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Vicious... I don't think I got very far in this one... Need to learn how to handle multiple bishops better... If it's super heavy RNG, maybe I just needed  run with a good weapon drop,.. I thought the knife had cheese potential, but in practice, it did not seem that helpful. 

The presentation seemed pretty cool though, the transforming chess pieces, and chess board motif elements that showed up from time to time.

Oh and I did run into some bugs... it seems like the mouse positioning doesn't track well especially when you resize/scroll the screen after starting. And I did have a freeze related to dying.

Thanks, yeah, it's set to nearest project wide, but apparently shaders don't respect that, and I was using them pretty extensively. I have a fix for it though that I'll put out post jam. Thanks for the score info =]. I know the game too well, so I can't really say what a good score yet is either, especially on a single run XD. I think 65 should be doable though once you lock down what the clues mean. 

I'd like to get a par score system in place so that each time though has three possible outcomes (promotion, demotion, retry) to give it a proper difficulty curve (and encourage improvement). I think that should make it into my post jam version also, assuming I figure out what those numbers should be XD.

Nice improvement, thanks. It would be nice if there were a little less dead space around the playing area, but it's _way_ better. Got a 5:37 for my first clear (4.5 hearts).

Thanks =]

Thanks, it's an interesting balance. Everything is deterministic so the wrong guess clues can actually give a lot of information.

I'd love to see some high scores posted if anyone's actually cleared it to see how well the clues come across.

Thanks =P

I think both the good thing and the bad thing about this game is that everything feels pretty hectic - it sort of fits the personality of our detective, and the chaos of the real world situation. 

If I were doing this as more of a pure logic game and less for the feel, I would put an ability to rewatch the cutscene (watch footage / remember concert) in the main game, add all the in-game observations to the mouseover text for every item, and make it clear which items belong to which people in the box stage.

Love the concept, even if the box thing feels like a real stretch... You could beat this game satisfactorily without the literal box existing at all.

Actually, you could just use the color ramp for that... Guess I've been doing too much with shaders lately XD.

Really nice to have some non-standard movement mechanics in there, fits the 'weird space location of the future' vibe. The 3d bg visuals are cool, but... I would rather have a better view of the action / text. Even a simple camera jump in tight and out when you click on a level / email would have been really nice. 

The ending stuff is fun, if super sketch XD. As someone who usually does all my own everything, I feel you on the creative side. Sure there's a lot of free assets you can grab, and they will probably be better than whatever you can make in the time left over after coding a game and designing levels - especially if you end up giving yourself a four hour clock.

If you've worked with them before, you can put together a nice static star field pretty quickly in godot using a texture rect you assign high frequency noise to (by selecting a noise texture (fastnoise), and a cut off shader that turns anything below a certain threshold to black.

'M' should mute / unmute the audio, including the music for this particular game XD. I thought that might be an issue this time...

I added the music quite late, so I did the absolute minimum on it and just never thought to go back to patch it. So it's very short, and in some sense missing a melody, so it doesn't have the variation it needs. I'm quite unhappy that the music is so lacking this time but I was more focused on visual elements for this game.

So yeah, feel free to mute it XD.

Well, the game is very mechanically simple, but the objects and the fog look quite cool. There are a couple of strategic elements you need to figure out in order to start winning with reasonable frequency. Figuring those out was fun, but by the time I did, I was at a decent deficit, and it certainly would have been less grindy to restart with my new knowledge (though probably quite against the spirit of the game.)

I went back and lost the game on purpose just to see the bad end, (cutting up some jokers as I went, which always seem to make you win otherwise) and... well it's really something XD a bit tonally off compared to the rest of the game. Though I suppose it's not something you're likely to actually encounter much in play.

I had fun with it as a one-shot experience.

Really enjoyed this, it tells a good story. I got everything first try, though of course it took me a fair amount of time with all the evidence on the table to think through it.

At first, I was grouping the evidence by subject, and it was only when I had a pretty good idea of who all the characters were, that I started grouping them by who owned the items.

In a perfect world, there would be physical items instead of just pictures of them, and you wouldn't have to seal empty boxes for no reason before switching to the next one.

This type of 'story deduction' game is totally my jam. And it just works, it's tenuous at points, and the last box is mostly proven out by process of elimination, but it works.

