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Thank you so much the detailled feedback, and for sharing your whole playthrough. It's really insightful! I have regrets about the trivial difficulty, but I was tired and didn't have the energy to balance it better. You're right about the pacing, I'll try to make it better post-jam to get better at it.

I had a blast playing your game, great job! At first I tried to upgrade the attributes according to the characters' strengthes, but from level 3 I went all in with STR with an occasional hint of VIT, and I mowed down the competition. The only minor thing is that for most quests, the enemies weren't varied, so for instance during the fire quests I simply swapped my blunt weapons and put them all back on for the ice quests, so combat was not too challenging. But easier is better for a jam game, and I'm certainly not one to talk since my game is trivially easy. The atmosphere is great, I really like the simple combat system and the hub with the dragon is really cool. I had fun from start to finish, great job!

Thanks for the nice words! I was too tired to balance difficulty well at the end, and decided to keep things easy so I could go to sleep lol. Glad you enjoyed the graphics, they are not my strong suit and took me a lot of time. Thanks again! 

Cool game! It's a nice wink to what happened recently. The theme implementation is a bit thin, but I'd rather play a fun game than playing something that desperately tries to stay on a theme. I enjoyed the structure with varied, well-designed environments and verticality. The progression from a site to the next felt logical, too. The perk system is interesting, even though I ended up just using fast movement. I'm not sure what stealth do, does it add more time before the police comes?  

It ended a bit abruptly, I would have enjoyed seeing a real newspaper article or something at the end, but that minor.

Great job!

Thanks for the kind words! I actually have zero experience with match-3 games so I took a huge risk implementing that, but I'm glad it turned out fun. I had fun playing with shaders for transitions, but in hindsight I agree that the combat transition would be snappier at 2x speed. Thanks for playing!

Cool game! There are lots of great ideas, I loved the skeleton minigame, it was a "oh, this is fun!!" moment, and generally the theme of cleaning up after adventurers is implemented very well. The graphics are cohesive and colorful, I would have enjoyed some background music to set a mood.

The first time I interacted with a skeleton, there weren't enough pieces to complete the grid, so I thought I'd have to find the missing bones in the dungeon and lost quite a bit of time because of that, but then I realized that the pieces were random and I just rerolled until it was doable. I backtracked a lot because I was constantly missing pickup items or small environmental details like chains, but I persevered and completed the last of my work after about an hour of playthrough. Making the items shine or making them pop out a bit more could help the overall flow, but I still had a great time.

The puzzles are solid (loved the pipes, too!) and the dungeon environment is varied, all in all a very solid entry. Congrats!

Hey, thanks for playing through the whole game! Given more time, I would have made combat more challenging, but I wasn't sure of the pace either, and wanted to keep things snappy. I'll spend some time balancing things after the jam.

Cool game! I enjoyed the exploration with some great verticality a lot, there's a strong Etrian Odyssey vibe that I really like. I enjoyed being able to prepare by choosing from a plethora of different items, it really nails the dungeon JRPG vibe.  The rewards for combat were a bit light, so it was a bit too grindy to gain enough gold to buy the better stuff, especially because a large part of your loot must be spent for ammunition and healing items. 

I think there should be a default weaker attack you can launch when you run out of ammo, since not being able to attack at all is very punitive. 

Great work!

Thanks! I wanted to try something different this time and took a risk with match 3 especially because I don't like that mechanic myself, so I wasn't sure if my game was remotely fun. I regret nerfing the difficulty so much just before submitting, but it was late and at that point I just wanted to sleep!

Glad you enjoyed your playthrough!

I might be biased because I absolutely loved Dungeon Encounters, but I think your formula works and I had a lot of fun playing your game through the end. I think becoming dispirited mid-way through the jam is far from unusual, I wasn't sure myself if my game was any fun before publishing it.

The battle system worked very well and my old DE reflexes kicked in immediately, it's constant fun to try and get hit as little as possible, and when things start to go wrong, they can spiral down pretty quickly as your timing strategy collapses, so to me combat was a total blast. The combat UI is very clean, readable and polished.

I loved the art (characters, environments and monsters), the jazzy music hit the right notes to me, so the game feel was really smooth and chill.

I had a bit of trouble with the control scheme (I couldn't get used to A&D to turn until the very end), and wished the arrow keys worked in the menus.

