itch.io

This is a pretty chill, zen experience, thanks! Also, I like the options for adding my own images and for getting access to a daily selection. Game page is clean and your logo looks great on the loading page. Nice to come back to it!

Good Halloween fun! Maybe add some spooky music next :)

True, my bad. Used effectively tho.

The tension of the icy obbligato over low welling tones and the gradual intrusion of the bell motif set up the drop beautifully. You draw from a wide palette of sounds, and I enjoyed gnashing through the modulations around 1:33-1:43.

This starts with some banger classic organ emanating from the depths of an evil wizard’s mansion and then swings organically into tribal bravado rhythm as he enters the house rave, robe swinging. I hope you plan on finishing this!

To me this music teetered between utterly relaxed abandonment and gnawing anxiety. I enjoyed the tension between the smooth flow of chill instrumentation and the jerky random reception as if a dial were being twiddled and throwing me from one perception to another. The game description matched this cleverly with its uncertain progression and existential doubt. I would like to wander in your art. I would be hard put to connect it to the theme, but I’m really glad to have experienced it and am sure I’ll play it again, probably next time I transubstantiate.

I’ve actually never heard error pings used to such musical effect. I think you have a real talent for hijacking ambient sound musically and committing cacophonic mixing.

This has all the power and drive I’ve come to expect from Alpha. Your trance-inducing beats are rich and smooth and your variations are subtle but pronounced. It’s a good night for a crackling storm.

To me this music teetered between utterly relaxed abandonment and gnawing anxiety. I enjoyed the tension between the smooth flow of chill instrumentation and the jerky random reception as if a dial were being twiddled and throwing me from one perception to another. The game description matched this cleverly with its uncertain progression and existential doubt. I would like to wander in your art. I would be hard put to connect it to the theme, but I’m really glad to have experienced it and am sure I’ll play it again, probably next time I transubstantiate.

why, thank you

Damn, you got right to the point. Flashy femto-riff!

This is you, right? https://www.vientoverse.com/

Because Itch does not have a very good search function, I can't find SpectralAudio, but I'd like to follow them too. Could you post the link here?

super vibe, thanks!

Lots of offbeat fun! Would be good to have some general game info on the game page, including song info (is it by you or a team mate or another source?)

Good idea - note animation would have been a relatively simple way to spice it up visually! Smoother movement would be a good way for me to learn something :) Thanks!

Always remember that taking the time to critique something is a compliment in itself :)

Also can't wait for your rhythm game.

Since you varied the speed of the music, the fact that it was repetitive was less irritating and almost steadying. Cool bit of adaptive coding. The art also fits the game well. I will assume that the various upgrades provide the concoction element to the game? For my feeling, the enemies are a bit op and the upgrades underwhelming, but the interplay between movement options and the various upgrades and trying to figure that out does provide a satisfying game experience in the end. The fast pace and quick reload mean it’s fun to keep playing and motivating to get better. Nice!

Thank you for squeezing this one in. I love them bad apples.

This is a cool idea, and awesome that you got it to work. I do see that there are other versions of this in existence (invisible cow from 2013), also on Scratch (cow, cat). If there are any other projects or assets (code, art, sound) you used for inspiration or know-how, your game page is a good place to give credit, provide links and explain what new directions you took the project in or what your challenges were in recreating something. Keep track of your sources while you work and leave time to document them before you submit. Everyone builds on libraries, game engines and pre-existing code, and it builds stronger and faster communities to recognize and credit this where possible.

Another thing that would be helpful is if you explain the connection to the theme. I would like to see how you connected this to the idea of concoction because it is not obvious to me. Your game page is a great chance to explain to others what you were going for.

I liked how you structured the devlog and comments. Providing documentation and requesting feedback are excellent habits to have as you move forward developing games or anything, really. Thanks for submitting!

Yeah, I think renpy and twine are better for VNs and interactive fiction, but good job experimenting. Scratch is cool if you want to program a greater variety of actions and still make your own art and sound. It really does a good job of giving one person the ability to create many types of things relatively easily.

