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This definitely works as a game, and having a random buff/debuff applied most of the time keeps you on your toes and forces you to approach the zombie situation carefully and with at least a little foresight and risk management, so you don’t end up frozen in place and dead :3

A few thoughts:

• I don’t feel like the music being spatial audio works that well here
• The game ran out of zombies~
• it is the worst hat! :D keeps freezing me at inopportune times

It’s got some good core parts of a specific kind of game; enemies that will eventually overwhelm you. I think if more zombies appeared quicker over time, the hat would become really annoying (in a good way) when it slows you or freezes you - but for now, I just run out of zombies >w<

This game has excellent vibes, and the pixel art is really really chill and cozy and nice, very pretty~

The idea of puzzling out the game worked really well for me, at least I feel very comfortable making and serving the orders :3

The music loop sets the mood quite well for the game.

The game reminds me of Cart Life, a long time favorite game of mine. Excellent job.

I sadly ran into a bunch of bugs, two of which ultimately made me unable to progress. The second one kept me from playing beyond day three.

I’ll try to explain the four mechanical bugs I ran into (seen in the screenshot collage):

1. The thingies that the ground coffee goes into got stuck in the coffee maker, first one (which was progressable), but when they both got stuck, I couldn’t continue and had to reset. Day 1
2. Moving the ground coffee holder thingie around eventually caused it to completely disappear, leaving me with only one thingie for the rest of that day. It came back the next day, though. Day 2 I think.
3. Just a graphical glitch with everything but the coffee inside the cup going invisible. I also couldn’t place the cup/cups on the mat for the sprinkling, but figured out that I could drag the cup to the sprinkles instead of the other way around. Was able to progress that way. Day 3.
4. One of the customers asked for a tiny cup with both sprinkles. Dark first, then light. Despite following the order (three times), they never accepted the coffee I made for them, making me unable to progress further past day 3.

Of course, game breaking bugs are unfortunate but this is a jam, and the vision for the game (as well as the gameplay itself when disregarding the bugs) really shines through. Excellent work!

Update: We’ve added flavor text to most objects in the most recent versions.

Yeah, that’s probably not a bug - you can interact with objects as well as characters, although very rarely is this an option.

We initially wanted to have most objects be interactable, providing flavor text, but we couldn’t get that in before the deadline. You have no way of knowing by day “3” that objects are interactable, and that’s on us.

Expect an update that adds flavor text to objects at some point - or, for the time being, you can see if any background objects look different than what you’d expect :3 (I can provide stronger hints if you’d prefer that).

Either way, thank you for trying out our game~! Hope you can be bothered to give it another go at some point :3

Thank you for playing!

You’re absolutely right, that is not very clear from the in-game tutorial.

I’ve updated the tutorial on this page to (hopefully) reflect this mechanic~

I was mostly breezing through the rounds, so maybe more difficult item designs? Again, the designs are really cute and good~!

I think the most enjoyable combination for me would be a difficulty increase not with more items (10-12 is probably enough), but increasingly subtle differences, maybe?

As others have mentioned, the laser is not quite there.

Other than that, it’s a nifty little game, with nice art assets~!

I didn’t expect much based on the game image and no screenshots, but this game was surprisingly enjoyable!

I found that having the 10 second time limit meant I took way different descent decisions than I otherwise would; no time for safe maneuvers :D

Sometimes the landing pads are barely visible on the start screen, making the first second or two very frantic compared to the descent. I’m not sure if this was intentional.

I got to the dark levels, but didn’t manage to complete all of them.

All in all, a simple and effective implementation of Lunar Lander, good job!

Very nice art!

The story had me quite intrigued, and then it was over~

I’d love to see more~!

Very polished pong, awesome!

Having all these settings in the menu is really cool (especially remapping controls)!

The game is pong, but somewhat juicier and very smooth, great!

I think either making the camera static, or zooming out the camera enough so the camera always renders the entire board would make the game even more playable.

