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Hey, I'm really glad you enjoyed it!

Fun fact:

Originally, when the player reached the end of the game, all that was left there was going to be Gregory's grave. So the story would have been that Gregory had already passed away some years prior, and left behind the misguiding signs because he didn't want Streiter to go all that way just to find that he had already died.

But we decided to take it out because it might not be very relatable, since I'm not sure if anyone would really try to hide their own death like that in real life, and it's the Comfy jam, after all!

Thanks for playing!  :D

Thanks for the feedback!

Oh, I thought I might've been missing something with the colors on the skill tree! Thanks for letting me know!

Very juicy game! I loved the artwork and all the squash and stretch animations! The music was good, but it didn't loop.

Because the goal of the game was to max out the entire skill tree, I didn't see a lot of point in being selective over which ones I upgraded first, since I'd get them all in the end anyway. So I kinda clicked them without discretion.

I did notice that I might be able to maximize if I chose certain abilities like the coconut exchange rate upgrade first, but for the most part, I didn't want to spend the time to look through the skill tree and calculate it.

I think the salesman paused giving me cash while I was in the upgrade screen. It'd be cool if he would still give me coins while I was looking at my upgrades, because that would help me get my shopping done sooner (better customer experience). Plus, that would make the downtime of waiting for the coconut-to-cash exchange an excuse for the player to take a look at his skill tree.

Towards the end of the game, I was having trouble spending the excess XP I gained. It would be nice if the zoomed out icons on the skill tree showed the currency needed to buy the ability, as well as if they were maxed out or not, so I wouldn't need to hover over them individually.

While there was a clear attempt to implement the limitation, it left my mind not long after reading the sign. However, the strong summer vibes in the theme were sweet.

At the very beginning of the game, I was wondering why I couldn't loot the chest, but I think that was just me being me. Once I collected some coconuts and sold them, it became clear. I think it would have been fun if the abilities leveled up more exponentially, so that by the end of the game, you'd have the sky practically raining coconuts, but that might just be goofy, IDK.

I know there wasn't much positive feedback written in this post, but that's because the visuals were so good, that I really have no complaints about them.

This is going off-topic, but a cool way to get people excitedly talking about your game after they played it is through giving the player a story to tell. That could be through an actual written story, or through emergent complexity and elegance, like how an abstract game like chess or go can tell a story of a conflict between two sides.

Although I'm not really one to talk, considering the longest comment on my own entry is only 2 sentences long.  XD (BTW, would love any feedback on it! I'm new to writing, and I noticed the narrative I wrote was boring, so I'd love any critique and tips for improvement!)

This is an incredibly polished game, and I enjoyed playing it with my brother before we headed off to bed. Fabulous work!  :D

Hey! Nice game!

It took me a while to understand how to play the marbles game, but once I did, I had a ton of fun! I'll write down my best understanding of the rules here in case anyone else is confused:

1. Flick all the marbles out of the ring to win.
2. When you're about to shoot your marble, wait for the green arrow to stretch itself out fully before shooting. Then you'll flick the marble harder.
3. In the top-right corner of the screen are your marbles in-hand to flick. If you run out of them, you lose.
4. Any marbles you flick off the map will go to your hand in the top-right corner of the screen.
5. I used to think that the mushrooms were the enemy's marbles and the green marbles were mine, but I don't think there was a difference between them, except for the black marble. If you flick the black one out of the ring, you lose.

I'm sure I've probably misrepresented the rules in more than one place (And feel free to correct any of my mistakes). Though I really liked the mechanics, it felt new and innovative. And that crunchy pixel art looked fabulous. I liked the shadows on the marbles as well.

I was a bit confused by the first dialogue, since I didn't understand why the car was there. Once I talked to the grim reaper, I think I understood. The music sounded a bit on the redundant side, and the high-pitched voices were slightly hard on the ear. Though I did like the SFX in the minigame. The win fanfare and pling of flicking marbles out of the ring was so satisfying.

