The asthetics are on point and beautiful. Absolutely love the sfx, music, animations, everything. I just found the actual moment to moment gameplay less than stellar. The darkness is super annoying to deal with as your sonar is on a timer, making the entire game just sonar -> move -> wait till sonar comes back -> repeat. The movement also just being a straight wasd float movement cheapens how interesting the rest of the game feels. Also, checkpoints, cause these levels are very long and intricate (which I appreciate) and dying is simply too punishing. I'm not sure how you would fix this system as is, but the current gimmick with the darkness and sonar might warrant a full rework of the mechanic. Super cool entry though, and I can tell alot of work went into making this the best it could possibly be.
GanosSnap
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I enjoyed everything but the gameplay sadly. The current gameplay loop is too undercooked, as it can be solved with dispense cookie -> fire -> deliver to customer -> repeat, and the first 2 steps can be done nearly standing still. Needed alot more work on the game design department. The visuals and idea were really cool though! Flame thrower cooking is definitely an idea that can be evolved beyond just this.
Art. Mwah. Audio Mwah. You really cooked with the presentation. Gameplay... less Mwah. The idea is definitely solid, but with how limited 2d is, its hard to make something creative. Untitled Goose game is really helped by 3 dimensions, you can run multiple directions. Here, there's only one way to go, and the repetitiveness really kills my enjoyment of the game sadly. I wasn't able to get to the two other npc interactions you detailed elsewhere. The tutorial you made with how the fountain works and stuff was really well done though. There's some good game design here, it's just obvious there was a lot not realized due to time crunch. Great job submitting though. i think it's still a good entry overall.
ITS SO CUTE. Only thing I wish that could be different is how charging works, as it felt like I had to wait a full rotation to get a big enough bite (but this is nitpicking). Great idea with the eating, and trying to make the biscuit roll afterwards is ingenious. The hill environment being a different style than the fairies and the cookie while still meshing perfectly somehow is some art witchcraft. Every part is tailored made to fit this whimsical but wacky aesthetic and I love it. Great entry.
I really enjoyed the idea yall were going for, even though the execution I think just wasn't up to snuff with the vision. I have a few things yall could consider for future projects, or even this one if you plan on an update. I can see from your itch page that both devs haven't made too many release yet, so I was a little extra nitpicky so you guys could know exactly what to improve on for future projects.
- Mixels: Using assets from different sources (for sprite work), is usually discouraged due to not being cohesive in artstyle, but you could get away with it as long as you kept the pixel sized consistent. The issue here is that the character's are finely detailed, while the environment has massive pixels. You almost never want to mix different pixel sizes, and it is the biggest contributor of the game looking chaotic and half baked.
- Color pallette: This goes back to using assets from multiple sources. With the environment being basically all green, the character icons not following this color even slightly makes them looks jarring. A quick fix to this would be to tint your characters green as well, to cement the green lighting, but a better way to go about it is to not use clashing palettes from the very start.
- Dashing: The dash being a teleport forward without any animation (or cooldown) just feels bad. Usually a dash wants to be a speed up rather than a teleport, but if you do want to make a teleport, consider adding some camera smoothing and a disappear/reappear animation, so it doesnt look like the game was just fastforwarded. (Also a cooldown for balancing reasons in other games)
- Attacking: I really liked how the daggers spun off after they hit an enemy, but I don't see any reason that the attack shouldn't just be hold to attack. In the current implementation, there's no cooldown so the optimal way to play is to mash the hell out of lmb, and that's just not very fun. Also, attacks have no oomph. No weight to attacks contribute to stale combat.
- Enemies: I couldn't tell you what the enemies do. I found no reason to approach and let them attack, so they all just slowly moved towards me (or literally didn't even notice me) while I went around in circles. This is a let down mainly based on the combat.
- Combat: Combat just wasn't fun. I'm sorry if I'm being harsh, but the combination of movement being too quick, ranged combat, mashing the attack button, and enemies being too dumb to actually pay attention to me made combat more of a shore than an actual enjoyable activity.
- NPCS: I liked the idea about pursuing a different romance option. There isn't really much depth to it though sadly, and I can contribute that to mainly a time crunch. What I can't really contribute to a time crunch is the lack of consistency when talking to NPCs. I can only interact with them sometimes, and there's hardly a reason for that. I talk to them, go back in the dungeon, talk to them, repeat. Feels more like a poorly communicated checkpoint system for a quest.
