itch.io

Cute little board-game experience! I have some issues with the game design (how most of the game is controlled by randomness) but the art and audio are both nice, and the issues are probably fairly simple to fix!

The amount of RNG removed most meaningful choices. The main choice appears to be between rolling for movement and rolling for stats, but both can lead to lost HP and this choice disappears during the boss. Unless I missed important info about the system? Oh well!

I'd recommend letting players input when the die is on their desired number, like lining up slots in a slot machine. Even if there's still chance behind-the-scenes, the input would at least add an illusion of control. That's all the game really needs to feel good tbh!!

Despite the consistent self-criticism in the game, I like the little narrative-focused experience that's here. This could definitely be a fun exploration of each character's personality and how the clutter of their offices communicates their feelings towards the work environment. Too bad about that sandwich, though! Would've liked to find it :)

You can throw downwards to boost yourself up :)

Okay this game is REALLY cool and I wish it was more clear what actions were happening, because it seems like the player's attacks activate and loop on rhythm, and the same goes for the enemies...! A rhythm based cooldown-action game is a wild thing to try for a jam. I just wish I could clearly see when I can and can't use my attacks, how to regain charges indicated in the top right, etc.
Keep it up because this could be fire!!

Cool concept! I like how fast the idea of a "moving object" changes over time. Doors, prison guards patrolling, a flowing river... if I made it further, I'm sure the ideas would continue to surprise me!
Unfortunately, I got stuck on the river screen. Standing on the red button activated another one, leaving the red button would despawn the other... and I couldn't freeze time on myself or either button. Stopping the river didn't seem to affect much other than if the river could push me or not.

I like this mechanic a lot though, so I encourage you to iterate on it after the jam! Best of luck!

33 was my high score! I can see this being a fun game to expand on. I like the idea that it's not height, but bounces that adds to your score. You can try to box the ball in but if an object isn't the right size, you might trap the ball or knock it away instead.
I believe the game would benefit from an outline of the object you're about to place, and the Tetris Hold/Next UI element. Being able to see what block comes next could add an element of forward thinking, rather than how it goes now with spamming left-click to box things in or trying to play pong with the ball as it leaves the screen.

Also, it might be more clean to have the game end when the ball exits the screen horizontally, instead of just vertically. Sometimes the ball would leave the screen and I'd have to sit there doing nothing for a few seconds before the game marked itself as over. 

Y'all should definitely work on this more because it feels like a classic browser game! High score, silly physics, easy to retry. I probably don't have to tell y'all that I wasn't feeling the theme in this one, but then again, I did anticipate a lot of folks interpreting "loop" as "game loop". Still had my fun with it all the same :)

Hype moments and aura. If y'all add some music and maybe let the camera see people behind you this'd be so much funnnn. See me in the Great Hamster Wheel Race

Hi! This game was made for an arcade cabinet, so the controls are pretty unorthodox on keyboard. Check the section on this page labeled "Controls" to see how player 1 navigates. Thanks!

Highlights
Always a fan of unique twists on popular genres! The level design here feels in touch with the core mechanic too, and that made my brain go :) as I figured out how to navigate. And that game over screen is really nice too. Whole game looks pretty!

Lower points
Some control stuff felt a lil janky. If I held a direction down to aim the head, threw the head, then threw it a second time without re-pressing the direction, the head wouldn't go where I wanted it to. I also managed to get myself stuck in a block, see screenshot for more! 

I'm gonna be picky about music cuz I'm a nerd hehe. The composition of the first theme that plays is nice! But the sounds wouldn't be able to play on GameBoy. Most people tend to miss that part so I won't knock it too hard. :p

Really enjoyed this overall. That lil opening cutscene is all I needed to like the strange headless skeleton. Lots of charm throughout!

Won't spoil much, but you'll want to start by heading to the top right of the manor for the first power. There's some puzzles along the way

Love the art style!! The setting is also very cute, playing as an evil scientist guy zapping objects with his grow/shrink ray while he escorts baby kaijus feels sufficiently quirky for a silly game like this. 

I love the idea of this game being broken into small challenges rather than a long continuous level. IMO, the scaling mechanic here felt strange (buggy?) because it wasn't always clear which objects were scalable. I assume it's only the objects with an outline when you hover them, but I couldn't always scale up my lil kaiju guy. Certain props also had thick black outlines too, despite not being scalable. Outside of that though, fun game! Music matches the charm, hatching eggs and sacrificing an upscaled baby kaiju gave variety... solid entry overall!

