itch.io

To answer the question and address some points others have made - from my perspective the comments are great to tell someone they've done something impressive for the time. The star ratings I try to keep more objective to facilitate comparisons. I don't find that very easy though as whilst we all have the same constraint of time, it's often comparing apples with oranges. Games developed with different amounts of pre-made elements and teams all dramatically alter the ability for someone to scope and adapt to circumstances, and in the case of teams can dramatically alter the man hours available. To ignore these things entirely would be for game jams to tend away from having individual developers - so I take the approach that where I am unsure if I should give a game, say, a 4 or 5 in a category then I will tend to give individual developers the benefit of the doubt.

Thanks and well spotted. Yes. 

I've seen a couple of the 'switch to the other dimension to avoid dieing' type runner games in this jam, but what I really like about yours is you can see a bit of what you're going to get when you do switch first. Still hard, but I thought that aspect was better done in yours than others.

Understandable. I think the way itch.io works didn't help here as it hid the instructions when I clicked run game. So I opened a new tab to have them available and then had another go. Really enjoyed it. Nice puzzle game.

So, thought I'd leave a comment myself. A general theme is that you can just spam the space bar to fire and concentrate on jumping. You can, but it makes it harder for you. Each axe thrown/shot causes a hole in the sky/ground above. So you have much more jumping to do and you're more likely to come across difficult jumps (although it prevents all impossible ones). I left it in as a play style the player could choose but coded it out as effective by that relationship between the axes and the holes. It's just not visually clear that's what's happening (there are some technical reasons for that) and maybe the dialogue can point it out. Basically it needs communicating better. And that's a great point for me to learn and make improvements in it. I think I missed also that in the learning curve for the game spamming axes probably is easy for a while and then the player can get locked down in that idea - a kind of false local optima of their gameplay. If I progress it further I'll see what I can do about that and there have been some great suggestions. Anyway...my main reason for a comment of my own here is that as I've played it too much I wanted to drop a video of the two different styles of play in back to back sessions as I think it clarifies it:

Thanks. You made the map - the more you hit space, the more gaps appear in the upper level :) I love the idea of ammo or something so the upper one affects the lower one too. I'm not sure I'll take it further than the concept it is now, but if I do then I'll include something like that.

Good job for your first game jam. I also had the bug where you could move into yourself that somebody else mentioned but also couldn't repeat it - there's something odd when you press keys quickly one after another (I think when it happened to me I pressed up and left quickly. Ignoring backing into yourself, sometimes if you press two keys quickly it ignores one). For more general things if you want to continue working on it - sounds and music would add a lot and perhaps make it faster or ramp up the speed quicker. 

Oh it's like every game that's 3D that gives me motion sickness if the camera moves. Nothing to do with your game, just me and my stupid brain being overly sensitive.

You can put a script on a light in Unity and use it to adjust the intensity (or other settings). I've not tried it but something like this https://gist.github.com/SorraTheOrc/496e2abacbe2d2bde661b55af71add92 , if it's a path you want to go down. 

This is very slick. What's there feels like a completed game. Would love to play this when you've had time to do everything you envisioned.

Very clever idea. Maybe a bit too clever for me :) I struggled with getting used to how much I need to keep track of. But I can see others mastering it. 

Endless runners for the win! :) It's was good and didn't take me long to work out what I'm meant to do. I found the background scrolling when it went faster made my eyes go squiffy but that's probably just me.

This is the perfect employee. You can get him to work 24/7 just by pressing 'e' every so often. 

I'm worried that this might prove that working could be fun. It most certainly proves that I need more coffee. Good game that you can add more tasks to in the future.

Great idea. Like others I thought the countdown window was the virus until I read the comments here. Also I jumped off the top of the screen and disappeared - I guess it's a Mac thing :D Also disappointed about the lack of essay - as punishment please hand in your essay assignment of 5000 words on why essays are essential in game jam games by monday please. Good job.

I think this is a fun concept. Good work in a game jam timeframe. If you want to take it further afterwards then it would be fun to focus on more on that concept. So as somebody already mentioned - maybe you can jump up through clouds but they stop you from falling down. That'll make it feel like clouds are more fluffy and not like ground. If you had time you could also add indicators of height. So maybe you can see a bit of a mountain in the background to start with. Then higher up the occassional bird flies past, higher still an airplane, and higher still a space rocket. So many possibilities. Good job.

