itch.io

I made it through a couple of time jumps.

Progressively unlocking more plants is a good move to not front load the complexity.

Getting fauna to move in was a nice incentive to keep playing - although I wished for a little more interaction when it comes to clicking through the tools. It would've been fun if you for example had to do like a raking movement when digging through the grass, or shaking the can to get some water out. Or things like the ground drying up again. 
I was fairly soon just turning the entire field to muddy brown and then just redigging a square once I harvested a plant.

Cute graphics and chill music.

Suuuper creative gameplay idea.

Awesome visuals and atmosphere. The concept of being the body invading alien and going undercover, tricking the crew is also very funny to me.

Unfortunately the voice rebinding didn't work great for me and because I was struggling a lot with hitting words, it was also pretty frustrating to not now which words to fish for. Would've loved to continue playing this, but I was hard stuck pretty soon.

Pretty awesome game!

I gotta say though, I feel like a dirtbag - I've been lecturing the other crew members about staying positive and cleaning up the rust, while I haven't even attempted once to shrub a single speck of rust and just went back to sleep.

It's fun that our games landed at a somewhat similar art style, although if you'd want my advice in regards to shader work, I would recommend converting the rgb colors to hsv via the colorspace conversion node, apply the posterization to just the v component before converting them back. Simply posterizing the rgb values, like I assume you are doing right now leads to somewhat garish and unnatural gradients, which of course could be by design, but doing it the way I suggested gives you more control over the color, while keeping the cell shaded effect.

The atmosphere and writing are great.

I had a difficult start with the game as I didn't know what to do initially and my first cycle was bumping into everything before finally getting the prompts done. Of course I only had to figure this out once, but it still wasn't enjoyable and took a long time. In the same regard I also missed a lot of the dialogue in the first few cycles, as I didn't expect anyone elses display to change (I assumed I was playing all of the crew consecutively and not just one guy, so I only read the messages I left).

How you tackled the theme was great! And I agree with a lot of the other commenters, that this was pretty much the best application of decay and cosmic horror, I've seen this jam.

While I do think the smear on the life pod has potential to be iconic, I think you could easily improve the packaging of your page with better screenshots. Even on the title it would be more striking if you would show not only the smiley, but also the silhouette of the pod.

Because the game is a somewhat large download for a jam project, I think it's important to present it as best as you can - if the comments weren't as stellar, I don't think I would've given this project a chance.

Awesome! Looking at it this way, it's really more of an UX issue to teach the player the intended way to play. I didn't get the card merging at all.

I think another thing that I would've appreciated would be seeing the deck. Especially if I'm meant to strategize about using cards, it would be good to know what will generally be available.

An idea could also be to introduce a casting cost to cards. If you needed to kill a couple of enemies before being able to afford a card to play it would emphasize the strategic aspect.

From the description I gather that the game is largely vibe coded, so I am gonna focus my feedback on the larger design decision and how coherent everything came together.

I think the idea of an automatic space invaders game mixed with card mechanics, even if not entirely original is a good one. I also like the general art direction and chosen color palette, to me the UI came together quite coherently and looks good in general. Standout for me are the graphics of the enemy ships - they are somewhat reminiscent of games like warning forever, which I am a fan of.

I found the music generally annoying and thought that it didn't really match the gameplay or aesthetic. Something low bit or even just instrumental pieces would've matched better.

Generally bringing in an overarching narrative is a good thing and would work well - however I felt like the actual dialogue was largely pointless drivel and felt like I was actively wasting my time reading it. I assume it was also AI writing, as it was a lot of text with very little substance or meaning I could make out.

The biggest draw back and thing that needs improvement the most is the gameplay though. Especially the card-game aspect. There were little to no actual decisions I was making when playing the game, just taking any card that spawned and dropping it on my ship seemed like a valid strategy, resulting in me just watching a simulation with minimal input.

I don't want to take away from the effort, that was clearly put into this - but I would say, if you cut out larger parts of the usual game development work you need to put more effort into making the parts that are made by you stand out more. 

yoo! There isn't much here. But the systems like the quest logs and the dialogue seem pretty fleshed out.

The graphics style is very appealing to me and the characters have a lot of charm.

You should really go out and provide some feedback to fellow devs just to get some eyes on your game. I think it'll resonate quite a bit with a few people.

Unfortunately because of the unfinished state, there isn't much I can gather about the story or how the jams theme ties into the entry.

Wow, thank you so much for the detailed feedback. 

E for interact makes sense, I'll add that.
The start menu not reacting to the mouse was just a mess up. Will fix!

