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Thanks for playing and the feedback.

Can you clarify what you meant by "because of my pc"? Are you getting lag? What is happening that is causing issues? Eventually we will need to list minimum specs for people, so it would be good to know if there are certain systems it does not work on. Could you share your system specs, so we can try to find a PC with similar hardware to test on and see if we can optimize for it?

We are planning to adjust the pacing of the game and to reduce the travel distances. It had been meant to convey the story element of spending time looking for food, and the scarcity of the food, but is impacting the fun, so we will be adjusting it for gameplay fun. The Travel and Game Speed sliders were meant to allow the initial feeling of searching, but then be able to speed up if you wanted, but we acknowledge that players should not have to find those and change them, so the speed up is on our list of improvements to work on. Unfortunately, the best way to do that will be to shorten all of our map segments, and that will take some time to implement.

We will check out your game when we do our next batch of games in a few days.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

The game is moving more towards an RPG feel, over the simpler design it started with. You can't change equipment right now. With the party being Slimes, you can't equip the human armor you find. The Slimes eat the human equipment to power up their spit attacks. We are working to make this more clear in future updates.

This jam is all about helping each other. You took part in last month's jam and did not rate or comment on any other games. If you wish to remain in this jam, please be prepared to play and comment on other submissions. If you do not take part in commenting on other games, you will be banned from our future jams.

Thanks for playing and the feedback. We like RPGs and story based games, so ours has had the story continue to grow as it's been developed.

The CRT TV effect is neat, but can make things hard to see. I'd recommend having a setting to disable it, and perhaps an option for keeping the effect, but lessened. Depending on how many settings you want, you could add several options for the different effects and background. The longer I played, the less I liked the effect.

It can be hard to tell what is a clickable button, as they often blend in with the background. A bit more contrast, especially when hovered, would be nice.

It would be nice if you added an icon on your buttons that are external links, identifying them as such. I was not expecting the credits button to be a link.

On the Piece Level screen, the 2 right side columns look to have the # 0, and then missing characters for the font. I am playing on Linux, so my guess is that you are using a Windows system font that is not installed on Linux by default. Based on your screenshot of this screen, perhaps Wingdings? There are free Wingdings fonts you can get if you prefer to use text over an icon, but an image might be easier for compatibility.

On my last round, after selecting my purchases and clicking continue, one of the popups remained visible over the game board.

This was an interesting take on Chess. I don't feel like I fully explored all the gameplay mechanics. I didn't really pay much attention to the score or multipliers and mostly went for eliminating all pieces, but the score ended most rounds first. The CRT effect had me narrowing my vision and focusing on the pieces I was working with and game board, while largely ignoring the sides where its effect on the text made it unpleasant to read. Overall this feels like a good start.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

I'm glad you liked the combat tutorial. It is still a work in progress, as there is so much to teach and we want it to not feel too overwhelming.

The Quest Log is a recent addition and more quests will be added in the future, including optional ones. The Quest Log will also be getting expanded to add progress bars and details of the quantities needed, along with optional goals. The overall game is fairly linear, but we do want to give the player more choices, especially as it has become more of an RPG as we have developed it and the story has grown.

The game art is currently being updated. We had been using public domain assets that lacked animations. We've been creating custom art to replace those, and will be continuing to expand the art to add additional animations and effects once the transition is done. The next update should be the first with all of that art replaced, allowing us to move onto the enhancements.

We currently have around 40 forest segments, and the next one is randomly picked. They are all pretty similar, and we will be working to make them more distinctive with the new art. As the game progresses, the terrain will also be changing as you move to different parts of the forest and then leave it.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

The game was originally meant to be simpler and faster paced, but the story has grown on its own and become the focal point for us, with the game systems being developed to make a fun game around it.

We are reworking the combat to add more variety and strategy. There is going to be a hunger system added to add more to the choices of what you eat, along with additional affects. As RPG gamers we completely understand wanting to save all the items for when yo may need them later. Originally we weren't even sure if we would include a default attack ability. It is supposed to be weak enough to just be a fallback if you run out of items, but in the current version it is a bit too powerful, and you are unlikely to run out of items. A major change we are working on will be using the traders to send items back to your Clan for the main quest of collecting enough food for winter. This, of course, could encourage more saving of items, so we will be drastically redoing the base attack ability so you are instead encouraged to use the items and have more decision-making over which to save or use. Eating the items is also going to play into the special abilities more in the future as we do not like the current cooldown system.

Redoing the target and action icons is on my to-do list. I'll be sure to take another look at all the ones that have cooldowns as well, and see if I can improve the contrast.

Managing your inventory to select the loot you want is a key part of the intended strategy, so we tried to design it to have a lot of space to let you see as much as possible at a time, and with options for sorting and filtering. As the systems evolve it will certainly get an overhaul, but with the items playing such a key role, it will likely remain a bit overwhelming. The sorting and filtering will be more useful once we add shops and sending loot back to your Clan.

Glad you had fun! Your game is already in my queue, and I'll be playing in the next few days.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

We are planing to rework the tutorial to break it out a bit more, though story-wise, having them all leave from the town together fits better, so we won't be breaking them up further unless the story evolves in a way that it feel natural. Our game design is heavily story driven. We originally had all 4 together and broke them up so the tutorial was just 2, as you see now. We will try to shorten some of the text and only go over the basics, but at the same time, people still miss a lot of what is said in there. Currently you have all the abilities in your first fight, so we want the player to know how it all works, but if they can't retain it, then something clearly needs to change. We certainly need to reword the description of how items work, as you are not the first to not understand how to use them. The Slimes eat items to enhance their spit abilities. All of their abilities, attacks and healing, are based on their spit, and that is affected by what they ate. Even the human equipment they collect as loot is eaten by them to power up their spit abilities. The tutorial is definitely a WIP, and will be getting updated after we do some tweaking of the Slimes' abilities.

