itch.io

I managed to find everything except the third scroll, 4 coins and I assume two hidden heart potions (assuming there's a total of 16 hearts

Pretty sure one of those heart potions is in a cow level, part a bunch of spikes - but I can't tell because it seems if you don't have a scroll, you can't select any scroll after it in the inventory, so I've been limited to nothing but double-jump for the whole game. But better than my first two attempts at playing it where I got the spike resistant scroll first... and the game still gave me the double-jump skill when it auto-equipped that scroll...

"Autocomplete" in this case is a bit fuzzy (the behaviour will be most familiar to people used to using command shells like Bash or Zsh, etc). Pressing <Tab> will show you all the possible completions from the letters you've already typed, completing it automatically if there is only one option. So when you press <Tab> without typing anything you''re getting all the possible commands. It's just unfortunate that the first two are "get" and "help", so hitting <Tab> makes it look like the output is "Get help...".

G, S, H, C, P,  R,  and W will each give you a couple of possible completions and need an extra letter before they are unique so they can autocomplete.

Huh, on my laptop it seems like I can drag using the touch screen, but can't drag using my track pad.

But I'll say while trying to figure out why I couldn't actually do the drag and drop, I was very grateful for the fact that pausing the game resets the enemy attack timer. ;)

The wire end points are interactive, the target points are apparently just incredibly finicky and inconsistent. With enough tries though, you might get it. But if you do, you later get the ability to repair lights by assembling a puzzle.

If you get to that point, I recommend not playing on a laptop. Not because the trackpad makes it harder to solve, but because it's a lot less tempting to throw a desktop across the room.

Dear dev: Not a bad game concept, but please fix the click/drop/whatever detection. In the headlight repair "minigame" the light might be the least broken thing.

Played about one and a half levels. I think it has potential, but the controls feel very slow and clunky to me, and the visual effect makes it very hard to read the hint text.

To the issue of the controls, it's somewhat painful to have to wait through the walking animation to press the next key, especially when it's the key you're already pressing. And with the walking speed being as slow as it is, that means waiting a full second (if I timed it right) after you press a key before another key will register. If you're even a little early, your press is ignored. This makes movement feel very slow and awkward, especially when you're going down a long hallway where all you're doing is pressing one key over and over every second for 10-15 seconds or so.

Once I figure out what all of that means, I'm going to really hate you, aren't I? 😂

Remain the ooze? You can be the ooze in the second branch? Is there a way to become the ooze after the portal that I just haven't made it to yet? Because if I become the ooze in the main story line I no longer have the option to go to the altar.

Thanks. I had thought a while back that the crane game might have been what I was missing - but for some reason every time I tried talking to the cow, he always just told me to let him know when I wanted to play, so I thought maybe I didn't have enough money.

I can't remember if I ever actually tried speaking to him twice in a row until just now when you reminded me of it.

I can tell I'm going to be facepalming a lot playing this if that's how I started lol

I feel like I'm being trolled, or I'm just missing something really obvious, as I've never even managed to find the key to the car. It's my weakest start to a game ever. I can usually at least solve the first puzzle/level lol Still the game has a certain... something to it. Charm might be the right word.

Level 2 needs a different approach to "breaking" the big guys. In level one, you broke out by "deleting" part of a leg with an orange block. Breaking a leg here won't work because you need every block, you can't afford to sacrifice any.

But you don't need to actually remove parts of the big guys to break them - you only have to make them look different than the small guy. The arms can be affected too.

Use that to line up the two big guys with the big guy with short arms to make the middle one a proper big guy so it can be moved.

You need to finish with all white squares containing an orange block, and no orange blocks left that aren't on white squares. You don't need to end with as many orange blocks as you started with.

Ugh... that level. Yeah, that one took me a while. I don't remember the exact positions of things right now without going back and replaying it, but the basic setup is that you need to position an orange block such that the first big guy you move can be "broken" by a white-on-orange in a position where its legs are blocking your ability to move a big guy into the stuck orange space (I believe the position you want is to place an orange block three spaces above the blocked orange block).

You then use the spare orange blocks to clear out only enough of the water to let you move the second big guy's arm into that space. If you positioned things right, , a leftover water block should remove one orange block when you do that, letting you free up the two blocks remaining from the second big guy so that you can move all the free blocks into position.

