Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines

eswartz75

74
Posts
A member registered Feb 11, 2024 · View creator page →

Creator of

Recent community posts

Interesting concept, though I needed to use hints throughout. But I can see without them, it would be an endless toil, like a good fever dream is.

Nice use of fractals and shaders! Like others found, it was a little difficult not to lose most of the puzzles, so a little more leeway would be appreciated.

Pretty frantic fighting off those advancing soldiers!  (I also saw the "Freeze" but I think that means you lost)

Yes, quite nightmarish! I never found a way to catch the coin and not collide with geometry, so sad. I liked how sometimes when I fell to my death, the falling and screaming animation repeats more and more often! I also liked the squishy weird movement sounds.

Pretty neat concept and visuals. Too bad (on Firefox) that the drawing was never quite centered where I wanted, and right-mouse always brings up a menu :) But I could close the circle with LMB only and was able to get along okay. Somehow I never died, either.

Pretty fun and hypnotic with that song repeating and speeding up... what a fever!

Pretty fun sorta-idler :)  The audio and red bloom makes it interesting to keep running while the numbers climb :)

Pretty fun! It was easy to get into the gameplay loop and keep playing. I didn't run into any issues,

Very odd little fever dream. I like the background effect. I eventually woke up after making it through all the levels.

It was interesting to see the actual map assets. I guess they were repeated and tiled upon themselves for the gameplay? Neat way to make the world seem bigger.

Interesting setting and theme, though I couldn't get very far beyond the first two enemies.

Pretty interesting, and props to self-made assets. I saw Suzanne in the first level! The animations are cute.

Note on the Linux build, try using an older runner (ubuntu-22.04) else it won't run on a lot of systems.

I built from source.

I got out! Not sure how.

I liked the ambience and effects, and the dynamic nature of the world, which is obscured but though I'm unsure what purpose there was for the things I could pick up. 

Fun and exciting! I tried to make use of obstacles to slow down the swarm, but not sure if there was any way to "win". Given the title and fever theme, I assume not. :)

I want to like this but the automated camera movement and ambiguous direction of player movement make it impossible for me to get past the first jump. 

Pretty fun, once I got the hang of it and was able to make use of a torch. I did appreciate the sounds not being too annoying (given about a thousand of them would eventually occur during a night). 

A minor oddity is, once I got to 2:46 but that didn't count as surviving. Is "2.5" minutes really "2:50"? :)

Very bizarre! Good feverish mixture of bitcrushed audio and pictures.

Not sure how to turn... it seemed automatic at the start, or I fooled myself into thinking something was happening when clicking the steering wheel or the area left or right of the wall. It seems that "I" was able to dodge walls for a while until I answered the phone. 

The hints on the game page are amusing but could answer this minor gameplay detail, if indeed there is a way to do what the game title suggests  :)

Quack, quack, quack!

The sky and lightning are nice. I lost one green duck somewhere, though. Dunno who hired me as duckling wrangler! :)

I'd recommend some degree of keeping the ducks in some reasonable range, but hey, nice fever dream on the endless sea!

(1 edit)

It's in a decent state for a jam game. I would like to see the "idle" time sequences as click-through screens, since jam testers want to advance (in a good way) to the next game as soon as reasonably possible.

I gave the game an hour and a half of my browser's time, and went through several kind / upgrade upgrade cycles, so I think I get the gist, but wonder if there's more. I needed to stop it because my fans were going nuts. :o  (Consider `WinitSettings::low_power_reactive_mode()` for idle games.)

Tips for players

* If you don't notice the dim border, the floating yellow things are actually floating ... pizzas? It's food, not weak antibodies.

* The status area also shows the floating "pizza" and means "Eat food" according to the description. A count of food particles eaten minus energy consumed?

* When you click on a controlled cell, the dim grey plus signs are active -- they indicate where you can attach things. The center may also have a larger plus sign. Clicking on these shows contextual toolbox (at the lower center of the UI) where you can select what to attach. Click one of those to add it. Click on the plus again to cancel. 

(I only add these tips because of how embarrassingly long it took me to figure them out. The long forced idle times are enough to completely forget what I was planning or doing before.) 

Interesting juxtaposition of music and feeding (?). Like others mentioned, a bit of story or explanation of the goal would be useful. Finally got the golden fish to catch the food (?). Little bugger seemed to be avoiding it!

Sweet and simple, with some fun random happenings. (I need to check the bed's feet; they're noisy.)

Thanks for mapping WSAD movement to screen space.

Pretty fun and meta. The game's author has a recorded record of all the ideas that went through their head! 

The maze bit was the toughest by far. Those red squares are not friendly!

Nice prototype! The character is quite well-modeled and animated. Transitions between the "pushing" hint vs. other walking is a bit abrupt, though, but it works and makes sense. Also kudos to the outlining of active buttons/etc.