Thanks! Yes the only real consequence is the number you get in the victory screen. I really would have liked to have done guess limits and retries (or even demotions). It would actually be great for learning the mechanics as well, since it would take you back to earlier levels where it's likely easier to learn, but I was more focused on visual presentation for this jam title.

Cool one, really like everything you're doing with lighting here although it can make navigation a little more challenging, it's great atmosphere.

The enemies are fair, so most of the time it feel like you at least could have defeated them without taking damage, which is great.

The automatic doors to me read like overhead elements that were simply vanishing when you got close, so I didn't realize they were actually doors until I had to fight some cannons on the other side of one.

It would have played smoother with RMB for reload, since you're already using the mouse (and as a gun w/ flashlight, so it would be quite thematic) but R as reload does add some tension, because it forces you to limit your own movement capabilities to reload.

Adding some static overlay features as landmarks would have been nice for navigation. The occasional blood trail or similar leading to nearby doors might have been helpful as well. Making important terminals stand out even more would have been a nice touch also.

Personally, I liked the backtracking for defeating the charging enemies, it works well with the low visibility and door entrances, and the general importance of not backing yourself into a wall/corner.

Fun game =]

The gameplay in this is awesome, level based, with beautiful difficulty and some interesting mechanics that work well. I'm pretty sure I'm just about to beat it, but unfortunately if I play it one more time my eyes will go on strike. I'm guessing it's using fixed aspect ratio scaling?.. In any case, it stays quite small, even at full screen depending on your zoom levels. I'll come back and revenge it once my eyes recover from not blinking while staring at mini-sprites for ages XD.

It's not super easy to put together even a simple survivors-like, so well done. On the downside, the roads, and the world boarders, were very much just suggestions. I guessed at a way to get AOE damage, and doing that carefully was enough to get me past the difficulty curve into infinite winning - breaking a bunch of stuff in the process of course (attack speed always seems to struggle at high levels if you aren't expecting them.) Without that, the game tends to end pretty quickly, because you don't seem to be able to keep up with enemy scaling for long at all. 

Quite like the enemy art especially but  it would be nice to have animations of some sort for this type of game. Numbers going up tends to be a nice incentivizer in general, but only when you actually have periods of being strong, which isn't much of a thing if you try to play normally.

The blood creeping in effect is quite cool, but it does make the game a bit difficult to play when you don't know what you're doing. On perfect runs, it's purely cosmetic and barely worth noticing. A way to punish recklessness I suppose and make the game more puzzly. The spikes are actually somewhat clever in the way that they circumvent softlock situations, but because they're all hidden-block style, it does make them a bit annoying at times, but it does open up some opportunity for mastery where in replays you're constantly avoiding hidden spikes and bad paths that would kill you if you didn't know which way to go already.

The cat room is obviously the best, and while I'm not so sure about the rest of the game, the cat is certainly in a box (because of course the cat is in a box, silly cats.)

Fun game! XD.

Quite different take on the Tetris concept. If there was piece rotation, I didn't figure out how to do it. The combo system was interesting, and encourages risky setups - nice to have a risk vs reward mechanic in there. Managed 139 by getting a five combo early on. The way blocks clear was interesting, but not as rewarding without any collapse mechanic (very low additional safety gain from clearing in general) The horizontal + vertical clearing caught me off guard, but it worked and added a little extra depth. Music was nice enough, graphics were very simple, but you had some interesting elements in there like text effects and such.

The mini-map is supposed to represent your magnifier, it's primary gameplay purpose is to let you see the 'clues' in the room more closely. How useful it is depends on how small the boxes are, and what you can gather from the clues.. but while I tried to make them more intuitive, I'm not sure how well I succeeded.

Yeah, I was considering putting in a limitation to the number of guesses on a stage, but I ended up going with a guess counter instead because of time constraints. The 'correct' locations are quite a bit different graphically, but they should also play a sound effect. I do have a random sound that sometimes goes off when you open a 'wrong' clue as a surprise, but it's only at 10%,, so maybe a bit too low.

