Cool. That's on my to-do list, but I added a GitHub issue here: https://github.com/rparrett/taipo/issues/10 so I know to prioritize it. I'll swing back around to Taipo after Bevy Jam 4 ends in a week or so.

Thanks!

We could definitely be doing a lot more to either teach folks how to play or make it more obvious. Open to suggestions!

But I haven't been super motivated to work on this outside of keeping up with engine updates.

Cute little TD. Made it through to the end. Some feedback:

It's not possible to make it through wave 1 without taking a lot of damage, right? I only managed to kill one creep in my best run. This made me restart a bunch thinking there was something I wasn't understanding.

I was surprised when the Heavy Tower shot three bullets up/nw/ne based on its description. Although I guess I didn't have any regrets about how I placed them based on that description.

Yeah, I think that is what I was experiencing. Thanks!

Nice one. Very polished. Didn't have any issues in Chrome on an M1 Macbook. Stopped shortly after becoming a billionaire.

Interesting game. Unfortunately it is difficult to play.

- The UI elements / text are VERY small on a high DPI display.

- The dictionary seems limited. It feels bad to invest heavily into a particular common word only for it to not be in the dictionary. (Actually, maybe some other bug is occasionally preventing letters from getting word bonuses)

- It keeps hard-locking my browser, especially when clicking and dragging / trying to research. (Chrome 118, MacOS)

 ゲームを作ったにおめでとう！９２０スコアをしました

Thanks!

Yep, there was a conscious decision to not worry about the theme too much. Some other commenter has argued that placing towers makes your defense more powerful but has a side effect of reducing mobility and increased upkeep time as you travel further to refill them. I suppose I could have leaned into that in the game description a bit, but it's a bit of a stretch for me.

Thanks!

It sounds like you're playing with the keyboard, correct? I really need to figure out how to fix the feel of the controls there. I'm currently just treating WASD as a virtual stick and I probably need to be doing something different there. Maybe adding a "walk" or "turn in place" key would help slightly, but I'm not confident about that.

I've toyed with just increasing the rotation speed, and maybe I'll do that slightly, but it seems easy to go too far there. Diagonal movement on keyboard is also faster than intended at the moment which isn't helping.

On a gamepad you can turn in place or move slowly while turning, but on the keyboard it's just sort of full throttle and awkward.

A few other players have suggested having a more "car-like" driving experience where controls are relative to the player's current direction rather than but that just doesn't feel right to me.

I need to go find a game in a similar style that does this well and study it, perhaps.

I do have some small fixes on the way post-jam related to items which should make them more forgiving to grab.

Got to 140 seconds on the second attempt after getting comfortable with the controls.

Pretty funky little arena / music experience. It seems like you prioritized your time well, minus the lack of a web build.

I had a couple issues with the controls:

• I had to go and google the xbox controller layout so I knew which button to press on my pad.
• Pushing the left stick to dash while also moving with the left stick felt awkward.

Otherwise I appreciated the effort to add gamepad support and the controls felt pretty good. I think the default zoom level is too close, perhaps.

I also had to make the following change to get the game working on a mac: https://gist.github.com/rparrett/6e1e6b76e3789aa5df4daa435c72e092 

Since a link to the source code doesn't seem to be a part of the submission and I had to do some minor internet stalking to dig it up, I'll have to refrain from giving a rating.

Cute little environment and characters.

The "sleep for 30 seconds" side effect wasn't super fun.

I'm not totally sure what's going on though. Is picking the only action that's implemented?

I also had a hard time understanding what was going on. I wasn't sure whether status effects would affect me or the boss. Or what was actually happening during the fights.

I wish I was able to know a bit more about my starting creature before choosing -- is it purely cosmetic?

I have no idea how to play backgammon but I like the graphics and throwing real dice is pretty cool. But the dice seem to leave the table pretty often and the pips are difficult to read. I think they should be a bit bigger and have colored pips, maybe.

I also think it would be fun to be able to use the mouse to toss the dice in a particular direction or something.

Nice work getting the game up and running on the web.

I was intrigued to see how you did the dice. It seems like you've packaged it up into a crate here: https://lib.rs/crates/bevy_dice which is awesome. But the source link there goes off to a seemingly unrelated project?

I wonder what I am gathering, and why? I am intrigued by the idea of a ghost girl wandering the forest digging through trash cans like a raccoon or something.

I thought it was hard to find the player at the beginning of the game and was a little confused by the cans occupying the same tile as trees. I didn't realize I could become solid again on top of a tree or can.

Unfortunately, you've marked your entry as complying with Rule 3 but used pre-made assets :(

It doesn't seem like a link to the source code was an official part of the submission, but because it was easy to track down I had a play.