I found a few bugs:
- On the first or second red map, I was able to trigger the map completion bonus as much as I wanted just by trying to get back on the teleporter (the teleporter didn't trigger, instead I got the bonus each time)
- When you're moving but not forward, I've noticed that:
        - the tiles are not displayed on the minimap,
        - the teleporters don't trigger,
        - the encounters behave like walls

In terms of difficulty, I was in a very tight spot once or twice, so it felt just right to me. I didn't get to use the laser saber much because I was saving my energy for a potential boss, and I found that I was never really forced to use ranged weapons because no enemy had an absurd amount of melee def, but honestly I think you balanced the game pretty well for such a short dev time.

I really enjoyed your entry, that was great!! Thanks 😊

Thank you very much for the kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed the relaxed pace of the game. I actually don't have much experience playing candy crush or other match-3 games so I tried to code the battle system without any preconception, so being able to swap any 2 orbs is indeed by design. It's not explained anywhere, so it may not be obvious enough at first glance.

Thanks again, I really enjoyed your game, too!

What an experience! I went in without reading the game page at all and was able to fully enjoy this bizarre world without any context, which was an absolute delight. The environments are varied, surreal, and the 3D background is gorgeous. I loved the Stanley-Parable narration style, and the retro robot enemies are really cool. 

I enjoyed the fact that combat doesn't prevent you from moving and that you can chain them, especially near the end when you're overpowered. The game was a bit on the easy side, but I enjoy that kind of chill dungeon-crawling a lot.  I didn't understand why I was destroying Apple ][ computers, though.

It's a splendid game, great work to you all!

Thanks for playing, I'm glad you liked it! I spent so much time making the assets and polishing the visuals and animations that I barely had a cohesive game when Saturday evening came, so there was not much time left to do a lot of testing and balancing. I ended up lowering the difficulty as I was afraid that combat would feel repetitive, too. 

Your comment about movement feeling good is a huge relief, it's rewarding to read that after spending a few months coding a new engine in python. Thanks again!

I fixed the timeline! I had some trouble with the difficulty, before taking advantage of the stun mechanic and moving more prudently. I really like that the minimap has to be unlocked even though I nearly missed it entirely, and not finding it the first time around is probably why I failed during my first attempt. I'm not sure if there is a way to increase your stats to make things a bit easier, but I was eventually able to win.

I really enjoyed the enemies art, it kind of reminded of a mix between saturday morning cartoons and Earthbound. The city is gorgeous, too. The contrast between the 2 time periods is great, the postnuclear design of the 2019 enemies does a lot for the ambient storytelling. The music is perfect for the mood of the game, it stopped playing at some point but that's minor. Cool story, too!

Out of curiosity, I edited my save file right after starting a new game to see if I could actually "reach" the stadium as the young selves, and I unlocked the "you broke the game" ending. That was a very nice touch, I laughed out loud!

It's always a lot of challenging fun to play your entries and this one was no exception. Great job to you both!

Ah, thanks for typing all of that all over again! Your kind works are very encouraging to me, I'm glad you enjoyed playing! There is actually a way to toggle fullscreen, you can press ESC at any time to bring the Options menu, where you can toggle things like fullscreen and instant/smooth movement. I realize it's not obvious enough beside a tiny text in the corner of the title screen (which might even have been unreadable on a 4K screen). I'll add thart information on the game page.

Thanks for playing!

Wow! There is nothing I didn't love about your game! The art looks absolutely gorgeous, I loved the illustrations, the humor, the verticality of the level design, the lighting... And so much loot, not just for stats but for gameplay style, too. I didn't get lost, everything felt really intuitive. 

Fantastic work!

Thank you for your kind words, and thanks a lot for mentioning that bug too! I remade my engine from scratch using a new framework, that's an oversight I'm gonna want to fix. 

At the very least it's not completely game breaking since you can edit your save file, I left a note on the game's page. Thanks again!

I absolutely love that liminal space atmosphere, the vague creepiness of it all is delightful! The songs are really cool, you've really nailed it on the mood, it's very cohesive and fun to explore. 

