itch.io

Unless I'm missing something, there isn't really any reason to choose one emergency vehicle over another, is there?  So the challenge is just noticing when a type of vehicle that you need becomes available.

My first time playing I ended up doing so well that I wasn't sure it was ever going to end (it seemed like it was always giving me situations that were possible, though maybe I was just getting lucky; or is there an ending?) and I gave up, which is a thing I've noticed in the past as a possible issue with endless games (which is why I put a limit in one mode of my own game).

The last couple puzzles took some thinking for me, but I figured them out!  …and then kept accidentally blowing myself up because I wasn't paying enough attention.

I feel like at least for me it's kind of hard to tell what happened when I try to attack.  Maybe I'm just not used to the genre, so I have to make an effort to look at the health and the place at the bottom that says what happened (which doesn't seem to automatically scroll down so I have to scroll it myself), but also I notice there isn't really an animation or sound effect for getting hit, just for attacking.  (I think Pokémon has a different sound effect when you do a super effective attack, so something like that might be helpful.)

Are Weak Skeletons supposed to be groups of enemies?  When I've encountered them it says the enemy is killed and then the skeleton's health goes back up again.  I thought at first maybe the game had glitched and I was stuck.

My first attempt failed when I encountered a Soldier Skeleton with -4 health and then the game showed an error when I tried to attack, and later I somehow encountered a Demon Lord near where you spawn after running out of health, which also caused an error.

I liked the sound effects!

This might just be some sort of compatibility issue with my computer (especially since it looks okay in the GIF on the left here), but it seemed like the highlight on the items you're pointing to isn't quite long enough and the tip of the mouse cursor isn't quite what's being clicked.

Am I missing something, or is it mostly luck based?

Is the left side of the handbook supposed to be cut off?  (It's the same full screen and not full screen for me.  Screen resolution 1280×800, so that would be an 8:5 aspect ratio.)  I can't read it well, and can't turn the page back once I've turned the page.  I did eventually figure out enough to win.

Ooh, shiny!

Camera controls seem to be locked to one axis (unless I'm missing something or something's not working right), which feels kind of bad and means that I can't see the entire level at once even on the earlier levels.  It would be nice to actually be able to see more at once.

Interesting idea, and after the 2022 jam (theme: roll of the dice, so there were a lot of games kind of similar to this, though this particular take on the idea is still new to me) I kind of have some feel for how to do this sort of thing.  Early on, I did try to work out ahead of time how I should move, but then realized that just sort of following what the level seemed to be hinting at and/or trial-and-error would work, and then the last level seemed particularly hard and I had to use the hint system and some trial and error.

Undo doesn't seem to work with the arrow spaces in the last level.

There's a number counting down in the top-left, and the polyomino gets closer to the board each time it counts down.  (…although there isn't a hint on the one-tile polyomino since it's just there for one time unit)

I feel like there's some strategic decisions here that I don't feel like I'm good at making.  Pellet shooters are additive, speed-up is multiplicative, fire converters are multiplicative (but random), and then you need to collect them but you don't want to collect them too fast because then the fire converters won't have a chance to multiply the pellets, so are ice and gravity and the automatic collection actually worthwhile?  Seems like I wouldn't want too many of those, at least.

Maybe there's feedback that's missing?  I can't tell what the yellow pellets do (are they just worth more?), I can't tell if pellets from bigger loops are worth more, I don't know what exactly is happening in smaller loops.  Or maybe I'm just not familiar enough with the genre (seems cookie clicker-ish, which I don't think I've played anything from that genre).  Or I just need to play more times.

I don't really know what's a good score.  (I guess if the middle circle is smiling?  I somehow completely didn't notice that the first time I played.)  Looks like my first time I got 102, then 40, then 120, then 477 (I was trying to lose that time to see how high a score I'd get), then 144.  I'd consider myself at least fairly goodish at understanding RGB.

It sometimes feels like the colors change more suddenly than I expect (though maybe that's just how RGB works), and that maybe the color sometimes lags behind the sliders or something, though I'm not sure if I'm just imagining it.

I'm not good at Rubik's cubes!  I seem to remember there being a previous theme where that came up a lot (maybe it was the roles reversed one?), and it's still true now.

Anyhow, it's a neat concept, but some of the thing don't look enough like their symbol on the left for me to be able to tell what they are, and it was not obvious the first time I played that I could right-click drag to rotate the whole cube.  It also sometimes seems to twist in a different direction than I intended.

"Hey chridd why don't you have a job yet?"

My inclination for most of the game my first time was just to reject everything.  The poor aren't getting fed, but at least I'm not making things worse.

I kind of expected approving getting rid of the suggestion box to have me laid off immediately but it didn't (I guess what I'm approving is different from the suggestion box?).  None of my choices seem to have consequences I can see besides a couple numbers going up or down… but I guess that's the point.  The company just wants me to think of genocide as an abstract thing that earns 100 moneys.

*sees the final "carrot" cutting scene* *tries to click everywhere else, hoping it will do something*

Trappy bird!  (…I hope that doesn't mean anything bad, I was just making a play on words with the name and flappy bird.)