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or serious, but as I have a downvote, and you're a negative comment, I'll assume you're serious. So... here you go, step by step:

1. Move leftmost orange box right two or three spaces
2. Move the three orange boxes in the upper right section into a horizontal line one line above the white line.
3. Push the three orange boxes left until they are all sandwiched between the white targets and the three-unit black wall above, making the wall, boxes, targets and water resemble a large version of the player.
4. Move the now controllable massive "player" up and over onto the first orange block to open a path for the stuck blocks, destroying part of the leg (which will make the large player no longer controllable, returning control to the normal player.
5. Bring the previously stuck orange blocks up through the opening you created
6. Put all 5 orange blocks on the white spaces

I just tested this, so I know it still works. So if you were just trying to be funny and weren't the downvote, then I apologize if I offend by dumbing it down this far and missing the joke, and if it's still unclear to whoever downvoted, please let me know what still doesn't make sense so I can dumb it down further.

To everyone who is stuck on level one (and/or thinks level one is broken/impossible), it's doable. The problem is that the key mechanic of this game is non-obvious. I'm pretty sure I never would have figured it out at all without the hint from wellchan in the first conversation thread. If you need a clue, take a look at their post.

To the developer - while I appreciate a new mechanic in games like this, if the intent is for the player to discover the mechanic, you might have wanted to make it easier to run into accidentally, because I don't think it's easily guessable.

To anybody who needs to know the new core game mechanic, not just a hint, read on:

if you create an image of the player character using the blocks and environmental elements, that "avatar" becomes the character that you can move (with its own interactions with environmental objects and blocks.).

Interesting. I couldn't think of a food - I figured out all the rules, but had to find a list of foods of appropriate length and see which ones fit the other rules. Found one, but now I'm curious if there are multiple answers. At some point I might have to go through the entire list and see if any others fit.

I'll agree with almost everything you said, and also add that the jump seems incredibly flaky as well, as half the time you want to jump, it just doesn't seem to fire. Almost like the physics and the graphics don't agree when you're on the ground or there's a delay between hitting the ground and when you can jump, or... something. I never figured out the pattern - I just accepted that at least half the time I hit spacebar I was going to return to the checkpoint..

I think what might have worked against it was the rest of the similar "placards". There's a number of them around he game, and of course lots of them in the museum, and every one of those when you read them after solving, they just give you a bit of info about the thing that you just solved. So by the time I got to that last one in the museum, and spent a while solving it to see something fairly obvious on the wall, I never even considered that looking at the placard again would provide anything beyond "It's a diving mask", and maybe some commentary.

To be honest, I didn't even think to interact with the money bag the first time after I solved that puzzle because no solved puzzle I'd interacted with up to that point, with the exception of the teleport leaf (which I hit by chance), and the chest (which was obvious) had done anything beyond just providing some flavour text (and I don't even remember if the chest needed a second interaction, or if I got the shovel immediately upon solving it now - which means if I did need to interact with it a second time, that being a game mechanic didn't actually stick in my mind)

I was stuck in (I assume) the same place. I just figured it out. It's non-obvious, but sometimes you _really_ want to read the signs again after you finish the nonograms. (for example, if you "read" the money bag again after solving it, you actually get the money). In particular, there's one in the museum that gives you the item in the display, and it will help you get to things in "deep" water (like lakes, ponds and soup pots...)

I could be wrong, but it at least looks like the card game is kind of a combination of "rock-paper-scissors" and "high card wins". %WR is ... % win ratio/rate/something. The card with the strongest % after modifier wins, the modifiers are based on Aggro > Control > Combo > Aggro. But if that's the case, I'm not sure yet what determines how much each card is modified by.

A fun little puzzle platformer from a relatively simply mechanic. I spent maybe more time than I should have playing it just because I was trying to see how low I could get the ghost count. Finally managed 52, although I think there was a lot of luck involved.

I did find the ghost queueing mechanic a little awkward. If you use the arrow keys at the beginning of the level to try to plan ahead, and get one wrong (for example underestimating the height of a jump), you have to clear out everything after that one and redo it all, so I ended up often just adding a ghost or two at time so that I wouldn't waste time adding ghosts I was going to have to re-add later. This obviously wasn't a problem with the early levels, but a couple of the later ones.

And if a "soft goal" is trying to get the lowest ghost count possible, then a level retry might be nice. I found sometimes I thought I would need an extra ghost, and then managed to reach the exit early, and it would have been nice to be able to go back and figure it out without beating the game again.

Level 2 was kind of annoying because hitting the bats is entirely unforgiving - you bounce out, completely lose whatever alignment you were aiming for, have no real choice but to back right off and try again, at which point you're done because there's no time to try again and make it to the end.

But I'm glad I stuck it out, because getting hit by the lava in level 3 was absolutely worth it and completely unexpected😆

I wouldn't have used mouse click to skip text though. Nothing else needs the mouse in the game, and you can't jump when there is text, so I would have just used the spacebar for skipping text as well - one fewer controls to worry about, no need to reach for the mouse.

