itch.io

At first I though it looked like a nice polished platformer and I would have a great time playing it. But screen after screen, I noticed the game actually wouldn't be kind toward me. It wanted me to suffer. I kept trying again and again, not because I like the game, but because I thought a real gamer wouldn't gave up... 

I gave up.

The dark part with all the moving platforms and electric things on the rails feels impossible unless I memorize all the jumps perfectly. And doing the part before over and over again was driving me crazy. I hate this duck.

Sincerely.

I noticed that and it was already late in the night so I figured it would be a feature now 🙃 After all it can be good if you die accidentally and you can still reset the positions by pressing R so its no big deal :)

There is a bug with Mini Micro in the WebGL version that forces me to play the music at max volume for one frame each time the track loops. If I don't do that, fading the music would not work on the web version. I think it was a necessary trade-off since the music changing while inside the bubble was very important to me. I didn't have flickering issues but thank you for mentioning it. I'll put the blame on Mini Micro's dev 😆

The gameplay feels nice and intuitive. I really like the solution you found to be able to move and shoot at the same time with keyboard only.

The visuals really lack consistency. On the title screen already, the background, the girl, flowers, title, "press to [] start" and space button all have very different styles with different shading, level of details, pixel sizes and pixel interpolation. In the intro, the outlines are different colors and the pixel size is way bigger than the rest of the game. The gameplay scene looks fine, except for the circle around the flowers and texts that should have been pixel art. In my opinion, that's what makes pixel art so hard. I recommend this video that explains pretty well what I'm feeling. And it's not only about pixel size, but about consistency overall. 

I also highly recommend changing the theme of your itch page. Finding the default white theme always feels low effort and doesn't compliment your game at all. Changing the colors and font only takes 5 minutes and you can even do it after the submission period is over. Giving a good first impression is always a plus and things like that are so easy that it's a shame to miss out on them. I hope this helps!

Definitely pretty good for a first jam! I like the interactions with the environment to give yourself different buffs. I recommend you edit the theme of your game's page (go to your page, click "Edit theme" at the top) to fit your game better (and so that I don't get flashbanged opening the page 🙃)

Great way to turn a simple game into engaging puzzles ! I got stuck at the "where are my friends" level. For this type of game, I like to have hints or the solution on the itch page so everyone can experience the full game

Pretty unique take on sokoban! I like the presentation which is simple but effective. I found that the letters running away from you when you go next to them was a bit frustrating and didn't really serve a purpose outside adding difficulty.

I was stuck at the second level for a bit because I couldn't figure out what the goal was. Since we started with "start", I thought it was more of a word game and I would have to find an anagram of "reverse" that would fit the terminal command theme. Apple isn't a terminal command ! I know the jam was short but it would be cool if the scementics of the words actually had an impact on either the narration or the gameplay.

Still a cool game though. Would give it a score of APPLE/10

To my knowledge, I don't think MiniMicro supports custom shaders so I only used sprites. It turns out playing with the tint and layer of the sprites is often enough to make cool effects!

Thank you!

Thank you! It took me a while to find something I was satisfied with with the theme, especially since I've already participated in a jam on this theme and I wanted to find something different from all the interpretations I've already seen.

Tank you for having a gameplay video because I was completely stuck in the tutorial 😅 . The swinging mechanic wasn't very intuitive to me. It's always super fun to have mechanics centered around going very fast and using momentum and that's great for a speedrun focused jam. I managed to get first on the leaderboard :)

Definitely a unique idea. The gameplay feels a bit frustrating though. Sometimes I just have a few frames to press the space bar to jump from one spot to the other so I just spam the spam the button hoping one click will go through. While doing that I often find myself teleporting to some spot off screen and dying instantly to obstacles I couldn't see which feels a bit unfair. There were also so instances where the arrow was red, yet pressing space did nothing. It would probably benefit a lot from being able to buffer a click. 

Once I knew where to go and I got used to the controls it was fine but rip my spacebar. (I got the best time yay!)

Very fun gameplay ! I love how you can use the orbs to get momentum and it definitly has a lot of potential for speedrunnig. I feel like you could have centered the game a bit more around the blue orbs for a stronger theme implementation but overall it's a great game !

I'm not sure the speed boost is supposed to carry over after starting a new game but I will assume it's a feature haha. 
Here is my best run :)

I don't really like the mobile game aesthetics in game jams but maybe that's just me. The gameplay is fine but I don't really see how it fits the theme (the arc-shaped rope isn't enough to convince me!). I recommend not using AI art in game jams. Even if it looks ok, people are going to hate it because of AI. You don't need to be an artist to make good looking games. I am myself terrible at drawing and pixel art, but using only simple shapes or premade assets can definitely be enough to make a beautiful game.  I hope it help. I wish you the best in your game dev journey :)  

I see we had a similar idea :)

Looks very clean, I like the  ship's trail and look of the planets. It was a bit hard though. Even level 1 took me a while to complete so maybe some easier levels before could be nice. I also wish we could steer left or right very slightly while flying so we wouldn't need to be as precise when detaching from an orbit.

Got a time of 3:42. I might come back later to try and get the high score!

Thank you for the feedback! It wasn't necessary to make it harder but instead to limit the character's movements and give it more potential in the level design. Having only 8 directions forces the player to think of a path toward the goal instead of just clicking where they want to go, especially in the first few levels. 

