itch.io

You managed to do so much with such a simple mechanic! Great submission. Also quite hard!

Absolutely loved the game. First run I had a horrible score, second one was amazing once I got a hang for the wonky car-with-butter-wheels physics which are perfect for this game. I had quite a bit of fun!

Ctrl+W = close tab command on chrome lol

Fun game with pretty great presentation. I enjoyed the choice of weapons and enemies, each unique and with different strategies to approach from. The stats, weapons, upgrades stack to a satisfying level after surviving for a while. While I'm not the biggest fan of the idea of inserting roulettes and other gambling devices as the cheap trick of "risking  it", I rolled that roulette wheel a few more times than I am willing to admit, chasing those sugar cubes like an addict chases crack. Great music choice as well. Also, who the hell named the character "handy"? I love him. Congrats on the submission, it has an impressive level of polish and depth.

Hilarious combination of gambling with tower defense. I just wish it were included as a choice rather than the main way to interact. I find the complete lack of control more frustrating than taking a "risk". It could be that we can gamble for power ups in the towers that you choose to build. But otherwise solid visuals, good music, and great page design! Interested to know if you'll continue working on this post-jam.

Ahhh, gotcha now. To answer your question: They just wander around peacefully. They have hard shells so they don't care about anyone or anything that's in their way, but they don't target. Good to know the enemies are still working!

Doesn’t do damage…? I guess you found a bug, not an alien 😅 Could you share where you encountered him so we can address it post-jam?

Thanks for trying our game, and thanks for the super thorough feedback. Really appreciated!!

Regarding the "blue round alien", he's a EyeSpike, one of the creatures that inhabits the upper layers of our Hell. He's invulnerable when he's right-side-up, but you're able to rip them out of the platform like a sea urchin if you hook onto them while they're upside-down.

Interesting game idea, I like the tradeoff of the aim directly affecting movement, making accuracy costly and needed to be balanced with movement in the list of mental priorities, which creates an engaging challenging mechanic. That said, there's nothing that really happens when you fall off (besides a snarky message) and I wasn't really sure what the "win" or "lose" state was supposed to be after playing for a bit. With a bit of polish and some reflection about the core mechanics this could turn into a great game!

Incredible production quality, especially for a solo project, well thought out production chain, you clearly have a track record of strategy games and this one is another great one on your repertoire. I enjoyed the loop of getting caught, doing research, and coming back stronger with a new strategy unlocked. Really added replayability and progression. Really fun game!

Fantastic production quality as always with those strategy games, YYZ. Keep it up!

Funny game with hilarious room variety. I spent a lot of time gambling. I also spent a lot of time with the mouse inverted and hoped it would be over after the mouse room... it wasn't. Made my gambling experience worse. Good job on the solo submission!

Reverse mouse was infuriating, made my gambling experience come with a drunk simulator...

Congrats on your first project, you made a lot of mechanics and a huge level! I struggled with basic movement though. The character was very floaty and accelerated very fast on land, making small adjustments when landing a death sentence. I was very frustrated and couldn't get very far, which sucks because the huge level got me really excited to get to the end. I love also the grappling hook, obviously, and wish it could be usable on more occasions.

Congrats on finishing your first project!

Nothing ran when I clicked... Suspiciously.

Hilarious concept and gameplay. I struggled a bit to find where I could shit at first. As fun as it was to dodge the patrols, the gameplay felt a bit underdeveloped. Maybe an aim mechanic could be in place to make things more interesting... or not. Maybe not.

What a beautifully disgusting game

Congrats on the submission! The idea is fun! With some work on the level design and a better camera angle this could turn into a great game. The cat is really aggressive!

I like the non-punishing nature of the gameplay. Interesting control scheme. Cool voxel art. The car mechanics are fast and intense. Nice solo project, I caught myself playing this longer than I should have! It's most of all, fun.

Extremely fun game, I love the exaggerated car physics and extreme speed and jump boosts.

