itch.io

Impressive game, I wish jump was also bound to Space though.

Amazing game! Love the art, dialogue and organic tutorial! 

Game crashed on me so didn't get to finish but what i did play through felt very polished and juicy

ay I'm glad you enjoyed it! We did a lot of brainstorming and went from really dark and horror-y ideas to this really goofy one, I'm still quite amused on the process of how that happened lmao

thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback!

yeah that's just a pretty difficult jump, I had trouble with it too. Due to crunch time we didn't have time to revise any of the difficulty of the levels. Thanks for playing!

glad it helped!

cool, thanks!

I feel like while the 90's had a very distinct look for 3D games, there was a wide array of 2D game styles. Like for example Pokemon Red and Blue, Chrono Trigger, and Secret of Monkey Island all came out in the 90's but have wildly different styles. Is there a certain console/look we need to follow or is there a lot more room for choice in 2D games?

Hey thanks for including my game! I'll give it a watch later

I'm not jonas, but if this jam works like others I've been in I might know how it works.

The median was 10 ratings, and it reduces your score if you have less than the median, but doesn't change it if you have more than median. So you would only get your score reduced if you have less than 10. 

That's why I wouldn't buy into the whole getting your game rated as much as possible craze, unless it is solely for the purpose of getting as much feedback as possible. In every single big jam I've joined (except one), the winner has been a game with just barely enough ratings to avoid getting their score adjusted. So yeah, essentially getting less but more quality ratings does lead to a higher score, because there's less of a chance for more people to see it and rate it poorly.

Hope this answered some of your questions, but then again the scoring system doesn't really matter so I wouldn't but too much stake in it, it's more about if you got quality feedback and learned from the jam

Nice, glad the thumbnail did its job! How would you suggest improving the jumps?

so glad you enjoyed the game! Due the the player having multiple sprites layered on top of it (the teeth, fins, etc), it made it so adding new animations was pretty time consuming. So we settled with a simple attack animation since it was easy. But it is definitely something we could juice up if we come back to this and have less of a time crunch!

Really glad you enjoyed it as much as you did! Thanks for playing

congrats on getting second! Well deserved!

To get plays (minus promoting it everywhere), i think it is important to have an eyecatching thumbnail, an interesting tagline, and if you want to go above and beyond, a gif of the game in the screenshots (which I dont always do because I get lazy)

Looking at your game, the thumbnail is clean and well made but idk I don't feel like it would catch my eye when scrolling through jam entries. I'm no expert at what makes a thumbnail good, but generally I think it's good to have more than just text. Include a hook or something, get the players curious and intrigued about your game.

And the description, intergalactic chess, doesn't really hook me, like all it tells me is that it is chess and space themed. If your game has a cool gameplay twist I suggest showing it in the description and possibly in a gif in the screenshot section.

But then again I feel like getting your game played is mostly just marketing or dumb luck anyways, so I wouldn't worry too much about it

Hope this helped a little

Lmao I didn't expect for anyone to make a troll game in this jam. A very bold choice

Coming from Mario Maker troll levels, there's a few things you need to have for people to want to keep playing your troll game and for it to feel like the right kind of bullshit that they can laugh at themselves when they die

- when the player dies, have it be due to a choice they made. Like going after a shiny collectible and getting punished for it.

- when the player dies, it shouldn't be too hard for them to figure out what to do next. I would have never figured out you need to halfway jump to bait the spikes then immediately jump back again unless I checked the comments. You never show the player that the spikes retract so there's no way I could reasonably be expected to know that they do. I thought I had to maybe jump left, jump in the pit, die a certain amount of times, but never that

I get what this game is going for, but I feel like it could use some improvement to make the game more funny and fun to play. I think I might be spoiled by Mario Maker troll levels though

Pretty polished game, the good ole pleasing palette with minimalist graphics and square player character never fails to disappoint. I don't think this game does anything particularly interesting with the "corpses are platforms" concept, since the levels all boil down to "play through most of the level, clone, then play through it again but make the jump this time". That said, what the game does, it does it well. The platformer controls are tight, and the platforming is pretty fun at times. It is also cool how the cube fades to black to match the terrain. Great job on your first game jam though! It's good to start simple

Really amazing looking game! The effects of the character movement, from the jumping to landing to swinging with the sword, is all really impressive! The game is really hard, but I don't think that's an issue. I think while it is a cool idea to keep advancing through levels even if the player dies, it was quite confusing when you're playing through the first time, and doesn't ever give the player a chance to actually learn the game or get a handle of the controls. Also the walljumps felt kinda finicky. But these are minor nitpicks in what is otherwise a fantastically executed game! Great job!

yes background art is definitelt a weak point I need to work on, I feel like that would've helped with the aimlessness.

But thanks for playing and giving feedback!