Like others, I'm not a fan of top-down plus direction-specific WSAD movement. Took a bit of time to stop falling off the edges accidentally. :) But, thanks for bringing us back to the nearest box spawner. Perhaps don't allow the player to fall at all? 

If you keep WSAD being player-direction specific, maybe it would be better to force movement to the nearest 45 degree angle? A lot of my time was spent nudging boxes into the proper direction so they wouldn't go at strange angles. 

(An alternative is to just turn the world so it's always "in front" of the player. That could solve both control issues, assuming these are real 3D worlds and not clever 2D maps. But I understand that's a big look-and-feel change.)

Hope it wasn't just me, but I didn't hear any audio. Sound effects would help a lot too to provide feedback.

Another minor issue is that sometimes, walking near an open bridge shows the closed bridge for a frame. Nothing breaking, though.

Looking forward to more!

Pretty hectic and I could see it being fun, though I think the instructions are a little unclear so I needed to bail early. 

(I was unsure whether to drag onto a pan and then press space, or whether space came at some other point (due to visual inspection? guesswork?). I don't know much about cooking, much less Thai cooking ;) And which pan should stuff go into? Does one mix eggs and other ingredients? etc.)

Anyway, the low-res aesthetic and cooking sounds are nice!

Pretty nice spin on roguelikes! It has a gentle learning curve along with a LOT of blood and an exciting escalation to the soundtrack as your HP falls. I didn't get too far (I hope there's health potion somewhere!).

That said, it's a bit tough to combine real-time battle with aiming the mouse pointer on the tiny characters. I could zoom the browser before gameplay and see better, though the game seems to want a fixed resolution, making parts of the screen scrolled off-view. None of that was game breaking, though, just needs a more practiced hand.

I'd recommend using Chrome over FF (or providing native builds), since the audio tends to get stuttery on web for me.

Hope to see more of this after the jam!

Pretty fun, though like others, I got stuck on the platforming section. Left-Shift is a pretty inconvenient choice, lol. If it supported right shift or enter or mouse click or some other distinct key as well, maybe I coulda got through it, but I was accidentally toggling caps lock, or swapping instead of jumping, etc. (As I see it, it's easier to keep similar actions together, so if swapping could be on another hand, it'd be easier.) Like others, I didn't really enjoy playing through the entire platforming section over and over. But it was amusing to jump on Rhino Toasterino.

Anyway, it was helpful showing the key binds at the top of the screen. The game ran pretty smoothly, sounds were fun (fortunately the gunshot sound for the flappy pacman section was short :) and the silly graphics and hand-wipe were fun to look at.

Oh, hmm, I had actually restarted and was sitting at a menu when I saw the "look at the sky!" suggestion. I hadn't even gone inside yet, but they each appeared when I looked up then back down. Hmmm. (Maybe it was re-using state from a previous run in the same process?)

Nice little game. I enjoyed the amusing dialogue and responsive controls to page through it. Dude's rug has to be respected. Timely minigame at the end, too! (Would be better with a bit of sound :)

Minor issue, I got stuck in a looping "punching" animation during the next-to-last long conversation. Seemed a little silly, but nothing breaking.

Good start for a first time. Keep working at it and improving!

Pretty melancholic visual novel vibe with the soundtrack and rain and the sad red balloon (nice string physics!). The character vaguely reminds me of "Six" from "Little Nightmares", though I got confused that all the friends/adults are all tall scary looking monsters. Maybe the other kids should be small scary monsters? :)

At the start I sometimes got lost when going too far left or right. It _seemed_ like the balloon bounced in the direction of where to go (at least, following it helped keep me on track).

Unlike Jan, I think the story could go on a little longer. The growing sense of dread let me anticipate what was coming, but perhaps some other scenes following that would help close out the story.

Nice job though!

Interesting concept! It took a little while (even with the tutorial) to see how Space switched the active sheep. It's not super-clear why the red particles come out when one is ... "done", and it's a bit hard to locate your active one during gameplay. But not an impossible challenge!

I like the ideas and the digging/filling mechanic is quite neat. 

It would be good to have audible indicators that the quest/task list has changed; didn't notice it at first and did some wrong things and maybe broke the progression -- somewhere along the way right-click to grab stopped working and I couldn't pick up anything to bury it. (I think I went right past the whale in the shop and engaged with the squids in the next room first, if that helps.)

It would be helpful to put the control instructions in the game itself (had to quit and read the game page to remember Right-Click and 1/2/3).

The Linux build doesn't finish loading after several attempts (there's a 'Flame.ktx2' loading error, though I see the same messages on the Windows build in Wine and web but it continues and runs :shrug:).

Also, seems the native builds are double-zipped. Probably not necessary :)

Hope to see this continue post-jam!

