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And I thought the horror games were stressful.

This ruled, and as an ADHD-haver (like many of us game dev types) it was all too relatable. Managing to stuff in 5 wheels, a mini OS, some fun writing and genuine introspective moments is a hell of a thing for a jam game, too. Nice and polished, clear communication of what the mechanic is, and a great throughline with the theme. Fantastic job.

I did play and plan, but nothing seemed to move. Using the debug keys weirdly got the game to start for me. Looks like you tried a lot of stuff here, and that's all we ask here at WHEELJAM.

I think I see where this is headed.

I got the gist of using the two wheels in tandem, though I never seemed to move up or down, nor move permanently. I always reset at the end. The notion of using the wheel to control both position and element is a novel one, and I'd love to see this fixed up and polished, because the concept is undeniably cool.

I like the concept! It was a sort of ATB take on wheel combat, which I can only say having seen/played a few wheel-based games.

I think having to pay attention to the particles and kind of casually suss out the info in real-time led to me just memorizing which wheel pattern worked best (up, left, right, down or whatever) rather than actually learning which segments were good? The base idea of working to find the most efficient way to take down an enemy group is a good one though. Art is great too; I love the little wizards and the environment, and the music was a bop.

Running out of time is the eternal problem with jam games. The framework is cool though; I can see the vision. I too ran into the debug teleport. I've left worse things in jam games before, lol. Nice to see the wheel get used for something closer to the original, even though all the innovation and weird framings have been cool. Solid showing!

This... is weirdly the farthest thing I expected from a jam game. It's difficult, and I sorta bumbled my way through level 2.

I love the aesthetic, and love the almost toy-like aspect of it. It definitely gives the feeling of fiddling with a device and learning by doing, which I enjoy a lot, and feel like if I sat down with this for a good 30 minutes I'd understand it. It'll be one I come back to on a night where I'm feeling contemplative and not wanting to play something high-energy. Despite having a pretty complex ruleset, the actual systems are really elegant, and I like that despite having a lot of shared DNA with an automation game, there's no real time pressure to figure this out.

Really dig it, even though it's something I won't always feel like playing.

I like the system! I like how you managed to keep the colors having their own core identities while still engaging with the wheel. It's a really nice integration, and if I still regularly played MTG I'd prolly print off some proxies and give this a spin.

Y'know normally I hate tower defense, and it turns out the key to making me like it is throw a wheel on it.

No, actually what did it was smooth movement-focused gameplay, cool and varied waves, and a really active approach to the genre. I felt the impact of the wheel less, but that's probably because I just figured "damage good" and didn't experiment much outside of trying to get my largest slice into damage.

Loved playing it, loved the soundtrack, and loved the buildup over time. Well-paced and frantic in a way that was exhilarating rather than exhausting.

Simple premise that gets out of control really quickly. Made me want to go fast to really get my little sounds out, and honestly I was so focused on having fun with the inputs that I didn’t even notice the wheel at first. I was just like… yeah moving up, down, left and right is totally wheel.

Anyway, great little game, liked the pacing and escalation over time. Very cute, fun, and responsive.

I haven't gotten to finish this yet because I've been going through every game as quickly as I can, but I really need to come back to this. The basic mechanic gets expanded upon so well, and I felt myself slowly unraveling like a madman as I realized what I needed to be doing. Pretty soon I was throwing the wheel on every surface and checking to see what happened. When I knocked the statue over I almost jumped out of my seat in a mixture of surprise and excitement. Really great pacing so far and I can’t wait to come back to it.

NOW THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKIN' ABOUT BABY

Difficult and spooky! I like the commitment to being slow, clunky, and noncombative. I also like that there weren't any other limiting factors like ammo or health other than what actively had to be managed in the moment. It was like guiding my avatar through a panic attack at any given moment, which works. It's a simple but elegant use of the wheel for a great little horror romp.

Man, this is so good. I'm so bad at rail shooters like this and I'm bad at this one too, which means it's very much in that difficult arcade-y lane. I really like the implementation of the shield mechanic.

The best part is probably just how easy it is to understand -- it's easy to get that small slices go to the bullet icon ones, and it's easy to do at a glance. The hardest part is just timing reloads and getting consistent, but the information for me to get better at the game exists, which is a really impressive feat alone in a jam game, much less having a full rail shooter for it. Great stuff.