Thank you for the feedback! I've definitely learned in that game jam that I need to work on my background art, I usually only focus on character stuff and don't know how to fill large spaces.

Also good point about the awkward controls, we play it with WASD and added the arrow keys in as an afterthought, so I can see how what you mentioned could be awkward

Thanks for playing

Lmao my girlfriend played through all your games after playing this one. They're all just objectively fun and well made games! I find it so funny that you come in here and flex on us by making a porn game that is more polished than most of the other entries. Well done on this one, everything about it is so polished and professional. Seems like you have this down to a science by now

oo nice, a pico 8 game! The graphics on this game are great, loved the animation of the emoji man crying, how it would be affected by the wind! The dialogue bit was also nice

I couldn't really make sense of the  gameplay, it seemed like my love meter was going up and down at random. I think more feedback on what is lowering it and what is raising it would be good.

Wow, the art on this game is just immaculate! The character art, scrolling background, cover art, everything is just so well done.

The gameplay was okay, but I don't feel like the wingmen really added that much of a unique fun element to the gameplay. It basically just boiled down to being a normal galaga-style shooter but you have to stay in place to deal more damage. Also a health bar would've been nice

But the pixel art is some of the best I've seen in this jam, so kudos!

Nice game, the graphics were great and gave me Warioware/Rhythm Heaven vibes. I love the pencil effect you did and I loved the dumb faces on all the bananas and how unsettling they were. The music was great too.

I couldn't really figure out what to do in this game though. It seems like you go to monke, then buy bananas, then peel them, then give them to monke? Rinse and repeat? I couldn't figure out how to progress the island victory condition, it seems like all I could do was go to monke. 

Reading the comments, it seems like sometimes the bananas damage you? That never happened to me, so I feel like you should definitely have a guaranteed rotten banana so the player can learn what they do and make sense of the gameplay more.

But overall, I love the weirdness and goofiness of this game, it is definitely one of the most unique artstyles of this jam!

Cool game! The idea for the game was pretty unique, with the swapping between characters on death, and the character sprites and animations for the rooster and the enemies was great! It's also impressive that you made a procedural game in 3 days too!

The game did confuse me quite a few times though. In the tutorial section, it says that the rooster can double jump, but I was still the green thing and I could double jump anyway. And I wasn't really ever sure how the batteries worked. They seemed to stay the same as I went from level to level, so I thought it was just a "you must have this many to pass" sorta thing. But some times my amount of batteries would just reset seemingly at random. I also am not sure what the point of having the blue bar to kill yourself is since it is quite easy to die in these levels. The green guy felt kinda bad to play since he took so long to shoot, I feel like if you have a character with that long of a shooting cooldown, you need to give him a visible recharging animation so I don't just think the character is unresponsive.

Also, I ran into an unbeatable level where every section to get down in the level was blocked off.

But overall well done, fun game!

Nice game! I felt like a chimp playing one of those enrichment games lmao

The game kinda does hit you with a lot right off the bat and expect you to learn it all at the same time, but since restarts are quick, this isn't too much of an issue. I was wondering why my fingers weren't hitting the buttons, but it was because they couldn't raise when the levers were in the way. Once I figured that out, the game was pretty fun! Got 11000 on Easy

One point of feedback is that I think that the fingers should raise faster, because it felt kind of awkward to have to wait a half a second for my fingers to raise before I could thrust my hands forward. That screwed me over a few times because I pressed space too fast and my fingers were only half raised.

Overall though great work! The 3D models are great

Nice game! I liked the combination of the 2D player and the 3D world, that was cool! I also liked how well you incorporated the theme, it was cool to visibly see my progression through the map and be able to light up more an more of the map. The different flavor texts were also a nice touch. Some points of feedback:

- pleeease let me skip through the text, I am impatient and given the amount of times you die in this game it became grating having to wait through it each time

- I feel like the area right after the first arrow trap is too open, i stumbled around in circles aimlessly in the dark until I found the next section of the temple

Overall though, really well made game! I really appreciate how you added a sprint feature, although it did lag my game (webgl) a bit

ahh, gotcha, I figured it was that since it said it was a dice rolling simulator, bht I wasn't sure. And yeah it's hard to add animations for everything in game jams, i feel that 100%

Ya I typically hate asking for people to play my game but I feel like it would be really valuable to actually be able to hear someone's feedback in a video so I swallowed my pride and did it

Well, this game has a longer rating period so technically I worked on them a week apart

But yeah I might have a problem 😅

Yeah that's fair, the complete halt when you run out of stamina does get really grating. It's not perfect but I do really like the world they built and what they did with the theme

Thank you, I appreciate the feedback! You're right about the wait time, if we come back to this one of the first things on the list is to tighten up the experience and remove some of the waiting

Yea I think for the spring enemies it is hard for the players to get ahold of their AI because they're never on screen because they bounce so high. So we can't really adapt to their trajectories since we can't see them unless they are on our face. The AI you made seems cool though, and it seems like it would work if the players could see the springs the whole time and if they were a bit slower!

