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I keep seeing games that remind me strongly of Baba Is You, and then I check... HEMPULI...

Some day I'll get past day 5 or so. Every time I try, I get a little bit further, but the balancing is fairly out of wack past day two :P

2000 units to craft an upgrade is a lot to ask of the player! On top of limited stamina, increasingly rare ore spawns, pricey quota items, and zombies that might prevent you getting home that run! But the gameplay loop is too compelling, I just keep playing...

Also, if you want your inputs to be very reliably recorded by the current version of the game, do that half-beat counting yourself- "1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &", and change inputs the & BEFORE the beat that takes the input, that will give you the most leeway, and is what let me become reliable enough to clear level 5 (which was super satisfying by the way)

And the final step would be juice, juice, juice! Music outside of the rhythmic setup part, and then sound effects and VFX for the things that happen. You mentioned sprucing up the walls, which indeed would help the atmosphere immensely, but don't neglect adding in little worldly details like chairs and tables, piles of books, stuff like that. And definitely, little faux-lore blurbs perhaps explaining why we're using a wind-up toy to steal gems instead of grabbing them ourselves, or just banter between the phantom thieves who might be here with us.

This is adorable, and a fun game concept. It's a little limited in that any mistake derails your entire plan, although that just means that levels shouldn't be much longer than level 5 is. One big pain point is the way the game counts inputs. If you treat it like a rhythm game (like it sounds like it is) you'll actually be hitting/releasing A/D as late as possible, or even later than that. You have to actually prepare your inputs beforehand. (And also, the music is or becomes desynced from the pumping/winding of the toy which appears to be the truer marker of how inputs are taken). I would recommend "cheating" here, and recording the player's input as much as half a beat later than it currently is (so, you're counting "1, 2, 3, 4!! 1, 2, 3, 4!!", change it to "1 & 2 & 3 & 4 (&)!!" and actually count the inputs on the &s after the actual beats)

If you don't do that, I might just have to make my own version instead, so I can personally tinker with the best way to take the player's inputs. This is a great little game and I would love to see more mechanics introduced, more levels created.

I'm officially a fan of VEXED and their work

Adorable game, and it has really high production quality even with the artstyle that looks drawn in (virtual) crayon (which is also an endearing style tbh)

I've done it!! This has plagued me since I found it, all during the making of mine, and I've finally gotten the time to take one last stab at it. Good stuff, easy to get into the loop of trying again and again.

Really cute, you've got a talented artist with you! The music is charming too, and the gameplay is simple (but effective enough). The whole body part fading out, and then the bloodstain underneath fading back in (as if progressing through phases of being cleaned) tripped me up, because I expected the whole thing to vanish, but once you understand that, it's fun to try different things to find the three different visual-novel style endings

Adorable, super cute, and I love the gimmicks. The music is amazing too! Lovely little thing. (Don't tell the technicians that I beat the game!!)

Adorable, super cute, and I love the gimmicks. The music is amazing too! Lovely little thing. Don't tell the technicians that I beat the game.

start = 600
k = 0.4 
args.state.game_history.reverse.each_with_index do |element, i|
  y = 130 - 25 * i
  ui_render << {
    x: 830, y: y, text: "#{status[element.type]} at #{ticks_to_time(element.time * k, start)}"
  }
end
. . .
def ticks_to_time(ticks, start = 0)
  time = (ticks + start) % 1440
  meridian = "PM"
  if time < 720
    meridian = "AM"
  end
  hour = (((time / 60).floor - 1) % 12 + 1).to_s
  minute = (time % 60).floor
  if minute < 10
    minute = "0#{minute}"
  else
    minute = minute.to_s
  end
  second = ((time % 1) * 60).floor
  if second < 10
    second = "0#{second}"
  else
    second = second.to_s
  end
  return "#{hour}:#{minute}:#{second} #{meridian}"
end

where "time" or "ticks" is "frames since the start of the game" at 60fps

Which is to say, the game starts at 10:00AM, ends at 6:00PM, and each frame is 24 seconds (every second is 24 minutes)

and controllers SHOULD have sensitivity-based input...? I'm using DR's input helpers "left_right" and "up_down", which MAY snap to the nearest integer instead of taking the analog input of a controller stick into account. I'll see if I can't cook something up, perhaps checking controller input if there is no keyboard input.

