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That’s fair. I definitely think that the actual scores are the main thing to focus on, though I also feel that getting a chatbot to sum up other people’s comments sort of broadcasts that a participant really isn’t interested in anything other than boosting their own submission. It’s not particularly subtle, and I wouldn’t be surprised if seeing it go unchallenged prompts others to take the same approach. More ratings don’t guarantee higher ratings, but jams on itch do penalise entries with fewer than the median. There’s every chance that someone bulking out their numbers like this will edge out someone with a higher raw score, and that chance increases with every other person who sees this happening and thinks “Well, I can’t compete if I’m only commenting on stuff I actually played.”

This is a really nice game. It’s simple, but there’s a fair amount of strategy to what you make a priority at any given time. I also like the feedback on how you’re doing: I definitely spotted the paddle wheels turning backwards and clouds in the background indicating that I was beginning to drop at one point! The only quibbles I have are very minor things to do with the execution. I found it harder to pick up tools than ideal (I’d like them to be grababble within a slightly wider area, and I like the suggestion someone else made of having an outline appear when within range). I also felt as though there were slightly too many asteroids: I’d like to be frantically switching tools all the time, but ended up primarily using the hammer and then just tending to the chickens/rockets whenever I’d managed to fix all the damage.

I’ve come across one participant who seems to be spamming pages with AI-generated comments - all rehashing feedback given by other players, all ending with the same invitation to play their own game, often posted within seconds of each other. It’s hard to imagine they’re even playing the games they comment on. Can we do anything about this? It’s not strictly rate-for-rate, but at best it feels scummy to have the jam flooded with this stuff and at worst I’m concerned they may actually be giving low/random ratings along with the fake comments.

I realise I’m pretty late to this, but here’s my game if you’re interested! https://damonwakes.itch.io/grapple-tower

The fullscreen button in the bottom right should eliminate that problem. I find fullscreen is also just quite a bit easier all round: I spent a lot of time testing this in GDevelop’s default preview window and I’d often end up clicking somewhere outside it while trying to make a quick change in direction.

Ah - whoops! I forget which order I introduced those new features, but apparently I never tested one using the other. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to fix, but given that anyone using the mouse to aim should have a button available to click at least once, even players who favour keyboard controls should be able to dismiss it.

In hindsight mobile players may struggle to get rid of the right-click tutorial, but I’ve already flagged it as not-strictly-supported so I figure that’s less of an issue.

Let me know if you ever release it anywhere I can have a go! It would be interesting to see it.

Thanks for playing and thinking so deeply about it! I feel as though you’re right about the level design and camera zoom. I think one of the difficulties with jams is that you’re often aiming to polish things quickly and it’s easy to move on before really refining the core gameplay. I already sort of wish it were more practical to play this on mobile, so if there’s ever a Grapple Tower 2 I think I’ll opt for just one arm and a portrait layout. Zooming out might also make it reasonable to have the arms run out of length before they get off screen, so there’s no benefit to simply flinging them upwards and hoping for the best.

Ah - it sounds as though the leaderboard may not have loaded. The authentication thing is for the benefit of anyone who wants to use a gd.games account: it’s not necessary if you simply type in a name. (In hindsight I should possibly have cleared the banner from the screen during the leaderboard load.)

I just looked up Double Wires and think I played it back in the day! It’s entirely possible it was a bit of an influence on this.

If I come back to this idea, I think I might opt for a single arm anyway (the bits that really benefit from having two seem to be what gives people the most trouble). Someone else suggested having more vertical space above the player, which I think would be a good idea, and if the whole thing ends up being portrait anyway I figure it might be worth aiming for controls that would suit a phone touchscreen.

Thanks for the feedback! Now that you mention it, some kind of checkpoint bar right across the tower probably would have saved me some trouble as well. As it is the game deletes any untouched ones lower down the tower, but making them impossible to miss in the first place could have saved me the trouble. I do sort of like the possibility that someone aiming for a fast completion time could shave off a few seconds by taking a gamble on not collecting the checkpoints, but anyone aiming for the fastest possible time is already counting on avoiding restarts along the way so it’s maybe not all that interesting a trade-off to begin with.

Thanks for the detailed response!

The grappling is probably quite a bit simpler than it looks: left/right click “throws” an invisible hand object in the direction of the mouse cursor. When that hits a wall, it stops and a force pushes the player towards it. The arms you see are just square sprites stuck to the centre of the player, rotated towards the hand objects, with their X dimension stretched to be as long as the distance from the player to that hand.

