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Very silly! I like it! Couldn't figure out how to rotate the camera though..

Looks like time constraints hit you really hard. If only you'd had 1 more day to bring it all together, polish up the systems, etc. 

Looks like you got a solid base going though!

Thanks for jamming!

Jams are a safe space to fail and a great place to learn new things! No shame in having things not work!

You'll do even better next time using this experience! 

I tried to make the difficulty curve smooth, but well, time pressures, lack of time to remake levels, etc made it tough to adjust levels for difficulty. Some of the later levels (I think level like, 12?) got an adjustment cause it was like, impossible, but that was the only major change other than quota and time tweaks. 

A difficulty system was suggested by one of my teammates, but we didn't have the time to implement it. 

Thanks for the feedback though! Glad you enjoyed despite it not being your cup of tea!

uhh, between the very much 3D motion sickness inducing controls (camera moved *way* too fast, and prolly the FOV also didn't agree with me), and the expanding potato earthquake field, I uhh, don't quite know what to make of it. 

(The 3D motion sickness is a problem, the expanding potatoes is, I assume, a feature and intended. The earthquakes.. honestly kinda funny, but I can't help but feel like it's not intended..).

Anyway, there isn't much of a gameplay loop (I'm guessing time constraints hit?), but it seems like it can be a basis that can be taken in a few different directions once things are stabilized! 

Hope y'all had a good jam!

Thanks for the feedback, glad you enjoyed!

It was indeed ambitious, but I think we got the game to a good place given the time constraint!

We had at one point wanted to implement a cell highlight thing, where the cell that the mouse is on top of would be highlighted to show the player exactly where machines would be placed. Sadly, we didn't get around to making that happen. 

Odd that you couldn't get picking up to work.. The way the game works is that during prep time, you can manipulate the entire factory, but while items are coming in you can only manipulate tiles that are within 3 tiles of the couch. Maybe that was the problem? To pick up machines/belts, you just need to left click on them. 

In any event, thanks for the feedback! Hope you had fun! Feel free to ask if you have any other problems with the game and I'll do my best to help you out!

Oh yeah, also, this was a 5 day jam, not a 48 hour jam, so that helped a lot. 

Thanks for the kind words! We worked real hard to get as much as we could in!

I do agree that the tutorial is a bit lacking - it's sadly one of the things that we didn't have enough time to make good (i.e. interactive)

Awesome! Thanks for the kind words! We had a blast making the game!

My pleasure! And I did upload those screenshots for further examples! Good luck, have fun!

(I'm tired tonight, but I'll be sure to check out your game tomorrow!)

Machines have an arrow that point in the direction that they output. 

Machines can only output onto a belt (can't output from machine to machine). 

You can build while items are coming in! While items are flowing, your range is restricted to near the couch (within 3 tiles). 

And yes, the level 2 time is very short! That was done intentionally with the thought that it would force players to learn that they could do stuff while the factory was running!

I should probably get a screenshot of what a working level 2 solution looks like and add it to the game's screenshots to give players a hint.. That seems like a good idea. 

Thanks for the praise! It was a pretty hectic week! We have 2 programmers on this team and both of us worked for around 15+ hours a day to get all the functionality in! Pretty proud of it!

The war potato is very intense! Surprised by how hard the war was fought. Story of potato was very informative! Great enjoyment! Thanks much!

The art is good, the music is nice and relaxing (and certainly gives me great post-jam cool down vibes!), but the gameplay is sadly lacking. There's a few things that could be improved upon:

First, the pace is too slow. I don't want to need to wait a minute for a customer to show up. 

Next, customers don't wait long enough. You can only realistically get 5 or 6 ingredients onto the potato before they leave. 

I see this as being very similar to the Papa's games, so my improvements are based on them and what made them enjoyable. 

The lineup of customers giving you multiple orders to handle all at once. 

The chain being more complex due to each step of the process requiring something slightly different. 

Being able to prepare multiple things at the same time. 

There's never a reason to have more than two potatoes ready at any given time - customers simply take too long to show up for that to be a concern. 

Beyond that, setting up the potato is too simplistic - until you get to the final step where it's a panic to read what the customer wants, figure out which thing it actually is, and then apply it. You can't even do things like prepare some things that appear to be more common (even though I think the requests are completely random?) because you can only have 1 potato on a kitchen tray at a time (or at least, I couldn't get there to be two potatoes in the kitchen at the same time..)

In short, it could use just a bit more polish and balance. Well, from the outside at least. Knowing how these things work on the inside, setting up what I'm describing here would probably have taken another 3 days, or for it to be in the plans from the start. It succeeds in being a cozy (albeit really slow) game, so if that's what you were going for, good job! You nailed it! If not, well, back to that polish bottle. 