A beautiful piece of art. What initially seems like a mechanically simple sidescroller uses its simplicity of gameplay to deliver complexity of emotion. What beautiful visuals. On one of the levels I had to double take if there was any in-engine lighting, and nope- pure artistic talent. Very immersive, introspective, visually loud and expressive. Most beautiful game I've tried so far in the jam.

I WANT TO GO BACK

Thank you for trying it!! If you liked the art go check out our lead artist Jassi's page on itch. Our checkpoint system is now fixed, if you give it a try again you might even get to eat the devil's cookie, even if you die a few times...

Thank you for playing, and thank you for the compliments. Our artist and game designer is no joke when it comes to beautiful visuals!

Regarding the soundtrack: We had some bugs in our audio system but now that it's fixed we'd love to get your thoughts on the sounds! 

Hey, brother. I tried it again, downloaded it, tried with different settings, but it all looks like a black screen.

I will give you a review based on what I could see from screenshots and videos:

Pros:

• Charming low poly art style
• Cool concept, interesting twist on the TD formula
  • The "nuke" dynamic brings a lot of strategization oportunities
    
• Interesting tower selection
• Diverse locations and enemies
• Game has multiple endings
• Cool visual effects

Cons:

• Didn't run on mac (webgl OR native)
• UI seems a bit rough, there are inconsistent designs, colors, and elements

Thank you so much for trying (and even enjoying?) Recolonizer!

First off, I laughed at the "the win sounds like defeat" comment. These things are so subjective, I've gotten all sorts of comments about the sounds but never heard this one before... And indeed, maybe I'll change "Defended" to something else. Brains, man. Sometimes they work in weird ways...

Some comments about the mechanics:

I’m guessing you have to remember how the waves go

They kinda have a pattern, but there's some RNG to keep you on your toes. I'd word it as, "remembering how they go will give you an advantage, but will not guarantee you anything".

I’d generally lose the first try but get it the on the second since I had a better idea what to expect and understood the field better

Exactly my intention – reward attention to detail and learning from mistakes.

About the location system:

For me, the zones didn’t add anything ... I'd rather just pan ... waiting for the pan and losing precious seconds

That hits hard, but I agree. The version I'm cooking after the PJJ feedbacks gives the zones a bit more function (no spoilers), but indeed you put the finger on the biggest issue with the zones – they're too restrictive. I will go back to the whiteboard to allow the freedom to pan between zones and hotkey. It's time for the location system to mature.

I wonder if zooming out but the area is surrounded by fog and the arrows only go to the edge

This one is intentional – only Fort Wright has intense fog, specifically to "nerf" the map view and force you to be lower to the ground, or squint. As for whether this is challenging in a fun way or annoying way, I'm not sure. But I don't see a reason to change it at the moment. And yeah, the arrows are to help you see offscreen. Keeping them onscreen resulted in a bit of visual pollution and gets quite overwhelming (even after making them quite small...), which I wanted to avoid.

Final thoughts:

I'm really happy to hear you enjoyed the granular upgrades, their icons, and the tower synergy! What was your favorite tower combination?

And yes, if you decide to come back, there's quite a few more things to unlock, including harbors that let you have your own ships to collect money / shoot enemies for you. 

You and the other testers have helped me focus my efforts IMMENSELY in this pre-release stage.  Thank you again for playing and taking the time to write your thoughts!!

Best,

FLCB

Definitely an interesting concept; the creatures are completely bizarre and I was completely lost but I enjoyed the card fighting mechanics, even if I didn't really understand who I was fighting or why. I do enjoy the whole cycle of getting paid and managing your finances. The whole bit about needing to pay rent and bills at the end of the day is so dystopian (love it), but also a nice risk-reward mechanic. Who knew neglecting your responsibilities would make you rich enough to stock up on 27 electroshock cards for your next workday.

All the bits about office politics, and workaholic culture are a cherry on top.

Do note that, like my friend in the comment below:

I didn’t play past day 3 because the story didn’t seem to progress, at least not at the start of that day.