This game is adorable, and hilarious

This is amazing! I'm not patient enough to get through more than a couple of screens' worth (my patience getting the better of me and smashing Kabuster into the crushing hazards seconds after respawning), but I can tell this game has a lot of love in it. The control(s?) feel(s) good, although the differing behavior between tapping on an action and tapping on a neutral zone sort of trips me up from time to time, even though I can see the huge benefit to turning the cursor around to skip waiting through most of the metronome.

Hopefully, one day, Mrs. Penrose will play this game on stream. The demo is very good, I think it captures Rin's personality well.

You're totally right about the package color. The assets I'm using even come in neon blue and neon orange. I've changed the package color to orange, should stand out like a sore thumb now.

A victory screen is for winners though, and there are more packages to deliver!

Eyeing this up... might scoop it up for a game I'm thinking up! Could probably offer a lot of the visual scaffolding to kickstart the idea and shape concepts. (Obviously I would be buying the whole halloween pack, to support creators doing amazing things)

Just have to think on it a bit more. (The game either looks amazing because of this, or looks mediocre at best when I make the sprites myself)

It's indeed very important to understand and internalize the difference between biological sex and biological gender, and the many different ways your body expresses different forms of this "male v. female" binary (or something outside of the binary), and how these many poorly-organized biological mechanisms can sometimes very strongly disagree. Biology is so very messy, and English's blending of all possible male-female concepts (and, of course, the stuff in-between) into two simple worlds helps not at all.

Sending love to all our queer friends out there, just trying to figure out what they even are. In general, don't worry too much about it, do what makes you feel right.

That sounds a lot like the way I made my own non-euclidean game! Except instead of procedurally generating it, I made it all by hand. There was no way I was going to make gravity-based puzzles which depend on the orientation the camera is when the player enters the room procedurally. It is also not the longest game out there...

I think I would like to perhaps expand on that world (without the 64x64 jam restriction) and make an even more insane world to put a non-euclidean RPG into. Maybe even make certain sections as close to homogenously-curved as possible, a la hyperbolica's very authentic hyperbolic worlds, instead of just this tiles-stitched-together "manifold" stuff. There are lots of possibilities to explore.

Found out you updated your fun little galaxy-exploration game with a few pretty graphical flairs and a more zoomed-out camera. I think it's great! The turning seems a little... more sensitive? but it just takes a few minutes to get used to it.

"The chill between levels tune is really nice, but it becomes a bit of a whiplash coming from that bossbattle."

I actually think it's nice- something something achieved world peace. It's not necessarily super triumphant, but a sigh of relief.

Fun little puzzle game about clicking piles of money and rethinking the structure of the piles to fit as many high-value large squares into the pile as possible.

This game is definitely harmed by the low resolution restriction- it feels like you're squinting at a tiny part of a GBA screen... I tapped shift which apparently skipped a ton of battles, so I only REALLY experienced the last one, when I finally took my hands off the dang keyboard and let the entry animations all play...

The gameplay is solid! Although I'm not sure how much strategy is truly involved, since the units aren't very differentiated in terms of strengths and weaknesses, seeming more like there are simply "strong" units and "weak" units. (As in, I didn't really have to hide certain units behind others to keep them away from their weaknesses while allowing them to strike their strengths. Just kinda drove over the advancing human wall)

I saw some subpixels in there!! The healthbars seem misaligned with the pixel grid behind them, and the animation between levels definitely doesn't follow a 64x64 restriction. By the minuscule 3x3 font, though, I can tell there were efforts and sacrifices made to stick to the resolution restriction.

got stuck a few times, had to search a long ways for an available switch to toggle the switch state to something favorable before being able to find new areas. Not bad, just tedious. Got stuck in the green area (wherein you platform and particle physics over to a blue switch to get to a purple switch to open a door to... I don't even remember!)