I was also thinking limiting the movements to 8 directions adds a bit of consistency in the context of speedrunning. You could argue it's a good or bad thing, but I prefer that to resetting a run because I clicked a couple pixels too far in a direction (I hate speedrunning point and click games haha 😅)

Thank you !

The lore runs deep in the fishbowl... 🌊

- That supersonic speed is just what happens when a goldfish reaches its full potential.

- It’s not telekinesis, it’s just pure fish willpower.

- The narrator?  I don't know, who even put that fish in this room ??

Thank you so much for the kind words! And yes, the leaderboard is 100% real and functional. You can compete with all the most elite fish in the world! 🐟✨

I love the wall pushing mechanics! It was one of my ideas for the jam, and I'm glad to see someone make a game out of it.

I feel like the day/night mechanic was not very intuitive, and it's a bit frustrating to have the room reset because you ran into a hole you couldn't see. But apart from that, you did great on the idea. Keep it up!

Amazing animations, the boss model is beautiful. I feel like the difficulty is very high, and it can feel frustrating for some players. It took me a while to get used to the attacks, and I feel like many things could be made easier (more invincibility on the dash, more delay between the attacks from the boss, make the poison puddles disappear faster). 

But with that said, I still liked the challenge and I had a lot of fun speedrunning the game :)

In my quest of speedrunning as many games as possible in the jam, I stumbled across your game with a speedrun timer!

Overall very simple and coyote time would be a nice addition. I really like the level transition. I feel like it's the thing that links it to the theme nicely and it looks cool!

I found that if you press E multiple times very fast you can trigger the button multiple times and skip some levels. Sorry for breaking your game but as a speedrunner I find that kinda funny :)

I really like the interpretation, having multiple rooms with the goal of ending with one. 

I encountered a few bugs with the game freezing after completing a level and the reset button not placing the car at the correct position (especially in the last level where it teleports you outside of the map).

I had a lot of fun trying to optimize the route to complete the levels as fast as possible :)

I like how the different collectables serve different purposes. It feels really good to throw that pizza slice and see a big portion of the boss's health disappear! I like the bullet hell mechanics, but it's very hard and unforgiving. It looks like touching even one pixel of those letters is enough to hurt me. Combine that with low HP, small invincibility, and no way to regen health, and it can feel frustrating for some players.  I would rather have more projectiles and smaller hitboxes to make the game feel more fair. 

I also didn't like using the F key to grab since I had to either take one finger off the movement keys or place my thumb in an uncomfortable way. Using the space or LShift key would be far more comfortable in my opinion.

Here is my little speedrun of the game :)

I don't think loops take that long when you reach enough speed to get 10+ laps per second! Of course you need to get there and it requires some practice 😉

Thank you for the feedback :) 

The platformer phyisics are really top tier. It feels really good to play! Simple art style but it works very well. When I saw your game had a speedrun timer I couldn't help but try to get a good time on it haha.

Initially I set the goal to 1000, but I ended up lowering it to 500 😅. With the optimal swimming technique, you can actually reach it in less than 2 minutes!

I was expecting that some player would want more things to do in the game. This is a game about boredom. I think it reached its goal :)

When in doubt, place a coffee table 😉

The game looks very clean and polished and I love the aestetics. It was very fun with some good puzzles before I discovered the coffe table was that powerful!
Overall very well done!

I'm not the best at using the mouse so the speedrun isn't very optimized, but I tried my best :)

Well done ! ✨🐟✨

I saw you are the first player to reach 500 score. Congratulation you elite fish !! ✨🐟✨

Haha, I didn't think the jumping game would be so engaging! But don't get distracted! You are fish. You shall swim, not jump.

Thank you! It took me 3 days (after work) to get the style I wanted. I'm glad the efforts were worth my time!

I am fish

It looks like nobody has mastered the art of swimming yet, but with proper technique, you can actually reach 500 turns in only 1.5 minutes! What a shame nobody commented on the extremely high skill ceiling of the gameplay!

I knew this was a silly idea from the beginning, but I wanted to see how dedicated the players could be on a game that is made to be boring! And also to challenge myself to make a good game from a silly idea 😂

Thank you! I think I know the bug you encountered. It should be fixed for the post jam version

Simple but surprisingly fun! I feel like the difficulty curve is very well done, and it gets very intense at the end. I got a high score of 5072. 

I like when games have a little intro like that, but it would be even better if the style was consistent with the rest of the game. Maybe you could have used the same sprite as in the gameplay animated inside a very short cutscene. Also, I noticed the pixel size is inconsistent in the game, but that's nitpicking at this point.

Overall it was pretty good, especially for a first game jam! Keep it up, and I hope to see you in a future jam!

Thank you. I'm glad you like it! Not sure yet if I'm going to add more content to the game post jam. I will make some fixes, and maybe adding an online leaderboard could be fun :)

This is very impressive for a first game jam! I love the atmosphere and the idea of using playtesting for the narrative was very cleaver (bonus point for the voice acting !). My only criticism would be that when you die you have to start again from the beginning, and I didn't feel like starting all over again. By the way one of my friends did play the game and told me it brought him back to the title screen, but I just got a red screen and nothing else. But overall, it was very cool and you managed to give me chills!
Keep up the good work!

Maybe you've missed something. Did you watch the gameplay video to see if you did the level right? By the way you have to kill the last guy by jumping out of him. If you stay on him it will not count. 

But anyway, thank you for giving it a try 🙂

Thank you! I will upload a small update post game jam to fix some issues but for now I have no plan on working on it further.