I only scanned the first page of comments - but maybe I'm the first one to say it - does this mean I'm pregnant now? :)

I think it's a great concept and I like the simple design. I think improvement suggestions have already been covered by others - it seems it should be the kind of game where you get the satisfaction of having rotated just in time to match that color up to catch the....erm...particle thingies and just got there in time. Then the speed and smoothness of the enemies and rotation influence that feeling quite a bit and at what point you force the player to take a hit from the wrong color (if you want that at all).  For a game jam game it's great, and the core is there, I hope you go on to tweak and enhance it later.

I'm a fan of this interpretation of the theme (it's unique in the games I've come across so far). These sort of 3D games give me motion sickness so it was a bit of a battle between that and my desire to explore more :) I genuinely enjoyed exploring and looking for gaps. For movement I ended up using a combination of the game controller and mouse to look around. Originally it felt a bit like my squashed down princess should be able to get under the gates - it was the first thing I tried because her body is less width than the hole between the bars. Then I turned around and learnt what I should do. I got the thought that more dynamic/flickering lighting may help make some of the gaps a bit more noticeable as the light would change a bit differently. But you may or may not want to do that given the balance in the game is the finding of where to go - it might make it too easy. But good game. I don't think I got anywhere near the end of the game but I also wonder why she didn't ask the guard for an envelope and a stamp then flatten herself and post herself home :)

This is well done. It starts out confusing, but intentionally so. First I was like - hang on, I can't go backwards and I was a bit against it because that's not what you expect from a platform puzzle type game. But I think it makes for an interesting design and puzzles so I definitely came around to it. I think it would be good to have the character stop just a little bit quicker after I release the key though - a couple of times I just slightly overshot where I wanted to stop and if you can go back on a regular game that's not noticeable but when you can't it's a little frustrating - nothing major though. The same with the going from one side of the screen to the other mechanic - at first it confused me as it's like walking into the abyss sometimes. But I also think that's intentionally so and I picked it up and liked it quite quickly. I didn't find any bugs. I did find a cat the meows nicely but I didn't stroke it as I don't know if it's had its vaccinations :)

This is the kind of beautiful game I make....in my dreams :) The lit up character sprite is a bit of a trend, but one I happen to really like and the layers with the parallax work great with it being dark behind and then the moon being bright again at the back. It seemed to me that the rotation keys could do with being a bit more enthusiastic in what they do, but I did quite enjoy face planting the poor guy time and time again :)

There's a sea of general comments, some for the wrong reasons, some because maybe (as I have done on a couple of occasions) someone found something okay but don't really have any suggestions or the dev clearly already has future plans in mind, and some I'm sure because the comments being non-anonymous can have a bit of kickback if you accidentally upset someone (the format as a whole discourages honesty a little bit).

I've noticed what a few people do in feedback is to give a clear indication they've played the game. by mentioning something they would not know if they hadn't. Then list any bugs they came across (which is an easy win for a dev to fix later), any more general issues, and suggestions. These I find the best feedback and I've tried to take onboard this sort of style when I'm doing it. I wish a bit that itch.io didn't have comment fields for this but some kind of mini survey/standard questions like "What did you enjoy", "Were there bugs", "Were there other issues", "Do you have ideas to improve the game or ideas for paths for future development". It would discourage those not giving genuine feedback and give some direction for those giving genuine feedback.

Awesome. I could imagine actually playing this back then. My only two issues are I couldn't find the slot to insert a coin and also I came last because I kept trying to see if I could take a shortcut in case you missed any :)

Yes an No. I'm a perfectionist, as I suspect most of us are, and I wanted originally to do more. This is my third game jam and the first one where unexpected real world (life in 3D :) ) commitments stacked up. So I wanted the game to be more but I'm proud of my time management and ability to rescope so there's still a viable and playable game along the lines I wanted. From the previous jams I've tried to improve upon feedback and ratings in this one, so that remains to be seen. But I think also this is one of the beauties of game jams other than seeing what you can produce in a short time frame, you get to take the kernel of an idea and get feedback on if it is something viable you should keep working on after. There was also a side project in mine - in that I created my own tool to render 3D models out to 2D sprite sheets for animations. That makes things a lot easier for me in the future - so I'm probably more proud of the tool to be honest :)