In the story we do have a difference between the stats and abilities of the characters, which will become more obvious as the game grows. Some in your party are older and more experienced, while others are meant to be very young and on their first adventure. For the current state of the game we have kept the skills closer together, but will be expanding the range as we do better balancing.

We have the icon of who is speaking in the dialog. I'll need to look into how feasible it is to add them into the text. Trying to get them to look good without making the line too tall is probably going to be a challenge. The slimes might fit, but adding icons for humans would be taller than the text. Similarly, we don't have the names currently due to wanting the left side to not get too wide. We are looking at options to fit the name of the speaker in.

We do have plans to improve the combat to add more variety. We also have plans for being able to heal and consume items between fights from the inventory screen. Still, the combat is a big part of the game, and much of it will be traveling between towns or other points of interest with regular combat along the way. Combat is going to become more common as the game progresses, and the distance between towns longer. There will be other elements to the game, but if you don't like the combat, the rest probably won't be enough.

The combat animations and SFX will getting a significant overhaul. We are in the process of switching from public domain assets that were static to our own art, so that we can do more animations for the various abilities. We will be adding audio and visual FX to make each more distinctive.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

Glad you enjoyed the world building. My partner is a storyteller who loves to make rich worlds where every character has a name and backstory.

We are working to update the art and add more variety to the backgrounds. As you progress we plan to have the environment change, with different types of trees, and then leaving the woods. For now we just have a bunch of pre-made segments that are 2 screen widths wide, which are randomly selected from. Later there will be a world map as well. Random events are also planned for while you travel.

We plan to redo the tutorial to streamline it in the future, now that we have the popup based one in place. The 2 "enter" icons are shown because the number pad enter is a different physical key, and so shows separately in the list. 

At the moment there is no equipment for the Slimes. You eat all items to use them. For the player, all items are single use consumables. We are working to add a secondary, Slime focused, description to all items to help with the confusion on if the player should be able to equip the human weapons and armor on their Slime party,

We are working on ideas around shops, but the main use of all the extra loot is going to be fulfilling the main quest of feeding your Clan by sending it back. There is more to it than that, but that part is a WIP.

We initially planned for this to be a simpler, faster paced game, but over time the story has grown and it has taken on more RPG elements. We recently decided to drop the focus on simple and instead embrace the grander RPG direction it's been heading in. With this change we plan to add a world map that you will be able to interact with for some decisions, such as the path to take. We are not yet sure on the UI for it, as we have a few more things to finish up before we dive into the major new systems we want to implement.

Combat will be getting updates with this change as well, though those are less defined for now as we need to test out our various ideas to see what plays best.

Thanks again for all the feedback!

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

We created this for Godot Wild Jam #83, last July, and have been working on it since, when not taking breaks for other jams. It has gone through a lot of changes as we have learned along the way.

I'll look into the music bug, and see if we can clean up the looping.

We recently added the popup tutorials, and allowed skipping the Trainer Terry fight, due to complaints from people not liking the longer tutorial, and mostly ignoring it or finding it had too much info that they did not retain to the first fight. We plan to rework both in the future, trying to find the right level of clear enough for those who need more details, but not too much.

We've acknowledged that the action and target icons can be a bit small at some resolutions and need to be redone or enlarged. The Trainer Terry fight does mention the icons above showing what the opponents plan to do, but that tutorial includes too much, so most people don't retain everything. We definitely need to review both tutorials and improve how we convey things.

The art is going through a transition. We initially used public domain assets for our jam submission, and have been switching over to art we created, which does make for a bit of a mismatch in styles. We will be working to finish the conversion over the next several updates and then refining it as we see it all in place together.

There is a setting for the travel speed. We set it at a pace to give the feel of travelling, but for players who want it to move faster, it can be increased to 150%. You can also adjust the overall game speed to 150%. Both of these can be adjusted in the main settings, on the pause screen, and with hot keys. We do play around with the base speed still to try to find a good default, so it may increase over time.

Early enemies have somewhat limited abilities, but we do have a system in place for special abilities for them. As we build out more enemies and the game progresses further, they will have more they can do. For now the enemies use potions and scrolls similar to the Slimes, but we plan to use the abilities system to add mages casting spells and give the physical enemies other abilities as well. We also want to expand and rework some of the Slime abilities to give the player more to choose from in combat.

You have an Options screen with Audio and Music, but neither seem to do anything. Also why is there Audio separate from Music? Is Audio supposed to be for Sound FX? If they aren't active in the current version, it would be good to hide them for now.

In the tutorial, it says "add some archers to you army", instead of "your" army".

On the second turn of the tutorial it says to take the next region on your own. I clicked on the army, and tried to click on Army Actions, but nothing happened. I don't know if that is because of the tutorial, or because there is nothing to do in the current region. It would be good to give the player some feedback here, possibly greying out the button if it can't be used.

I found the font could be hard to read in places, such as the pop ups used in the tutorial. I know it can be hard to find a good font, and font size, to fit everything on screen when you have a lot to say. Some of the text felt a bit blurry, probably from scaling. It might help if you could increase the contrast a bit by slightly darkening the background.

I played a bit on the Demo Map. It feels like a good strategy game. There are lots of little things to manage and monitor. The tutorial gave a good overview of the basics of how to play, allowing the player to get in and not be overwhelmed. There is still plenty to learn by playing.

This was tough. It took a bit to acknowledge that jump in the direction of the mouse was not just left or right, but also included up. My initial jumps were too low and I felt like I was missing something to get them higher, which I was. Once I understood the jumping mechanic I was able to progress a bit, though I was never good at it. I got the diamond on the left, and made it up to the next screen on the right. I got the first of the jump gems at the top left, but did not get to the second one, and that was where I ended it, as this is not really the kind of challenge I'm in the mood for right now.

