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DcaveDerps

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A member registered Oct 20, 2019 · View creator page →

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Very strong visuals, music, and SFX. The pixel art in particular is fantastic and fluid. The whole game has an incredible style. I'll echo what others have said that this looks like a finished product that took months rather than weeks. The game feels pretty good to play, no issues with the controls, but I think it's simultaneously very easy and very punishing. I don't consider the game being easy a bad thing, I prefer it as someone who played all of the other hard IWBTG-style games in the jam, but the game has a few aspects that can cause things to snowball into being pretty frustrating.

As is, the fatal flaw of this game is the Yoshi's Island wig recovery mechanic. It's a cool idea, and most of my problems with it come from the spotlight effect that significantly reduces the player's vision, but I think some design quirks get turned into real problems because of how the wig recovery works.

I'll start with the spotlight effect. When you take damage and lose your wig, you're probably in a situation where you're likely to take damage again, so reducing what the player can see while they're in a dangerous situation obviously makes it more likely that they'll be hit again. It's especially frustrating when this happens from something you can't see, and it kinda feels like the game kicking you while you're down. On one hand, that can be a skill issue, because you could argue that players should be able to remember their immediate surroundings when they get hit. However, in the final boss fight, if the player loses their wig and the screen goes dark, they can't always see things like random enemy spawns or the final boss's visual cues. The wig has a tendency to fly to either edge of the arena, so if you're following it you can't see the center where the boss is, or you may need to move from one side to the other where an enemy you didn't know spawned is waiting for you. This leads to cheap deaths, and since dying in this game means being sent back a level, it often feels like you lose progress from things that feel like they aren't your fault, because you can't react to things if you don't know they're happening.

Enemy health scaling is largely pointless in this game, with two exceptions. The first one is the egg enemy, which actually has a sense of self-preservation and will try to run, which I actually like, because it makes sense conceptually and makes the enemy unique. The second one is when you've lost your wig, and this is when the scaling can become a problem. In later levels, it can take 10 seconds, maybe longer, to fully defeat an enemy with how high their health is. So when you lose your wig, it typically isn't worth it to try and defeat whatever dealt the initial damage, because it will run out your wig recovery timer, you'll waste your damage i-frames, and the longer you wait the further away the wig can travel. So usually the initial threat is still there and can finish the job while you scramble for the wig. And, of course, the spotlight visibility issues are still present, so if this happens in a room with 3-4 enemy spawns, or if you need to follow the wig into uncharted territory, taking damage can quickly snowball into a death.

Despite those gamer rage paragraphs, I do think the game is easy. Outside of the egg, every normal enemy gets stunned on hit or is immobile, so once you get an initial bounce on them you can just keep bouncing on it crazy style until it dies. As health scales, the only thing that changes is how long I have to wait in one spot before moving on. I didn't use the punch much. Generally, enemies are pretty easy to draw aggro and pick off one by one as well, although this slows things down even more. That said, this is only really a problem when replaying levels or in the final floors.

It took me about 6 tries to beat the final boss, and I only died 3-4 times in normal levels, and some of those were because I was tilted from dying on the boss. I do think I got lucky on the winning final boss attempt. I didn't do it hitless, the wig just cooperated when I lost it. About half of the boss attempts died to the visibility problems I've yapped on about, but I wouldn't say any of the boss's attacks feel too unfair when you can see them coming (at least, with the double jump wig). The sound cues and boss dialogue were pretty funny, by the way, and it has some of the best pixel art in game, and probably the jam.

There's some other problems with the wig recovery. I only had it happen once, but I lost the wig on the stairs leading down in the room with the Mario pixel art head, and the wig moved right while keeping the same altitude, so it was impossible to get it again because it wouldn't come back down within the time limit. I'm unsure if that can happen in other rooms with lots of vertical space, but I'm assuming it can. I also had 2-3 instances where I lost the wig, then got the wig back while I'm guessing I was overlapping an enemy or fire with my no wig i-frames, got the wig back, then immediately lost it again instead of getting the i-frames upon wig pickup. That I could see being intentional, but it doesn't feel good.

A lot of this could be fixed if you just add transparency to the spotlight effect, so you can keep the effect but still see things underneath the black space. Maybe add a way to enforce separate maximum vertical and horizontal distances the wig can be from the player, where if the wig goes past one it starts moving back towards the player until it's in range. I'd add separate ones because generally it seems the game is more horizontal than it is vertical, and if you used one value for max distance it'd be easy to run into problems like the Mario room if it's too big for one axis.

With all that said, this is still undoubtedly one of my favorites from the jam. I saved this one for the end because I figured it'd be quality. I'm glad to see another FCK game after last year's, and this one was definitely better. Great work!