Nice!! Randomized wave survival with upgrade branches makes this a fun game to play and replay. I did have a very hard time reading the font, to the point where I felt like I didn't have enough information to make a decision at some upgrade screens. If you fix that and maybe also do a balance pass with enemy behavior (would sometimes get screens of entirely stationary enemies who couldn't hurt me because they shot in a straight line), you'll have something that feels great to die and retry to.

Good work!

Thank you!!

thank you so much 🥺

Thanks for all the feedback and the compliments!! I reported the music looping issue on the title screen during playtesting but Single Shot said it was intentional... :p give my music more screentime darn ittt

I'm impressed you found a bug with the Botanical Gardens boss that we didn't, we were in a discord call screensharing our gameplay to Single Shot and yelling at the boss for it being too difficult LOL
Hope we can fix all this stuff post-jam! You rock for catching all these things and playing our game :)

Ok wow, this game's really fun! At first I was like "aw man, I can't believe I have to start over from the beginning every time I die" but... levels are really fast and it's almost a warioware-like flow state when you get really far in! The lover just kinda ascending towards the player like a magnet is fun too.

My only gripe is that sometimes the lover dies offscreen, which can be frustrating near the end of the game. Didn't beat it but I liked how the difficulty increased each level.

Def an underrated entry. Music is solid, especially the 4th(?) track where it gets dramatic and fun. :)

Love me a good survivors game. Great job with this! I like the idea of using inventory space for the theme, choosing places for powerups was pretty novel at first. But honestly, the player levels up so slowly after the first few upgrades that I wasn't able to ever max out the inventory. Also at some point during my run, the game just... closed? Didn't crash, the window just stopped being a thing. I was having fun though, and that's important. I don't think the Gameboy'd be able to render so many enemies to the screen at once, but that aside I really liked the sprite work for the enemies and player. Had a great time overall, be proud of this one!

Also, when I reopened the game, the mouse was in the window and transformed into the left-right drag icon. I dragged out of curiosity, and the window froze then closed. We love game jam bugs!

Isn't a review of the game, but after downloading Windows marked the .exe as a trojan and removed it from the OS entirely. Not sure what caused that, but...? Might be worth taking a look

I like the concept of the gameplay. The wild movement and jetpack as a limited action could be used in really fun ways! But I found the very first bits of the level design frustrating, because some jumps were only just barely doable with the jetpack filled all the way. There was also a tutorial explaining how to pick up items, but I never learned what item I picked up, why I did, or if I could use it.

As for the Gameboy part of the jam... the resolution, graphics, and audio don't fit within the limitations of the Gameboy. The limited colors are fine, but the window's not square and the audio uses realistic sounds (the Gameboy could only produce sequenced music on a handful of waveforms and audio had to be intensely downsampled through DPCM). The physics are also likely not possible on the Gameboy. I'm no programmer so I can't 100% verify that, but the amount of smoothing between values required to recreate that feel could take up a lot of processing time.

This'd be a cool gameplay mechanic/vibe for you all to improve on post-jam though, I like the premise a lot :)

Like Clark said, the graphics feel like they belong to an older console... the Game Boy could absolutely run this, but it feels like Happy Space Cleaning Day's inspired by really really old PC games or Atari 2600 games. Sound's also pretty harsh. High notes in chiptune have to be written very carefully to avoid this...! I struggled with that a lot when I was getting into chiptune.

Imagining what this game would look like was fun though. A person walking through different apartments and inspecting all the furniture to clean things up sounds like it could be cozy (like how Power Wash Simulator got very popular off a similar idea).

Congrats on getting your game in, and happy ratings!

Heya! This is cute and I like the idea of creating a custom alien to platform with. The music was fun and the sound effects were (importantly) pleasant on the ears! That doesn't always happen in jams like this.
The game itself is pretty short, though I guess you all probably know that. Is it just me, or does the level sometimes have an extra eyeball enemy on the right side? It could be cool if the level changed a bit each time...! Maybe that's how this game works, but I couldn't tell after about 5 go-throughs.

Congrats on making it to the end of the jam!

Nice job on this! I played normal and easy and will probably give hard a shot soon. Cool that there's these options in a jam game!! And seeing the "hero" party have different party members in easy made me want to replay again in hard.

I was a lil confused at first with the summoning screen. I'd assumed I could summon multiple of the same unit so I kept clicking the one slot and wondering what was going on with my remaining mana. Bit silly of me in hindsight!