I think the core gameplay mechanic works well. It is not necessarily something I'm going to want to play a lot of, but for this style of game it works.

It would also be nice if you did not require fullscreen to play. In Godot, you can go to Project Settings -> Display -> Window and look for Stretch. Change the Mode to canvas_items. That will allow Godot to handle the much of the resizing for different screen sizes for you.

I did not get far. I couldn't quite get the timing for jumping over the holes on the same level. I kept hitting my head on the roof above and falling short or being too late and falling into the hole. I think my issue was that I was just trying to jump alone. When I tried doing sprint jumps it helped, though my timing was still not great. My top score was only 23. I like that the controls are shown as you need them, but with the quick pace they can be hard to read and react in time the first time through. It also would help if perhaps you had a mention of sprint jumping, as  I missed it until doing one more play as I wrote this. I think part of it is that you don't really need the sprint initially, so I focused on the jump and mainly ignored the sprint, treating them as separate things. For the attack instructions it says it is also to "slide", rather than "attack", or perhaps "swing".

The biggest thing to me is that you have to use the mouse to click on Replay, when the rest of the game is keyboard. It would be nice if you had the button grab focus, possibly after a short delay to allow the player to stop pressing any gameplay keys.

I caught several fish. I gave the first to Lua, and got some item that she said would improve getting stuff for her. I gave the next to the king in the area below, who rejected it and said to fish in the rift for him. I went back to the starting area and tried to go right, but was pushed back. There was something that partly showed at the top left for a short time when this happened, but was not clear. I could not go through the left from the starting area. I fished some more and caught a shark. I gave that to Lua and suddenly she fell in love and the game ended. That felt very abrupt. A jam demo being short is fine, but the story of humans hunted my kind, but one gave me 2 fish and now I'm in love, just didn't work for me.

I restarted while writing this. I did no fishing, and when I tried to go down to the king's area I was pushed back, same as in my previous game when I tried to go to the right, only the thing at the top left was different, and was the item I had gotten from Lua in the first playthrough. Now I understand that it is showing the item needed to unlock the next area. My guess is that I needed to give the king something better, such as the shark, to get his item to unlock the next area. That was not clear from playing and could use with something to tell the player what it means.

While experimenting I clicked on the book at the top right. It could use a bit more of a hover effect to indicate that it is interactable with the mouse. If there are any other clickable things, I did not notice. I tried a few spots, but with clicking also starting the fishing mini-game it was too annoying to do it a lot. I'd also add a mention of the book being clickable to the game page notes on controls. The first time I opened it I missed the tabs for turning pages. I was just starting out and had not moved yet, and I think the look of them just blended into the background to much that I did not see them as tabs, but something that was part of the land behind. I think they could use a bit of tweaking to look a bit more like the book, and less like the land. It would also be nice if you added hover tooltips to the book with details, such as names of things, and maybe other stats or flavor text.

In general, the game could use with a bit of improving of the UI, and intro to the game. It seems like a good start, but I felt a bit lost on what to do and what was interactable, then, before I felt like I understood the game, it was over.

I played the web version.

I played 3 fights. The first I did not use either of the Q or E special abilities as I had focused on the controls popup at the left, and learning how things worked and somehow completely ignored the abilities at the bottom right. I finished with about 1/3 of my HP. I wandered around after the fight looking for where to go and what to do. If there is nothing more, then it would be nice if you displayed something to tell the player it is over, preferably with some stats on the fight, but for a demo, just a you win/lose message would be good. I did not die, so don't know if you have a check for losing/death.

My second fight I tried using the abilities. I like the E ranged attack, though it did not pop up and damage numbers. The spin attack has too much knockback. On one hand, a knockback ability can be useful to give yourself some space against a group, but this is one on one, and you have a dodge ability to get clear, reducing the benefit of the knockback. With the way it spins around multiple times, it feels like it should hit many times quickly doing a lot of damage, but I found that it often hit once or twice and knocked the enemy clear of the damage zone. I could do far more damage with my basic attacks. Add in the delay to start it and not really being able to chain it well with the basic attacks, and I mostly ignored it after a few tries.

I also found that there is a dash attack when pressing a directional button and clicking to attack. I had done it accidentally a few times in my first playthrough, but did not stop to experiment with it. When I did experiment, it was not consistent, and I'm not sure if there is a cooldown, or exactly how the timing works to activate it. I tried a bit after the fight, but it did not feel reliable enough. I feel like there is a cooldown, but did not notice an indicator for it. It could just be that my timing on button press and click was not good enough to get consistent results. 

I'm also not sure what the grey bar at the top under the enemy HP is for. I see it building up as I am actively attacking, and then draining, but I'm not sure what it means when it is full.

The combat works pretty well. This feels like a good start. A bit more of a tutorial or details on abilities would be nice, feedback when you win, and, of course, after beating the boss being able to level up and move on to another.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

We have more planned for the game. It will not be open world for this game, as that would add a lot more content to create, and we want to focus on getting a story game finished before moving on to a bigger one. We like to have detailed characters and a lot of depth to places, so an open world would be a big undertaking for us. We are thinking of adding some choice of the path the player takes. but the paths will be headed toward the same goal. Optional quests are also planned. We only recently added the initial quest system, and need to add more quests.

We need to work on the damage calculations and figure out a good way to predict damage for the player to see an estimate. Right now we don't have a good system in place for showing things clearly.