Other than the somewhat lack of polish, considering theres a bunch of unused menus, and the names are quite hard to parse (missing translations?), it's a fun turn-based card game that feels like playing pokémon. As much as I feel like it gets a bit repetitive just going between two rooms, it entertained me for quite a bit of time. I wonder how much better this can get if you polish it, and make the art a bit more cohesive. Once there's a proper story is introduced (or a bug preventing it from progressing is fixed) this game will have some great potential.

I enjoyed it! Do you have future plans of expansion?

So I had 5 clones, and I tried to promote each one to a different class. In the first few upgrades they are so similar I didn't notice what was supposed to be different about them from watching them move and interact with the enemies. But nothing a bit of rebalancing wouldn't fix. 

You can make the first few upgrades have a "great" effect, then have them get exponentially more expensive, and diminish their returns (i.e. you pay 10x the price to get 1/10th of the upgrade). That way, in the beginning, you really feel the upgrades stacking, but as you get more advanced, you really need to accumulate points to make them go from doing 1000 damage to 1100 damage. See this article.

But yeah. I was in a bit of a rush so I didn't hover over anything, I was clicking. A LOT. lol Maybe something in the UI to visualize what the upgrade (i.e. 100dmg >> 110dmg) would help communicate it.

IDK about locking the promotion. I think clearly communicating the effect on the clone should be enough. In my opinion you don't want to restrict too much player expression. If I want to promote right away, I should be able to do it and be aware of the tradeoffs.

I like the powerup idea. You could even have a special clone that just collects powerups!

As for the anticipating enemy direction thing, I made a `TargetManager` class for Recolonizer, and it's definitely overkill for your project, but who knows, you might find something in here to improve the targeting of the clones. It's where I wrote the predictive targeting logic (see GetCorrectedTargetPosition). It has quite a few dependencies for some other functionality (such as using physics to shoot a rigidbody projectile perfectly on target), so if you want me to share more just ask.

Good luck on your project!

I am gonna preface this by saying I got pretty addicted to it, and my expectations got pretty high; so I got a bit disappointed as I played. Let me get the compliments out of the way first:

• Classic, killer 8bit soundtrack
• Cute and cohesive pixel art design
• Fun clicker game concept, and good variety of upgrades
• I like being able to press the button to 99% early; rewards proactivity

However, what made me kind of not want to play it anymore was:

• Very slow build up. I wasn't expecting to be doing most of the clicking with 5 upgraded clones, 6 cycles in...
• Clone promotions seem inconsequential? Maybe I didn't go far enough in the levels, but the clones are a bit too stupid and slow to be effective, even after 3-4 speed upgrades.
• A bit more polish in the clone AI would go a long way in bringing satisfaction to the player. And reduce the frustration of seeing 5 clones chasing 1 ghost, right behind it, when they could've intercepted it earlier if they weren't stupid (i.e. make them chase where the ghost will be rather than where it is)
• I find the choice to upgrade the amount of enemies a bit strange. Instead of spending our money on this, the game should increase its difficulty every time you press the button, to encourage player resilience, and fighting till the last second. It would also have the consequence of increasing the amount of rewards each time you start a new cycle.
• While I love the soundtrack, having just 1 loops gets boring pretty fast. Would be nice to have a low-medium-high intensity loops depending on the cycle you are in / number of enemies and so on.

I think you got a solid foundation with a decent amount of polish. Address some of the frustrations, add a bit more variety in ways to interact with the enemies (maybe some turrets? mines? etc.), and enable better automation, and you will have yourself a pretty addictive, cute-looking infinite cookie-clicker game.

Note: I never got to level 61; some of the feedback might not be relevant considering I might've missed content.

First impressions:

• Beautiful and charming hand-made drawings in the main menu
• Nice soundtrack, fits the theme
• Nice abilities, allowing for a huge amount of skill expression (i.e. parkouring on bouncing hats is hard but satisfying to pull off)
• Interesting lore (the little I was able to parse from the very quick text!)

