itch.io

Sorry you couldn't finish the game! It's definitely much harder to play with a lower frame rate, and unfortunately we didn't have time to implement graphics settings options to make it easier to play on lower-mid range devices, but that is something we'd like to do!

Your game suggestions are great, we'd definitely like to do some of those if we continue building the game in the future :)

Fantastic puzzle game, great job! The gruesomeness caught me off-guard lol, but it works well with the pixel art look! It would be nice if the game would remember your speed scale assignments when you respawn, but otherwise I really dig the gameplay loop!

Awesome WarioWare game! It could use a bit of balancing on a couple of them (*cough* bunnies *cough*) but the gameplay loop is satisfying and the game as a whole is fun to watch and listen to.

I really like the concepts that I see here, but to be honest, I'm not sure how to actually play the game properly. It looks like I have partial control over the claw arm and can pick up a block, but then I don't know what to do with it. But the main concept of building up a taller and taller tower with those blocks is fun! If the controls were listed somewhere, that would help a ton.

That's one massive caterpillar! It took a while to get past the water part - I didn't realize there were lilypad platforms until a few deaths in since they spawn so far apart, but once I noticed them I knew what to do. I got past the bird then grew to be as tall as a skyscraper!

Nice work on this! I agree with Spico that it would be nice if the game got more challenging; perhaps with increased boulder drops, varying rock sizes, maybe even some physics mechanics where the device could wobble back and forth as the rocks hit it or as the air speeds past.

Wow, this is an excellent little puzzle game! I'm sorry it hasn't gotten much attention - if I had to guess, it's probably because the thumbnail images are deceptively plain looking, so you might need to throw together a more focused/styled cover image in the future for the itch page.

Out of curiosity, is the game supposed to continue after the second set of levels? After I clicked 'continue', the game visually bugged out a bit with some duplicate assets and I was brought back to 2-1 again. I was hoping there would be a bit more, because the puzzles were very intriguing and the expansion mechanics between the two characters just worked so well.

Surely this artist must be ahead of their time! From the text about phytoplankton I can tell that there is clearly a hidden message to decipher; a meta-meta-narrative if you will, about the day-to-day struggles of man and the feelings of doubt that consume us. 10/10, a true masterpiece.

In all seriousness though, you should be at least a bit proud that you took the first steps here and managed to submit something that technically is playable and has some basic interactions going on - that's already much more than can be said for many of the other participants in this jam. I don't have the exact numbers, but I believe there were around 30K people who entered, and anecdotally the average team size I've seen has been around 2 people, so with some quick maths I can guesstimate from the 7.6K entries that there were likely between 10,000 - 15,000 people who didn't submit anything at all (30000 - (2 * 7600)). Game development is tough, learning in general is tough, but you actually did accomplish something with this entry, even if it's just a stepping stone for future development.

Here are some suggestions for the future that you can take or leave:

• Don't self-deprecate your efforts; it encourages you to give up sooner, and even if it's clearly beginner-level work, people would prefer to see the work of someone who tried their best the whole time than the alternative. IMO The self-deprecation talk can be excluded entirely. It's fine to include a description on the game page explaining why things don't work if you don't manage to finish everything!
• Don't underestimate an interesting narrative! Even though there were just a handful of paragraphs in the text that popped up in-game, it did actually manage to catch my interest, and with your writing style I believe you genuinely could make an interesting story (meta or not) with even dead-simple gameplay.
• Consider how you want to continue to learn going forward; I noticed that this game was developed in Unity, and with your admission to being new to game development, I can't help but feel that there might be better options for you to try. Godot has been gaining a ton of traction recently, and in my own subjective experience it is significantly easier to learn and use than Unity, and has a brighter future ahead due to its open-source nature. In this year's jam, it is now nearly neck-and-neck with Unity in terms of % usage by developers (37% to 43%) compared to last year's wide gap (19% to 59%). You can find many great tutorials on YouTube for free (e.g. Brackeys), or if you want a more structured environment, I can recommend GDQuest's beginner's courses as a good starting point. Of course, nothing beats reading the documentation and trying things out for yourself in-engine!

Regardless, I hope you continue your game dev journey, and I hope you will choose to participate in more game jams in the future!

Pretty funny voice acting! The gameplay was basic and repetitive but didn't overstay it's welcome thanks to the presentation. This is definitely one of those games I could imagine there being some more meta-narrative interactions wit the narrator, where he could keep introducing more things for you to do to try to throw you off from being able to blow up the balloon - could be fun!