You do not equip weapons for the Slimes. Their attacks are spit based. You eat the items, which powers up your next spit attack. This game was for a jam where the theme was Consume, so the Slimes consume the loot for their attacks. Being Slimes, it also would not make sense for them to be equipping human suits of armor. The enemies are human, and do have normal human equipment. Later in the story the Slimes will be able to get some armor and other, limited, equipment. Mainly, we plan to let them use helmets as full body armor. Currently the descriptions for all items are based on how they would be used by humans. We plan to add a secondary description for the Slime use as well.

Different people have different strategies. Some like to defend, others skip it. It is a common ability in games, so we included it. It is not something that is going to be used every battle, but may be needed at some point when HP is low and no healing is available in time.

Hover tooltips are drawn above the button, if they go offscreen, they are redrawn in an onscreen position. The size is not calculated until they are drawn, so they show for a frame in the initial position, causing the flicker. I plan to get back to it and add some extra logic to try to better predict if they will be offscreen in advance.

We will take a look at the skipping. Our recent update did make changes to the dialog system. We tried to test various combinations of skips and clicking through, but may have missed some.

After reading your reply I opened the game in a Private Window to try it fresh, as I did not see a reset/start new game option, and didn't feel like clearing the files manually. You may want to add a new game or reset somewhere for testing like this.

Looking for it, I did see the symbol and was able to befriend the first being. I think the issue is that there is a lot going on with the being's art, and everything overhead. The icon blends in with everything else, and is hard to notice when it appears on screen, especially since you are suddenly being attacked before it is clearly visible. With the B&W art style you have created a limit for yourself. You don't have as large of a pallet to work with to differentiate the icons from the beings. I don't work in B&W myself, so don't know what to suggest, but I think that for the system to work, you will need to find a way to make the icons stand out more as something separate.

I went to the next one and befriended them as well. Again, knowing how it works I was able to do it, but even knowing what to look for, it took time to process what the symbol was and what it meant. Over time I could see getting used to it and it will be easier, but for new players, they just blend into the rest of the being too much for the fast paced attacks coming at you. I died once and was close to death a second time when I befriended it. Thinking on it, the thing that most stands out to me is the exclamation marks above the head, the symbol to befriend, and the head/hat are all close together and slightly detached from the main body. They all kind of blend together as part of the being. I think if the head/hat was more attached to the body, that would help. The double exclamation marks could be reduced to a single one, and possibly moved a bit further away. The other option would be to make all of the befriending/action symbols have something about them that really sets them apart from everything else. They need to be recognizable at a glance, both as different from anything else on the screen, and from each other.

I like the art style, and think it works well for the game. Now that I know how the befriending works I really like it, and that you created such a system. I think it just needs a bit of tweaking  of the display a bit to make it easier for new players.

Game play was pretty straight forward. The hollow blocks showing where the platforms will be in the other world is nice, and works well. I did find myself getting stuck on the top edge of things I was trying to jump onto. It was most often when starting close and moving toward it too soon, triggering the wall slide.

The tutorial button could use with looking a bit more button like when not selected. I totally missed it when starting. I had used the mouse to start the game and just continued using it to check out the menu entries, and start playing. Perhaps if I had switched to keyboard or joypad I may have moved the focus to highlight it, but it still wouldn't hurt to have the 2 top buttons on the screen look like buttons when not focused, to draw the eye enough for first timers to notice them.

Since I missed the tutorial, I started level 1 and spent a bit of time messing around with the keyboard trying to figure out what keys did what. I gave up and switched to a controller, which was easy enough to figure out what did what with.

After playing through the first world I had issues with the controller not seeming to be able to move the focus on the buttons. I tried again on another run and initially it also did not seem to work. I tried pressing D-Pad and Analog Stick, and at first did not get anything, though later did. It may have been that I was not pressing them far enough to trigger the movement, though I have not gone back to restest if there was a delay in them working, or it may have just been needing to move the stick further.

Due to the controller selection issues I ended up selecting retry after my first run, which I did not want to do, So quit to the menu, at which point I noticed the Tutorial and did it. I'm not great with wall jumps, and found the wall jumping while switching worlds to be tougher than the first level, though I did make it through. Afterward I redid the first level, finding the disk and getting a much better time.

On the Options screen, The resolution option button is hard to read at the default web viewport size.

The game aesthetic reminds me of classic Mega Man, without the combat. I don't really play this style of game much anymore, but it felt like it played pretty well. I played through the tutorial and level 1 and the difficulty felt reasonable. The core gameplay mechanic worked. All around looking good.

The premise is intriguing. The B&W aesthetic is neat. and works well with the hand drawn art. Some of the text could use a bit more contrast, such as on the Pause screen, when it is over a lot of white. It looks like you have a slight blur effect, but you may want to add a darker semi-transparent Panel Container behind the text to give a bit more contrast when the text is over a lot of white.

When I started I noticed the "0" after "Remaining:" was clipped on the left side, though later, after getting upgrades it looked fine.

It would be nice if your current XP/currency was shown when you hit the upgrade shop. I had not noticed the gained XP on the Pause screen, so was not sure how many I had when talking to the shop and just bought something, then went back and bought the other. Trying again I was told I didn't have enough. After that I went to the Pause screen and saw the upgrades. Knowing it is there, I can now go check it before a shop, but it is generally good to show the currency available in a shop. Similarly, I'd prefer being able to see the current amount of something when able to purchase more.  It wasn't hard to guess the upgrades provided by each item, but it also would be nice if the first time you visited the shop they told you what each was for.

After a while the music stopped. You may want to check your import settings for the file and make sure "Loop" is checked.