Bugs:

• When I entered fullscreen and exited it, my browser (Chromium) gave me the following error:
• The game's resolution didn't change; When I was out of fullscreen, it was too large to fit in the frame of the itch embed, and when I was in fullscreen, it would show fully, but it wouldn't expand to fit the entire screen.
• With the dog and grim reaper, after I talked to them at some point, it would still show their dialogue character sprite when I went to talk to other characters.
• Sometimes it seemed like one character sprite would be talking when the other character is supposed to be talking.
• The YSort origin seemed to be on the middle of the sprites instead of the base.

All-in-all, I'm glad I played this game! Thanks for sharing it and great job!

When going into fullscreen while loading the game from main menu, it would show the default gray background outside of the black fade-in. You might want to try setting Project -> Project Settings -> display/window/stretch/mode to "canvas_items" to fix it.

Using different buttons to grab/throw the box (E/RMB) felt a bit counter-intuitive. I think the water texture was scaled down too small, which made it look as if it were far away from my feet.

But with all that said, I liked the 3D modeling! The totem pole was especially impressive.

Well done!

https://crankycranton.itch.io/helios-golden-sea

Discord: cranton

Thanks for playing!

Bless you.

Gesundheit.

The quality of this game is through the roof, especially considering it was made in only 15 days! The only complaints I have are all so minor they didn't really affect my experience that much:

• There didn't seem to be any difference between the enemies. Not that it was a problem. The skill tree had all my attention absorbed, so I wasn't really thinking about it.
• Perhaps a slightly faster way to collect coins in the larger combat rooms? Or maybe I'm just too trigger-happy.
• In the larger combat rooms, occasionally enemy billboards would z-fight with each other.
• Invincibility felt more like health. And while everything was polished and balanced to the T, none of the mechanics particularly stood out as revolutionary. At the same time, "Invincible" is a difficult theme to deal with.
• While I could definitely see how some would enjoy searching for the corridor coins, it slowed down gameplay, which made it a bit fatiguing for me in particular. At first, I felt obliged to collect them all to optimize efficiency, but after a while, I ignored them so I could go through the runs faster. In contrast, I loved the weakness exploit ability. It added a thrill to combat.
• Eventually I got to the point where I could one-shot most enemies, so I didn't feel any need to upgrade my sword, which led me to ignoring crystals all together. Instead, I would try to upgrade chain lightning so I could take out multiple enemies with one hit.

I'm only writing the negative things, because if I wrote down the positive things, this comment would be way too long.

Excellent game! (and I'm not just saying that :D)

Thanks for playing. Our first time making a deck-builder. Colored-cards is a cool idea, maybe pale pascals for an old-timey Western style. We toyed with the idea of making it two-player PvP, but didn't want to gamble on the time, and wanted to focus on polish and balance. We tried it on paper prototype, and it was a different experience.

Nice puzzle game, and great interpretation of the theme: science fiction meets Old MacDonald. The intro text was tops. It was a little difficult to figure out what the bad guys did. I liked the strategy play-style, and the feeling of herding cows with a UFO. Having the spaceship far off the ground made it a little tricky to line up with the cows and dash on over. Even though the art style was simple, it fit the game. The cow-face abduct animation was nice.  I liked that you gave a few different sound effects for the same action, especially since this is a game where you spam the controls to get across the map quickly (at least, I did). Having some music might be nice, but silence is okay for a thinking game. Better than an annoying track.

For some reason, on certain levels, I would either run out of milk or win with a lot of milk left over. I tried to use tornadoes to save on fuel (i.e., M.I.L.K.). The bullets seemed relatively easy to dodge (same goes for cows, unfortunately). I found myself trying to line up with a cow from a distance of at least two blocks away to prepare my dashing direction. I found it helpful to hone in on him from a distance, like a rook's line of control, and if he steps into my path, I can dash. Otherwise, he's in a smaller box. The hardest part was trying to get to an opposite end of a map after abducting a cow.

Played it with my brother, much more fun together than alone. Good level design. More checkpoints on the long-distance horizontal jumping room to the right would be nice. Got stuck there before replaying it. Killed myself trying to figure out the jumping jacks spire, until I figured out you just let go, and let gravity do its propulsion thing ("What have I been doing all this time?"). It was a little laggy, maybe the particles effect. Dash sound repeating when you stay still on ice was a little annoying. Coyote timing would be nice.
Brother: The fire element worked nicely with vertical motion, while the ice element worked nicely with horizontal motion. Cool parallelism (or should we say perpendicularism?)!

