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Thank you for recording this, watching people hit it blind is the most useful thing there is!

This is really useful, thank you. The pacing point is fair and you are not the first to say it, the slow cycles are the thing I would cut first if I revisit this. The ending situation is worse than you realised too, because there is no way to skip ahead, so wanting to see another ending means sitting through all of it again. That is a design mistake on my part, not a content problem. If I do a post jam version, a cycle skip after your first playthrough is the top of the list. Really glad it clicked for you around the dog and the mouse.

Congrats on the results! Narrative at #88 out of 10.5k entries is seriously impressive, and it deserved it. Solid scores right across the board too.

Here is my final run:

1:46.49 in 7 years, down from the 3:14 I posted when I first commented. The last 40 seconds of the video is the route i could come up with

Worth repeating that this is on the current build with the explosion life not counting, so it will not be comparable to whatever times look like once you fix the timer. If you do rework the project I would happily route the new version too. :)

Thanks for making something worth spending this much time on!!!

Just to say up front, I hope you don't mind that I went digging through the game's code. It's purely for analysis and route planning. Everything I changed is in a local copy on my machine for logging and measuring, I'm not touching your build or redistributing anything. If you'd rather I didn't poke around in there, just say so and I'll drop it.

On the categories, that makes sense, one timer and lowest time is the cleanest thing for a jam game. Worth knowing though that once the explosion life counts, the route changes completely. Right now that life is worth about a minute to me, because I dump all the slow ferrying into it and none of it shows up on the clock. So my current run would be a lot slower under a fixed timer.

For the fast deaths, it's two things in your own code. K calls die(), and die() first waits for the player to land, it checks is_on_floor() and velocity.length() < 5.0, with a 2 second cap. So if you press K while you are in the air or sliding, you sit there for up to 2 seconds doing nothing. Press it standing completely still on the ground and it fires immediately. Then the 6 second corpse animation is skippable with jump, but only when next_dead_id > 0, so only once you already have at least one corpse (note that water deaths and the wall explosion don't leave a corpse, so neither of them unlocks the skip either). That means your very first death always costs the full 6 seconds and every one after that can be mashed through with space. Put those together and a throwaway life is about 3.5 seconds of real time and roughly 0.3 seconds on the in game clock, which is why buying years is so cheap.

For the route view, I unpacked the .pck and ran the project in Godot directly. I added an autoload that writes one CSV row every physics frame with position, velocity, state, which keys are held, the year and both timers. The map is not a screenshot, it's rendered from game.tscn by walking every CollisionShape2D, so it's the real collision. Then one script draws the logged path over it with a colour per life, and another renders it as a video with a trail that stays behind so it ends on the full route.

The same setup also draws every collision and trigger box live in game, plus a free camera so I can check whether a route exists before wasting lives on it.

Happy to send you the logging and drawing scripts if you want them, they're generic enough to drop into any Godot project and might be handy when you go back to the timer.

I'll keep the actual route and the other glitches I found to myself for now, mainly because I'm still improving it. But honestly I'd love it if you left them in. Half the fun of routing this game is finding that stuff, and without them there's a lot less to work with, so please don't patch them yet :)

Got it down to 2:03.91 in 7 years now, and I'm still working on the route so it should go lower.

The main thing I wanted to ask you about is categories. My run is completely optimised for the in game clock, that's the number I'm trying to minimise. But because of that I keep going up in years, since dying is really cheap on that timer. I went from 5 years to 7 and the time dropped by over a minute. Two of my lives now are just spawn and die. So a real time run, or a least deaths run, would look nothing like what I'm doing. Do you think there should be separate categories for those? Right now it's not really clear what the record even means.

There's also something about the timer I wanted to tell you about. I noticed in game that the life where you blow up the wall doesn't seem to get counted, so I went and looked into the code, and the clock only gets saved when you die. The explosion sends you to the year screen without going through that, so all the time in that life just gets erased. Not sure if that was intentional. I actually really like it for routing, it makes that whole life free, but it does mean the in game time and the real time can end up very far apart.

Genuinely the best game I've played in this jam. The aesthetics were really cool and the movemnt is simple and fine. I also love that you thought about speedrunning, having the timer there makes you actually want to optimize. My first run ever took 25+ years and 30 minutes, now i got it down to 3:14.43 but a sub 3 is deffinitely possible! That loop of learning the world and shaving off runs is really satisfying.

Is there a leaderboard or anywhere people are posting their record runs? Would love to see a speedrun leaderboard for this (here is my run).  Amazing work for 4 days.

Really cool concept, gambling with your time is a great idea. Unfortunately I couldn't get to the shop or restart the level, and none of the buttons worked for me(had to re launch the game just to restart). That might be on my end though, I'm running it on Linux through Wine and it's a Unity game, so it could easily just be that.

At first the shooting felt limiting since you only fire in the direction you're moving, so up, down, left or right, but no diagonals even though you can move that way. Got used to it pretty quickly though. It's a solid foundation to build on, you could add upgrades or a better shooting mechanic on top of it. Great job for a first game, fellow first timer!