This is so good! The sound and graphics are fantastic, but beyond that I like that the gameplay suits the character: he’s not particularly fast, and you can’t withstand fall damage, but you can manage the ladders and slide down the cliffs like someone who’s done that a lot in the past. My one quibble is that the Rayman-style moving platforms in the lighthouse took me out of the story a little bit. The jumps and crumbling bridges make more sense as obstacles.

I’ve done it! Not sure how much practical use it is, but it looks nicer than the standard mouse cursor at least and should offer a further clue that you have both arms available.

Yeah, it’s often best not to make any massive changes in the last little while. It might be more something for a post-jam version if you feel like tackling one.

If there’s any chance you fancy another go, I’ve uploaded a new version that makes the checkpoints a little harder to miss!

I feel as though this could really do with some textured ground (and ideally a skybox of some sort) because the moment you look away from the floating platforms you lose all indication of your speed and direction. And you HAVE to look away from those platforms on occasion because they’re what you’re aiming for, and you’re travelling backwards. (I’d also kind of like to have the two pistols visible on screen at the start, rather than have to hunt around for them initially!) Very satisfying to blam your way through the skies, though, and the limited ammo makes for a good challenge. I’ll probably be coming back to this later!

Oh, so you’d have the left half light up if you’re holding the left button and the right if you’re holding the right button (or something like that)?

Thanks! Any thoughts on what visuals you’d want for the mouse input? A crosshair or something? There’s still nearly 24 hours to go so I might be able to do something.

Ah! I’d been trying to do it from the right. I hadn’t considered using the wonky wall on the left as a starting point. If I end up adding high scores, I think I’ll also add an egregiously long section of spikes higher up the outside of the tower just to ensure this isn’t viable. (If I don’t add high scores I’ll leave it as-is because it’s kind of funny.)

Haha! I did wonder if anybody would take that as a challenge. Did you actually manage to make it all the way to the top like that? I find the long stretch of spikes running up both walls of the tower (after the checkpoint under the arch) is tough to pass even with the benefit of a safe platform beneath it and two walls to grab, and I haven’t managed to get anything like enough distance from the wall to make it past the corresponding outer row of spikes myself. I can maybe see it being possible if you slingshotted yourself outside the tower from within, then managed to bounce off the wall near the spikes with the benefit of that starting distance, then managed to grab a patch of wall above them, but that involves a significant string of moves with the target and occasionally the player out of sight.

I’m considering adding high scores based on completion time, and don’t want a non-obvious optimum route that cuts out a bunch of the obstacles altogether. (I’m also not 100% sure I want the kind of competition that comes with high scores in the first place, but if I do throw it in there then it should be based on overall skill rather than the ability to pull off one very particular trick.)

Thanks! “Connections” felt somewhat secondary, but the more I thought about it the more I figured that you really are aiming to connect to something all the time you try and get a little higher.

Ah! It doesn’t help me specifically, but only because I’ve also run into that exact issue before. Glad you got it sorted!

You might need to use SceneWindowWidth() and SceneWindowHeight() - I’ve had trouble with this myself, and the fact that it works after you hit F11 (which presumably makes the scene window the size of your screen) makes me think that could be the issue here too.

I really just need some way of getting the individual tracks. I have to be honest, if I need to fire up a YouTube downloader and manually split the tracks up before I can even start incorporating them into the game, I’ll probably just go with something else.

Thanks! That’s super generous. If you do want to create something new for this, it’s pretty much got to be today or tomorrow - otherwise I won’t have time to work it into the game.

I’ll probably hold off using anything pre-made just yet in case anybody else is keen to get involved: I know it can be tough to form a team so if anybody’s specifically looking to produce something new for a project then I don’t want to take away the opportunity too soon! Your Startropics-inspired tracks sound like a good fit, though. Do you have them available for download anywhere or would it be a matter of getting hold of the audio from YouTube and manually splitting them up?

This sounds good! Are you up for making some music for the jam, or just offering these tracks?

I rushed together an entry over the weekend because I’m busy this week, but neglected to include any music. You can play what I’ve got here. Here’s a screenshot just to offer a basic idea what it’s like:

I wasn’t originally planning to team up, but with days left to go I figure I might as well offer the opportunity for any musicians who are interested to chip in some tunes.

Ideally I’m hoping for a handful of different-but-compatible tracks (perhaps with the same beat in the background?) so I can fade seamlessly from one to the next as the player climbs the tower (though I’m open to suggestions). Broadly speaking there’s:

• A gentle section early on.
• A broken-looking section with more room to fall.
• A section full of spikes.
• Space.

If this would be of interest to you, please do reply with a link to somewhere I can hear some music you’ve made! I’m hoping to get the music included within the next three days, so be sure to get in quick - I realise it’ll likely take you some time to make it and I don’t want to cut things too close to the deadline. If there are no takers then I’ll likely use public domain tracks, but I’d much prefer something original made by someone else here!