I think you might have an "=" when you mean to have a "+=" or something, since buying a wrench actually sets the click power to 5 rather than adding 5 to it. The rest of the options add, so I'm assuming that's a bug.

Oh, lol. I must have been tired when I did that level. I spent so long trying to figure out how to get a gravity block through that barrier that I didn't even recognize the Microban level 1 sitting right there in the "end game" (I'd forgotten Microban, but I've seen that as "level one" in almost every variation...)

I did appreciate the Sound Of Silence parody though. That was well done.

Lines 3-6 take on so much more meaning now too, that I realize I have to rediscover the solution to it every. single. time. 😅

Yeah, this one took me a bit as well - just solved it though.

That being said, obviously some spoilers follow.

So if you're reading this and still want to solve it by yourself you want to stop reading now.

Really... I mean it..

Alright, that's enough warnings...

In that screenshot you're exactly where you need to be. Push the left block up one, push the right block around to bring the right block up one space. Then it's basically solved.

I'm going to chime in here on the controls as well. I agree the arrow keys should have been an option, but there's a more subtle issue with the controls. The hand/hands (depending on how you play it) have mixed "responsibilities" that make it more awkward than it should be to coordinate. With the WASD/E/Space controls you're either using one hand, where that one hand is doing _everything_, or you're using two hands where one hand is handling movement and switch, and the other hand is managing (optionally) jump and place. I'd have to go read the research in more detail, but I believe this adds cognitive overhead to the control scheme. Also, by doing this it means the "movement" hand has to keep moving off the movement keys (occasionally needing to reach the "switch" key). There's not a lot of inputs required for this game, so it would be easier to be able to leave one hand on "movement" and one hand on "actions". Less travel, and less effort trying to make one hand manage different types of actions.

But other than getting me tripping over my own fingers trying to coordinate the place/switch/jump chains (and often failing by hitting the wrong button at the wrong time), so far so good!

I just came back after giving it a break for the weekend to see if I could shave a few more seconds off... I'm out lol.

21:28? My best for even getting out of the first stage is a hair over 6 seconds. And someone else shaved my whole stage 1 (and a bit more) off your best time?

There seems to be some timing with the dash that builds up extra speed, I'm guessing you and the current leader figured out some timing I just can't hit that gives MASSIVE speed boosts/longer dashes.

We are well outside my limited speedrunning abilities now 😆 

Oh, it's on now - not because I need to be first, but because I really really want to figure out how you managed to shave nearly 7 seconds off my best time. It doesn't even seem possible. I figured I was maybe off the best possible time by a couple seconds given how smooth that run was.

Possibly me, but when I went to check the leaderboard it came up first as no names, with 99:99:99 times in the top 5. Then when I refreshed, it came up as empty. I hope I didn't break the leaderboard somehow. It doesn't load on two different computers now. (it was fine before I hit my 59:64 time)

Edit: Seems to be fixed now, not sure what happened to it before. I'll keep the broken screenshot here anyway, just in case the bug report is useful.

I'll confirm this. I haven't beaten the game yet, but I have all of the blackjack upgrades purchased up to and including the last extra deck removal and the spy (I forget which one came first). But I'm down to one deck, spying on the dealer, counting cards, and have one or two (I forget) winnings upgrades...

Win rate is sitting at 43%. Tracking 100 games manually I see a win rate of around 46%, so 43% overall win rate seems feasible. Blackjack returns - almost stable, but that "almost" is definitely a loss. I very briefly made money off it at some point, and it quickly went back down into the negatives and just keeps on going

It's fun and relaxing until it crashes. And so far in my experience, it always crashes. After a little while of playing, it just inevitably freezes.

If it helps, the partial console log when it freezes is:

Uncaught RuntimeError: null function or function signature mismatch    Pixel Game Jam 2024 (Aqua Theme).js:84

    at 0883753a:0x336099
    at 0883753a:0x251d71
    at 0883753a:0x33d8cf
    at 0883753a:0x3395d1
    at 0883753a:0x336099
    at 0883753a:0x251d71
    at 0883753a:0x33d8cf
    at 0883753a:0x1f90d0
    at 0883753a:0x9cd977
    at 0883753a:0x1089d93

I can get the full log if necessary, but at a glance the stack mostly looks like a recursive animation frame/main-loop scheduler call chain.

I've enjoyed most of these games (I think the one with the undo mechanic is the only one I haven't beaten yet), and as a programmer, the idea of this one appeals to me. I am struggling to work out some of the controls though, and part it it might be what I think is a right-click-and-drag? That's a simple sounding interaction that's surprisingly awkward to perform on some laptops.