I saw a note in your devlog about controller issues with web browsers on Linux. I am playing using Vivaldi (Chromium based) on Linux. My controller (8BitDo Pro2) worked fine. I played a bit like that, but found the R3 to Slice messing with my aim and switched to keyboard and mouse. I like that you support many input options. With mouse it really started to stand out that holding space to be able to act was really odd. It didn't feel quite so awkward on joypad, but trying to hold Shift, Space, and use WASD to move was getting unpleasant after a while. I remembered seeing Toggle Hold in the options, and tried it out. That feels much better. With so much of what you are doing needing that aiming, it seem odd that you have the requirement to be in that mode to do things. It might make more sense to allow toggling the display of the cone, but allow use of abilities at all times. For mouse it is obviously easy to see where you are aiming without the display, while I can see that other inputs may need the display to know for sure. Still, I think that action mode being the default seems to be preferred, at least with what I have played so far. If the display of the action cone is problematic, perhaps add an option to adjust its alpha with a slider so players can have it show, but only as faintly as they want.

Finally, the biggest thing that stood out to me was the combat. The description on the web page had me intrigued by the potential options of how to play, seeming to promise the ability to play peacefully or be violent. Asside from the 1 shop I ran into, Everything was trying to kill me, and nothing other than Slice seemed to do anything useful. The trees moved for Shout. But no matter how many times I shouted at enemies, and I did try it a fair number of times, it did not seem to do anything. I tried Shock as well, but that puts you in greater danger and was much harder to do, so was tried less. Still, I did not see any effect from it. After a fair amount of redoing the first part from dying many times trying to find the non-combat options the description implied were available, I went ahead and used Slice. I tried a few more times on different enemies, but always fell back to Slice. I did try running for a while, until I thought I hit a dead end, and may have needed to kill the enemies to proceed. After killing those I could find I did find a path around the top that I had not seen before. I do not know if it was there and I had missed it, or if the killing had opened it up. I had been trying to get through from the left side where there were 2 destructable rocks, and several I could not destroy or pass, and those were what I thought might be tied to killing.

I think it could use with a tutorial, including a bit more info on how and when to use the abilities other than Slice. It could also use with a bit of rewording to better prepare the player for the need to do a lot of fighting, if it is indeed needed. If there are ways to not fight, then a bit more guidance on how would be good.

Thank you for playing and the feedback.

We are always open to feedback, and don't find it picky when someone points out typos or other mistakes. We continue to find them ourselves, but sometimes you get so used to something that you can miss what otherwise should be obvious, so others pointing them out is helpful.

I'll do a bit more reading up on it, but from a quick check on "dialog" vs "dialogue", I do think that "dialog" is the correct term for what the tutorial is describing. Here is a quote about how "dialog" should be used from one of the places I checked: "The term suggests a direct sequence of talk or messages, often used to advance a storyline or operate software." The tutorial is largely talking about the text being written out.

The combat is a large part of the game. There is story as you reach towns and camps, but much of your gameplay loop will be combat and collecting loot. We are working to add new features to allow you to do more in the towns, along with more quests and achievements. We have some ideas on potentially allowing the player to pick which path they take later on, but still heading towards the same destinations, though this is still being worked out. We recently decided to switch the pacing of the game from a focus on simple, single button to act, shorter fights combat, to allowing more RPG-like depth, so will be revisiting the combat to see if we can make it feel more engaging.

When I started, the game window was partly cut off on the right side so that I could not see all the plants over there. As soon as I started to resize the browser window, the game adjusted itself to fit the window.

The game could use with a tutorial, or at least some basic info on the game page. I've played games that are similar enough to this that I was able to muddle my way through, but never felt like I had the time to fully understand everything. I did start by pausing to skim everything, but tooltips don't really describe how things work in action. By the end I had a basic understanding of how to win, but did not feel invested in the game.

The message log felt like it faded too quickly, especially as I was learning things and constantly trying to look at other things in more detail. Considering the right column does not use up the full height, I would suggest increasing the size of the log area so more messages can be shown at once, and letting them remain for longer.

For my playthrough I didn't even register the goals, and only barely glanced at the current population stats. I focused on the eagles as threats and once I had enough put down some protection. I then worked to place a bit of everything out, figuring even if I did not fully understand, a balanced ecosystem is important. Then I spread out the protective ferns over much of the west side, and sprinkled the other things among them, other than the decoys which were mostly placed a bit east of cent, or near the eagles if they were attacking. My final score was 30 Moa, 1432 Mauri earned, with 662 remaining, 182 seconds, and a score of 41 points

I think this has a good core, but the tutorial could use some work. The tutorial does a good job of explaining the basic controls, though stopping everything to show the instructions really breaks the flow of an otherwise fast paced game. My biggest issue was the attack mode. I'd enter attack/hyperdrift mode, and do donuts to deal with the swarm of enemies following me. I watched the bar that shows your charging progress to see when it would end. Before that bar went down to 0, somewhere around the halfway point, the screen would shake, the car would stop drifting, and it would go straight for a short distance before stopping. It still had a glow around it, the meter continued decreasing, and once I could move again I was able to still attack enemies. It would be nice if there was an explanation as to what this is. My guess is some kind of overheating mechanic from hyperdrifting to long in a row, but it would be nice to have more details.

My final strategy was to just hold shift always, and charge the meter by doing fishtailing mini-drifts as I moved. It let me move fast enough to stay ahead of the pursuing swarm, while quickly charging the meter. After getting the fire trail upgrade it was even better. Once the meter was charged, I'd activate hyperdrift and do donuts to deal with the swarm that had been following me. Initially I would just do it until all enemies were gone, but with the screen shake stop I switched to doing it for about a third of the meter then going straight a bit, before doing more short bursts.

The upgrades also stop everything, which can be disruptive, depending on what you are doing. It might be nice to close the popup, and then have a short delay, possibly with some "Ready, Go" or a short 1-3 second countdown, before resuming play.

