It was surprising to see this game in a friend’s “games I like” collection, and then to see another friend posting a comment here, when neither friend knows each other as far as I know. It’s like it really is a small world.

Also this was lovely and poignant and reminded me of my childhood of practically living in the library.

https://fluffy.itch.io/cat-catcher

https://fluffy.itch.io/songs-of-substance

I’m glad somebody noticed the Katamari reference

It doesn’t look like anything was uploaded though?

Hm, that seems less likely. I have an RTX2080Ti, pretty standard card, running on Windows 11.

Oh god this is so wholesome and lovely and I love everything about it and I want to give everyone a hug

I also want to see all the endings but I don’t want to make the ghost sad or uncomfortable :( :( :(

I was half-tempted to set up my dance pad to play this. I definitely wasn’t expecting a rhythm game.

It’s like horny macro-vore Wario Ware. Really cute art, nice use of Paper Mario-style QTEs. The dragon is adorable, and I love the art style in general (both the detailed lineless ultraflat stuff and the Atari-esque pixel sprites). Cute story too. I’ll have to replay this a few times to see what the different choices do.

FYI, you should tag your builds with the platform they’re for so they can launch from the itch app. Makes rating way easier.

The art’s cute, story isn’t my thing but it seems well-written for what it is.

It was a pleasure to make the music for this game, even without knowing what sort of game it was. The gameplay is fun, reminds me a lot of that old UNIX “Robots” game where you just have to avoid robots for as long as possible (only with magic spells to defeat them instead of inducing them to crash into each other). Having a stamina meter for the dash would definitely be a good addition. A wider variety in upgrades too. As it is, it seems way too easy to just load up on Rune Protect slots and then tank your way through the rest.

It was a pleasure to make the music for this game, even without knowing what sort of game it was. The gameplay is fun, reminds me a lot of that old UNIX “Robots” game where you just have to avoid robots for as long as possible (only with magic spells to defeat them instead of inducing them to crash into each other). Having a stamina meter for the dash would definitely be a good addition. A wider variety in upgrades too. As it is, it seems way too easy to just load up on Rune Protect slots and then tank your way through the rest.

For some reason when I try to start this up it only appears as a tiny window that then disappears. I hear audio in the background but I can’t seem to get the game window to come to the front. I suspect it has something to do with my setup, as I use a 4K TV as a monitor and that tends to cause all sorts of weird scaling-related issues in a lot of game engines.

I love the design of the characters and the environment. Definitely some movement jank but it’ll be nice to see where this game goes if you develop it further.

I had the same problem. I suspect the game’s UI was barfing on my 4K TV.

also yeah the first episode’s chime is a bit harsh. I should go back and replace it with the chime I settled on for the later episodes

The hope is that after people empty their minds, it then gets filled up with better things :D

I’m glad you liked it!

Mavis Beacon rides a bus

I wish this were completely keyboard-accessible. Also it took me seeing that there were people who enjoyed the music to realize that the music menu options did anything. It should probably default to having a non-zero volume setting and show what the current volume level is.

All that said, fun little story.

I feel like this game was built for VR, or at least it should be. I would love to play this on my VR rig.

I think you’ll really enjoy episode 4, if I can get the mix to not be awful.

Ah, good to know. That’s a bit disappointing, as this seemed like a really great project. Oh well.

Thanks, I compose each track specifically for each episode.

• Fixed a rare bug where beating a levelpack could cause another levelpack to save data wrong

Surely this is actually a new game mechanic waiting to happen?

Hi, I have nieces who are really interested in getting into game development. Superpowers seems like it’d be a perfect development environment for them. However, their computers are Chromebooks, which means they can’t install Linux/Mac/Windows applications.

Since Superpowers itself is an Electron app, it seems like it should be fairly straightforward to port it to ChromeOS. Does the dev team have any interest in that direction? It seems like that would be a really good fit for a lot of young users.

Yeah exactly, it was more work than I wanted to put in for something subpar. I like the authored podcast better.

My plan was to do some procgen on prompts and then potentially feed that into a language model (or a Madlibs-style template) and a sufficiently-tuned TTS system, but it all seemed like a lot of work for very little benefit.

Is there an official Mastodon toot I can boost? I don’t really use Twitter anymore, nor do a lot of the folks I’d want this to reach.

Thanks, that worked!

Where does one enter the coupon code to get the game for judging? Would it be possible to add a bundle with just chapter 2 for the purpose of the jam?

Thanks! I had fun making it.

Using file system exploration as a gameplay mechanic is a lot of fun. I ended up using find | xargs open because I am lazy.

That was heckin adorable.

Thanks!

FWIW the appimage thing has been there for a while now. I’ve been using it since 11.1, at least.

Yep, of course! But in the meantime I’m enjoying the challenge of working within the constraints offered all the same.

I think the ideal thing would be to let everyone choose all 18 notes on their own, yeah. With a C-major scale you can already get many of the most common modes just by transposing to a different tonic, but that doesn’t help with the ability to have chord progressions that go between modes (and also still doesn’t have any way of getting harmonic minor). Also having multiple adjacent half-step intervals is really useful.

Yes but those pathological cases only affect the people who are trying to share their unlistenable weirdness. :)

Personally I like the constraints imposed by the realistic music box length, and the only thing I’d like to see added is alternate tunings (which is something you see in commercial music boxes, where the spools have to be matched to tine sets and allows for harmonic minor and more interesting chord progressions).

Ah yeah the comment interface can be a little weird!

What I meant was like. Since you have patterns of on and off, and you’ll have way more off than on, instead of storing every storage cell, you’d store the distances between cells which are on and off. So for example, storing the pattern 000010000001 would be stored as the sequence {5,1,6,1}, or realistically since most of the time you won’t have two adjacent 1 cells, you could store it as 5,6, and use a 0 to indicate adjacent 1s (so for example 0000011000001 would be {5,0,5}). And there’s almost certainly a statistical distribution which could cut down further on the number of bits needed to store each of the numbers; it’d be a great application of Huffman codes, which I think I’d mentioned in the other comment.

gzip+base64 could also be pretty efficient but it’s not really optimized for bitwise storage like that; I mostly brought it up as being fairly easy to implement.

This was great! It’d be really neat if there were some means of sharing songs with others, like having a password you can enter.

Ah, this is great! I’ll have to point game jam friends to this the next time they want to make a platform game so that the world won’t be afflicted with yet another ice-skating game with floaty physics. :)