Very cool atmosphere. I especially like how the damage sound, combined with the attack rate on the bigger ants, makes it sound like a heartbeat. That fits well with the eerie music.
If I'm understanding correctly, you can feed an ant to a mouth to get an upgrade? I found it very hard to feed it the right ant. I ended up losing all my upgraded guys that way...
Are there health pickups hidden in the walls, or do you just heal in certain corridors?
The GameInfant is ever so nostalgic. It was one of the few things I could do in a car without getting carsick. Not sure why.
I particularly liked the jumping over posts minigame. I definitely remember staring out the window like that, and controlling it with mouse movement is such a good way to capture that.
The annoying the sibling bit felt a bit straightforward. Maybe the target could move each time?
Overall, this was charming, and very well executed!
The spinner battle system is such a novel idea. I really liked it. However, I found flicking quickly with the mouse was quite difficult to do, and I don't even have any wrist problems. For accessibility, maybe a different control scheme?
I love how we leap past each other to attack. Very anime. It seems like the damage numbers stay on the original side though?
The art style is great, and I really liked how the music changed from peaceful to exciting as the battles started.
Putting a timer on the end screen was a nice idea, though I don't think I'll ever be good enough to speed run it :P
The animation for changing layers is very cute, and changing the colour helps keep it very readable.
It could use some platformer conveniences, like coyote time, and not colliding with platforms from below. I would also echo what others have said about space feeling like a jump button. I kept pressing it out of habit, and falling through the floor. Enter for the switching might be less confusing.
You made a nice range of challenging levels. At times it was almost frustrating, but I think it was just on the right side of that. The "sorry" made me laugh.
This was an intriguing experience. It felt like an old sci-fi TV show.
I liked the orbit matching interface. Lining up the trajectory was fun. I kind of which you'd done more with that, since the other screens seemed to just be a single button press. Perhaps overlapping orbits, to route around a moon or something?
Is the code on the scan screen just the game's code? That's very funny.
PS. You'll probably get more plays with a .zip rather than a .rar, since Windows can't extract those by default.
This game has such mechanical depth for a jam game! The learning curve was pretty steep, but once I got the hang of it, it was really engaging.
As far as I can tell, it gives you the same tiles, in the same order, until you play something that shuffles the deck. That's a little confusing. It looks like a deck-builder, but it plays more like a designed puzzle game.
I did eventually beat it, which was very satisfying. Overall, this is a very impressive game!
I enjoyed the migrating birds flavour, and the combination of overland travel with a card game is nice.
Is there any cost to playing cards? It felt like I could just click every card in my hand without needing to think about it... I wonder if you could have two challenges at a time, so you have to choose which cards to spend on each one, for example.
Does the terrain affect the encounters you face? I felt like it did, but I may have imagined that.
I thought the use of hanafuda cards was really nice. Overall, the art and music you selected was all very pleasing, and worked together very nicely.
This was great! Very hard early on, without many corners, but the fact that you keep progression helps with that a lot.
I found I was quite often rotating cards when I wanted to drag them, and vice-versa. Would you consider using right click for rotate?
I like the little blue guys. They're very cute. I wonder if there might be some mechanical space in having tiles that trigger when walked on. For example, a monster tile that gives you a useful tile when played, but is dangerous to walk on, so you'd be looking for side spaces to put it in. Which is to say, I think this core mechanic has a lot of potential.
A very strange interpretation of the theme, but an interesting one!
It felt a bit odd to have 2 different fistfight systems. Why not pick one and develop it? I personally preferred the second one, though the first seemed like it would have more depth if I could get the hang of it.
This is really cool (no pun intended). I enjoyed planning how far to drive before running back to shelter.
I never worked out how to eat food, so I got through the game by loading up entirely on fuel, and sacrificing the operators. After clearing the game, I checked the start again, and the button was mentioned in the tutorial. It seems like an important point, so maybe make the tutorial a bit briefer, and/or put a button prompt on the HUD.
The deforming snow is really impressive, and the snow material is also very nice. I think the level design might benefit from more variety of paths. For example, maybe there could be sheltered paths which are easier to walk, but which are too narrow to drive through. Or windy areas where health drops much faster out of the plow. Strategically planning routes was very fun, so I feel you should lean into that more, if you continue developing this.
I get a nice JRPG vibe from the graphics. Reminds me of Dragon Quest.
A few points where it could be improved:
The pixel art would look better with consistent scaling. The big monsters, small monsters, and trees all look like they're from different games.
Some hit reacts would make the combat feel more satisfying. Even just having the sprites flash white.
If there's no disadvantage to constantly attacking, do you need an attack button?