I got a high score of 17 so far.  Also it looks like the top of the left wall doesn't have collision; that's how I lost when I got 16 the first time.

I've played Mancala before, but it was a long time ago and I was much younger and I'm not sure I figured out/understood the strategy for it.  Nevertheless, I somehow won.

I feel like there's a lot of text to read up front (rather than something more tutorial-like), and no way to refer back to it once I actually started playing.  Clicking on the cards to see what they do is helpful, but it wasn't clear at first that that's how that worked (I expected clicking on a card to play it immediately), and it doesn't tell you about the cards the computer uses or the other rules.  Also maybe some things would be a bit clearer if there were animation for the stones moving.  (And I can click on the deck and discard pile but I'm not sure if it ever does anything.  I guess you draw back to a full hand of three at some point automatically but I can't find anywhere in the rules that explains that.)  (That said, I was able to figure out enough what was going on to win, although there was one time when it looked to me like the computer just didn't make a move and I wasn't sure what was going on there.  It's possible it did and I just had forgotten what the board state was before.)

Aside from the lack of animation, though, the graphics, while simple, do look good and the music is good.

Yes, the entire thing is in JavaScript, with very little third-party code (although I've been pretty much building my own framework, sort of, over the years, since I've been doing it this way since the year of the first GMTK jam).  The graphics and sound are also in JavaScript (a bunch of calls to the Canvas and Web Audio APIs), which the music as a big string literal in a format I came up with.

I actually did consider at the beginning having a part that takes place in outer spac—

Oh.  You meant space bar.  Controls are rebindable in the options menu.

High score so far: 186.  A rhythm game where you can choose the rhythm!

At first I was just failing every attempt at watering no matter what, but also it had really bad framerate issues.  Zooming out in my browser seems to have fixed both of those problems.

The art and concept are good, but I just can't get the hang of aiming, and just kind of gave up partway through trying to get anything more than one star.  (That said, I've also made a game involving orbital mechanics (My Very Educated Moths, for a different jam), and had a hard time getting good at my own game.  Maybe it's just hard.)  At least they seem to lock in to the correct orbit if I get close enough.

Trying to think what could help... you could show what the trajectory would be as you're aiming, but then that might make it too easy... but maybe if you showed the trajectory on the first level (so I could get the hang of it) or showed the beginning of the trajectory or something...

Now I'm curious what games have up/W for jump.

Something I'm bad at in real life and the game!  Although in real life I don't even try.

(Is this what people who care about popularity do all the time?  Match messages with other messages?)

As I mentioned in another comment, you can change the controls, but also most platformers I've played don't have up=jump (e.g. Mario, Sonic).

Baa!

It was cute, nice concept, but something about the physics or controls or something felt a bit off.  Maybe it's that I can slip off the corners of things... (maybe I'm just not used to platformers built with general-purpose physics engines?).  Also it seems like sometimes the mushrooms bounce me higher but I'm not sure why/how to make it happen intentionally (I tried timing the jump button, I tried holding the jump button).

(It's also entirely possible that some of the physics-feeling-off came from me having a decade-old laptop with an integrated GPU...)

Aside from that... cute!

Wait, how did you get stuck on that level?

Were you trying to jump between the tracks to get everything?  You don't need to do that.  The title of the level is accurate; there's only one place you need to jump after you get the clock.

Hint on "duck want up": You do need to go through the level twice to get enough speed.

(Not sure if this is helpful because I'm not sure what exactly you've done.)

If you mean the different pitches for the sound effects, each part of the music has a different chord note assigned to it and that note is used to determine the pitch the sound effect is played at.  (This is a thing I've also used in a previous game, though it's more noticeable here due to sound effects playing more often.)

All the audio is synthesized during the game, and I wrote the code to do that (a lot of that code is part of the "non-game-specific stuff I copied from other games", and ultimately it uses JavaScript's Web Audio API), so I can make the format that I made to store the music have a way to specify a chord note.  When the code reaches that point in the tune, it stores the frequency of that note in a variable.  The sound effects are entirely made using code, so they can calculate the frequency to use based on that variable.

It would also be possible to do this with sampled audio; you'd need some way to store a list of time ranges and which chords they go with (e.g. 0-1 second, C major; 1-1.5 seconds, G major; etc.) and then either choose different sound effects or change the pitch of the sound effect based on the current chord.  There might be tools to make that easier; I don't know, since I haven't really looked into it.

There are also specific points specified where tunes change to other tunes.  There's a four-bar intro at the beginning, which loops until you touch a platform for the first time, and then when you win it switches to the ending theme, and both of those wait until the end of a phrase.

"The music could get an upgrade" What exactly do you mean by that?

"I  think it could have been fun to launch yourself out of the water by holding jump" That was a mechanic I considered but ended up not implementing.  (I was originally planning on having more of the game take place in the water, and sort of stopped working on the water mechanics when I decided not to do that.)