Thanks for responding with some helpful info!I have been having a hard time wrapping around how to get shaders to do what I want, so I've been putting off learning them. But I think it is time to just study it until I understand. I'll look up shader graphs thanks for the tip

I think for me, it more made me realize that I need to stop stalling learning more complex visual design features, which is something that I've kinda been afraid of.

This is my second game jam doing it as a full time artist, and I feel that my art always ends up looking a little dlat. I like working in a low pixel, limited color palettes art style because I'm not confident in my ability to quickly make art that is more complex than that, but I think I need to learn more about shaders and particles to make my pixel art to go from "pretty good" to great.

This really stuck out for me when I played I Return Stronger, which literally just had a square and simple shapes, not to mention had the same core game idea, but looked so much better because it used a lot of shaders and particle effects. 

In that case, maybe you haven't checked out these either yet!

https://slimgekko.itch.io/down-in-the-fifth-round

https://sergio9024.itch.io/perfect-place

Daaamn this game is so good! It has the same idea as my game but like 100x more polished. The animations, color palette, particles, everything are just so expertly crafted. If I could provide any feedback, it's that I think the abilities should be bound to number keys and the spring enemies are impossible to predict and bounce way too erratically. But overall, absolutely incredible job! Makes me a little sad about my game, but motivates me to improve

(Also would you mind sharing how you did the wind effects for the floating ability? Was it shaders?)

I'm gonna assume you've played everything in the top 50 most rated or so, so I won't recommend any of those. But sorting by random sometimes does have its perks, you find buried gems!

Have you played any of these games?

https://burningapparatus.itch.io/emergency-protocol

https://stegersaurus.itch.io/nerve-impulse

https://flavedogame.itch.io/sprouted

Cool game, the graphics I felt really fit with the gameplay/theme of you being a kid. 

I liked the "story" of the game where your mom would help you if you fail, since you're a little kid.

I feel like the point of this game is the gameplay, but I still couldn't really make sense of it? Is it just random whether your fish die or not? And is it supposed to be like your mom is buying more fish when they die, or does she resurrect them? I feel like some animations for that would help clarify that. Also, the particle effects for the fish could be improved, since they appear out of nowhere and disappear without the fish even near them sometimes.

But overall good entry for a first jam, and congrats on completing! I liked the voice lines as well

(btw I found this from the rate for rate thread, and I would not mind throwing in my hat to see a review in your youtube video)

This is, without a doubt, the most unique game I've played in this jam! I don't think I've ever played a game like this, it is like a new take on QWOP. The control scheme is just so wacky and over the top that it just works. I loved the experimenting aspect of the game, like how you had to mess around and fail with certain brain lobes to know what they are. 

There was an element of strategy to choosing the poses, as you want to find the poses that propel you the farthest.  It definitely kept me wanting to come back and try to form the perfect jank machine to fly through the level. Definitely want to come back and try to beat this! 

I think that graphics and sound are the main areas you could improve in, and gameplay-wise maybe allowing the player to right click to deselect brain nodes in the selection nodes in case they misclick (and if it is an unrevealed node you just don't show the pose until they test it). Also maybe some way to prevent the player from just unlocking the whole brain by just choosing 4 nodes, retrying, rinse and repeat

But overall this game is one of my favorites! It is so creative and unique and fits the theme, great job!

Edit: I think what this game could use is a simplified, shorter level with more simple but varied obstacles and less uneven floor, and a speedrun timer. I feel like it would fix the issue of just resetting for every pose, and I feel like this game would be very fun to optimize

Nice game! The art was nice, especially the character art, and the respawning mechanic was cool but felt a little bit finicky on where I would respawn. There was a few bugs but hey it's a game jam afterall!

Game crashed for me on a level...4 i think?

Here's the error message

Overall though I enjoyed with the game, and the art, again, was great!

Great game! Honestly the complete package right here! The simple art is great, the animations and menus are really polished, the gameplay is fun and varied. I liked how creative some of the control schemes you made were, like the diagonal thrusters and reverse flappy bird especially. It also keeps the gameplay fresh and varied. The game isn't a pushover either, I had to come back and beat it on my second time (granted i was trying to learn the game on the first round and took a while to get used to each of the controls)

Only point of feedback is that sometimes it is impossible to get to an asteroid on some control schemes like the diagonal thruster, and this can get frustrating if these situations chain together multiple times due to bad luck. But I could just be unlucky, and it really isn't that big of a deal.

Overall an excellent game that accomplishes what it is trying to do very well! Great job!