Analysis:

You got yourself a very cool looking platformer with a super nice set of character skills, and huge potential for a fun game. However, repetitive looking areas quickly become confusing to navigate and boring to adventure in. Enemies strike fast and with not much indication, leading to pretty much one way to succeed in combat: strike fast and as far away as possible and then run away. There's not much interplay with the enemies, because allowing them to do anything at all results in punishment to the player, and the enemies seem to have just 1 move. Enemy design seems a bit incoherent. Why am I killing birds? What are the slime blobs?

Platforming mechanics (bouncy hat, dash, ground pound, wall-jump) are pretty solid and incredibly fun. The wide breadth of possibilities is awesome, and lets you navigate the platforming challenges in however you see fit.

Issues/Bugs:

• Controller D-pad doesn't work in menus (need to use stick to navigate, which is unusual)
• I have two sticks - feels weird to have the left one for both walking & aiming, and the right one unused
  • Correction: Feels even weirder to aim the hat with one stick and aim reflect projectiles with another! If you want my opinion here, I'd suggest to keep all aiming on the right stick, and all movement on the left. I kept stumbling over the controls because I kept forgetting which stick served to aim what. And kept foolishly trying to use the right stick for aiming the hat, several minutes into the gameplay... Muscle memory is powerful, remember your players bring baggage from other games; trying to keep things as standard as possible will make your game much more intuitive.
• Text too fast
• "I forgot my hat" message is confusing, it looks like I already have a hat on!
• Typo: "Come find me ... if you are gnome enogh" (should be enough)
• Enemy animations are hard to read. They should have some sort of charge-up, to telegraph the attack, and then a wind-down after the attack misses 
• Unlocked dash but it remains locked in the abilities menu
• Pressing the "start" button on my controller while in the pause menu unpauses the game but the pause menu remains visible on the screen
• Game doesn't pause when showing what was unlocked by the rock, leading to deaths that are impossible to avoid (because you can't see what's attacking you)

Verdict:

You have a solid prototype and good foundations to make a great game. You nailed the design of the protagonist and their abilities. If you put some work into adding more visual variety and polish, and more carefully think about the enemy interactions and solving some of the "jank", you will have yourself a great platformer IMO. For now, the clunkyness is getting in the way of my enjoyment, and every attempt to have fun with the mechanics leads to some frustration with the jank getting in the way. But don't be discouraged! Everything can be solved with patience and iterations; some of these things are hard to nail the first, second, or third time. 

Good luck with the project! Don't hesitate to contact me again if you want me to give it another try in the future, once you've addressed some of these issues.

Best,

FLCB

Thank you so much for the feedback. All are good points, and some of them are things I've been trying to deal with since forever, clearly unsuccessfully... (Camera, I'm looking at you)

Let me respond point by point:

1) Glad you think so!

2) Great suggestion on the arrow pointing off-screen; it's exactly the way I wanted to iterate on the current way to announce enemies (location icons flashing red on bottom corner), which is quite ineffective.

3) Not sure how to deal with this one. I'm gonna have to go back to the drawing board to figure out how to expose more angles without exposing the ship spawn locations or make them too far away. But indeed, the more I relax the camera movement, the more people want to see of the map. Something needs to be done here. I've gotten feedback about people wanting to smoothly transition between locations when the camera is moved toward the neighboring location, or zoomed out beyond the max (to go to the map) and I think it could be a nice solution to help make the camera feel less... awkward.

4) Thank you! Soundtrack was made by this gentleman here, go check him out! And noted, I'll take another look at the mix; you can also turn the audio to your desired level in the settings, and if I didn't fuck up, it should remember it next time you play...

5) Yep. The game over screen... It's definitely quite raw; it's an aspect that remained unchanged since the first prototype, and didn't mature with the rest of the features. I'll take your feedback to heart and address this somehow; no promises on the specifics, or whether it will be more forgiving hahaha

7) Glad you appreciate it. Hope I can take feedback No. 3 into account to capitalize on this grand scale...