I wanna give you a prize just for making that weird little dude who crawls at you. In the final around he came at me a second time and it was genuinely unsettling, even though I knew what the consequences were. The atmosphere is just phenomenal, and as someone who isn’t usually wowed by horror’s atmosphere other than for goofs, the little dude is a sort of reminder that the best horror is also kind of funny?

The wheel gameplay was cool; I liked searching for books and figuring out my own multipliers. It added another strategic layer that the core wheel kinda lacks sometimes.

I love the little guy though. I want him nowhere near me and if I saw it in real life I would kick it clean across the room while screaming.

KARL

I really like the irreverence and funky music paired with just getting fun pictures of fish that people doodled in your notebook. This feels like the kind of game that would exist as a bespoke arcade cabinet somewhere like Meow Wolf if its presentation were polished up. The core concept is great. I'd love to be able to rotate the view to get a clearer idea of where my actions are sending me so I can find more fish, but sometimes the thrill of just finding the Illustrious Lobstmaid makes the slightly random feeling worth it. I only wish my real-life fishing trips led to finding such fascinating creatures.

Conceptually rad, and the execution ain't half-bad! I love the idea of the wheel controlling both sets of actions; it's a great reframing that makes it a lot more strategic, to the point where battles started taking a few minutes each as I read through text and tried go get the best solves -- and in some cases still failed!

Very cool way to have multiple uses of the wheel throughout while keeping the core mechanic intact. I love the overall kinda cryptic vibe of trying to earn favor with these massive gods/beings, and the very scrawly black-and-white art style keeps it feeling very mysterious.

Very cool! Realized I had the option to rotate the wheel after a few battles, spammed it, then realized I had a limited number per battle. Funny moment.

Having the limited rotations was really nice; it added a layer of strategy to the battles. Really just needs more in-game communication as to what's happening at a given moment (who's getting a buff, and which buff at which time, etc.) to be really parse-able and fun to play. I hope you do more with it cuz this is a great start.

Cool proof-of-concept! Love seeing the wheel used for a variety of stuff, and a stationary shooter's a neat take since it lets me keep the wheel firmly in one hand.

Bombs were hard to aim so my strategy basically devolved into slamming to get the largest segment on SHOOT, then taking out an enemy and hoping I didn't miss, lol.

Definitely the kind of thing that could be expanded on by like, having to balance your wheel with different actions or something. Hope you keep making stuff!

That's game design sometimes! I still had fun with it and y'all really nailed the style. <3

Cool proof of concept! Seemed really simple at first but that last puzzle took me a bit to figure out. The visuals were great and the sound/music were both well done and well mixed. Not a ton of game here but what is here is really polished. Thoroughly enjoyed.

I managed to get 13 minutes and change. This was great. I liked having a "racing" game with zero time pressure and a weird gimmick. Especially since I'm bad at racing games!

The varying terrain made for a lot of challenge, and on times where I managed to maintain a good speed, I could drift around corners and glide through obstacles in spite of my janked-up wheels. Other times I flipped upside down going off a ramp and absolutely ate it. Was happy either way. A little music, some more hazards and some recursive level design and you'd have a hell of a rage-game on your hands.

Also, loved the aesthetics. The foreground trees were dense enough to be hazardous which quickly gave way to the wall, and the distance really looked like deep woods as a result. Amazing use of limited assets.

Very simple and fun, also a lot of wheels. I wasn’t sure if the pluses were 1-to-1, because at some point I was just adding 0 of a lot of things! Still, the feedback and audiovisual stuff were great – I loved the gently bubbling chili and clicking through a bunch of wheels. Very satisfying.

This is a game I lack the brainpower for, mostly in terms of tracking elemental weaknesses in realtime etc. I see that largely as a communication issue though. The core concept is really solid, I love the idea of actively using/switching around the wheel and rotating it, and the movement controller is pretty nice.

I never quite got the logic behind why some bounces would work or fail, nor really what my spells did outside of change colors, but it didn't really stop it from being fun. In a lot of ways, it was refreshing to play something unique and indiscernible. This definitely left me wanting more, while also making me think about the other ways throwing things would be fun in games. Great work.

