

The presentation is your game's strongest point, I think. The entire package feels complete and everything fits together well. The instructions and gameplay are clear. And the character/monster design is great, too. 

I think the weak point for me was the pacing and some of the interactions with the trainer. The build-up to the final battle felt a little too slow and I nearly quit early assuming it was going to be an endless arena brawler type thing. And some of the interactions felt like they were assessed too quickly. For example, if I received a command to Flame Dash and I moved at all, there was a chance to instantly fail the command. A similar thing happened when I was told to play dead and got hit by an enemy. 

But despite those little frustrations, everything else was enjoyable. The game controlled well, and the abilities felt good to use. The ultimate could have used a little more oomph, maybe. 

Overall, great job team. I look forward to more great games next year!

Congrats on finishing your game!

These sort of programming games don't quite land for me and I can't figure out why. I love the problem solving aspects, but a lot of the times I don't feel like there's the right amount of information. The handbook/rules thing here was way too much information upfront, but it seemed essential for figuring out how to even play the game. And not being able to page back through it was frustrating, especially when unlocking more pages. I wanted to trial and error thing, but the '?' blocks kept throwing me. Do those rules change every time? It felt like this game was asking the player to re-solve for the same problem every puzzle, instead of letting me build on previous knowledge to feel like I'm learning or progressing. 

The music in the menus was great, but the actual gameplay music was way too distracting. 

The art and presentation were nice though. The sketchbook vibe was a nice touch. The monochromatic display portions were  a little hard to figure out... I can't tell if I was missing important information or not. 

I feel like I'm being too harsh. This sort of puzzly game is really ambitious for a jam, and you clearly have a ton of content. Perhaps testing, refining, and making the learning curve easier to get into would have helped me stick with it more than the first two blocks. 

Keep making games!

Congrats on finishing your game!

Gorgeous art and presentation. This looks really nice overall. And the music was a nice fit without being overpowering or distracting. 

I couldn't get a hang of the controls though. The wall climb felt unreliable. I got to the screen the starts with a long drop onto a collapsing platform and could never make it past the spike walls reliably. Needing to press a button to latch on just didn't feel right and I wasn't given enough time to learn it before being thrown into the challenging platformer elements. And I had a frustrating bug that caused that first collapsible platform to not reset with the level. If you collapse it, then die to the spikes before it respawns, it appears that it's respawn timer is reset, too and so dropping down immediately will just land the player in the spikes. 

I wish I could have gotten to see more of the game, but I don't know that I can invest so much time to master the controls for a jam game. I don't think I got to see much of your theme, either. Unless you were relying on difficult controls to sell your theme lol

Still, congrats on making your game. I hope you're proud and that you keep making games!

darn that new input system! Gets me every time!

Oh? Maybe the frequency of adding new cards to your deck plus a low draw rate just means I didn't cycle through my deck fast enough to see units again. 

Thanks for the reply!

I see a fellow mini-game enjoyer! Nicely done! We nearly went the Wario Ware style micro-games route, too. Glad to see that path fully realized by someone else!

The breadth of games here is pretty good. You'll eventually see repeats, but only once you've gotten the hang of a few of them. I had a lot of difficulty figuring some of them out though. I like having the controls on screen between games would have helped adjust. I had the most problems with the following games:

Don't Shoot .. the messenger - I thought it was "Don't Shoot The Sheriff" so I kept failing and not really understanding what the guy in blue was. For those games, I assumed you had to shoot the unique one and the guy in blue looked like he was brandishing a sword at a glance. Also, WASD worked for all other games, but not this one. That was a little frustrating. 

An Apple A Day - It looks like tapping is the quickest way to win this? I failed a lot until I realized the arrow keys worked for the Don't Shoot game above. By tapping both A and left arrow, I won easily. But holding a single one, which was the intuitive solution, didn't work. 

Read Between - the case sensitivity on this is a killer. I realized afterward that your controls said case sensitive, but it still felt pretty bad to lose when I thought I had it figured. Plus, using arrow keys to move didn't feel great with being able to do most game with WASD. Unsure if there's a better solution though. Maybe the line slowly moves up/down on it's own?

By the end, I got a highscore of 24. Up from 1 on my first try lol. 

Congrats on finishing your game. Keep making games!

Congrats on finishing your jam game!

A visual feast! I loved all the fish and the little environmental hazards. The music was the right amount of arcade-y without being distracting or overwhelming. At the start, I was a little apprehensive that the indicator for the correct fish was too far off screen, but you did a really good thing to make those fish flash when they were about to change. That's a huge win for the design. 

On the flip side, I felt there were too many times where the fish type was a big one and there just weren't any on screen. Fish move so slowly that I mostly found myself sitting still and waiting which didn't feel great. Could you retheme the player as a shark or something and make them constantly move? That might add an extra element to keep the player engaged when they're dodging instead of scoring. 

I think I encountered a "bug" in which the target fish type changed to the same fish again. Not the end of the world, but something to look out for when changing between random results!

Overall, neat little game. I enjoyed my time with it! Keep making games!

Congrats on finishing your game!

I love the bears and the little worker character. The art is charming and the music reminds me of something that I can't quite put my finger on... 

The cooking/order taking genre fits really well with your theme/cliche choice, too. 

Walking from one place to another seems to be through arbitrarily huge spaces for no other reason than to make it "harder" to complete orders. Timing things out is a big component of this genre of game, but the slow movement, slow bees, slow walking bears, simple tasks, and even slower pace to fill the meter just left me wanting more. Busy like a bee makes me think of more frantic gameplay, but I felt I had seen everything I wanted to see after a few orders. 

Still - this is a pretty good game for a jam. The goal was pretty clear after a little bit of play, and the art is phenomenal. Keep working and learning and growing! And keep making games! 

Nicely done. 

This game was pretty challenging, which I'm guessing was your idea to play into the theme. It took me three tries before I got the hang of it and won. 

Card games are super tough to pull off. That set of randomness is a balancing nightmare that really wants time and lots and lots of playtesting to pull off. But it looks like you were able to make a nice dent in it. The biggest improvements I could see would be focused on clarity. You've already got a lengthy tutorial and it's easy to forget things that you don't actively learn through gameplay, but I know a gameplay tutorial/walkthrough is asking a lot for a jam game. Card clarity then, such as all unique art and maybe effects that indicate where cards are going when they die or are used might help. For example, I didn't realize that units never come back once they die - meaning you have to really save each one carefully. 

Tough game for sure. Well made considering the time we had to make stuff. Congrats on making your game. Keep making!