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Really liked the look and the writing of this one. Went out of my way to talk to all the NPCs, and I think I got them all. I did get stuck on a crater here after getting my last quest item, where I couldn't move and couldn't see the menu when I opened it (I could hear the sfx for opening, selecting options, and closing it, but it didn't appear on screen). I think the sfx for getting the quest item was still playing when it happened, and I know bumping into things plays a sound effect, so maybe there's some connection there. I had a save file, though, so I didn't have to replay much to finish it. Very cute and headwarming story.

Phenomenal art and music, and the game play felt pretty good. There's a lot here for the jam period! Three floors with unique enemies, music, and graphics is pretty commendable. I liked the game enough to finish it twice to see more items and weapons, and I ran into a few bugs on the second playthrough. The biggest one being that you keep everything from previous playthroughs into future ones as long as you don't close the window and don't die. On subsequent playthroughs I skipped the intro cutscene, though, which might be meaningful here. That also might be responsible for some of the other bugs I found:

  • The chainsaw just doesn't seem to work sometimes. I only found the chainsaw on my second playthrough. I picked up 2 projectile size upgrades and tried using the chainsaw, and it usually worked, but sometimes it wouldn't deal contact damage unless I made sure it wasn't overlapping any enemies first before using it. It wasn't able to damage the final boss at all, though. Unsure if this is a problem with the chainsaw or the stacking size upgrades.
  • You have full player control during elevator cutscenes. That means you can use weapons and consume ammo, which some might find annoying during a cutscene. Could be a bug or speedrun tech, I didn't try to see if doors worked as well.
  • Killing the second boss with a chainsaw causes this to happen, where the elevator opens, and the fight ends, but the boss sprite and health bar are still visible on screen. Touching the boss sprite at this point does nothing.
    • I first triggered this on my second playthrough with the mega chainsaw, but I don't think the second playthrough shenanigans had any affect here. I was able to recreate it again by killing the boss with a normal-sized chainsaw on a fresh playthrough.
  • Buying multiple copies of a weapon allows you to get extra ammo back from the half ammo to all weapons box. You get half ammo per copy of the weapon you own (I think, buying two copies of a weapon gives you full ammo on future box pickups each time when you should only get 50%).

Most of these are just weird quirks and didn't detract anything from the experience. I figured I'd mention them in case you want to keep working on the game after the jam. Great job!

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Adding scroll wheel support to move the highlight is definitely a good idea that would make bulk dropping items easier. Outside of dropping items and seeing what items are called, the additional keyboard controls for the bottom inventory are mostly an unnecessary leftover from earlier in development. Originally, there were no mouse controlled GUIs, and everything was going to be controlled with the keyboard. This sucked, and I couldn't think of a way to design the cauldron and other stations that wasn't awful, so I pivoted to mouse controlled GUIs, but didn't remove the extra keyboard controls. I definitely wouldn't add click and dragging items in the bottom left inventory, I feel that would over-complicate interacting with GUIs and be more annoying than the alternatives for dropping items once the scroll wheel fix is in.

Rule 2 of the Wild Jam would prevent me from submitting this even if I wanted to, but submitting anything to multiple jams that aren't all explicitly cool with doing that kinda goes against the spirit of a game jam.

Thanks! Getting started seems to be a sticking point for people. I thought that might be a problem, so that's why I didn't add timers to individual requests, since it wouldn't feel good if people were failing the first few requests while they were still figuring things out.

I thought that would be good enough, but in hindsight I'm thinking the underlying issue might be inventory management. I'm realizing now that a new player would probably pick up a bunch of items at the beginning to learn where to get things and end up with a lot of stuff they don't need immediately, requiring them to trash or drop them. I could see that being tedious, is that what happened to you? After the voting period, I think I'll solve that by adding an item preview that appears when you're near a station, so you can see the item before you commit to picking it up.

Excellent work, very good atmosphere, amazing art, and honestly a pretty good length for the jam period. My only gripe is that I had a bit of a hard time deciphering the safe code, because some of the heads look really similar and I have small eyes, but nothing was anywhere near frustrating.

Fun game, cool way to work in the theme. I liked the beanie bit to introduce the blinding mechanic. The fights and fighter animations felt pretty authentic to me, although I've only ever played the original Punch-Out. The mirror block gave me a bit of trouble at first, because the telegraph animations are long, and I was consistently using it too early. Good job!