Very heavily inspired by the limitation, which is great. Graphical style is pretty nice. A lot of systems are implemented here, One thing that isn't an issue unless you level, is that health is allowed to go negative, which messes with the health bars graphically. Decent speedrun potential which is fun, a zero encounter run being very doable if you know where to go. Cute ending cinematic.

Fun little puzzly game. Nice graphical cohesion, collision can be a bit silly with solids merging , but once you get used to avoiding them, it plays well. Very much an All in a Box game! A victory screen / text would have been nice.

Hmm, probably a mistake to save my own entry for last XD. I certainly could have pushed a few things really hard, where I didn't, and several things that I know that I purposefully did were too subtle so that without listening for it, I didn't hear them at all... And several things about some of the timings and tonalities that were bothering me, but I thought I was being silly about did in fact still bother me when I was listening to it XD. 

And some of the things I did later on to add texture just weren't well thought out... and wow I could have done a lot more with instrumentation. The things I tried to push low into the mix weren't low enough, and I need to do a lot on mixing/mastering. So, I need to do about another dozen of these jams to start to catch up XD.

Yes, the fit on this one is really good. It sort of reminds me of what I tried to do (but more complete and executed better XD). I quite liked how you did the fairly hard section cuts. Overall, sort of gives it that movie trailer vibe for me where we're seeing various cool scenes from the piece. Epic, but a bit of a teaser XD.

The fit on this is excellent. I've been spoiled a lot by these entries, so there are a few places I can see room for improvement. I couple moments in the shimmer/ sleigh bells sounded out of place, a swell that didn't go as big as it could... a place where an instrument came in loud instead of starting quieter and ramping up. A bit at the end where it felt you were rushing the ending... Just tiny, tiny things.. Overall really very good.

XD Thanks. I drew inspiration from the sort of church-esque vibe of the picture for most of the instrument selection.

Nice, I like the way the motif switches between parts, and the breaks it takes to help keep it from getting too stale. Personally I would have liked for some of the instruments to be more present at times. For example, for the drums to speak up by taking those two beats or giving an echoed response to them. There was a lot of clever interweaving in some places though, so it may have not had many opportunities.  

Something seems off about the start of the piece, almost like the recording was started a little late - possibly a quirk of MS to work around. I think it came across fine otherwise.

I'm not getting this specific story from the music, although it certainly captures a medieval city vibe. And perhaps that intro section is evocative of the stag? I'm curious to know more about your interpretation.

I think I followed this pretty well, you were thinking of the first panel as a rescue scenario?.. Any way, the soundscape is fascinating, for me it reminds me a bit of Megaman game music. I'm all inspired to delve into 80s synth sounds. Love this.

The orchestral sound is quite nice! I couldn't help but think about them being like, 'okay, we have 3 seconds to move this xylophone 20 feet back... and now back to the front...' XD. Probably a side effect of how immersive the audio sounds. Perhaps it could have just taken the entire middle section off instead and build up some anticipation for its return.

Clear three sections, like the three panes in the scene. I found it a bit too constrained - by the xylophone in particular. There is a lot of interesting movement by the other instruments though.

Quite interesting, in some sense this has a music out of time feel. While personally I miss having more support instrumentation, there were some interesting repeating motifs - and I did get the impression of a three section form. The long held notes that fade into the audible range for me around 1:10 added a lot to the third section. Personally, I would have liked it to be more present in the mix. Nice wistful sense to the piece overall.

I really liked the instrument choices XD. It captures what I feel is the overall emotion quite well. For me personally, I would have liked to start in a major key, if only initially, to do some storytelling that covers the first panel.

The changing instruments and levels throughout were nice. Personally, I would have liked more variance in the piece, although I can certainly appreciate the value of its stability.

Yes, it is quite tonally different, you're right about that! Seems as good a time as any to discuss my interpretation, though feel free to ignore my rambling =P

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Section 1:

The two people meet in the forest, a woodsman who gathers food there, and the sister of the current king.

Enthralled by the beauty of nature, the princess implores him to let the stag be, which he does, and they grow close. (Panel 1)

Unfortunately, her stories of the lovely forest and the wonderous animals there lead to the king claiming ownership over it as the kings forest and banning all hunting there. However, the people who live in and around the forest rely on it for food, so they continue to hunt there clandestinely, causing tensions to rise. One day, the current king comes to explore the forest himself, and he is shot and dies there. It's unclear whether this is truly an act of aggression or a hunting accident, but it doesn't really matter.