Okay - I think I’m expecting at least one update before the jam deadline, so I’ll see if I can pop that in. (I think it’s literally just a case of shooting out the arm when mouse or key is pressed, and retracting it when both are lifted, but I’ve been caught out by ‘simple’ changes to basic gameplay before!)

Yeah - left button, left arm; right button, right arm.

I’m wondering if I should put that in the game rather than just the description. (I also realised today that I never added any music, so it might be due an update.)

Not really! I can imagine maybe two on-screen cursors - one controlled with arrow keys, the other with WASD - or possibly even just a few pre-set angles (so AQWED would shoot an arm out in a particular direction) but my guess is that it would feel very different to the mouse version.

Then again, I could quite easily add keyboard buttons so you could use, say, the left/right arrow keys to grab with the left/right arm even if it were still dependent on the mouse to aim. Would that make any difference?

Yeah, I thought The Skellification of Everything was another one I thought did well there. Admittedly it is still quite silly, but being presented with a child’s voice you get the sense that it’s serious to someone and there are some meaningful choices in there. It’s putting the scruffy crayon assets into a context where they’re not entirely ridiculous.

I had to borrow a Windows laptop to get Final Dungeon Quest working myself. I imagine the technical barriers were probably a significant factor in the low number of ratings. Definitely give it a go if you ever find you can! I’d certainly prefer if it were easier to run, but I feel as though there’s a massive difference between a game that works under limited circumstances because it’s doing something bold and interesting and one where the creator just doesn’t know how to make it more widely accessible. This is definitely the former.

I definitely felt as though this was inviting low-effort entries - and would have been entirely happy with that - which is partly why it was such a surprise to have wall-to-wall bangers. Most jams you expect at least a few that are just interesting rather than impressive, and it’s not even as if those entries are unwelcome.

I see what you’re going for here, but I don’t think the game balance quite gets it across. The same as a few others here, I breezed through the game while mostly making the more sustainable choices, but still got the “Earth becomes uninhabitable” ending, which seems to suggest that the current system would be fine if we simply had different billionaires (like me, overseeing a responsible business that delivers organic lemonade by bicycle).

I understand keeping the difficulty reasonable so people can reliably reach that ending, but the trouble is that those who make it there without trashing the environment themselves are getting a different ending.

Also, the decision of whether or not to buy up the competition feels kind of off to me. For one thing, I feel it’s possible to read this as turning around other companies who are undercutting me by making all the unethical choices I didn’t. For another, I can’t fathom why choosing to lower prices has the effect of raising prices:

I had been hoping to get them to move only horizontally or vertically (and ideally not stack) so that there was potential to coax them into easily laserable lines, but ultimately just barely had time to get the controls and basic movement working. Turns out an hour really isn’t a lot of time, even if you’re aiming for something modest from the start!

A 108MB GIF? In this economy???

I love the little skeleton faces on everything - the stretchy horse one especially. The kazoo music is really good too! An incredibly well polished little experience overall.

I’m absolutely floored by the fact this was made in Twine. It was a bit of a pain to get it running (WebGPU doesn’t seem to play nicely with any browser on my Linux machine), but seeing the results was more than worth the hassle. I think I ultimately got stuck on the final floor after restarting: the locked gates returned to their original position, but the enemies and lever in the side rooms weren’t available to open them up again. It’s a bit of a shame to miss whatever ending there is, but I was already super impressed by everything that came before. The game looks amazing and the humour suits it really nicely. (Pokey Pete is my favourite.)

This is fantastic! My favourite detail is “Okay, we’ll wait a minute” followed by precisely one minute of waiting - though I’m not sure it makes sense to circle back to before you’re asked what kind of animal you are rather than just a “It’s been a minute. How about now?” line. The fight sequence is amazing and I love that both possible endings actually make solid sense in the context of this bizarre setup. It’s very polished for something this crayon- and kazoo-y!

It’s interesting to see such a minimalist take on the jam, particularly when the story builds so heavily on the particular assets chosen. I feel as though it lends some extra significance to the mention of drawing materials and artwork in both stories as well.

I’ve said it before, but it’s super neat to see a GameBoy take on this jam. Even if the plain colour tile apparently didn’t work as a background, I’m astounded how readable (yet still crayon-y) you’ve managed to make the other assets despite the small size and constrained palette. The game’s fun, too: I like that there’s so much to poke around an explore, and Story Mode strikes me as pretty ambitious on its own (though I’m afraid I got caught out during the hacking minigame having forgotten which keyboard key was A and which was B!).