This game genuinely made me laugh. The story, the art, the music, the voice acting; They were all magnifique!

I think a few small changes would have increased the immersion and overall polish immensely. In particular, slower mouse sensitivity, a more in-style exit door and target movement location, and perhaps using shuffle bag randomness to prevent Jacques from saying the same line twice in a row. But all of that didn't stop me from thoroughly enjoying it!

I really liked this game. One of the best jam submissions I've played in a while. Hats off to the developers!

Hi, thanks for playing!

All I did was the design, animation, and code. Most of the 3D art was from kenney.nl. The HDRI/panorama texture was from freestylized.com. The road assets were provided tile-based, which allowed me to use Godot's GridMap node for the majority of the level design. The asset pack already came with a curved slope tile, so all I needed to do was give it an automated Trimesh collision shape and align the Path3D that the cars follow along that slope, which wasn't difficult with its built-in bezier curves.

I went for a goofy theme, because as much as I enjoy a nice and dark setting, I've noticed that often people are more likely to overlook unpolished elements if the game gives them a good laugh.

Its very messy, but I decided to release the source code on GitHub: https://github.com/CrankyCranton/freehand-driving

OK, thanks!

Ha ha, that made me laugh. Thanks for playing!

Hello! Perhaps it was already on the page and I missed it, but how will the jam be rated?

The amount of juice you managed to pack into this game in just 3 days is amazing! The SFX are nice, although I wish there was music. Stars don't seem very useful. Replacing them with health/ammo pickups could add more motivation to grab them. Though the current amount of health the player has per level feels pretty good.

The enemies seem like they're hard-of-hearing the way you can shoot right next to them without them being alerted, but once they know your presence, they're fun. The map design feels rather redundant. Maybe it'd be more exciting if you couldn't see the enemies until they're in line-of-sight, or when you enter the room.
Sometimes the enemies will shoot backwards. After finishing the game and returning to the level select menu, the cursor is hidden. I like how you did the gun cooldown system.

Nice juicy game. Well done!

Nice time! I was considering following the theme, but I couldn't think of an easy way to make horse controls, so I decided to go with cars instead, since the theme was optional anyway. But thinking back, I probably could have used the same control scheme and themed it as a horse.

Thanks for the review, and glad you had fun!

Wow, the fact that you could beat it at 10 FPS is impressive!  If you were playing on the web version, you might want to try the downloadable version for better performance. The 3D graphics can slow the game down quite a bit.

Thanks for playing!

Hi, thanks for playing! The reason behind the delay was because enemies take time to move on the board after the player. So, as you said, we should probably put some visual feedback in to indicate when a turn is done processing.

OK, thank you! I'll try to integrate the theme better throughout the design process!

Hi, I started working on a game yesterday, and was wondering if I could submit it to this jam.

The problem is, I started work before knowing about the jam, so I didn't have the theme in mind while thinking of the game. However, it coincidentally did vaguely follow the theme. The game's a mix of PvP fighting games and rhythm games. But rhythm games are typically more about hitting in time than they are about hitting out of it. Although, I do want to try to put in some mechanics to throw your opponent off beat, such as changing the BPM and approach rate mid-song.

I was wondering, because I might be able to receive more feedback if I submit the game to a jam. I'd also be happy with receiving a 1 star in the theme category.

Anyways, I only want to submit it if it follows the rules & spirit of the jam. Cheers!  (^^)/

Wow, thanks! Nice short game!

The drifty-controls made me feel like I was a drag racer! I liked the elegant & innovative way the panna mechanic was implemented! Though there was a way to break it by spamming the kick button.

The custom-drawn art was nice! (I don't know how I would have drawn all those soccer ball panels. ;) ) Going around the track backwards and then forwards triggers bugs, (saw Santa's leg flying across the track, lol), but nobody would do that unless he was just trying to trigger bugs. (like me! :D)

Thanks again, and merry Christmas!