It would be nice if the camera was a bit closer to the car so I could see more of what is ahead. It is good to see the trail of enemies behind, but when enemies spawn in front it would be preferable to be able to see them and have a bit more time to pick a clear path. I know this is meant to be fast paced, but the distance feels a bit too short.

It would be nice if there was a play again option on the game over menu, as there is no point returning to the menu if I don't have enough to buy anything.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

We are planing to redo the settings screen. We've continued adding a lot more options and the gameplay tab is getting too full, but haven't yet decided how we want to regroup things.

We intentionally don't reset the cooldown on abilities for gameplay reasons. We are still working on the best way to balance them. The fights are short, so having a delay before use that starts with each fight would limit them to bigger/longer fights. Letting them be used at the start means we'd have to reduce their power with the expectation of being used as the opening move every time, or make them be more specialized, like Guardian, so they are not as useful in every fight. For now, the best we came up with was the cooldown limiting your use of them so they feel useful, but also can't be the only thing you use. We may need to switch them from a "cooldown", to something that is "charged up", with a charge that lasts between fights. It could amount to about the same thing, but presented to the player differently, so it is more accepted.

The use for the extra loot is a WIP. It is one of the next big changes once we finish redoing some backend and added a few more small features. The story bits about collecting food for your clans will be brought into gameplay. You will be using the traders to send some of the loot back as food for your clan. The Quest Log will have a progress bar showing how much is needed, and how much you've sent. Items will have a food value, with lower level items providing less food, giving the player some choices over just dumping all the old stuff, or giving some better gear. We are also wanting to add shops, but are still balancing the idea of selling loot vs sending it back, and if we should add collecting gold for shops in addition to the normal loot.

For us, giving and receiving feedback is a big part of doing jams. The feedback from other devs has been a huge help in becoming better game devs ourselves.

I'm not saying that you should make it so the player can interact without facing the object. Just give the player some feedback that they are near something they can interact with, so they don't have to walk and turn a lot. I wanted to be sure I found everything I could interact with, which meant a lot of take a step and turn, instead of just walking next to everything. I wasn't sure of the size of the collision zone, so made a lot of small steps.

This was a neat take on pong. It took a bit of experimenting with the different abilities to get a feel for them, but they played well. I made it to level 5, before I started to mess up a lot. I'll probably try again later after some sleep.

The UI could use some work. At the default size, the font size of most buttons is too small and hard to read. The game over button I could not read at all. The buttons themselves are plenty big enough for a much larger font size. On the controls screen the blue of the background feels a bit bright for the white text, and I'd suggest making it a bit darker to increase contrast. The font there is better, though bumping it up a size or two, if everything still fits, would be nice. Adding a Margin Container around things to move the text off the left edge would also look better. It doesn't have to be much, even 4 px might be enough.

I like the addition of the checkpoints, though personally would prefer being able to restart on each level. Perhaps you could add a "difficulty" setting for how often to have checkpoints.

It felt like later levels required more points to win. It would be nice if the level start screen said how many are required to advance.

I beat the first level, but was not able to get through the second. The jerky movement just didn't work for me. It took me a bit to realize the platformer part relied on tapping the buttons and did not allow holding to move. I'd say part of that was there being such short sections and immediate jumping that I was naturally doing a lot of tapping to start, until I got to a bit where I just wanted to keep moving and stopped. It would be nice if you added the list of controls and a bit of instructions to the web page or in game.

It was also odd going from the slow and smooth top down, hold a button to continue moving, of the opening area, to the jerky press a button to move quickly a short distance and stop, of the side scrolling levels. Resetting back to the left side of the initial area and having to slowly walk across it to the door, to then go back to the jerky movement likely made it feel worse. The long walk certainly was annoying to have to do each time you restarted. It would be nice to be able to restart on the level you were on, but even if you make the player restart at the beginning, let people quickly get back into playing. I didn't notice anything in the opening area, other than the door, so that long slow walk might be OK for the start, but doesn't feel like it serves a purpose for the retries. With the very different controls, I'd personally drop the movement on the opening area, or change it to be like the platforming sections.

The level design seemed decent on the 2 I saw. I wasn't good enough with the controls, but could see the path to beat the second one. The danger spots were clear. The collision detection felt decent. This feels like a good start.

This has a neat concept, though my playthrough was very buggy.

The sounds are not well normalized. I was not able to find a good volume where I wasn't having some things feel too quiet and others too loud.

On the upgrade screen the Health boost shows it will replace the claw, though the text says it is a Boost Upgrade. Purchasing it did not replace the claw.

When fighting the turtle I tried charging in and clawing rapidly. After I died and the popup showed, the character was still attacking and defeated the turtle, including giving the victory dialog and then going to the upgrade screen. I bought a health upgrade, and then clicked retry level, and was on the next level.

I bought the health upgrade 3 times, but it seemed to keep being lost. Once was before the turtle level where I lost, so restarting the level may have reset it. Then after defeating the turtle I bought it again, only after the purchase noticing it had been reset. I was able to beat the bird level without restarting, but after it the health was again back down to 10. It is possible that the reset bug caused future issues.

When starting the ferret/weasel level I was shooting, even though I was not pressing a button. I got it to switch to the claw attack and was able to get close and hold left mouse to rapidly do the claw attack, while it was standing still launching grenades over my head, and only occasionally hitting me. After I defeated it, the claw attack continued and I was unable to move. The character still turned to face the mouse, but that was about all the control I had. I could see the materials, the enemy's helmet, and their grenade belts, floating on the screen. I pressed F12 to see if there were any errors in the console. That was the first I acknowledged that the claw attack changed direction based on where the mouse was. The animation was the same, except for the white curved lines, and I had not noticed before, but moving the mouse down to the log I was suddenly digging through the ground.