I'm not super sure what to do. I made some sort of potion and thought maybe I could drop it on the zombie, but that didn't seem to do anything. All of my other attempts to do stuff crashed the game with

thread 'Compute Task Pool (0)' panicked at 'not yet implemented', src/potion.rs:113:14

So I'm guessing it's just very unfinished?

Here's your participation trophy, haha. Hope you have a better time in Bevy Jam 4. What you have now reminds a bit of of a particular particular search result for "hotdog" on giphy.

🏆

The "jump-wind-up" is quite satisfying. Has that old-school prince of persia feel to the animation.

Level 7 broke my brain, but level 8 seemed more straightforward and fun. I didn't find 11 tedious. It was fun to figure out what to be done pretty immediately and just execute.

I took one look at 12 and thought maybe this isn't going to be fun. But then I sort of realized what was going on and thought that it definitely was going to be fun. And then I made a mistake and wasn't very motivated to continue.

Seems like a pretty unique puzzler though, and fits the theme really well.

I almost missed the other overcooked-inspired entry in the jam! It's down to the wire rating all the entries for me.

I agree with other commenters that discovering what precisely you need to put where is difficult. I started off just throwing a bunch of stuff in the trash. The blender needs some sort of indication that it's full/empty/ready to collect.

It's really confusing to me that I need to run around to the other side of the bar to serve folks. And that I can serve them despite them seemingly having full drinks in front of them. I ran around for a long time behind the bar trying to dispose of their drinks so I could place a fresh one down or something before thinking to go to the other side. And then when I got there, not being able to drop items except onto the bar confused me further.

I wanted to force-feed one of the patrons cherries to check out the side effect, but somehow I got into a state where attempting to deliver the drink would just toss it over behind the bar. Not sure what was going on.

Anyhow, hope that was useful feedback.

Not bad for a first effort!

I found the hitboxes to be very unforgiving. Dying with ~10 empty pixels visibly between you and your enemy is no fun.

I sort of liked the slower pace. Maybe a bit of a knockback effect would have been nice. Simple SFX for the weapon would have helped a lot, I think.

Also... what am I?

I had a lot of fun with this. The puzzle mechanics were a bit difficult to discover, but it felt pretty rewarding to figure them out and execute them.

The visual calming effect is really nice, but the claustrophobic vfx felt a bit out of place with the rest of the artwork.

Impressive for a first time Bevy user on a tight schedule.

This has been a bit of a theme in this jam, but it's hard to make "choose the least bad thing to happen to you" feel good.

The thing that really frustrated me was that it's extremely easy to accidentally choose your new spell without even seeing the new-spell-screen while fighting. 

With a single swarming enemy type and no real reason to switch spells, I feel like this could have been more fun with the spells autocasting.

I'm not personally fan of the "edginess for edginess' sake" thing you've got going on and I'm pretty confused about the story. Am I hallucinating these mutant babies? Why can they kill me, and why did I have the shotgun pre-pill? Or did I give birth to them? I wasn't visibly pregnant and I feel like that might violate the first law of thermodynamics with the amount of babies being produced. But I suppose other lesser-quipped mothers-to-be in this hospital might be experiencing the same thing and that's where they're all coming from?

Anyhow...

The pixel art in the cutscenes is great, but it feels like a bit of a mess in the actual game.

I'm not sure if there's anything new after stage 3 or so but I'm assuming not and that's where I tapped out. Some sort of doom-esque music might have kept me in a bit longer.

I was pretty sure that the game was just completely broken until I came to the comments and found out about the camera situation.

I recompiled the game to swap the camera controls to right click so I could move the camera into a position where I could play at all (no middle button).

I managed to create a Saturation potion (I found the mix of GUI controls and console stuff a bit confusing), but clicking the "TURN IN" button on the screen with the angry witch that needs it isn't doing anything. It would be nice to prepopulate the console with an MOTD / welcome message that lets you know it's an actual part of the game and you can type help.

I returned to the console out of desperation and not finding anything helpful there, typed "exit" thinking it would exit from the "lab app." but it closed the game.

I'm going to move on to another game, but I hope this account of my experience was useful in some way.

Enjoyed the puzzles!

This is definitely a bug in bevy_ascii_terminal. I opened a github issue here: https://github.com/sarkahn/bevy_ascii_terminal/issues/13

I think it must be a bug in bevy_ascii_terminal. I was able to play/win tracking down the github repo and multiplying by my particular scale factor in convert_world_to_game_tile_pos.