I collected all 42 artifacts over the course of, I think, 90 minutes. If that tells you anything. about the quality of your game.

the passcode is "44", because there are 4 locks :^)

The yellow room with five red blocks (there's a screenshot of it) is unreasonably difficult, unless there's some fifth secret I haven't yet figured out. Getting past the second and fifth red blocks, specifically, where you have to flip somewhere while you're in danger of getting hit to avoid falling into one of the two pits (or escape out of the pit, but that's significantly tighter on timing)

Also! The player's position isn't rounded to the nearest visual pixel for collision detection like it is for rendering, so it's almost as if you may die randomly if you look at the spikes wrong. This is actually "unfair" to the player, whose screen looks the same yet results in different outcomes, while the large player hitbox is simply "unforgiving", something the player has to get accustomed to, but it isn't unpredictable or impossible to account for.

While that yellow room is there, I don't know if I can get under ~12 deaths or get close enough to beat the 2:30 par time. Gotten S plenty of times, V is out of reach.

It's a good question. I couldn't think of anything other than the starting area, which is small and uniformly interconnected, but there are a few things which would benefit the game experience

Like a map! But that'd be very difficult to implement, given how arbitrary the world can be constructed. As long as a tile doesn't try to connect to itself (since that breaks some of the assumptions that the interpreting makes in connecting tiles together as the player moves through them), any arrangement of map tiles can be laid together in any arbitrary order. When you can't lay things onto a flat grid, or even reliably transform positions onto a flat grid, making a map out of everything is not going to be easy.

So, I guess the secret to "how things fit together" is "however I want them to, shaddup" with a side of "usually either three, four, or five adjacent tiles to any corner". Making a tutorial or a map for "the developer's whims", to put it bluntly, is not easy!

The solution, I suppose, would be to restrict freedom, and enforce one of those rules strictly (3 or 5 tiles to a corner) which would make maps a little easier to make. Some ability for the game engine to draw perspective would help make a map for the "3 tiles to a corner" curvature, but I don't have any good ideas other than the good old poincare disk for "5 tiles to a corner", which I don't have good math for.

The water section was added fairly late in the development of the game, so I was probably a little fatigued, and given its size (22 rooms, each 7x7 tiles in size, but collision behaves poorly if bordering tiles don't match ground with ground and air/water with air/water, so really I've got a 6x6 area to work with) I simply didn't bother with adding generic landmarks that'd just make it harder to get through the solution, which ended up making it kind of impossible to map the area out in your head and build a sense of what's going on and how to navigate it. Sorry about all that.

The music is actually not composed by me- it was something copyright-free I found in the jam raft discord's resources channel (by the name of "8Bit Cave Loop", by "Wolfgang_"). I'm glad I didn't have to make any crummy programmer-music for the game, otherwise I would've been doomed (the sound effects, which are by me, certainly aren't groundbreaking)

The controller thing is a good point, which I hadn't considered before. The game wasn't made with controllers very strongly in mind (there was the real chance there would've been no way to interact with NPCs on a controller had I not thought "wouldn't it be cool if...")

If I make a post-jam version with feedback taken into account, controllers would get better support- using the second joystick to pan the camera as if it were the mouse, moving jumping onto space and one of the controller buttons (A or B, I don't know enough about controller accepted norms to know intuitively which one). Most of all, there's difficulty in maneuvering into 1-block-wide gaps which I really want to make special collision-cases for but definitely didn't have the time to hammer out during the jam period.