- Gold..... What does gold do?
- Audio: I like the hit effects, and the shoot effects, but the overall track doesn't feel like it fits the vibe? it feels very ethereal, but the game visually doesn't follow this energy.
- Misc: I just found it very jarring that leaving the dungeon doesn't put you in front of the dungeon, but the starting location. Also, what's the point of the bomb objective if you have to kill all the enemies to leave in the first place? That's the true objective, but isn't portrayed in the story at all.
Overall, this was a pretty cool entry that was just undercooked due to inexperience. Great job submitting and getting something to run though. That itself is an accomplishment, and jams are the perfect environment to learn.
Really polished title for the time we had. Everything felt silky smooth, and the actual gameplay with throwing weapons and shooting was really fun. My biggest gripe with the game would probably be that the rounds are too long? Two minutes per is a lot of time to do the same thing over and over again (especially as there were levels with no new enemies). I feel like a kill all enemies on the map type style would feel better, as waiting for the time to tick down after hitting the max risk feels bad. (Also the shop items really don't change the gameplay either, which would have helped alleviate the monotony). Still though. I loved the art, the sfx were really good, and the core gameplay loop feels great. Really good entry!
The day and night cycle during the races is so funny to me. I had a lot of fun, with my only gripe being its got quite the slow start where you got to just watch the snails slowly finish races before you have enough money to do anything (this tracks they're snails lol). This is remedied mostly by the phone and being able to play games on it, but still could go a bit faster. Also being able to just port games into your game is some actual voodoo black magic programming lmao. I'd love to see how y'all did that. Great entry!
PS: THERE ARE SO MANY SNAIL SPRITES WTH
What an interesting project! With so many people working on it I'm sure people came in with super high expectations, but I'm sure the management to even get this game out and running was way harder than I could imagine. It was really cute and fun, and had a lot of things and places to look around :) Good job everyone who contributed. (music also fit the vibe perfectly so good on the composer)
I liked the concept of the maze, but I feel like there was atmosphere missing. The evil wasn't that scary either, as the sounds and visual feedback were just a third of your screen being red, not much else. If you were to add to it, I suggest focusing a lot of development time on making walking around just feel scarier. Besides that it feels slightly unfair because you can get insta killed walking into a room. Maybe have it so the monster spawns in the middle of the room instead of to the side to prevent this? I'm not sure. Regardless i definitely saw the vision, and I think you did a great job for four days.
This was a really fun one! My most obvious suggestion would be to use a pixel font that fits the scale you want your game to be at. A lot of pixel fonts have only a specific pixel size (and it's multiples) they function at, and with how blurry and difficult to read the text was, it would definitely be of help. Other than that, some of the levels got REALLY long, and not being able to view the entirety of my pathing and edit the middle of it really detracted to the puzzle element, and became kind of about how well you can execute a 30 step program. I did have a good time though. Great job!
I appreciate all the nice words :) I plan to at least make the game completable and add a few QOLs, expanding on the narrative also sounds good but that'd just exponentially increase the game's complexity in the back end so would have to do a whole refactor lolol. Will look into it, but regardless, I'm glad you enjoyed :D
Whatever has been finished is really cool. I myself had difficulty with branching dialogue, and seeing a full game about it makes me appreciate it all the more haha. Great writing on behalf of Ella. Writing that actually flows is hard, but it worked really damn well at conveying emotion. Great work!
WOOHOO BEAT IT FIRST TRY. Very fun roguelike. Felt a bit too easy to the point where a lot of the new balls felt like fluff (I never took damage so I'm not even 100% sure what the trigger for damage was). Other than that though it was great, and having it all contained on the same screen was kind of ingenious design. Great work!
Apart from haha funny hamster running, there was an immense lack of actual gameplay, even when looking into clicker games. Usually you want to at least have the player be able to do something, be that by adding little side games to interact with, or having your currency go up so fast that they are constantly buying upgrades. This one felt a little slow in comparison sadly, even though I did find the upgrades funny, and the wheel speeding up also equally goofy.