But I'm not sure if I'm comfortable rating given that a link to the repo doesn't seem to have been a part of the submission.

Anyhow, I thought this was a cool little game but found the controls quite unintuitive. I kept mashing "L" when I wanted to build lines, etc. Although I'm struggling to think of a scheme that is obviously better, WASD for item/ability selection seemed to melt my brain a bit.

Great job with the game page.

I think there must be an issue with high DPI screens -- I am having to click a half a screen length up and right of where I actually want to place a building or cast an ability. So that's making it pretty impossible to play :/ 

Loved the player and enemy graphics. Shame there's not much of a game to play.

Props for creating a really complete experience.

The gun effects make it really satisfying to use.

I almost preferred the visuals in the web version though... the background in the native build was really distracting and the bloom is kinda intense. But had to switch over to native because right clicking to activate the shield on the web was causing issues due to the context menu popping up and taking focus.

I think there's a bug where the arm movement is framerate dependent. On a 120hz display, the bird arms rotate 180 degrees and the game seems to play slower somehow.

Surprisingly entertaining. Pretty challenging with a trackpad!

Some fun puzzling. I really liked the "now you move x spaces in y direction" side effects. I think that maybe there was a bit too much going on too quickly. I think there's a lot of potential there with some more time for level design. The last level seemed oddly easy?

I managed to get a few doors in, but had an issue that prevented me from continuing.

After selecting a drink, controls seem to go all wonky. It felt like a movement key was stuck "held down." At one door, this seemed to cause me to fall off the world. Or maybe I was staring up at the sky? Either way it was all grey and I died.

Also, this happened:

Which was sort of a relief, because the other potions didn't seem super fun.

Nice job getting 3d animations working! This is definitely the first time I've killed some things with a sword in an FPS in bevy. It's cool to see bevy and its third party ecosystem growing and enabling stuff like this in jam timeframes.

Thanks!

I agree that it's a bit slow, especially at the start. There are quite a few factors contributing that I want to improve on post-jam :)

Oh, yeah - I wanted to mention that - riding up an ammo pack/jumping on it felt a bit janky too. I'd def prefer them to be just pickups, not collidable items.

Yeah, I think that makes sense as long as I add colliders to the spawn points.

I actually quite like the fact the player has to be careful when carrying an item - I thought it was clever that falling down wasn't a game over but still had a cost.

That's totally fair. I think maybe falling far from the tower kit spawn is plenty painful already though. I also had vague plans of a sort of "mario kart lakitu" style animation that happens when you fall off that eats a few more seconds of time though.

I sort of paused that thought when playing through the endgame a bit where it was quite fun to have to do suicide jumps to refill towers.

Sorry for the back-seat-design - I tend to do that when I really like some idea 😁 

Not at all -- very happy to be able to talk through some of this stuff with someone. That's a pretty intriguing idea. Just visually I love the idea of the droid carrying a big ol vertical stack of items.

Thank you for the detailed feedback!

You're right that a lot of these issues were on my mind during the jam, but it was down the the wire and corners had to be cut! But there's some good stuff in here.

I wanted players to be able to stash ammo, but until there were multiple ammo types, it didn't seem as important to figure out. I'm still not totally sure how to let players do that without ruining the platforming. Maybe items should not be physics objects?

Preventing players from placing towers on the tile they're standing on is an easy win. I also want to respawn the tower kit if the player falls with it because that can totally ruin the first wave for new players.

I had thought about letting players zoom out to see what's going on, but a very simple minimap might be better. Cool idea. I'll have to think about that some more.

I had to make the time-to-first-wave way longer than feels good to accommodate first-time players and slower PCs. I plan on adding a small tutorial level and preloading pipelines to prevent the potentially huge stutter when the level starts. That should help, but I'll keep "sending the next wave immediately" in mind. I think players should have some time to explore the level before things get going too.

I agree about the towers feeling kinda week. But I think that SFX and an actual laser effect would help a lot with that.

I do plan on some post-jam updates. I've already fixed a small issue with the item colliders -- they are balls and the probe was too high.

Also I am truly sorry for the music. At least it turned out better than Bevy Jam 1. I'm going to find someone who can help me out with that.

Really unique and fun puzzles. Proud to have made it to the end of this one. Though the level felt long enough that breaking it up or adding a checkpoint would have been welcome! Redoing the jail room over and over again while I figured out the graveyard hallway (well, I got past it... wouldn't say I figured it out.) got a bit tedious.

93568 points.

I escaped! Although I was pretty confused about what was going on most of the time. Is there a reason to ever play a negative card?

Wish I would have read the note about the effects before playing, oops. Some pretty cool enemies in this thing!