I'm confused on the camera part though. What about the camera isn't smooth...? It's locked to the pixel grid, so it can't exactly be perfectly smooth, but it's not disjointed anywhere (the non-euclidean approach made camera position-continuity non-trivial, so I've made sure of this much), and the movement of the camera is governed by a target point, which it moves some small % towards each frame, so it _should_ be as smooth as a 64x64 screen will allow...

Err, if you mean "I can't pan as much as expected", this is for an unfortunate reason. The way rendering works is rigid, deliberate, and not easily expandable. Theoretically the conceptual model I'm using to represent the world could be extended out infinitely, but there is no procedural aspect to the rendering, and each tile would have to be manually added to the queue (with more logic involved as more possibilities arise, like a tile being fully obscured by perspective lines, or being partly obscured but not by a perspective line starting at one of its corners). Right now, the tile the player is on, the four tiles adjacent to that tile (north, south, east, west), and the eight tiles which could be depicted as on the corners of that tile (northwest, northeast, southwest, southeast, westnorth, eastnorth, westsouth, eastsouth), are all rendered in whole or in part. Anything outside of that 3x3 grid is not rendered, so panning further than what the camera allows _now_ would reveal the edge of the tiles (and in some extreme cases, I think you can still just about see that edge anyways...)

Super creative mechanic on top of silly rooty-tooty-point-and-shooty!

A cute little espionage game. Is the player character a robot? That's super cute and it took me a minute to notice that might be the case

Amazing roguelike, if only I had been blessed enough to fully upgrade...

Delightful little game! Great graphics, great sound effects and music, and the level design is purposeful and well-thought-out. If only I was quick enough on the draw to get to the end!!

ohhh, dashing. I hadn't messed with my keyboard and/or read the instructions enough to figure that one out

A quaint little duck game with keys and bananas! Adorable.

Assuming this is the sliding-block-puzzle room (the one with the block in it)... You just fall right through! There are multiple pits "underneath" which lead back into that same room from a different angle. You use your own gravity to move the block to the button! I suspect I didn't exactly telegraph this process well enough, though...

Generally, hopefully, you can't get stuck. I checked all over the place for weird softlocks and wasn't happy with the layouts until I couldn't find any more. Falling into a pit is almost always progress to a checkpoint!

This is true, the collision can be unforgiving at times. It would be theoretically possible to get the character to fit into exact-size gaps in a really quality-of-life way but it would not be easy (I tried... all it did was make all collision glitchy and gross!)

But it's something to aim for, if I ever touch this again.

The jumping issue is actually the same exact issue, because the collision was made specifically to not care which axis is which at all, so solving the first one (by, like, forcing the player to snap to the axis if they're trying to move in that direction and they're "close enough") would also solve the second by the same mechanism (the player would simply snap into the gap in the wall if they're "close enough")

pressing Z will let you jump! which lets you explore some more places

This game is 264px wide and 144px tall, which is larger than the restrictions for the jam. Additionally, the player character's sprite is not affixed to these pixels, and in fact has 3 subpixel positions (likely no real bound, the game is upscaled 3x) which sort of makes it the full 792px by 432px

There's no music (but there are sound effects), and, unless I'm mistaken, the third level seems... impossible? I can't find a way over to the platform in the center?

The controls feel pretty good though! I just can't get very far into it because level 3 hasn't revealed its secrets to me yet.

Whew, loud! Seems like a roguelike, too? Crazy that some people made whole roguelikes and RPGs in the time allotted (AND in the pixels allotted!)

This is an adorable game but I cannnnnnNOT seem to hold together long enough to survive level 4! I'd attribute it to the controls being not as tight as I'd want (would probably feel better if the jump button made you jump with the same speed you fall down when releasing, and also hang in the air until you release the button) and enemy hitboxes being a little bit wonky (I can phase right through the flying enemies, they seem to only have mouth-hurtboxes right at their front)

Can confirm it's massively replayable and can confirm she's got a sizable dump truck