Ha, nice hand-drawn feverish aesthetic here. The "control" art is ... disturbing in a good way... why are the human pets so biiiig? lol. 

Like others have said, the "observe" and "relieve" minigames need a little more leniency since it seems there's barely enough time to achieve whatever the goal is. But there is a nice set of "tossing and turning in bed" screens to keep thing interesting in between, whatever the outcome.

Thanks for having an in-game audio menu to turn down the music :)

Eep, looks like the Linux version needs a much-too-new version of libm.so.6 (it wants glibc 2.43, while my Debian forky/sid -- "semi" bleeding edge -- is only up to 2.41 so far!).

An easy-ish workaround is to build against e.g. `ubuntu-22.04` baseline (the bevy_ci_github_template's `ci/release.yaml` can be edited to try this) to improve backwards compatibility.

But the web and Windows version (under Wine) runs fine as a workaround.

Very nice! I appreciate the low-poly/grimy aesthetic and the (overly?) helpful UI.

I am assuming the solution is the same between plays, though I somehow can only safely eliminate two. Hmm. It's not quite obvious if my actions change the gameplay at all (characters seem to say the same things in the same order regardless, unless I overlooked something), other than the phone call at bad times, ofc. But I'll get back to it and try harder later on.

Unfortunately the short looping audio soundtrack sample got a bit repetitive and accessing the settings menu required exiting to the main menu -- though I got there often enough through bad guessing :) 

I did see the easter egg/clue to look at the sky. Neat. I also went behind the opening building where it's invisible, oops :) I'd recommend a collider for 348's door, which otherwise is silent and sorta clips when you get close.

It worked fine, looked neat, and concepts were introduced well. The gameplay seemed clear (once I realized the glowing crystals were inert (?) enemies and not health regen stations :). It might benefit from resolution scaling since the level meters are pretty tiny on a 4K monitor. The game could have used audio to enhance the aesthetics.

And please confine/hide the mouse cursor to avoid accidental out-of-window clicks :)

It worked fine, looked neat, and concepts were introduced well. The gameplay seemed clear (once I realized the glowing crystals were inert (?) enemies and not health regen stations :). It might benefit from resolution scaling since the level meters are pretty tiny on a 4K monitor. The game could have used audio to enhance the aesthetics.

And please confine/hide the mouse cursor to avoid accidental out-of-window clicks :)

It is a neat idea, a solid effort for a game jam timeline, and the audio and visuals are fine. I think the gameplay can be polished a bit in terms of how concepts are introduced, to make it less punishing. Unsolicited advice to follow!

It is nice to use text ("did I see that move?") etc, but it so happens that the player can't actually do anything with jumping/swapping platforms on that first level, and may waste time trying to reach them (they seem _almost_ close enough) -- not realizing there's a screen to the right requiring the jumping.

I commend the evolving gameplay, but it comes a little too quickly, since the third screen also introduces the idea of three cycles to the platforms, and also added difficulty, since there are also enemies, and a  little stairstep in the way preventing you from jumping immediately when entering. This 3-cycle mechanic could wait for yet a later screen, perhaps, so the player is used to jumping a little more.

Finally, before I gave up was the level introducing the cycling platforms ("did I see those rotate?") because, again, you can't do anything with them until you go left back to the other screens. The help text should probably appear in the same screen where you can use it :)

I wondered why the world was so flat :) For the slope issue, perhaps look into `dynamic_friction` in https://docs.rs/avian3d/latest/avian3d/dynamics/rigid_body/struct.Friction.html. There's different friction values for "static" cases -- sitting still, even if you're on a moving platform) vs. when a collider is moving along a surface ("dymamic").

The art style, fonts, and music all work together quite nicely!

For gameplay, I recommend on earlier levels spawning more mice than needed for the goal. I often find myself failing to find that very last mouse...!

No worries. Since publishing I have convinced myself that part of the feverish nightmare is the player not knowing the rules precisely. I tried not to make anything impossible on Normal skill :)

I should mention the default volume and mouse sensitivity are pretty suboptimal (too jerky and loud, for me -- I need to shove everything near minimum). Unfortunately it also seems the settings reset to default whenever I look at the Settings. (That should be a Startup system, I think. It's the same place you'd check for persisted preferences later.)

Also, I'd like to have access to these Settings during the game (usually you provide a way to Escape to an in-game menu). That way one doesn't need to wait to fail before trying to edit the settings again.

From what I saw, though, it had an interesting use of the "bloody screen damage" effect, in a nice low-poly way just like the game models. I could see that minimalist style being effective. Maybe it doesn't really need the art guy yet. I think it's more important to improve the feel of the movement, turning, and firing. It's not easy to do under a deadline, so I don't blame you!

Good luck improving this later on.