Strategy spoilers, I guess. If other people are having trouble after playing the game, here's my Prima strategy guide:

I stumbled into a fairly consistent strategy that makes the game a lot easier, even in expert mode: spam right uppercuts until you're blocked, then spam left jabs, then go back to right uppercuts to repeat the cycle when the jabs are blocked. If you get blocked multiple times in a row, regardless of punch, be ready to dodge. You're probably going to get a telegraphed attack, after which you can go back to spamming. This doesn't fully stunlock the opponents, you're still going to need to dodge and block big attacks, but it does seem to prevent the random quick punches they can throw. I've beaten Expert mode 4 times doing this, with my best "time" being 9 seconds left on the final fight.

Expert Mode Screenshot

Thanks! What you seen in-game is about as deep as my thinking went into it. Having certain ingredients control things like different hair styles or things like straight vs curls could be cool things to build on, but were never planned. I was mostly focused on hair color.

The names primarily came from the size of the potions, because I thought it would make sense that tonics with more ingredients or complex recipes would result in bigger potions. So I made sprites for a small, medium, and large potion first, and then afterwards tied the bottle size to hair length. So "short", "normal", and "long" can be switched out with small, medium, and large (and are in several places internally).

If you meant seeing the hair tonics work on customers before they leave, that also wasn't planned for the jam build, but would probably make fulfilling requests more fun and satisfying.

What should we do for web builds? Should these be the original submissions, or can they have (non-critical bugfixes and/or content) updates? I ask, because I imagine if there's a browser version available, that's the version people will play and rate, and you can't see the build version in the file name like you would on a file download.

Really good stuff here! There were some micro-games that had some cool mechanics compared to other WarioWare likes, like the keep the ball up game. Plus, the rewinding mechanic changing up the games you've played is really cool, and a really creative way of intertwining the theme with the genre. I also prefer the consistent control scheme of the keyboard, instead of potentially swapping between keyboard and mouse for each game. I think the visuals also work with the genre pretty well, and the music and jingles were great.

Short and sweet game! The dialogue was really entertaining and I really like the concept, I think a game with this premise could be developed into a cool Day of the Tentacle / Toonstruck hybrid. I wish there were puzzles that spanned multiple channels, but for the sake of the jam it's probably best that each one was self-contained.

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This has incredibly strong visuals and environment design. The first person animations for reloading and healing were a nice touch. I got a little lost in the first room before I got my bearings but after that I didn't have any trouble. I didn't really use the back-tracking gates that opened as you explored, but I'm glad they were there. I think the tapes were pretty well hidden without being too difficult or easy, as well as being pretty funny with the cover art and descriptions. The enemy designs tying into the tapes was also cool. The designs were great on their own, but the added context about the Turtles' lore made me appreciate some of the little details more.

I definitely had my fill of the combat by the end, though, since it's easy to aggro lots of enemies at once and get overwhelmed, especially if you run out of power for the glove. I definitely learned to take out enemies from a distance to more easily avoid that scenario. The primary attack feels weak, and the charge attack has a long charge before it shoots the projectile, making it hard to aim while staying mobile to avoid projectiles. I wouldn't say it felt frustrating, though, since there wasn't really any penalty for dying thanks to the check point system. It's possible to get a negative number of batteries if you die while reloading, but that was the only bug I encountered.

I think I really learned a lot about safety from playing this game. Thank you, Middle Aged Man-Like Safety Awareness Turtles. Really nice job!

Sweet Contra-like, definitely felt like a retro game without being frustrating. The art was great and the end was a nice surprise.

I imagine it's a false positive, but one of the checks on VirusTotal is flagging this as a virus:


VirusTotal Link

Neat little games, though. I wasn't always sure when I was winning or losing in some of them, but the art was cute. I'm no super fan, but I thought you matched the style pretty well. The Ben Franklin game was my favorite.

The environment and duck themed movie posters were really cool, and the idea of running a store is fun. The sound effect for selling the perfect match to a customer confused me a bit, it sounds more like a negative sound to me. I also got unlucky with this bug pictured below, where I was unable to buy an upgrade despite apparently having enough for it. I'm guessing it's floating point comparison funkiness:


It feels a bit odd when you start running out of stock, and therefore are unable to make perfect matches for each customer. Because (as far as I could tell) there's no way to dismiss customers if you don't have what they're looking for, and their requests don't seem to take into account your remaining stock, in the back half of each day most customers get whatever is left, regardless of what they want or how well they tip. I typically held on to high rarity merch until I could maximize the tip, but that led to me running out of lower rarity merch quickly. Maybe playing that way isn't ideal, but if there was some way the player knew about upcoming customers, I think the gameplay would feel more strategic and therefore more satisfying. As is, it's still pretty good for a week!

Very good, the Bob Ross game's screen shake was definitely a highlight. I also liked how the table got more stuff themed around the games.