Yup, that worked. But like XxxDemon_hunterXxx, I don't think I would have gotten that ever without the hint. The door code being six digits long makes it look like the answer could potentially be six digits, which obscures the solution. Even if the door code were only three digits (i.e. without the extraneous leading zeroes), I'm not sure it would have been obvious. It didn't occur to me to try counting the statues in groups of hundreds-tens-ones. I wasn't even sure if those were the statues I should be working with since I couldn't even interact with them, meanwhile there were a few "lifelike" statues I could interact with that seemed like they might be important (the only clue they might not matter here was the broken bust tablet).

I'm not sure what you can do to make it more obvious, but I'll be curious how many people get it before they read the hint.

Not bad. The concept works. The puzzles are relatively straightforward so it does feel a bit more like a race than a puzzle - but you realized that and noted it in the description.

One small problem is with the controls as the pace picks up. On a laptop trying to do fast and precise mouse movement on a trackpad is tricky. It gets a little bit harder with the sole use of WASD for movement instead of arrow keys, because some laptops temporarily disable the touchpad when most keys are pressed to prevent accidentally moving the cursor while typing. My laptop for example has a nearly one second delay between pressing any letter/number/space and being able to move or click the trackpad.

Not too bad - the jerky camera motion though made it very difficult to control sometimes, and hard to look at.

And speaking of hard to look at - that seizure warning, yeah, that's necessary. But the reason for it - completely unnecessary. All that flashing didn't add anything to the game in my opinion except additional eye strain.

That one took me several tries to figure out. There's a single full row that you can make that involves only pushable blocks (no walls). Once you've done that, the rest basically falls into place.

Gave it a quick play - beat the main quest, haven't beaten the bonus dungeon yet. I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes. I see potential, if it's the kind of game I think it is. But since you asked for feedback (yes it looks long, but only because I'm trying to be thorough why I think a couple things were issues, in the hope it's more useful than merely pointing out the issues):

The puzzles don't seem very difficult. This isn't necessarily a problem, in part it depends on what the gameplay is meant to be. I definitely get some "Zelda" hints from this (especially with the pixel art - has a nice retro feel to it), so focusing on exploration over hard puzzles isn't a bad thing. (also, having grown up on games like Zelda, Secret of Mana, etc my idea of what is a hard puzzle in such a game might be skewed). So I don't think it would hurt to be more challenging, but I also don't know that it needs to be.

I got a little lost at first going through the the first dungeon. In the end it was just because I didn't notice the water rise to let me make the crate bridge. I don't know if it just wasn't obvious to me though, or if I stumbled across a bug, since when I came back later and tried again I noticed it right away.

The main issues I had were the controls. I'll toss arrow keys out as just a personal preference when controlling games like this, so WASD + JK/etc feels a bit weird to me - but again, preference. At least you didn't use the mouse for attacking, so thank you for that. But I did find it to be awkward switching weapons/tools. K wouldn't always switch (I believe it was when I was in pushing distance of a block, the ready-to-push overrides the equipment switch, so when I wanted to change to the torch near some crates for example, I had to realize I needed to step back first). Also found myself accidentally changing the tool by hitting K in the middle of encounters, so don't think I'm sold on the "tool switch" interface. (I have a few other thoughts on inputs as well - although it starts to wander into HCI theory, and the comment section might not be where I want to write a UI dissertation right now 😅)

When I first picked up the torch and it asked if I wanted to equip it, I found that a bit annoying, and I didn't want to use it right then, so I said no - only to find out later that I needed to equip it in order to be able to switch to it. Later, when I got the umbrella I said "yes" to equipping it so I wouldn't have to later... only to find that unequipped my weapon because there's only 4 equip slots. This feels a little awkward, since there's kind of two levels of inventory management - one to decide which items are "usable" and one to decide which of the usable items you're using. I don't know how else the inventory is used, but I don't think I'm sold on that part of it at least. But I'm not sure I have a suggestion - depends on how much tool switching is necessary, and what else the inventory does what UI will make that cleaner.

I quite enjoyed how so many random pieces of the environment could be played with - lights, fans, ovens, etc turned on and off - it's not really necessary, but it's a kind of cute little bit of "flavour", but I did find having to interact with doors and ladders to use them a little bit awkward - in part because I'm not sure I remember playing too many games where you had to interact with ladders, but also because since you've got an interaction "target" you sometimes have to move around a bit before it targets the ladder or door. You might want to make "use" preferentially target things that can actually be interacted with in front of you, even if they're a little bit "outside" the default target zone (then you might not even need the visible target marker).

Looking forward to seeing the boss in the beta build!

It's not just the double-jump that's inconsistent - the normal jump was too in my experience. I found the maximum jump height seemed different every time I held down the space bar.