Thank you for the high praise.

I swear I tried using left and right mouse click on the corpses with the hammer, but just nothing happened.

Anyways, really cool game with a great hook. It would make a good steam game imo.

Yeah, I think the player had a really great move speed - it was really fun just to jump and run.

I was really thinking about how the camera distance makes you seem more slow if it's far away. Games like BELOW are a good example.

Or Among The Sleep for the inverse approach - but both make you as the player feel small.

The idea of morphing the environment with progression of the game would've been dope!

yo! Thank you so much!

But yeah - I don't know how I manage to screw up the camera movement in every single jam. Truly my Achilles heel. :(

Yo! I love the graphics. The little followers are immediately endearing.

The gameplay was pretty boring - but I think it has potential to be interesting. I think it would be cool to lock a few options away and give the player something new to click every now and then - or even to take something away.

Just adding some anticipation for *what might be around the corner, if I just live another minute* could elevate the concept greatly.

as an added feedback - I was thinking about the player presentation. I think you could've leaned into the size a bit more.

Either you could've brought in the camera and widened the field of view to make the player feel like they are an insect in a big world or you could've pulled the camera waay out making the player character feel tiny and slow.

Just something to think about. :3

oh wow, that sounds stressful! Good on you for powering through!

Awesome art, awesome mood. I didn't get what happened at all. 

Cards kept changing their power seemingly without any reason. The randomized encounters can border on impossible - starting with guys wanting 8 and 11 points looked crazy to me.

Yo this is such a fun concept.

I would've played for longer - I don't think this type of game needs a time limit at all. I would've been perfectly fine with just cleaning up murder rooms for my eldritch god.

Sad I didn't get to use the hammer - also I didn't find out how to dispose of the stinky human corpses - but bagging and scrubbing was great.

Awesome aesthetics as well. 

My biggest gripe was that my mouse cursor wasn't locked which made navigating the game very challenging.

yo, awesome music! Would've liked it even better if the tracks where starting/ramping up with the encounters.

The hand drawn elements are fantastic on the player - but not so much on the creatures. The flat sprites just don't fit as well there.

I havent played that many boomer shooters, so I already fell a lot in the tutorial, but I appreciated that the core gameplay really wasn't reliant on my platforming abilities.

Great style!

Awesome art style. I love the retro textures and the abusive chromatic aberration.

Very cool voice acting and progressive escalation through dialogue - however I found the gameplay just too boring to finish the game. I got to day 9 and at that point I had hoped to have reached the end - imo you really need to switch something up eventually and surprise the player with some new mechanics or even just monsters that appear.

I think it would've also been cool to have a first person camera and have to look around at different screens instead of seeing all of them at once and closing in on only the ones where a monster appeared.

Yoooo! The mix of 3D with sprites looks dope. I was pretty impressed with the credits section - it was fun seeing the names coming with their respective camera swings - and holy moly, you've brought a lot of people together - kudos for getting everyone on the same boat.

The movement felt awesome - I liked running and jumping around. Visually everything is pretty coherent. Although I liked the line art more than the actual 3D rendering.

The tie in to the theme didn't quite convince me. Sabotaging a ship isn't really decay in my opinion. Especially as the small stowaway alien who's running around for 2 minutes. 

There have been some moments that felt really clutch and awesome - but the energy cell sucking wasn't quite engaging enough for me to try again after failing two times.

Awesome! I'm relieved it's not some kind of bug that is blocking your controls.

Hey annarose, sorry if we didn't show the interaction controls. On keyboard and mouse interact is the spacebar. On gamepads it's generally the A button.

Thank you for the detailed feedback!

You are not alone in the feeling of being lost on where to go, we'll take it as something to work on.

In the mean while maybe we should add a written guide in a spoiler tag on the games page.

Haha fair enough.

Awesome to hear that the performance isn't super bad, but yeah some really obnoxious and easy to avoid performance pitfalls are in the final build (some really spammy logs hammer the console for example).

thank you so much! High praise! :-O

I think this needs a bit of world building. Like a news ticker, or twitter threads where people are flipping out about the stonks. Or ceos promising that their company will make a fortune etc.

Aaand I think it would be cool if stocks could actually terminate and be taken of the market. Right now it's too easy to just buy low and wait to sell high, because everything is guaranteed to eventually hit it up again.

As neither a gambler nor a stock trader I appreciate the opportunity to partake!

I like the concept, but the balance is out of wack. I had enough defense that I didnt take a single point of damage.