The sinwave mechanics were pretty fun to control once I understood what was happening - this works well as a game basis! It definitely needs a little more to make it feel like it fits the theme though, even if it's just a bit of window dressing in the form of a story & some slight restyling. For example, I could see this repackaged as a game about controlling the growing scale of a galaxy, pulling planets into the right orbits by using the sinwave mechanics to adjust their positions. There's plenty of ways you could take this concept!

Definitely a neat concept! It would be nice if all the rooms would snap to a grid though - it's very difficult to line them up with the current system. But I really like the puzzle mechanics involved with scaling up and down to rearrange and then traverse the building.

On a separate note - since you mentioned that you are new to coding and haven't started using an engine yet, I can personally recommend the Godot Engine as a great starting point! imo it's relatively easy to get started with, and the community has been growing rapidly to the point that you can easily find tutorials and resources to learn 2D or 3D projects. If you were thinking of pursuing Unity instead, I won't say it's a bad choice, but I think Godot will have more to offer over Unity in the long run given it's open-source codebase and growing popularity (from last year's jam to this year, there was a shift of 19% -> 37% of games made with Godot vs. 59% -> 43% of games made with Unity). But no matter what game engine you choose, it can definitely help you to design games like the one you've made here!

Nicely done! The shading and patterning complements the setting perfectly, and the game is easily one of the best looking in the entire jam. I wish there were more levels, and maybe a bit more interaction in the segments where you perceive objects to change them, but that's asking a lot for a game built in such a short timeframe. Congrats on this awesome accomplishment!

Very satisfying game with a cool style, but I would've liked to see some mechanics that play into the scale theme a bit more. For example: half- or double- sized pipe segments that have to be mixed in with the normal sizes, or maybe a way for the board to expand dynamically once you've finished a smaller set of connections. But still a great game as it is!

I really enjoyed the aesthetic you went with! The gameplay was fun, but I wish the screen transitions were like 10x the current speed, and I never felt incentivized to use the large scale mode - maybe there's some additional game mechanic that could be added to help with that, such as a shield buff or a heavily increased turn speed? It's also cool how the difficulty ramps up the longer you go, it makes for a great challenge!

You have a very neat style with this game - I wasn't expecting to have to check out a serial murderer, but it works! I like the mashup of different minigame styles, but the weighing ones got to be a little bit boring; I think a small but meaningful change that could help would be to have more visual variety in the objects that appear in that minigame, and maybe let the player place weight stickers on them to help a bit with doing the math. Otherwise, it's great!

Very fun & engaging mechanics, I had a great time with it! The reset loop bug was a bit annoying, but not a big deal since everything moves at such a quick pace anyway that restarting the game wasn't an issue. Nicely done!

Thank you! I Am Fish was one of our initial inspirations when thinking about how the controls would work, but then we took it in a pretty different direction lol.

Thanks!

Thanks, we're glad you had a good time with it!

Thanks for the glowing review!

Glad you enjoyed it! We definitely get some sonic vibes from it too, we considered adding some loop-de-loops and stage obstacles in a similar vein but didn't quite have the time for that lol.

Thanks for playing!

Super fun and well executed, I just wish there was a bit more to it! Maybe multiple levels with different scales and objects to play around with?

And I'm glad to see that Godot is getting so much love this jam, it seems like it may have finally surpassed Unity's developer base, at least for jam making. I used the same dialogue manager addon you did for our game, this community is awesome :D

Really neat take on the theme! I actually find this gameplay loop much more engaging than suika game or other similar ones because of the natural time pressure it puts on you. I eventually found a strategy that works maybe a bit too well, as I was able to beat the hardest AI difficulty level - I think the AI maybe prioritizes quickly dropping gems a bit too much over making smart plays. Maybe for game balance there should be a slightly larger hitbox between the gems so it's a bit less finicky, but otherwise it's really well designed as-is!

Then maybe some more mechanics that play with that dichotomy and drive home the scale difference would help? This might make more sense if the other team is also controlled by a different kid (or imaginary friend) that can also do these scale difference moves, but you could have moves like:

• a finger-flick attack that launches troops vertically, knocking out other ones in its path
• drop snacks/drinks on the board to create obstacles that give one team an advantage, like a nacho chip that provides cover for archers
• have the kid grab some units from the enemy team and "convert" them to their team by dragging them over

And perhaps the currency for these large-scale actions could even be different than that of the troops, so you'd need to multitask between two separate scales throughout the battle. Just some ideas! If you do decide to work on this more in the future, I'd be interested to see what additions you make :D

Definitely a fun game! Considering the theme of Built to Scale, I think it would be really cool to see more in the way of "scaling" objects on the game board, such as having toys of different sizes joining each sides' armies. Maybe you collect something like Lego bricks to piece together some larger characters and objects to use on your opponents? What's there is a great start though!