Thanks again for taking the time to try it out! Hope you give it another shot again in the future :)

Best,

FLCB

First off, thank you for the compliments, I really appreciate it. 

Very thorough feedback, and incredibly punctual. All of the points highlighted are things I'm aware of and plan on fixing / have tried to fix in the past without success, and need to iterate. Let me give you a point by point:

• Money sfx: There is a sound there, although quite placeholder-ish... But now that I have a soundtrack it disappeared in the mix. We're working on it. I'll do a few more audio passes to update the final version of the soundtrack, and to include more sound effects, as many interactions (hitting ship, building, upgrading, ui navigation, etc) don't have a sound and it's quite jarring.
• Tutorial level difficulty: Ugh. The tutorial level is a bit of a legacy level with quite a few problems that have been accumulating, including the difficulty. I'll do another pass on the tutorial to make it less wordy and introduce the difficulty gradually, maybe even redesign the level? Turtle beach is too exposed indeed, and quite difficult to defend. I'm not quite sure what the long term solution there should be, but on a first look I'll just reduce the number of enemies there / their health and call it a day... In any case, if you want a better difficulty curve, skip the tutorial level and go to level 2 onwards.
• UI panel size: Yep, correct. It was made for mobile first, and my fat thumbs quite like the big panel. It definitely obscures too much and affects gameplay, so I'll work on the accessibility there. Maybe just forcing a zoom-out could address that.
• Zoom reset on switch: Ah, so I didn't fix this one on every map. Normally the zoom resets to most-zoomed-out (not your previous zoom level) when you switch, but I will align all the maps so they have the same behaviour; as you've experienced, some maps still reset to somewhere in between.
• No juice: Mate, I know exactly what you mean. The distraction + multitask difficulty was definitely intentional, but without another core fun mechanic, it becomes a bit pointless. I found quite a few people enjoy the core loop of just build / upgrade / collect enough that they don't notice it, but you are 100% on the money with that feedback. I'll go back to the drawing board to try to find another core mechanic to add to the fun. I wanted to bring in a end-level boss, or maybe a mechanic where you have to finish building something to be able to complete the level, rather than just survive X waves. To be seen!

  
  

  • Note: I just released an update with a new ship that helps you collect money, so there's a game mechanic to reduce this feeling of being overwhelmed via gameplay.

Lastly, let me thank you again for the incredible feedback. You really took the time to think and analyze my choices and mechanics, and I appreciate it a lot!! Hope you give it another chance despite the gratuitous punishment you received in the tutorial...

Best,

FLCB

hahahaha perfectly understandable! That one looks particularly annoying to iron out too…

huh, interesting. Gonna put it on my todo list to read your devlog and play frostpunk (don’t tell anyone I haven’t)….

thank you Mr Gatsby! I have heard negative feedback on the money collection thing, so look forward to a ship that helps you automate that in a future update! The distraction factor is intentional and adds to the pressure but I feel like you should have a way to mitigate it. Thank you for playing!

I absolutely loved the music and SFX, and the NES visuals.

The game itself, while creative and fun, is a bit limited in player expression through gameplay. All in all, solid game, tons of levels (I was kinda shocked when I first booted it up!) and pretty creative board-game-style gameplay.

Bug found: The arrow is not pointing in the right direction under certain marching orders:

Couldn't get it to run properly in the browser on a Macbook (macOS 14.6)

Main menu and all subsequent screens were black, except UI.

When I'm back home I'll download it and give it a try.

Oh, nice, even more kudos then; it's a lot of features for just one person! Also wanted to compliment the whole "reactor" idea – did you get it from Forts, or was it a case of parallel thinking? In my opinion its a great twist on the TD genre.

By the way, I wanted to let you know that as your main "competitor"—only other 3D game with a relatively similar visual aesthetic I've seen while browsing the tower defense category—you are a huge inspiration. I am currently trying to crank out an endless mode too, but you beat me to it...

Looking forward to the future updates!

You guys are really putting in the work! Good stuff :)