Buut I think the game in general could benefit from a couple of extra interactions.  Thinking about tamagochi, you could for example add a hunger meter and maybe tie the stat increases to different foods - so training wouldn't be the only thing you do.

a dizzying experience

really polished entry. The transitions from scene to scene look really good - and the little camera sway adds a lot.

I like the traversal between scenes, but getting random stuff from the piles and offering them didn't really click with me.

Am I playing into the devils tricks? How is going outside and digging corpses out of the snow gonna keep me warm? x)

yoo! Nice arcadey arena shooter, that turns into a bullet hell at one point.

The high move speed really separates it from a lot of other games in this genre.

But goddamn, all I want for christmas is the ability to hold the mouse button down to shoot instead of having to click spam - because that's really annoying. :(

Always dig a survivor like. I like your emphasize on traversing the level over just circling enemies.

neat, I feel like this is a call back to the golden age of rpg maker games.

yo, some screen effects and maybe freeze frames on parry would be great for this.

I dig the art style - the characters look dope.

very cute game.

Honestly when I understood the premise I noticed a bit of anxiety rising with how much of a toxic pit the internet is lately - but just highlighting positive interactions was very nice.

Sad for the hedgehog though - I don't think we could've done anything about him - or if so I missed it.

Lots of dialogue and art - very nicely made. Kudos.

Beautiful idea. I got very motion sick though.

The perspective and art style are really stand out, if anything I would try to increase the contrast a bit between walkable platforms and background details - it's pretty difficult to make out the difference, which led to some confusion in the beginning because I didn't even anticipate there being a jump.

The general gameplay puzzle feels a bit tedious though - I don't know if there's a clear strategy I could've kept in my head to map out which urn is connected to which other urn.

Stellar entry. Very creative imo.

well, the best thing about it was the rhyming dialogue for me - while I don't frown upon AI use, still can't really weight it as positive as I wanted too.

Also the chromatic aberration puts some real strain on the eyes for reading some of the texts - not a huge fan of that.

Otherwise, great music and art. I also like the papers please like game play. Especially stamping approval/ disapproval has a nice weighty feeling to it.

cool game!

Awesome mood. All the assets and the writing come well together.

However visually it still needs some UX improvements. Especially the ui items have too little contrast, so the 1bit filter swallows them completely. Readability is also impacted by this. Not as much on the cards them selves, but especially on the end screen - I can't make out a single word.

I really like the setting, and also like decision games like reigns - however with this kind of game you can really feel that it's tough to pull off the scope during a game jam. You essentially hit repeats very early and it's not especially motivating to start consecutive runs, as it doesn't really feel like you are building towards a emergent story/personality.

I think you might've gotten something truly great if you had abandoned the random aspect and instead hand crafted an order of events. I think you would've gotten a lot mileage out of crafting a scenario even without introducing any new events.

Yo! Beautiful presentation. 

The game feels very well rounded.

Interesting concept creating a one-button game as well. I wish there was just a little more to it. Maybe not even gameplay, but maybe some narrative - even just walking your self from encounter to encounter seeing a bit of "the world" would've really elevated this to the next level for me.

Great combination of visuals and sounds! I dig the vibe.

is this... a game based on the meme that women would rather be alone in a cave with a bear than a man?

The dialogue is definitely funny even though a bit drawn out. But I grew to like it and anticipate the next bit.

amazing mood!

I really enjoyed the visuals and the sound design. 

The game also really succeeds in building up a mystery, where you've no real idea of time and place but just a eerie feeling of being out of place.

The game is obviously very light on interaction and could've benefitted from some more moments like the whispers and the windows opening. Just a little more escalation before the ascension at the end.

Also a bit sad that you missed the pure 1 bit, by not choosing a pixel font and introducing anti aliasing at the most unnecessary place. ^^°

However more impressive than anything I find how many people have worked on this game. It's a real challenge getting this many people to work together cohesively, managing differences in opinion etc. Huge hats off!

A simple stealth game. I think it's passable, even though it really needs some work in the gameplay and technical departments. 

Even just setting some of the priests to different speeds could've made traversing through them more interesting.

Yes, I would echo the sentiment that it was really hard to make out if any of the choices actually impacted anything.

However the mood and especially the music are stellar.

I liked the premise of the snowy village torn between their rites and a ruley king they have to obey. 
I tried to make the decision I would've actually made in that scenario and in the end my village survived the winter. However I ended up with a lot of these middle-of-the-road decisions - which was great for roleplaying, but maybe as a game it would've been more interesting to force the player to do go one way or the other.

Nice entry!