Really cool game, I'm guessing you took some inspiration from Windowkill? I had a lot of fun in the few short levels I was able to play, but I'm either missing something or the game just won't work right for me:

Basically all the windows are up in the top-left of my screen and usually start out overlapping, but that didn't really stop me until this point - I don't see the character anywhere, and moving doesn't seem to do anything. Could this be because I have a dual-monitor setup, or a high-res ultrawide?

If you can patch out the bugs, this would be amazing!

This is a really, really fun concept that looks like it has a ton of potential! I wish you had more time to flesh it out - here's some ideas that I think could make the game nicer and more manageable if you revisit it later:

• Really embrace the frantic feeling by speeding up the music more and more when you have a lot of doors to place or unfilled requirements, this is also a good audio cue for players
• Have the residents of the rooms play sounds when you pass by them if they have more requirements
• Make the map larger and have the invalid rooms flash a color, maybe flashing faster/brighter depending on their importance - this would also be nice to see on the doors themselves
• Allow the player to swap the room in their hands with the room they're standing in front of
• Let the player see the requirements for a room before placing it down
• Visually offset the front and back doors a bit up/down for extra clarity on which is back or forward
• Instead of X: Y: to show the grid position, maybe Row: X Col: Y split on two separate lines would be easier to read
• For it to reaally scale, I think you'd eventually need to unlock some new special room types like an elevator warp that can take you between two or more rooms instantly

Really great game overall though!

You have a really neat visual style, I really wish there were some sfx and music to accompany it! I agree with the other commenters that there needs to be more of an indication of where and how to use each spell to its potential. Maybe it would make sense to let the player scale spells at will, and use the upgrades to unlock ways to combine the spells instead? There's some good potential here!

Loved the environmental storytelling, and the story as a whole! The crystal jump mechanic was slightly confusing at first but really enjoyable once I figured it out. This is super impressive for just 96 hours, congrats on making an amazing game!

What a blast! The hammer swing is such a satisfying mechanic, but I got a bit confused a few times when it wouldn't bounce off of smaller enemies. Great visuals, sounds, and gameplay loop. And I thought I recognized that art style - I played your awesome game Spared from last year, and I see you've kept up the great work since then!

Great job with this - I can see we're not the only platforming fish in town! I loved the puff mechanic for the platforming, it was well executed and gave just the right level of challenge without feeling overwhelming. Also I love these little guys:

Nicely done!I think just a couple minor tweaks would make this play better:

• Add keyboard support for the main menu and/or a way to quick-restart the game, because the jump between keyboard <-> mouse feels a bit awkward
• Maybe as an optional feature, find a way to visually distinguish the arrow keys a bit more - with the very limited color palette and low resolution, it's really easy to misread the keys when they shift over. Maybe they could have separate background patterns, or shift over in a more animated way so your eyes can track them better?

Regardless, it was fun!

Thanks!!! A couple of us who worked on it are already hooked on the speedrunning aspect - from what I can tell, every level except level 2 can be beaten in about 30 seconds with some carefully executed moves, but it's certainly not easy.

Awesome puzzle game, and great atmosphere! I wish there were more checkpoints and a way to manually go back to them though; I ended up getting softlocked near the end of the last level a few times before I could beat it.

Amazing game! I wish there was some reward for getting a very high accuracy score though - I spent such a long time on the octopus and got penalized heavily for it. Also it would be nice to have a little more fine control over the rotation feature, but maybe that was an intentional choice to make the game a bit more chaotic. But still great nonetheless!

Fun game, I like the leaderboard aspect although I'm not good enough to score very high on it! With some music, a bit of shading, and some adjustments to the character animations, this could really hit it out of the park!

Quite the captivating experience! Both music tracks fit the game perfectly, and I felt the controls worked very well, being simple to grasp yet challenging to master.

My score: 2113 beats

Love the art style, and the music too! The gameplay is great but I did have some difficulty sometimes selecting a mouse or figuring out where a mouse was going. I also didn't realize until near the end that each mouse could have multiple powerups, which definitely shifted the balance of the game, but I had fun!