This was a neat little game. It is a good start. The intro does a good job of having story and telling the player what to do. It does still take a bit of exploring the interactable screens to figure out how to meet those requirements. I tried launching under different conditions, and like the various endings.

It would be nice if you allowed diagonal movement. You don't need to add more art, just allow the movement while facing one of the 2 directions.

It wasn't too bad exploring and figuring out what was interactable, but it also would have been nice if the things you could interact with had an indication when you were near, even if not facing them. With the movement it did feel a bit repetitive taking a step, then turning to see if I could interact with something new.

This is a neat little game. I managed 19,874 on my second run, and stopped at several of the yellow station spots. The controls are simple and easy to understand, though it does take a bit of practice to figure out how to best use them with just being able to select the 2 gears, idle, and break. The sound when close to derailing is a nice touch. 

After I got the timeout popup, the train continued moving and I could still control it.

The music is decent, but does feel a bit repetitive after a while.

You are certainly making good progress and heading in the right direction.

The hover effect felt too subtle in many places. I had to look close at the buttons to even be sure there was an effect. I would add more contrast when hovering.

The new Spirit wizard feels grayed out, like it should not be selectable. The description text also seems to be a duplicate of the Wind Mage.

The text that appears during combat over characters can be hard to read, especially the enemies where there are words that overlap, such as when doing an AoE fire attack and they get burning, or misses.

The notification text at the top could also use with standing out a bit more. There have been times I was focusing on things at the bottom and did not see it at first, such as the first time I used a single target ability. Maybe give it a background panel to help draw the eye. It would also be more readable.

The font looks to have a semi-transparent background, which can make the font look a bit blurry and hard to read at times. For the HP of an enemy, I wasn’t sure if a 7 was that or a blurry 3, until I found a 3 to compare and looked at the bar to see that percentage-wise the 7 made more sense. The fancy extra line on the 7 was likely a part of the issue for that one, but the faint background makes many of them look a bit blurry.

The voxel background with 2D sprites felt a bit odd.

Hovering on the enemies to see who they are targeting is nice.

A short tutorial would be nice. It wasn’t too hard to figure out the basics, but a bit of guidance wouldn’t hurt. I started by mousing over things and then clicking around. I wasn’t sure how best to start. Since we selected characters to use I thought that I might need to click on a character to see the spells they could use. I did work my way to clicking on the spell cards.

I clicked on a spell card to see what it would do and then moved to the next, expecting it to switch. It was a nice surprise to see it could be used in a combo. It seems like what cards you can have are limited by the class of characters you choose, but what you can cast is not affected by them. I have not lost anyone yet, so maybe if they die you lose casting those spells. I did notice that you can use multiple of the same element, even though you only have 1 character of that element. Since you can only have 1 of any class that does make sense, though I had initially wondered if it would work, and had to go check if you could have multiple of the same class.

I like that cards, and many combos, offer 2 different abilities.

The Healing Wind ability says “Heal all heroes for <value>”.

I cast the triple nature ability and it did not look like my party was healed. The card says heal for all damage dealt, but maybe it was referring to only the damage dealt when an enemy was already poisoned?

Once you select a single target ability, there does not seem to be a way to cancel using it. I picked one, then saw the only remaining enemy was resistant to it and wanted to change my move.

Apparently you can target your own characters with damaging spells. Since I wanted to change my above mentioned move, I decided to try clicking on the casting character to see if that would cancel. I did not expect it to, but was curious.

At the end of a wave I noticed getting new cards. Sometimes more than others. I’m thinking it may be based on the number of actions left, but have not verified that. I ended a wave with another single target ability, and after clicking the ability, but before the attack, realized I had a lot of actions left and should have used them to get more cards. Then the next wave came out and I had a full hand. I had noticed sometimes only getting 1 before, and others getting more, but this was the first time I had paid attention to how many actions I had left at the end of a wave. This is something to mention in any tutorial or instructions.

Similarly, I thought that earlier between waves I was healed to full, but this time I was not. I may have missed it, and there might have been a partial heal, but I’m not sure. That would also be something nice to include in any notes if there is partial healing. The end of that wave I watched, and did not see any healing. Maybe I am misrecalling the earlier heal, but I did not do any healing early on and did take damage that I then did not see. The next round I gave the character who was low on health regen. At the end of that round I did see a quick bit of text flash at the top about performing mass heal. Maybe it only happens every so many waves? I do like that the regen carried over to the next wave. That is also something that would be good to inform players of. I had hesitated to use it before since the rounds have been so short.

I was almost done with wave 8 when the game locked up. I tried pressing F12 to see if there were any errors, but was booted to my computer’s the login screen. I’m not sure what happened. I have a lot of notes already, so I am going to end it here and not try another playthrough.

This jam is all about providing feedback. If you are playing any of the games, please leave a comment with some feedback. Ratings can help give a feel for how people view the current state of your project, but comments can be far more useful.

Let them know what you liked or didn't like. Maybe suggest something you think would make the game better. Mention any bugs you ran into.

As mentioned on the jam page, those who submitted are expected to play and leave feedback on at least some of the other submissions. You don't need to play every game, or be overly detailed. Just spend a little time and help out your fellow devs with some basic feedback, in exchange for them doing the same.

I had enough experience to recognize problems, and discuss them with my family, but these were intro courses meant for beginners who generally wouldn't know. Teaching bad habits to beginners who may carry them on for years to come is problematic. We did leave feedback pointing out the problems we saw, and that was several years ago now, so I don't know how things have changed. Hearing that you also notice problems that need to be ignored makes me think they have not taken such feedback to heart. The poor intro classes teaching beginners bad habits was enough that I don't want to support them at all, even if I personally could filter the info.