In any event, I hope yall had fun and learnt something! Thanks for jamming!

Woah! I see the vision. I see the BIG plans that you had. I see the potential! I also sadly feel the 3D motion sickness. It varies a lot depending on the game for me, but your little demo box here hit me hard. 

I could see how it could turn into a silly-fest full of.. stuff. 

Reminds me a bit of the old "Achievement Unlocked" flash games in the sense that you're constantly getting micro achievements. With more polish, and maybe a month more work to add in and flesh out all those systems, I can see this going somewhere!

Congrats on the level 1 win! Thanks for playing! Hope you had fun, and can maybe get to the later levels!

I don't think we actually ever said it anywhere in game or outside, but there's a total of 15 levels to beat!

Awesome! And the feedback is certainly appreciated!

Only problem with your feedback was we were already aware of it and had made moves to fix it internally, and then didn't publish the fix for a while due to playtesting and balancing and the constant stream of micro tweaks. 

Hope you give it another try in it's final form!

Thanks again for the feedback, and trying to go around giving people some advice before the deadline! Feedback is always appreciated in every form! <3

Pretty mechanically interesting!

It could use some sort of visual score to tell the player how many points they've gotten, but other than that, I see it as a complete mini game!

First off, thanks for playing!

Second, we're still updating some minor stuff - the last build is building on my computer as I type this out. Part of that update makes the output arrows on machines much more visible so it should be better!

I have discovered some bugs! 

1:

If you build up enough speed and ram into a wall, you can clip into it a bit. This lets you scale walls that you shouldn't be able to get up. 

Repro steps:

Hold a direction for a bit (~1 second is enough I think?)

Jump (while still holding down the directional button)

Have the jump be interrupted due to hitting a wall

Spam jump button to climb

2:

If you jump onto the corner of a ground ledge just right (it's really not that precise), you get a bit stuck, and you can hold a direction to build up speed, which lets you cross gaps that you shouldn't be able to cross. It tended to shoot me to the left, but I did get it to shoot the player to the right once.

Repro steps:

Jump onto the corner of a platform (ground) such that the player sprite is only about half on the ground

Observe that holding a direction key does not move the player

After holding a directional key for long enough, enough speed is built up that the player becomes unclipped. I've observed that the player tends to slide to the left a bit as a warning sign that the player is about to be ejected. 

(P.S. I found your game by doing some playtesting at GDC. Still an awesome concept . :)

My pleasure! Getting feedback is a huge part of why I published my game, even in its unfinished state.

Thank you for offering suggestions! It truly does mean a lot to me!

Gotcha, I see. 

I'm currently working on making the game mobile friendly (when played online), but after that I'll take a look at revamping the tutorial. 

I've gotten other feedback that also suggested that the tutorial could use an upgrade, so you're not the only one who thought it could be better. 

Thanks again for the feedback!

First off, thanks for playing and the feedback, it means a lot to me!

I can agree with what you've said, especially if you don't have any programming experience, the game can be tough to understand. 

If you've got any ideas to make the game easier to pick up, I'm all ears! I tried to design the tutorial in such a way that it introduced the core mechanics while also not being way too long, but even the basics is kinda information overload, and I skimmed over some stuff (like enemy explanations). Hence why pretty much everything also has a tooltip..

I think I get what you mean by 'too little gameplay', but I'm not sure what to do to alleviate that issue.. I guess I can make the script execution be even faster? 

From my point of view, the frustration with the game loop is that if you need to move in a certain direction, and the move card is just stuck in your deck and doesn't want to show up, forcing you to discard 3 turns in a row. I'm planning on adding in more movement options to help with that (specifically a teleport ability of some kind). Once I add in some sort of item system, I'll also be able to use those to influence movement as well, introducing more possibilities of how to get around the board.

Maybe giving the player a free move card in all directions (outside of the hand) every turn would help?

Glad you enjoyed that bit!

Well, I just really like puzzle games and solitaire games, so this just fell right into my niche! 

Yeah, wanting to avoid the bag system makes sense for what you described (same thoughts as what I called 'making it a solved game'). 

And yeah, very understandable to not want to open up the code again (for a variety of reasons). The different plane types would have made this much more interesting! Cause, theoretically, a perfect game would have you continuously getting the exact same tile every time, so having some variety of planes that act different to break that theoretical up could've been cool! Though, for what it's worth, the transition looks very smooth. For a game that you were making while learning the engine, this seems mighty impressive to me! Congrats for managing that!

Will definitely check out Urbion, thanks for the suggestion!