Thanks for the feedback! I didn't think I had time to implement a speed up system, so while the games do get harder, the time limit for each game is the same every time. I might add a proper one later, though, and do another pass on the scaling difficulty for some games (looking at the find the remote game in particular).

I saw someone else submitted a WarioWare game a few days before the deadline and wasn't too surprised someone else had the idea, but I didn't think it would be this popular. Gonna be interesting to see what directions other people went in.

Track3-LapCharacterFlapCharacter
Paaln Circuit1:44.72Hero Lion33.22Hero Lion

1.3.0 record for the new track.

Track3-LapCharacterFlapCharacter
Bedrock1:17.91Mario00:24.32Mario
Desert Busway1:17.43Pillar Pet00:23.98Barve Rat
Joey Castle2:12.06Hero Lion00:41.35Hero Lion

1.2.0 Time Trial Records. Definitely not perfect, but hopefully they'll provide a bit of a challenge to beat!

Yeah, the music is great and fits the vibe really well!

The visuals and atmosphere are top notch, but the lose\game over state needs to be better communicated, and I think the gameplay is severely restricted by the logic that determines the next round score. It looks like the next round score is usually determined by doubling the player's previous final score, which actively punishes them for doing well. I made it to the shop for the first time on my fifth or so attempt at the game, because I intentionally used less bones to sandbag my score to be something that would barely beat the current round goal, so it would be easier to beat round three. Otherwise, I was consistently doing too well in round two, making the round three goal unbeatable without really good bone luck.

Even past round three, it seems exceedingly difficult to progress once the round goal gets over a few thousand, because bone placement can only do so much (especially when bones seem to be drawn\created randomly), even with illegal bone placements that extend outside the defined grid. There doesn't appear to be enough money to buy multiple smokers\drinks\smokes to consistently get a good enough combo going, unless I'm missing something that lets you get more than $5 when entering the shop for the first time. I eventually figured out that smokes cost $2, so it's possible to buy a smoker and change the default cigarette they come with, but that was through trial and error, because the shop tooltip says smokes cost $3.

I'm just kinda confused, because I don't think this is supposed to be a min-maxing game where you're trying to just barely beat the goal every single time. All of the effects in the shop that I could see seem intended to make numbers go up and/or be triggered as many times as possible, as opposed to a mix of effects that give you finer control over your score to help prevent going too far past any given round goal. That leads me to believe that the intention is for the player to always make the largest number possible. However, I did notice that there appears to be a finite number of bones in the bottom right. I was never able to beat the round goal with no bones left to draw, so I don't know if the board gets cleared and the bones reset once you run out, or if the game is only supposed to last six rounds, and is genuinely a puzzle to optimize those six rounds to get to the end. If the latter is true, that goal should be stated explicitly somewhere in the game, because I think it would set expectations and clue players into the intended strategy sooner. If the game is supposed to last longer, then the round goal scaling should be a lot more gradual, at least until the player has the opportunity to visit a few shops, so they can explore how different smoker/drink/smoke combos work more thoroughly.

This game definitely stands out in a lot of good ways, the concept is excellent and figuring out bone placements is genuinely fun, it just feels unclear what I'm supposed to be aiming for.

There's a pretty devastating softlock + save issue. It doesn't seem like stat upgrades get saved, only the your story progress, money, and Frens you've collected. So whenever a save file is loaded, each Fren reverts back to their base stats. This is made worse because the final boss room has places where you can get softlocked before you can trigger the dialogue/fight:

<- don't go here, you will be trapped.

This happens on the right side as well. Reloading a save to solve the softlock resets everyone's stats, which then makes the boss fight impossible, I'm guessing, unless you grind back to where you were.

I still had a good time with the game, though. It was nice being surprised by the wide variety of things referenced in the Fren roster, and the art and music was great. I'll probably try again later with a new team.

Funny, clever, had really cool skeletons. I think you nailed the theme with this, and each of the games had some special sauce to make them stand out.

Cute art, loved seeing the familiar faces, and took a good idea and executed it well, with some cool curve balls!

Spent longer than I'd like to admit looking for the level exit in level 1, and almost ran out of ammo, but all in all a pretty solid little game. The outdoor level was a highlight, and the props\set pieces around the levels were pretty cool!

Replaced exe with zip which includes both, thanks for letting me know.

This game uses the Z and X buttons for input instead of the spacebar or clicking. If pressing the Z button didn't work to advance the text, how are you playing the game? I haven't tested this on mobile, and I doubt it will work there. It's working for me in Firefox and Chrome.

Added the cartridge file to the game page, with some instructions in case you or future people need them.