The princess becomes the new ruler, and turns her face toward the kingdom, while the woodsman is armed with a bow and prepared to join the battle they know is likely to soon be upon them. (Panel 2)

Section 2:

The princess, now queen, at the insistence of her people and the guard, seek to drive out any hunters from the forest and take the woods by force, the hunters however need the food to keep their people fed. The hunters fight a fierce retreating battle using their knowledge of the woods to shoot down many of the men-at-arms from the castle, but eventually the much reduced forces of the better equipped men-at-arms encircle the hunters deep in the woods, leading to a chaotic battle, the end result of which being that nearly everyone is lost on both sides.

Section 3 (Panel 3):

The princess and the hunter meet again having both fled to a small chapel in the woods known to both of them. Each of them, knowing time is short put aside the events of the last few hours and greet each other as warmly as they can, the princess littered with arrows, and the hunter having sustained critical sword wounds.  They comfort each other in their last moments, and the bell tolls.

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The result isn't as cohesive as I'd like - I think I was focusing on it more as story beats than an emotional journey, so hearing everyone's entries has been quite insightful XD.

Very interesting, some instructions would be nice, especially regarding the keyboard element and how it works. I was super confused until I paid more attention to the intro cutscene, which is surprisingly nice graphically. I think the idea that touching a propeller on the side of a 'ring' can disable them, and that messes with your movement is cool. Kind of reminds me of a game called ragdoll avalanche 3 in that sense. 

I saw the info about the keyboard, and was able to use it successfully once anyway, which was very helpful for that run. I imagine if you know the keyboard controls well, you can do a lot with them.

The in-game joystick was cool in that you can get some fine movement control from it, at least in theory. It's something you have to focus on though, at least if you're using a mouse.

Visually, a small touch of angle on the rings might have been good to help readability and help show where the edges are. It certainly adds cost to losing lives, mechanically it's a bit rough because of the negative snowball effect though the keyboard system is at least capable of countering that to some extent though.

I love the theming on this, I can totally see the fleshy/corruption vibe. This does a very good job of hitting on the limitation, it feels like everything you do, whatever you do, seems to loose you life.

I wish the trade in shrines were more rewarding as well (Maybe even as high as like, +10?). It doesn't feel good to use one for two health, that you may have lost just by trying to interact with it. Also perhaps this is intentional, but I'm pretty sure the jump cost makes the game unplayable.

The star shape, is kind of brutal, though I suppose that's sort of the point XD. Putting a star picture on a rounded rectangle or something would be kinder to the player as far as collisions if that was something you wanted to do.

The atmospheric background audio is quite nice, and the story is a nice touch, and perfectly functional.

XD. I was quite a fan of the music in Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest 1) on the original NES, and my brother could never stand it XD. (Although it did have proper held notes and more instruments!) Hope you have fun with Bosca Ceoil, I used it for game menu music for a Ludum Dare some time ago before I moved to LMMS (and eventually to FL). Good luck!

Thanks!.. Yes, the tempo I chose ended up making finding time for transitional language quite difficult XD. The middle section is meant to represent what I viewed as the tragic battle / war between them that I assume caused the outcome from the third panel.

Thank you!.. Good catch, yes, I wanted to convey the physical space with my instrument choices. The middle section is meant to cover the battle between the two factions that I thought was implied by the way the second panel (and the sword and bow from the first panel) lead into the third. 

Ooh, interesting - good interpretation. I took notice of the butterflies on the stained glass, but overlooked the butterflies in the foreground entirely, or perhaps just didn't realize how significant they were to the story. I had a lot of fun with this jam =] - Hope to try again in season 2 =P.

Good catch, yeah, there are a couple areas where I think sound effects would have brought some more clarity. Ultimately they got pushed out of scope, I had considered speeding up the walking speed while running away especially, Good commnets.

The quality on this is insane... you know it only goes up to five, right? =P

Seriously this was excellent, I think maybe the thinnest aspect was the fit.  For me,  it wasn't until the end that you captured the entirety of the artwork, by touching on the tragedy element, however lightly.

Lovely stuff.