Great little metroidvania platformer! I think my biggest gripe would be some awkward platforming layout. There were many times I couldn't wall bounce because there was a platform above my head. It didn't feel like it added to the difficulty but just added to the clunkiness of moving around. I really do like the wall bounce idea though and when it works its very fun to use. Great job for four days.
This is great for a first jam submission. Probably way better than my first ever entry, but there are many things that could use improvement. I apologize in advance if I'm sounding critical. I just think feedback is important when you're starting out (none of the comments I saw below are really giving feedback so I'm going to be a bit harsh to compensate). For one the player control is not up to par with a platformer game. It seems like all that you had code wise was velocity.x = whatever movement direction you're pressing while jump was just a flat adding y velocity. What's missing here is stuff you can find if you searched up and looked and other people's character controllers. It's stuff like coyote time, variable jump height, acceleration/deceleration and just stuff to make the platforming actually feel fun. Apart from that, the movement feels very floaty, which could be good in certain games, but I feel detracts from this one by slowing it down immensely. Another thing I noticed was that I kept getting stuck on random tiles for no reason (if this was purposeful it was not a well implemented mechanic as it felt like a glitch, but I assume it was a bug). This is most likely due to there being a weirdly aligned collision box, and since the character is a box, it gets stuck on the smallest edge. My suggestion for this is to make your player's collision a capsule (and also to double check your collision lol). This was you will be able to roll over small pixels of collision that might accidentally get left behind (checking collision of floor though should definitely come first). Those were my gripes with the main movement, and things that I feel you could definitely improve upon if you just knew where to look. Apart from that, I think your main idea was interesting, but implemented in possibly the most tedious way. You play a level, and repeat it while adding stuff to the end of it. That in itself means I would be replaying a high amount of sections over and over again without any change, and you have to wait for narrator every time. The narrator could easily have been speaking in the background while the player got on with the platforming. I see you tried spicing it with the weird effects, but with no way to predict them and use them to your advantage means they chalked up to a "huh what was that" while I continued to jump the same jump for the 5th time. Also if the collision weirdness I mentioned previously was one of these effects, please add more visual indicators. Stuff like screen shake goes a long way for these big moments. If there's no visual feedback to being stopped by an invisible wall (and that wall is bypassed by jumping), it is indistinguishable to bad geometry and feels unfair. Art wise I think you did great. It's a bit simple, but its cohesive, and audio wise, I suggest you look into editing sound effects in a 3rd party software to make them feel like they came from the same game. As of right now, these sound effects feel like they're all from different games and don't mesh together at all.
Overall, I suggest you focus more on the movement of a 2d platformer than you otherwise did. In platformers, it's all about getting to the platforming, and for the character to be enjoyable to control, while also having some sort of interesting mechanic. In this entry, I feel like you worked against yourself here with the way you implemented both the level design and player controller, shafting your ability to make the weird glitches into actual gameplay elements.
I hope this little rant was semi helpful and wont be passed off as the ramblings of a rando online. This was a great first entry to a jam. Congrats on submitting and I'm hopeful to many more after this.
I think the lasso mechanic was literally done the best way it could possibly be done. Fantastic feeling mechanic. The control of the character was also really good, but I had trouble finding ways to actually gain the speed I felt I should be getting from a sonic esk game. The levels were pretty good (could maybe use some more of those fun lassos), and the music was great too. I think the weakest part of the game was the art which was still really great. Especially the character which was super expressive. I just think that the world itself was undercooked comparatively, and the background was really busy. Other than that though, great project I had a LOT of fun with this one.
Call and response was really good, and it felt fun running around the stage. Only thing I wished for is if there could be puzzles using both characters, as in its current state it kind of just feels like go to a location... twice. I think the game would play the exact same if it was just one guy going to the checkpoints. (except then there would be no infinity tail and the infinity tail is really cool). I really liked the presentation. Good job! (died on cycle 9 D:)
I love how this game looks and sounds. It feels polished like crazy and can't believe it was made in 4 days. Only thing is that I really couldn't stand how unresponsive the jump was (i needed to wait like a full second after landing to jump again) and how long it took to respawn another bot. Has a lot of potential, but couldn't finish it with how slow it really went. If you update it post gmtk to make the gameplay smoother, I will definitely be coming back for seconds. The presentation was amazing, great job.