I've heard of GameDev.tv before, though we have not done any of their courses. We will check them out to see if anything is interesting, thanks. We mainly used the courses as a way to learn the basics. We have several dev YouTube channels we watch sometimes when they have tips, but mostly we learn by running into a problem and looking for a solution, or thinking of something we'd like to do and searching for info on it. Sitting and doing a full course is not our preferred learning style, and generally only for something new where we need a foundation to build on. Blender is something we are still only dabbling as we mostly do 2D currently, so those courses may be worth a look when we are ready for more in-depth 3D modelling, thanks for the tip.

The background feels a bit too bright. I like the colorful look, but think it could use with being toned down slightly.

Overall, it felt like a decent snake game. The snake leaving a trail is neat, but it also made it difficult to be certain where the end of the snake was. It would help if you change the color of the trail a bit or did something else to give a bit more of a hard defining of where the snake ends.

It would also be nice if the game scaled up to better fill the browser window.

The base gameplay seems decent, however I experienced a lot of lag. It felt like whenever the game board was being updated there would be a noticeable delay, often followed by losing, as a bunch of movement and board changes all took place. Sometimes everything would be OK, then I'd simply lose and never see the void spot that did it. Optimizing the board update would be my top priority. With the lag it is hard to really give much more feedback on the gameplay.

It would be nice if the game over screen included your current coin total, so you know if it is time to hit the shop.

I played on highest quality settings. I did not experience any noticeable stutters or lag.

The first thing that stood out was the flickering. I think the flickering background on the title screen is a bit fast. It could also be problematic for people with epilepsy. My partner chose High to start and it was more faint and did not feel so bad.

The mouse is also flickering between a normal cursor and the hand cursor to start. It looks like the semi-transparent bars are supposed to slide over when the mouse is over them, but they just rapidly move back and for the causing the mouse to flicker. When I changed focus to write these notes, and moused over them, they did fully slide over. When I click back into the game window, they do back to flickering.

You’ve got a lot of settings. It would be nice if the Settings area was taller so more fit on the screen at a time. It looks like all the main menu options are the same height, and most could benefit from the extra space. Clicking Play pulls up selecting a save slot, which is taller. You could still use more space above, but even that much more space would be nice.

I like the inclusion of a changelog in game.

I like your intro having skip, continue, the keyboard inputs to advance, and the pagination indicators.

The starting tutorial is pretty nice, though the location it tells you to place the source is under a side window, so maybe start that closed, or instruct the player to do so. It would also be nice if you pointed out that the numbers you are pressing relate to things that are mostly under the tutorial. The popup notifications at the bottom left are good at letting you know what is happening.

After placing the Research Center it did not have enough power. While looking into it I got multiple pop up messages in a row, with the 3^rd being about the research. There was too much information all at once as I was trying to fix the power issue.

Many of the names in the research tree are too long to fit. It would be nice if the images were made larger and the text was given 2 lines to make it more readable

After selecting the research the tutorial then told me to place more power. I think it would be better if you had this before opening the research tree, since the lack of power made me think I’d done something wrong and I started by placing more power myself before getting into the tree. I may have missed a step, but it mentions needing to use the market to sell, but does not make it clear how to reconnect the market. I ended up moving the research and putting a market at the end of the existing belts.

Right click deselects placing something, but does not deselect a placed item. I had to press escape to deselect, which on web also exits fullscreen. The selected item info box often feels like it is in the way, and I need to move the camera around to see things, but some of the popups also seem to be under it, such as if clicking on one of the build buttons, instead of using the keyboard.

If you click to buy something, and you can’t afford an option, it does not update when you can afford it, unless you click the button to open it again.

Overall, it looks really good. I like the graphical art and think it works for the game. The background music does get a bit repetitive. The UI could use some polish, especially with things overlapping, but otherwise it feels like a very nice game.

Buttons for web can be tough, and is often personal preference. Tab could work if you didn't have controls that make sense to navigate with tab. Depending on the game I've seen a number of options. Q, backslash, and backspace (though with web that can be a bad one if they lose focus) are fairly common. Left quote/back tick is also a decent choice being so close to Escape. We will often leave Escape as an option, along with a secondary non-escape key.

This is an interesting take on chess. I like the idea behind it, though there are a lot of concepts to learn. During gameplay some of the mechanics didn't feel good. Such as jumping an enemy and it doing nothing, but then they can jump yours to take it. I'm thinking it may have been due to how many pieces were nearby, but it could use with clarifying how that works. Is it the 4 base directions, or does it include diagonals. Is it just one piece touching, or does it need more than one.

The cavalry only being able to jump to alternating rows feels very limiting for them. I was trying to reposition one and realized this limit prevented them from moving where I wanted. It does add some strategy, but made me want to use them less. Their ability to chain jumps does add some power to them, and I was caught off-guard several times by the enemy chaining them.

It appears that the archers may only have 3 shots. I'm not seeing that in the tutorial.

The tutorial helps, but there is so much that it takes several times playing and going back to look at it. I think a more interactive tutorial, such as a preset game board with you guiding the player with instructions and having them try things out, would be helpful. I think some key things to show would be when doing the same thing has different results, such as jumping sometimes taking a piece.

I'm not a fan of the really tall layout and needing to scroll to see pieces, especially when the enemy is moving off-screen. I know the move is listed at the top, but that is small and hard to read. If an enemy is moving off screen, the screen should move to focus on them so you can clearly see the move, then move back to where it was. When I first opened it, the window was too narrow for the interactive tutorial, and I had to widen it to see all the buttons. After I started the main game, I made the window very narrow and tall so I could see the entire board all at once. A zoom option would be nice.

It is nice that you support multiple languages for most of the game, though much of the top UI on the starting page is not translated.