Nice game. At one point one of the options seemed to hang, then suddenly it started working again. But I could no longer build anything. Then a bit later an option hung again. For a one person game jam game there's a lot to keep in mind and debug though. Only thing I would say on that is the second edit doesn't sound like a game breaking bug fix but more gameplay improvement. I wish I'd seen it before that to understand what you achieved in the jam (which is obviously a lot) better. But anyway, you set yourself a big challenge and I think you succeeded.

For art it's a style, and it's very well done for that style. It felt a lot like I was playing on a zx spectrum.

Yup, good idea...thanks - that connection between axes/holes could be clearer and that would definitely do it and be a more visually interesting game.

Thanks for the comments. 93.9 is a very good score. And yes - the holes are created when you throw the axes but it avoids situations that would make it impossible for the player to jump. So throwing axes makes jumping harder but never impossible - the player is always going to die but I wanted them to know it was timing that they could get better at than because this impossible situation came up.

Well, if that was the goal then it worked then as I did figure out what I needed to do. 

I really enjoyed this. Took me to the second game to realise how to use other things. It perhaps needs some post game jam bug fixing (it told me at one point I had -1 flowers and at the end I had 0 flowers when I could clearly see some and my bee did decide to hibernate behind a flower next to a rock for the last couple of minutes :) ) but a very enjoyable game. Could work well on mobile as a 5 minute time waster whilst waiting for the train.

I thought another game had the best death sound is this game jam, but I've changed my opinion to this one. It's like it read my mind :) Fun game. My only comment would be it's a little small on my 4k monitor for my not very good eyes.

It looks great. I failed to wrap my pea sized brain around the controls though. I think it could benefit from a tutorial for dimwits like me :) 

In my first run the thief killed my owner, which I was fine with as he was stingy with the dog food and treats and never took me for a decent walk. On my second try I was much better behaved. I'm not sure I see much theme, but it's certainly a very charming little game. Only comment is that I got a bit confused that I was meant to keep walking as it looked like I might fall into the abyss. But once I had that figured out, I enjoyed it.

Could well be what Satinel says, I've had that a couple of times. That said, there do seem to be a lot of fake comments. The number 3 most rated game, for example, has mass spammed 244 comments sections complimenting and saying they've rated games but haven't as they're also making the same comments on games that don't work and have 0 ratings. Makes my blood boil when so many are genuinely trying to help each other with honest feedback. So probably a combination of itch.io UI being a bit wonky and comment spam.

Poor HD! The more axes get thrown, the harder her jumping is. :) Shhhh...secret better strategy is to concentrate on jumping and if you see a baddie out of the corner of your eye, throw a few axes. 

Thanks. And a bigger thanks for noticing about the holes - that was something that took quite a lot of thinking and working out that I thought nobody would notice because it's the sort of thing that if it is okay people don't notice.

Thanks. Funny you should say that - I did originally intend a futuristic theme. There were two things that changed my mind. The one was that I wouldn't be able to prepare enough graphics in a game jam timeframe to do that twice. The other was that the emphasis is on there being an HD dimension and a pixel dimension. I felt the setting then needed to be very neutral to highlight that difference as as soon as you put a more themed setting on it detracts towards one or the other. Thus I left the primary focus on an HD character and a pixel character.

Endless runners for the win! Nice game. Either I'm very bad at it or it sometimes throws up scenarios that you can't win?

Nice game, it makes me long for the days when I was little and all I had to worry about was being eaten by a giant frog! :)

Klik&Play - I had that! So...on to the game. My first thought was where did you get a photo of me going to sleep like that. Uncanny :) It's nicely put together, hopefully you'll get more time outside of the game jam to expand it. Maybe an animation on the dice would be a good idea - at the moment it feels a bit like I just click it and a number comes up.

Nice game. That death sound is exactly the sound I imagine it would make if you put a dinosaur in a blender. Not that that's relevant of course :)