I wasn't able to get past the bird after the locked door on the first floor, but that's just me being bad at drawing shapes with the mouse under pressure. I wish there was a little bit more forgiveness  with healing, like healing the player for free if they faint with not enough money to buy a soda. It felt to me like healing was in very limited supply and I progressively took hits faster that I could heal them. If found myself stuck nowhere after losing the very first fight without saving (yeah, I did that, too) and had to reload the game, but that's minor and it didn't happen again after I saved.

All in all, I loved the graphics, atmosphere, music, concept, even though I struggled a bit with the controls. Great job!

Oh yeah!! Can't wait to go back to SPLORR! 

It's not the DC Jam without a healthy dose of grumpiness

Hi Local Minimum,  thank you! Can't wait to see your next creation, too 😁 I really enjoyed your previous entries!

Hello CryptRat, thank you! It means a lot to me. I loved all your entries and your creativity too, that last battle system was impressive. Can't wait to discover what you come up with this time! 

Hi everyone! I've been waiting a while to see when the next DC jam would pop, this will be my 4th participation and I wouldn't miss this for the world. 

Even though Zooperdan wasn't available, I'm so glad to see such a cool team of organizers! Can't wait to have some fun together 😁

You can shake the board with space to break those infinite loops, but yeah with physics-based mechanics it's hard to control every possible case. Thanks for playing!

Thanks for trying the game! Weird, it should be fully functionnal, what browser are you using? I know Firefox and Safari can cause problems but it's mostly unresponsive keys. I tried it again to be sure and it works in my chrome-based browser

Thank you 🤓

Thanks!!

Hi, truly sorry to hear that! I didn’t use an engine, the whole game is coded in python and ported to web assembly using the pygbag library.

I have tested the web version several times and load times are sometimes a problem, but it should work. Maybe retry later if you feel like it, if not the desktop version (windows or Linux) is superior since it supports gamepads and local multiplayer.

Thanks for your interest! I worked hard on this and like how it turned out.

Simple and effective! The animation work is top notch. Great job!

I played about 11 waves of snowy tower defense but when I calculated how much waiting it would take to finish the game (20 waves multiplied by the number of locations) and seeing there  as no new type of tower or new mechanic, I figured I had seen everything the game has to offer and stopped playing. I lacks a bit of variety or extra spice, but as a standard tower defense, it's very solid.

That was fun! There's technically no challenge since you can just drown and eventually get enough money to max out your boat, but it's fun to watch and try to stay afloat as long as possible. Well done!

The stat system seems easy to understand enough, as is the combat mechanic, but some explanation about the unlocks, the buttons and the crafting mechanic would go a long way to help player make informed decisions.

Since combat is fully automatic, it feels painfully slow at the rate it is now. I'm actually writing this comment while combat is unravelling in another tab, checking once in a while how it progressed.

All in all, it has potential. Maybe add more life to the combat screen to give the player more to look at,  speed up things a little bit, and add a little more eye candy to delay boredom.

PS: I think PvP means Player vs Player but have no idea what PvE means. Did I play versus other human players? If so, that's cool for a jam game.

I think I must have corrupted humanity pretty badly seeing how people spoke towards the end! The writing is really good, the side articles made me laugh. I love the bleak atmosphere, tweaking the controls while listening to the conversation gave me strong  Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner vibes. 

Not sure if I could have done better in the game, but great job and full points for originality!

Thank you! I see you also submitted a game for GameOff2025, I'll be sure to check out your game too!🙂

As of writing this, I havent managed to beat the game (I came close though) but wanted to rate it  before the jam ends. This is really well made for a game made in 6 hours, I love the sound design, and even fumbling in rythm with the music is fun! Great job!

Thank you very much! Yeah, I could say no music is a choice to make the game sound more like an old shareware, but in reality I didn't have time to add music.

Wow, thanks! I wasn't  sure it was that fun to play, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

I escaped! This is simple but really polished, I had fun playing. I died a lot on the spikes but mostly because I was moving too fast. Adding blood splatters to all the places you've died before could be a nice little addition. Good job!

Wow, thank you for the kind words! I wasn't sure if most of the levels were that fun to play, I designed them quickly around the few buildings blocks I made. I'm glad you had a fun time!

Thanks! The way the enemies move is actually caused by me not wanting to spend too much time implementing better movement 😅 They only move when you are on the same row or same column than them, and so I designed the puzzles around that!

Thank you! I didn't have time to come up with very elaborate puzzles but I'm glad you enjoyed them!