Hey, thanks for the bug report! You were 100% on the dot. Fixed it on the local version. We plan to upload the bug fix after the voting period.

Hi, loved the smooth animations! The symmetrical map and the occasional darkness made it somewhat disorienting. Wasn't sure if there was a win/lose screen, but if there was, I hope I didn't miss it. The settings menu was a nice touch.

Nice work!

Yeah, we were running way behind on the art, so we just jammed in whatever assets we could scrape together before the deadline. Glad it didn't turn out looking like a monster. The player character is from here. Koroded drew the splashscreen/thumbnail in the last few hours of the jam, which to my non-artistic programmer mind, is just incredible.

Thanks for playing!

Hi! I think I took for it granted that I already knew the entire map as a developer, lol. Will probably have to at least double the respawn times, and most likely even more than that.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hello! To be sure, the narrative was (*very*) rough at best. Making things too loud has become a bad habit of mine. I should learn how audio producers manage to get the perfect volume on things.

Thanks for the review!

Hi, thanks for playing!

Regrettably, there wasn't the time to test out the game before the deadline, so it's as full of bugs as an ant's nest. Really unfortunate that you didn't get to see the end of the game. And come to think of it, the way it's laid out right now, even without the bug, some players might miss it. I'll have to think of a way to fix that.  We might do a post-jam update, IDK.

This is minor, but I think I may have found a small typo in Account settings -> Connected accounts.

ಠ_ಠ

Notice! We have decided to extend the release date. See here for more information:

https://crankycranton.itch.io/natsuki-and-asashi/devlog/962548/release-date-exte...

That's rather funny, because for the majority of the development time, we were working on the combat system (that has yet to see the light of day), and only in the last 14 hours did we start cramming in some visuals. =/

Thanks, we will do our best!

Thank you for the kind words!

We'll be releasing a devlog every day until re-release date, so you can check in on our progress whenever you feel like it!

Do you think you could export to Linux? Some GUI elements that I saw in the trailer didn't show up while I was playing it using Wine, and right where the bad guy stabbed the player it froze.

BTW, 4 months of development is impressive!

Audio:

I like the audio! Especially the click sound.

UI:

I don't know what the bars in the top-right corner are, but they look like health bars.

At the game over screen, sometimes it would still remain visible after I exited to the main menu. I think it might be because I clicked the on-screen button to go back instead of pressing Enter.

Adding an interactive tutorial would be cool.

Controls:

The C button was confusing, and I didn't understand what U or Space did. The arrows were easy to comprehend.

Enter was intuitive, but conflicted with the UI controls. So sometimes I would hit enter by mistake and not get to see who won the game.

Gameplay:

The physics could use some improvement. The car didn't steer like a car, and the plain didn't feel like I was flying because I could stay still in midair.

The plane was my favorite! I liked how it would drop bombs, and the better view was nice, too.

Art:

I liked everything but the map. Z-fighting was visible on the road intersections. The high walls gave the car a slightly claustrophobic feeling.

Nice job!

I loved the crunch to shooting bullets! At first, I didn't realize that when the enemies slide, they're dead, so I kept shooting the dead bodies. The bodies didn't feel like much of a problem until difficulty 8 when they would act as a meat shield for enemies. :D

There didn't seem much reason not to press shift, so using AntiMicroX, I made shift toggle to be always on.

The music wasn't bad, but it felt like it went against the fast-paced gameplay that the game supported.

Indicating whether a level was safe or not was a nice touch. Starting back at difficulty 1 when the player character died felt pretty bad. Maybe rough-likes get away with it because most of them have procedural levels, preventing the player from feeling like he's just repeating things he's already done before.

I couldn't tell when/why I got hit very easily when a shooting enemy would attack me. If the bullets were a different color, they would stand out more?

The water ripples looked good. It might feel even more like water if it slowed you down or something else to affect the game.

Difficulty 7: Starting right off with a bang was fun, except that for the first few seconds, it's hard to know where the player is.

Would love it if there were a downloadable version! (I don't have internet at home) Also, a full-screen option for the web would be nice.

A fun game which I still have yet to beat... Looking forward to future development!

EDIT: Just noticed the health potions in the castle level. It's a lot easier now.