The powerups are cool. Having them there in the first place really spices up the classic gameplay and makes aiming that much more important. I would have loved to see more, and more game-changing power-ups as well.

(Note: I’m not actually very good at pong~ :)

Very simple yet polished game. I quite enjoy spot-the-difference, so this was right up my alley :3

I would have liked to see more difficult pairs, and the limitation wasn’t super obvious until I deliberately failed a pair.

The art is incredibly cute, and the atmosphere of the game is super chill, well done!

Overall, a consistently pleasant experience~!

Thank you for playing our game~!

You’re right, the static background means your velocity relative to the ground is very hard to discern. We had some small dust particles near the ship, but those easily get lost in the hectic gameplay.

Based on your feedback, there’s now much more and larger particles that give a “feel” for how fast you’re moving relative to the surroundings.

Thank you very much for your feedback!

Hiya! Thank you for your feedback, and your kind words!

Based on this and other feedback, we’ve now doubled the amount of fuel you get per enemy you shoot down, as well as given the player a ~17% speed boost. This gives you more room to maneuver and have proper dogfights, hopefully :)

TL;DR

• exported pico-8 carts are standalone applications
• publishing to splore is manual/opt-in, and never default or automatic

As aloeheart pointed out:

That person is actually wrong about that. Games in splore are put there manually by their creators. You can export your pico 8 game in a binary format that both does not require pico-8 to play and doesn’t show the source code.

That is to say, all carts you make can be exported to run standalone.

They’re also kept off of splore, unless you explicitly and deliberately publish them on the BBS.

Thank you for your kind words, very happy you were able to get a little bit of a sense of scale at the 64×64 resolution 😊

Hehe, the different systems (weather, atmosphere, etc.) sadly aren’t tied together as tightly as we wanted them to be - a number of parameters are more or less random 😅

As for running out of fuel and scooping stars - we regrettably don’t have anything in the game to indicate it, but the yellow band around the star has the best fuel-to-hull-damage ratio, so the most hull-effective way of scooping fuel is to just pass through parts of the yellow band and then let the trajectory pull you away from the star again~

I’ve added a hints section to the game page based on your feedback, thank you! And thank you for playing~!

Very happy you like the audio, spent a lot of time on it~

The controls, while fairly consistent, are not quite intuitive enough to work without a tutorial. On the very last day we managed to get in the little instructional splash screens before each “action” segment of the game, but that alone hasn’t been enough to avoid confusion 😅

Thank you for playing~!

Thank you for your kind comments~!

Very happy you enjoyed the game 😊

Thank you for playing, and for your kind comment~!

I also hope I continue development n_n;

It very much does~

The Secret Life of Probes is an idea I've had for a while, but reading 17776 made it easier for me to do a little bit of writing (something I'm not very experienced with) for this game~

Oh and it's worth noting that since I'm actually rendering everything at a lower res, rendering POINTS means you get nice big pixel-perfect dots for stars - then a bloom filter on top of that and you get the really bright stars blooming up :)

Hehe, I agree, cats are the best~

Thank you for your comment :)

Hi! Happy you found the game beautiful :3 There's not a lot of story, so it's good to hear you enjoyed what little there was, as well~

As for rendering the stars, you can see my reply to botmark below :)

Thank you so much for your kind words! I'm glad you like the art style, it's kind of half the tech in the game :p

As for the dot-stars, technically you are visiting individual stars that dot the sky, but there's some trickery going on with separate scales for solar systems and the starfield as a whole. With a different interface, you would certainly be able to visit any one of those dots and get a unique and deterministic solar system :)

I render 8×8×8 "blocks" or octants each with 4096 stars;

An octant is given a seed based on its integer position in the galaxy (one octant unit = 256 unity units).

This octant seed is then used to hash out three coordinates for each of the 4096 stars, roughly like

pos = uint3(hash(i*3+0,seed), hash(i*3+1,seed), hash(i*3+2,seed))

The hash functions at the core of the game all support seeds for the hash as well, meaning each seed gives you another 4 billion hash values. It's not the highest quality hash, but certainly higher quality than causing any visible structure to the starfield generation~

Each dot-star's position is then used in a 3D hash function in the same fashion to generate each solar system as you travel to that star.