Ran into a couple weird bugs on the third layer, but a really great showing regardless! To be clear, I'm not really big on bullet hell as a genre (sorry) but I love the implementation of the wheel here. From the screenshots I was expecting that it'd be a bit of moving around the board, but you found so many cool, novel ways to repurpose it! The narrative beats and presentation are great too. Firmly in the "hard to believe it's a jam game" category.

Genuinely shocked to see a multiplayer game. Really unique use of the wheel, and I love the sort of casual game (non-derogatory) vibe this brings to the wheel. This feels like an expanded Mario Party minigame in the best way; it’s really simple but I feel like playing it with friends would lead to complex geopolitical rivalries.

I had no idea what the blue option did, and overall if you took this further I’d love to just see UX improvements, polish, and sound to really make the concept shine. Long live Circle, we stood tall amid the rubble.

Oh wait I read the comments, it’s a relationship system. Damn that’s cool. I wish it had been more visible so I could’ve abused it more

This is an important piece of art

A great, straightforward use of the wheel with a great conceit and theme. I’m a sucker for anything Eva-related, but it was nice to be deep in the screens while maintaining my teens. Well put-together and room to expand if you ever wanted to take the concept further, but definitely a solid jam entry.

I’m glad to see multiple takes on demon-slaying via the wheel! This one is cool – I liked the notion of buffing the base segments, and the blessing thing was cool too! Overall a really good encapsulation of roguelite mechanics.

Not sure if it was just my machine, but the game window rendered really small, only taking up about half of the viewport in the browser frame. I’d have loved to see it properly! It’s a great little game.

I’m not really a shooter guy, despite one of my biggest hopes for the jam being that someone would make a wheel-based shooter. This game has friction, and its flavor is of a bygone era of boomer-shooter cruft. It’s unrelenting and brutal – this is a shooter where you will take damage. It reminds me a lot of DOOM II in terms of both its casual rage and its sprawling levels.

The multi-tiered lava level is incredibly well put-together. The ending level’s atmosphere was so powerful that I was reminded of the Burnt Ivory King arena in Dark Souls II. It’s honestly messed up that you tricked me into enjoying a shooter, and I walked away thinking “yeah the Oblivion Wheel thing was cool or whatever but holy shit, the level design.”

Really fabulous game, wild effort for a week. I think if you spent some time polishing this (or just making another shooter and polishing that) you could make something really incredible.

This one is cute. It took me a cryptid to understand exactly how the wheel worked in this one, and then it clicked. I understood it after the first one, then quickly unlocked more cryptids. And that was really nice! The wheel sorta let me brute force my way through, which felt more like a reward than anything for understanding the wheel, and I got cute lil’ cryptids out of it. Having the Wikipedia links is a great touch! I learned about some cryptids I hadn’t heard of before. Great game, would kiss the frog.

It took me a while to grok the UI, but after my first run everything clicked in place pretty well, and I had a much better grasp on what I was doing. I really liked how spells were represented via the wheel, and loved having a poison-stacking build. The balance felt like it swung pretty quickly, from getting really easy kills to getting walled a bit. I’m curious how far I got, and I’m likely to come back to this one to try some more.

I really liked it, if that’s not clear! It just made me think a lot. The menus feel limited in the same way that old PC UI’s do, so it feels really nostalgic in that way, while having a really cool take on the wheel. Great stuff.

A very simple goof and classic interpretation of the wheel. Was a bit confused at first since the guy said “let’s go up” and the UI is diegetic, so I didn’t immediately realize it was a classic wheel at first. Once I grokked that, it was smooth sailing. Loved the simple lo-fi aesthetics, and the recontextualization of the wheel at the end. A short and straightforward experience, but a nice one.

A great use of the wheel and a nice set of wheel-based extensions. Never really found myself needing additional combat actions, and found myself rarely taking serious consequences from the wheel, but enjoyed its interpretation as a combat system. Music banged, art is gorgeous and really sets the scene well. Loved all the tooltips. Overall a great concept with a lot of UI/UX polish.

This game actually rules so hard. It goes all-in on taco puns with goofy characters, charming writing, and an absolutely banger soundtrack. For like a 90-minute experience, it does everything a game needs to. GOTY.

Not only that -- we'd be happy to host it on the official jam page for this and future WHEELJAMs with your permission.

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