I want to know too!!

These are very good suggestions from FayeDamara. The atmosphere was really creepy- art and sound combined so well!  Although there is a witch, though, I don't really see a concoction involved.

First of all, great idea and fabulous use of the theme. I would also include the instruction to HOLD DOWN space because I thought I was casting spells, but it was only the little pre-spell, which didn’t waste any enemies. Also at first I thought I was selecting the colors and didn’t realize I had to adjust the levels of the selected colors before space bar mixed them all. (Maybe ‘Use left and right arrows to select a vial and up and down arrows to adjust the amount of the vial that goes into the potion. Hold down the space bar to mix and cast the potion.’) I think I was too focused on remembering what colors did what (and I’m not sure I got the correct cool/warm associations). It’s fun that enemies can heal too if you aren’t careful. Very sophisticated use of such a small playing field.

Good job on the music and image. If you are going for interactive fiction, you can definitely go further with it. Even if you have the next pages as just solid color with text, you can use Scratch code to set up a story structure and make it interactive. You can always start with unpolished text and refine it after you've got the basic outline. You can learn a lot by trying it out and seeing what happens!

I really enjoy the mapping of this game and find it well-balanced in terms of umbrella distribution and the gradual difficulty of finding and accessing the umbrellas. It is also well-designed in that it has some challenges you can recoup and others that you can miss and must restart for. Generally, I would prefer if the ones I miss are a pure question of skill instead of lack of familiarity with the terrain, but at any rate it’s a question of discovery, which is fun. I found the tolerances were very tight. When combined with some coyote jumping, this made for a few unnatural feeling challenges, but I’m sure that is just a question of tweaking, and I enjoyed the challenges in their scope. I appreciated that I could play with the controller but also found that the keyboard weathered the tight tolerances better, although that could be a skill issue 80. I don’t gravitate towards timed challenges, but the timer made sense and was coherent with the scope of the game. Likewise, I found the music significantly more stressful than the friendly hippo vibe, but it did fit the timed challenge environment. The artwork was very cute, but maybe an impending storm would make more sense and match the urgency of the task of collecting 15 umbrellas. The blue skies and cute characters lull us into a false sense of security – to our own detriment! Seriously – good job on a fun game :)

So I think I had picked up:

Sludge, roach, caterpillar, tissue box, toast, shard? I think I had swapped the roach for the beak and made the sludge beak potion. But it also seemed like I had picked up more than one of each ingredient all of a sudden even though I put some in the cauldron. Maybe too much clicking?

Thanks for your invaluable feedback.

Yeah, sorry about the wind. It was a late night Scratch fix after bandlab kept crashing and I just needed one sound. Probably would have helped to move further back from the mike, but looking things up is a good idea.

I thought it would be interesting to give the player some control over which sound was played but leave a randomness to when the sounds were played so that different soundscapes were formed organically over time. For me it’s interesting to hear things blend and change in sort of a sound generator (like throwing sound into a boiling pot), but I appreciate that others might be less into that. I should probably inject more silence into the recordings to cut down on some of the cacophony. It was principally a programing project, and I am pleased that I managed to program what I wanted to do without too much trouble while having fun. What you propose could be an interesting further programming challenge, sort of building a Scratch synthesizer instrument.

Thanks for taking the time to play it and share your insights!😊

Certainly, Maestro.