The 8×8×8 grid of octants each have positions and vertices ranging from (0,0,0) to (1,1,1), and I simply scale the entire starfield by 256 at the end to throw the stars faaar away.

Finally, the entire starfield is kinda parented to the player in such a way that when the player moves right, the starfield moves with them - avoiding the parallax that would give away their real distance of maybe a few dozen metres.

Thank you, I'm glad it hit something like that~ :)

Thank you for playing the game, I'm glad you liked it :D

Yeah, making solar system flight also align the ship was a stretch goal I didn't get around to, sadly - as for the clipping through planets and stars, that's ... hard to fix so I'd probably just hide it with some visual warp tunnel effect instead :p

Maybe I was doing something wrong, but the horizontal velocity gets zeroed when I change the gravity so I ended up getting stuck - probably just couldn't figure out the puzzle owo~

Either way, what I did see of the game was really neat, the dialogue is quite cute, and the idea of flipping gravity reminds me of one of my all-time favourite games, VVVVVV

Also cat yay >:3c

This was really well put together and quite a fun story~!

I really enjoyed playing "the same sequence" with extra stuff to do to win~

Now I'm left wondering what really happened :)

Thank you for your feedback~

By your comment, I am unsure if you figured out how to turn off the SSP and conclude the game~ but super happy you enjoyed the game either way :D

I love six degrees of freedom, and this casual take was wonderful to play.

Exceptionally polished for a jam game, with a banger soundtrack ~ great job~!

(I got to 18~)

First off, music is immediately banger, great job on that~! Also main menu is super polished and the fact that you have one with settings is awesome!

I don't think I'd call the game a bullet hell though, it feels more like a shoot-em-up, I'm not quite sure why - maybe because there aren't that many bullets and they don't go off in all directions?

The screenshake is really neat, like quite subtle for small things yet with the potential for more shake, I like that~

There is so much to like about this game, the varied enemies and shots (bombs etc.), the funny death messages, the unknown cheat code entering~ very well done.

One thing I noticed is, there is never a reason not to shoot, so binding it to a button that functionally should be held at all times is kinda tedious. You could either always fire and not use a button for it, or have firing not be the optimal strategy all the time - like slowing you down while you're firing, or something like that~

All in all, a really solid entry - thank you for sharing this with the world :)

Ah, I'm glad that you find the vistas mesmerizing, that's really cool~! Thank you for your compliments, and thank you for playing the game~!

I'm happy you liked the graphics, a simple dither shader does so much for the aesthetics - separates it from other simple unity game scenes, I suppose? n_n~

Thank you for your kind words uwu~

Admittedly, a lot of time was spent on graphics and aesthetics, which kind of shows in the (very) short amount of story that was time left to put in~

Wow, that's kind of you to say. Thank you~!

I'm very glad you liked the shaders I put in, they were fun to make :D

The music was made by my co-conspirator, I'll make sure they get your comment :)

Thank you so much for your wonderful comment, it made me happy n_n~

It is working. Does the button not work?

<3

I see! That's really awesome - I've been working myself on making ECS/DOTS (with Jobs and Burst) work in WebGL, which was an ordeal especially because the Hybrid Renderer does not yet support WebGL so I'm using Companion GameObjects for now (with all logic applied to entities and just the transform of the GameObject synced every frame).

There were a few other gotchas if you're interested, but at this point your approach seems way more feasible (also for not using preview packages~) Good work, thank you for sharing~!

Does this build for WebGL/run in browsers?

This is an exceptional jam entry. Everything is very consistent and polished, the concept is brilliant, the gameplay is enjoyable, the colour schemes fit well together, the music selection sets the mood... yeah~!

Overall a truly great jam game, thank you for submitting~!