Damn, I thought I fixed all the bugs that let the string elongate infinitely. Especially if both of them are moving... suddenly realizes the edge case that I introduced: if both characters have the input to move held down, but neither is actually moving…  Well, thanks for brining that up. 

And yeah, no slingshot. The string pulls based on the characters, not the center node of the string. 

Thanks for the motivation that you think the game could sell well! We are considering continuing development since we also think that it's a unique idea that can become something great! The string definitely needs a lot of polish though. There just wasn't enough time to refactor over and over until I found the best way to implement it, so I went with my first thought and just debugged it as best I could. I have thought of some ways to improve it though. 

Anyway, hope you enjoyed it despite the extreme difficulty! (which was not planned btw. Blame the difficulty on string jank :shrug: ).

:D

The theoretical max is 16, but I'm thinking the practical max is probably closer to 14, since even that would take crazy luck.

Edit: OK yeah, so, I can consistently get to 10 (occasional bad luck puts me below, but 10 is average at this point). Anything above that requires good luck. I'll let yall know if I break the 12 barrier. 

One more thing, do you think you could add a tiny update with a 'restart game' button (preferable accessible even if you didn't run out of moves)? (I'd understand if you didn't want to, but I'd be super thankful for it)

OK, so, first off, thanks a lot for fixing the screen shaking in the webGL build, it became much easier to look at (and I also beat it on my first try without the shaking, so I get to blame the endless shaking on me losing before). 

A cool idea! The flipping from 2D to 3D is awesome! The 3D tunnels sometimes not being quite straight breaks immersion a bit, but well, 'tis a game jam. 

Overall, super cool that you got procedural generation working! It fits the theme really well and is a fun game to play!

A very interesting application of the theme!

OK, it took me a bit to figure out how to play, but I really enjoyed the process of figuring it out! Testing my theory as to finalize in my mind what did what was great! And then there's the actual game itself!

As a huge fan of puzzle games, I really enjoyed it. My main criticism is that there isn't really any way to influence what tiles you'll draw, it's completely random as far as I can tell. While in one sense this is a good thing since it forces you to play around what you get, on the flip side, it's a negative since you're at the mercy of RNGesus, and since I can't help but view this as a type of solitaire, in which everything is deterministic (though there is also a bit of luck there, but it's still deterministic), I can't help but view the luck of the draw as a negative. 

I'd say a bag system, where you're guaranteed to get one of every tile before you can get another, but the two sides have independent bags could really up the level of strategy that goes into the game, cause then you'd be able to carry over the tiles from one bag into the influence that belongs to the other bag. It would also let you hypothesize as to what would come next. 

Of course, the bag system could also lead to the game becoming solved (much like how one version of tetris that uses bags become solved), but the turn limit almost fixes that. At most, you'd be able to fully cycle through a total of three bags, and since you need to swap sides, that would mean you have an average of only refilling your bags on each side once, and then dipping into half of the next bag, which would maintain your randomness factor. 

OK, I'm done drooling over my hypothetical strategy solitaire game (if you couldn't tell, I've uhh, played a lot of solitaire, and several different kinds of solitaire). 

Overall, great game, and I will thoroughly enjoy it (and will possibly be the only one to still play it in 5 years when I randomly remember that it exists). 

Puzzle/solitaire enthusiast score is a solid 7.2/10. (I wavered a lot between 6.8 and 7.5, so just settled for the middle). 

Edit: I just got to 9, so I'll stop there so I have time to check out the other games. So far though, this one is the most in my niche, so it gets the medal for 'the game I am most likely to play in the future'

Edit 2: I just got 11 

A fairly simple concept, and umm, well, I'll list out the bad before the good (sorry in advance). 

* No quit button (or retry button after you fail. I had to alt-F4 out of the game and launch it again)

* No death plane (I uhh, fell through a hold and randomly moved until I got the lose screen)

* The character feels *very* slippy

* The terrain doesn't really match (you can go up and down irregular 'steps' and seemingly just ignore them)

* I uhh, hadn't realized at first that I had to collect the coins. It took me falling down and being forced the examine the level to realize that there were collectibles (I totally ran straight towards the monster thinking it was a cave that I had to enter, only to fall down...).

OK, so, other than all that:

Great art! It's always an extra challenge to go 3D in a game jam, and the art shows effort and a unique style!

I'm gonna not say much about the gameplay cause it's really short and very simplistic. Some sort of obstacles/abilities to get past the obstacles would be needed to make it a challenge. 

It's a good base to work off of, but feels more like a prototype than anything else. 

Lastly, sorry if you feel like I'm being very harsh on you. It's a game jam, so not everything can be perfect (or even close to it). I'm trying to give criticism by pointing out everything that I found wrong so you can do better next time/places to improve on this game. Congrats on actually making something at all!