This game is a ton of fun for those who enjoy puzzles and exploration. I think you’ve done an amazing job, and the concepts, variety of blocks, mechanics and puzzles are well thought out. I struggled a bit with the visuals. The text all looks nice and matches the atmosphere, but it is quite hard to read (and there is a lot). This starts with the opening screen, where I thought the ‘Z’ was a mouse symbol or something (I think it was smaller text the first time I looked) 

I also tried to test the controls (arrows and WASD) while reading the tutorials, but I had to z/skip my way to the end of the text before I could test movement. Since this happens every time we start the game, it would also be good to have the tut accessed optionally with a keystroke. My preference would be to have the controls (z, x, arrows/wasd) explained quickly and prominently and then to discover the mechanics by myself because that is part of the fun. Normally I would just experiment around recklessly, but I will say the lack of a save feature made me more cautious about exploring the mechanics. ‘X’ing my way back was time consuming, as was restarting. But I mean, those are just details. They probably would keep some people from playing far, though, since gamers are an unforgiving bunch.

*visually I would make the text more readable and optional for the longer bits (good job putting the recipes down on the game page, they could eventually be part of the inventory)

*visually some sprites are hard to recognize (tissue, shard)

*for a game this long and complex, you need either a save or some sort of level save so you don’t have to go to the beginning

*music was cool but repetitive, so I turned it off after a bit

After clearing 7 rooms, something weird happened with my inventory (some things doubled and others disappeared, and one item shifted to behind some text). I was in the process of investigating whether it still worked when Lemmy froze and I couldn’t proceed. I probably need to be more careful with inventory next time. I tried giving random stuff to characters to see what happened.

I think you did a creative job with the story, and you did a great job of embodying the jam theme! That said, I cared much less about Lenny’s paramours than I did the puzzles, so you might want to condense the story text. It is a good framework story, but in the end, it is important that the items, uses and potions are very clear, not what kind of characters Sam and Bart are. The bottom line is: Lenny is rejected, will he have a healthy or unhealthy reaction? We can understand that without much explanation, and because it’s a game, it can be fun to explore both reactions. I would say this game story is largely symbolic at this point and the puzzles are the core fun, so you should keep the text minimal. Later on, you could probably envision a version where the puzzles involve elements of psychological healing etc, and for that you could use longer texts, but I think I’d fix any save and bug issues before embarking on something like that.

Anyway, I took the time to put all this down because I think it is really worth tweaking some of the elements to enhance what is already a quality game experience!!

Set to public before you save

Itch can take some getting used to. It's very open source but very indie friendly. Just send me the project link once you have it, and I will send you a link to add it to the jam submissions.

If anyone is getting stuck on the submission part, let me know so I can help by sending a specific link. I know it can be confusing the first time, for instance.

If you are on Discord, you can contact me on the server or dms https://discord.gg/FADSj49eSB

Can I help with something?

I'm really vibing with the music and cauldrons, but I'm not sure what controls I need to proceed and get ingredients. Could you let me know?

I will play the game of anyone who uses the expression "to no avail". It seems cool, but the robots are so much faster! Aargh! My playing is to no avail!

That's great!

I liked how you structured the devlog and comments.

On your game page, it would be useful for others if you mentioned you used turbo warp packager (or other tools). Also, if there are any other projects or assets you used for inspiration, your game page is a good place to give them credit and provide links.

Thanks for submitting!

Htmlifier https://sheeptester.github.io/htmlifier/ Htmlifier is a tool for turning your scratch file into html so you can submit your project on itch.io jam site.

Turbowarp https://extensions.turbowarp.org/ Turbo warp is a third party website that lets you make scratch projects with a couple small additions like a right click detector and lets you compile it into JavaScript and HTML. Turbowarp also lets you bypass many Scratch requirements like the small screen size, some arbitrary limits, and compiles into JavaScript while editing for faster running games.

If you need help with the jam site itch.io, you can check out our guides for jams:

MAKING AN ITCH.IO ACCOUNT AND JOINING A GAME JAM https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VLvVqafAhBlQw9-pAQtu1wWyJ90H95ACjBbVVPDMeVM/edit?usp=sharing

CREATING AND SUBMITTING A JAM PROJECT ON ITCH.IO https://docs.google.com/document/d/19L39WJHUswKnlN8T__dpEUfjcwaixN6bMqVgS8ABK9k/edit?usp=sharing

https://discord.gg/FADSj49eSB