The progression from slimes, to skeletons, to golems, is nice, and makes it feel more like going on a journey. I can't beat the skeletons, so I just ran straight to the boss, and they all came on the journey with me. Sadly, they didn't want to help me beat him...
I really like the idea behind this. Plotting routes for the different groups is neat, and there are some interesting choices about balancing information gathering versus time.
As you said, I did encounter some bugs. The big one is that if you plan an expedition, then cancel it, you then plan the next expedition from the point where you cancelled.
I missed that I could move the map. I thought it was a one-screen game at first. After restarting, I saw that moving with WASD was included in the tutorial, but I wonder if it would be better to introduce that after the player reaches the first destination.
I can get out of the shell, but I can't for the life of me work out what to do from there. It keeps restarting, which I assume means I got spotted? It's a bit abrupt.
Fred is very eerie, with his low-res face and his unsettling chuckle.
This was really charming! I liked how many little mysteries there were to uncover. The alternate movement mode really made me laugh.
I finally figured out the fish after I'd found all the light houses, which was a bit too late. Cool idea for a mechanic though. Maybe the fish could have some dialogue before jumping back in the water? I feel like that shows up in a lot of folktales. "Spare my life, and I'll..."
I found the anchor a little hard to aim. I'm not sure what causes the arrow to be larger or smaller, and it seemed like sometimes a very large arrow gave me quite a short throw. I like the concept though, and it was fun to throw the anchor over an island and have the boat sail around it.
Yeah, originally I wanted it to louden important sounds, and quieten background noise. There was going to be a set of sound-based puzzles, but I ran out of time.
The Lemonverse doesn't seem like a very nice place...
I thought this was a very solid game, but it could use some tuning. For example, enemies take a long time to kill. It would be more satisfying to have more enemies that die quickly. Also the lemon trees seem to only be choppable from one direction?
Overall, interesting, alien-feeling lemon world. Tweak a few numbers and I could see this being very fun to play.
The jump physics seem a bit odd, but with screen wrapping I ended up not needing to jump, so that was fine.
I think you definitely hit the cozy aesthetic. Very relaxing to play, with just a little tension whenever I had to go near the golden lemon. There's a real feeling of relief when you can go back to pushing lemons off the edge.
Really nice low-fi aesthetic. The tongue animation on those lemons is very unsettling. Was it deliberate to have the skybox look skull-like? I thought it was a nice touch.
It's an interesting concept. Keeping the lemon on the skateboard, especially on the ramps, was challenging in a fun way. I also liked how it restarted quickly after a game over, to keep you in the flow.
I think if the camera didn't rotate with the skateboard, it would be more playable. I assume it's parented to the skateboard? Maybe add a script that just copies the position, so it lurches around less.
Weirdly satisfying. I enjoyed finding out what the next available item would be, although I'd have liked more choices along the way. Perhaps an alternate route to victory through making lemonade?
Some very cool ideas. I enjoyed the cat-summoning lock on the spellbook. Much more interesting than simply finding a book.
I would have liked a very brief introduction to give me some idea of that kind of dungeon to picture. Getting straight to the point is great, but a high level overview of what and where this dungeon is would be nice.
I think all the mysterious, magical stuff in the dungeon would make for a very enjoyable old-school dungeon crawl.
I can't believe you managed to fit in a hexcrawl, bestiary, preset characters and a dungeon with over 100 rooms. An incredibly dense adventure!
The science-fantasy vibe is very cool, and I particularly like that the power cells are both used to power magic items, and to feed goblins. So much shenanigan potential.
The tone of this adventure is just fantastic. Really ominous.
I especially like the combination of timeline and random encounters to ramp up the tension. That seems like it would work really well to build up horror and desperation.
I like the fairy tale atmosphere of this adventure. It feels more gentle than most, which is a nice change of pace.
While I understand the logic of putting the map at the back for quick access, reading the key before seeing the map was a bit disorienting. Perhaps the key could start by noting where to find the map?
I'd have rated this highly simply for the genius of Jonsey the Badger, but the rest deserves a high rating too! The alien influence is maybe a little on the nose, but at the same time, it's really cool. I can see the dwarven magictech being really fun to play with.
Just looking at the map, this looked like a really fun dungeon, and the room descriptions did not disappoint. The amount of magical weirdness going on is fantastic.
I initially thought the two room 9s were literally the same room, with some non-Euclidean space going on. Sadly, not the case, though the identical rooms will also mess with players in a fun way.
I love the idea of tectonic plate titans as gods. That's such a cool idea. The whole setting is really evocative.
It would be nice if the river map had an indication which way was upstream. I assume the caves are downstream from River Hop, but I was never quite sure.