A very cute game, but umm, I don't quite understand fully. 

The second level felt extremely difficult, what with the pellets dropping at one end of the screen, then the next at the opposite end. (this happened a lot). And since you can only traverse about a third of the screen (at best) between drops, the most I ever got was 3, so I kept losing. Until all of a sudden, it gave me the win after getting just 1. 

Also, the intro cutscene was quite long, so I'm glad for the (surely unintended) skip feature that I activated by alt-tabbing out of the game then back in. 

Overall, a very cute game, and as Jordan said, clearly much more was intended to be done, but in typical game jam fashion, there simply wasn't enough time. 

In my opinion, the best thing about it is the art (which is very cute). 

Pretty sure you mean fire boy and water girl!

Thanks for the praise, it means a lot! Really happy with the idea we went with, and the art really does look great (as does the music)!

Yeah, a bunch of us on the team are planning to continue development, so look forward to some polish eventuallyTM!

Thanks for the feedback! The difficulty (I think) was in part due to the jankness of the string, and some mal-layered ground tiles not refreshing the jumps didn't help. We might want to either lengthen the string a bit, or just make things closer together. I think we had designed a fair few puzzles around the string being max length, but the string not being perfect just ended up making them really difficult. (though almost everything comes back to 'the string needs more work' to me).

I'm happy that I implemented coyote time hearing how much you used it! Those 5 frames must have been valuable! 

Thanks for the level 3 praise (I built that one <3)! (though the level layouts were made by Kiran (Kiwi_HD on the discord))

Without making any promises, a few of us on the team are thinking of continuing development (I know for sure I would like to once my schedule clears up, though not sure if that motivation will last), so the feedback is greatly appreciated!

Hope you enjoyed playing despite the frustrations with the string, and the difficulty of the levels!

Also, thanks for praising the art and music! Our art and music talents worked really hard during the jam to make some great stuff!

So, I don't have any sort of game controller (long live team keyboard!), so I won't be able to try that. 

Being able to snipe towers across the map, yeah, that's a fair concern. So, lemme just up the difficulty in programming and say 'maybe the mouse should snap to the towers a bit' XD. 

And yeah, running out of time in a game jam is a very typical thing, so no worries. 

Interesting idea, but needing to click exactly on the towers made it tough to shoot. If you could click on the line between you and the towers, if would be easier to shoot (though that might be tough to implement, so I understand why you didn't do that). 

At a certain point, the enemies build up so much anyway though, that there almost isn't any point to even try to kill them. You can circle them in a fairly easy patten and consistently dodge, so only new spawns are a concern. 

Overall, a nice application of the theme, but like, without any incentive to fight, the game just, isn't all the fun after a bit cause I find myself just running around in a circle. 

I could see this evolving into a roguelite (if you keep working on it), with different levels (featuring different enemies) that you move to after beating each level's boss, different starting equipment (like, a gun that could do a buckshot, but has knockback, or a beam between you and the pillars, but locks you in place for a bit) and some other items that you pick up along the way to increase move speed, or general attack damage, etc. 

Gonna blame this one on my 4K monitor, but the UI got a bit messed up. 

I never saw the metronome timer to help me regain the beat when I lost it in the top left that you showed off when you demoed the game, and during the credits, I saw a duplicate of the credits hidden behind the credits. 

Ended up with a score a bit above 30000. 

Overall pretty fun! And a great feat for a solo dev!

Oh yeah, also, I felt like I could move faster if I moved diagonally, but I dunno if that was me imagining things, or if the movement vectors were actually adding upon each other. 

Yeah but like, they didn't have a string between them. SO um, HA! We win (or something like that)

Hope you enjoyed playing!

Yeah, the string is a problem. I spent at least 60% of the jam working on it, and got it to be 'stable', but it's still pretty jank. 

It 'weighing down the characters' as you put it is due to me fixing issues caused by both of them moving at the same time(specifically them moving away from each other, and falling with the string suspending them in the air). So, when both of them are moving due to user inputs, the center node of the string only moves at half speed. 

The level design vs the control scheme is uhh, something I don't think any of us thought of during the jam, but is certainly a good point!

And yeah, as a proof of concept, we on the team think it has great potential, but we also agree that there's some issues that would need to be ironed out to truly flesh out the game. 

Thanks for the feedback, and I hope you enjoyed playing (even if you couldn't beat any of the levels)! 

All good! I'll try out the downloadable build soonTM, prolly just over the weekend (which is when I plan to play as many of them as I can). 

Had just wanted to look at yours cause it had looked great when you showed it off in the closing ceremony, and you had a webGL build for me to try out!