Controls are remappable (although up for jump does prevent up from working in the menus... maybe that's something I should look into changing in the post-jam version).  But my experience has been that usually platformers have jump on the opposite hand from movement (thinking e.g. Mario, Sonic, Mega Man, etc.), and Z for jump is consistent with the computer platforms I've played (e.g. Freedom Planet, and I think Celeste's default control scheme is around that same area of the keyboard) which is why I chose that.

"Your time is: 15:11:69".

I like the lighting.  Switch doors seem to be vibrating for me.  I didn't encounter any out-of-bounds glitches until I got to the results screen.

Since the character is a random color each life, does that mean that if they die, they don't come back and instead someone else comes and completes the level instead?

I don't think I'll be able to finish this before the end of the voting period (I got stuck on a screen last time I played, and also I should get some sleep soon), but here are some thoughts so far:

• I like the artstyle
• One of the rooms had a full-screen flicker which I didn't like as much (also for some people might cause seizures?)
• Physics seem janky (like I get caught on random things)
• Every time I click a button I have to then click outside the buttons, otherwise the game interprets space bar as both pressing a button and jumping.
• Main mechanic seems interesting (like you're taking size from the blocks... except it seems you can enlarge yourself from a block that's already at minimum size)

Puzzles are good, physics feels like it has some issues.

(If I'm understanding this right, if there's a ledge that's shallow enough for you to walk up/down, then the game lets you move perpendicular to the ledge but not along it, one consequence of which is that you can't go up stairs if you're not centered, since the side of the stairs is a ledge.  For the case of trying to go up the side of stairs, maybe automatically moving the player completely onto the stairs would work better.  But also I notice the yellow blocks move on a grid, so I wonder how it would feel if the player also moved on a grid.)

I needed two pointing devices to play this game, since I don't think my laptop touchpad will let me do what the game is asking me, and also my external mouse's scroll wheel is broken.

I think I caused a paradox of some sort at the end there.

Interesting idea, I like it (and in 8 hours!  I was worried about whether I could get mine done in 96 this year.).

When I was playing it, I sometimes found myself wishing that there was a way to see what the actual differences were on a floor after I got it wrong (like, what did I miss?).  (Maybe; I don't know whether that would make it too easy.)

Cute game!

Watch out, little mouse (or big mouse), I think I saw some cats in some of those windows!

I feel like this comment needs a cheesy pun, but I'm havarting a hard thinking of one.  Maybrie one will come to me.

I like the art!  It's cute!

The collection part just seemed like "oh, whoops, you didn't get enough flowers, which you didn't know ahead of time, I guess there's nothing you can do now"… although at some point I started learning what items were popular to ask for a lot of and prioritized those, and things seemed to work out.

*sees the name* A typing game… wonder how it deals with Dvorak.  *tries it* Looks like it interprets all my keypresses as QWERTY.  Well, at least I can blame all the times I pressed the wrong key on not being used to QWERTY!

I like this game but I feel like something's not clear about the lose condition.  Apparently it's when the fire meter gets to zero, but most of the time I'm not looking up there, so it just seems like I randomly lost (and/or is it when too many cars are waiting?).  (And I'm not sure why it goes down; it says something about "stalls" in the description, but does that mean when a car isn't moving, or when they're told to move but can't, or what?)

I like the idea, but it felt like there was a lot going on at first (though I think I eventually sort of got the hang of it).  Some issues:

• It wasn't clear at first (until I lost that game and read the description) that you had to go back to the optical sensors to re-target (I thought it was just a one-time thing to make the outside visible), and kept clicking trying to target stuff and the robot kept walking back and forth.  Also there was at least one time when it scrolled to make something else visible right as I was clicking and I clicked the wrong thing.

• Sometimes missiles just wouldn't launch even though the electron was shaking and the bar by the missile factory seemed to be full; not sure if there's some additional requirement that I'm missing or a bug.  (Also, maybe more feedback of why a thing isn't working would be helpful?  I also tried the EMP once and it didn't seem to do anything.)

• The game kept freezing for a few seconds for me; not sure if that's an issue with the game or with my 10+-year-old computer with multiple other browser windows open.

• Minor thing, but I wish I could use the arrow keys to go through the black lines on the circuit board (to the different sections).

(I just saw another game with the exact same issue which had the same loading bar, so I guess it's probably an issue with a game engine and maybe not something you can do anything about.)

If you're having trouble getting onto that scale, there's another comment on this page that has a hint about that.

I don't have a very good sense of scale or artistic ability.  (I'm actually kind of surprised I did as well as I did.)

(Also, it seems on my laptop, using touchpad taps on the buttons in the game (finish, zoom, etc.) often don't register.  I'm guessing maybe some issue with the clicks being too short?)

I felt like the mana system wasn't really explained well in game; I was confused about why I sometimes couldn't do something (and didn't know what the thing about "move [x mana]" meant; I think that might have been a bit clearer if it was instead "move [1 mana per space]" or something) until I actually looked down at the description.  There also seems to be a bug where if you click a spell to deselect it, the button will still appear selected.

I basically solved the first torch level pretty much by accident, and I don't know how I did it.  (It's also not really clear to me what exact parts of the room are dark; I don't remember it looking different than the other levels where Donkus could see.)