Neat core concept but right now enemies just spawn endlessly with no progression, so there's not much to play toward yet. A shop and more enemy types would be a great fit. Worth building on!

What a hidden gem. No idea why this only has one comment, maybe people don't want to play the thing they do at work all day, but that's exactly what makes it funny. Reigns for tech deadlines is a great fit, and the skill unlocks between runs are a smart touch. Also very well polished. Ten hours for this is impressive!

Really enjoyed this one. The setup lands fast: you get about ninety seconds of being a good employee before the game takes your computer away, and from that point the whole thing is you clawing your way back with a phone that produces 0.01 units a click.

The art is a strong direction  I like the flat shapes and the character designs, and the boss rocketing off screen got a laugh out of me. There is some clipping though; a few sprites overlap or get cut at the edges of the screen. Worth flagging that I'm on Linux running the .exe through Wine, so I can't fully rule out that it's on my end.

My one real piece of feedback: I had no idea the convert number was a click-and-drag slider. On my first run I spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time spamming the convert button one unit at a time, wondering why the economy felt so glacial. The only hint that it's draggable is the mouse cursor changing on hover, (which under Wine I don't think ever rendered for me). A couple of little `< >` arrows either side of the number, or a "drag me" label the first time you hover it, would have saved me several minutes of my one eight-minute workday. Once I found it the pacing completely changed and the snowball actually felt great.

Nice work for a jam. The core loop is sound and the writing is funny, it mostly needs signposting.

Wow, this is the best feedback I could ever ask for :) Thank you so much for the 5 stars (this is my first game ever, so hearing that means everything). And you are 100% right about the header image, I am literally redesigning it tonight because of your comment (I am not an artist yet, but I am working on it). So glad the narrative and the subtle shifts landed for you. Thanks for playing!

Thank you so much!  The entire time I was making it I had no idea if any of it would land, so hearing this means a lot. The one thing I keep thinking is that with a real voice actor it would have hit even harder.

Thanks a lot! :) Really happy the narration worked.

Great game! Loved the echo on the frog in the chambers below that plus the way the music drops when you surface really sells the whole cave. Great work!

Easy and relaxing, nice vibe. could use a bit more variety though

Wait are we inside a duck?? No idea what's going on but it's fun lol

Best art and polish I've seen in the jam so far. Undoing a heist in reverse is a really clever use of the theme great entry! Would love to see more levels!

Really good game! Would love to see more of it! Anyway i did an any% TAS, 3.840, no major glitches (video below). submitting for WR, category rules pending :)

Love that the countdown itself is a physical object you can land on  that's a genuinely clever use of the theme, not just a timer slapped on top. Art could use some polish, but the core idea carries it. Would definitely watch a speedrun of this.

Cool mechanic! Juggling your sand as both health and resource is a neat twist. Unlucky start though: my first two runs I didn't run into a single snake. Fun once it gets going

Good game! Some puzzles just click and everything falls into place, others had me properly stuck. Theme link is thin, but it stands on its own as a puzzle game...

Great game! The enemies were a little hard to hit and I missed a lot of my shots... though honestly, that might just be my own fault for sprinting around like a maniac the entire time!  Really fun concept and solid execution overall.

Thanks! The waiting is on purpose, the button is talking the whole time and I wanted that to be read instead of skipped. But that only really works if you care about the story if you are here to play, it is just a pause. Fair criticism, I would shorten it.

Thank you for being honest! Yeah, it only gets going later and that was a risk. I could not find another way to tell the story though, the boring part is doing the work

Thank you for playing! :) Portal is a huge compliment. I only wish I had somebody to do voice acting for it, that would have made it so much better

Shooting garbage is peak janitorial work, but playing at night meant those bright explosives straight-up flashbanged me! Great entry!

I  loved the puzzle mechanics in this one! The gameplay is so solid that I would actually love to see speedrun leaderboards added for it. The art might need a little bit of polish, but overall it's a fantastic entry. Great job! 

Thank you! I actually haven't played Please, Don't Touch Anything (going to look it up now). Really glad you enjoyed :)

Super creative take on the theme! The game itself is on the shorter side, but figuring out how to get some of those extra badges took me a really long time!

Super cozy game with amazing art! Completing the resolutions was fun, but man, those mini-games are hard!

Great job on this! I have to agree with the other comments the art is really nice, but that  visibility made navigating the maze a lot harder!

Thank you this genuinely made my day. "Not what I was expecting" is the reaction I was hoping for most.  There are two more, and if you'd rather not do the whole walk again, you can skip: open the browser console and type CD.last()

Really nice puzzle game! The timeline switching is a creative mechanic. Just a quick heads-up on a small exploit I found: if you spam 'x' (the time switch), the timers actually stop running.  Overall, a really solid entry, great job! 

Great job! Good art and playing as the thief was genuinely fun. The hourglass move-limit fits the theme perfectly. My only struggle was the 'unknown' searching blindly for the keys and trapdoor is tough when every single move counts. Overall, a solid jam entry!

My first game and also my first jam