Also would be nice to have the player's menu buttons hide while the attack phase was happening. Would be a good way to direct the player's attention to the action!

Congrats on submitting, this was a nice lil experience!

Took me a minute to find the game, then another minute to figure out how it worked... but the puzzles are really smart and having a block that destroys the dangerous blocks added an interesting layer to the puzzle solving. Didn't beat it, but I had fun with what I played! Glad you were able to get something in, if it ends up counting.

💞 Congrats everyone!

Pokemon-like games are part of a new-ish genre called Monster Tamers which fit that kinda vibe. Digimon, Coromon, Monster Crown, Monster Sanctuary, Disc Creatures, etc are some good games to check out if you want more ideas!

I played the demo what feels like years ago now, and it's always stuck in my head. Congrats on the release!!

Thanks for the kind words! The controls are actually on the game page (not this one, which is the jam submission page).

Perhaps this is bias speaking, because I do enjoy picross, minesweeper, and the like
But this definitely emulates those kinds of games well and I found myself having a lot of fun with this entry!

One thing I noticed is that sometimes solutions would generate in the 0 columns, so if I selected everything in those columns, I would just win automatically. It's not a big deal but you could remove that so players have to think a bit more! Though getting lucky is fun in it's own way... hehe.

Congrats on submitting your first jam entry! Here's hoping things went well and there'll be more to come :)

I'm glad you had a good time with it! And don't worry about Mongrowl, it's a boss battle so you actually can't catch it. 

The girl is supposed to have updated dialogue along the lines of "Thanks for bringing back Mongrowl! I know he can cause quite the mess, but he really is a good boy", but I wrote the code to check that condition less than 10 minutes before the deadline so I didn't test to see if it worked. Whoops!

I love the ideas in this game. The movement feels really nice, and I was laughing while playing. One thing to keep in mind about the controls though! Control + W is a command to close the tab in google Chrome, so doing the light attack in the air closes the tab in html5. I decided the download would be the best bet. Glad I did!

Woah. This definitely gave me VVVVVV vibes, which is a really good thing. The difficult sections never lasted for an extended time, something VVVVVV occasionally struggled with -- difficulty isn't bad, but ramping it up for small sections is something I find pleasant. This could be a great project to see to completion :)

you can imagine how much more productive your day would be if you were working on a jam submission... :' )

Glad I'm not the only one haha! Can't wait :)

After playing for a little bit, here are my thoughts:

• Woah. I love the presentation of this game. The writing of the intro and death messages was fun, and was tonally consistent with the music, gameplay, and character design. The visual effects are punchy and didn't make my computer chug too much haha. Cream of the crop for consistent presentation!
• However, I did encounter a few issues during gameplay. One time, I shot in the starting building and the bullet launched diagonally up when it bounced off a table on the top left. I was teleported outside of the map, couldn't get back in, and couldn't find a way to restart in-game... so I had to close the window and reopen! Another issue I encountered (not exactly sure what caused it) was the camera getting locked inside of the starting building. I think it may have had to do with how the camera follows the bullet, and the bullet went somewhere without giving camera control back.
• The main mechanic was super intriguing and I would definitely play a full version of a game that expands on the mechanic and level design presented here. One suggestion involves enemy health - I noticed some enemies took two hits while others took one, and assumed that every enemy had two health but by ricocheting the bullet right next to where they were standing, it collided twice, letting me K.O. faster - I thought this was an intentional design and felt it was really cool! Like a strategic element, almost. But it actually wasn't  a mechanic and it seems like it was just an inconsistency? I'd love it if this were more intentional, it has so much potential for environment interaction (by that I mean encouraging players to ricochet bullets rather than just point and shoot)
• The music was really good but also really loud compared to the sounds that came before the gameplay loop? This could be fixed with a small settings menu :)

I really really like this idea, it feels like a prototype for something that could easily be much bigger.

lmao

AYEE let's go!!
I've just started college and it's a bit intimidating, but if you manage your time I'm sure you'll be able to finish up!

ah, yeah the text is likely a resolution issue - I didn't do much optimizing in that area

May you elaborate on reworking the environment? Do you mean layout, visuals, interactions, or a combination?

Thanks for playing, I hope you were able to see a good portion of the new content!

Thank you for playing! Pressing up on the d-pad is how you interact with the environment and the d-pad in general is how you move in the menu~