itch.io

Did you miss that you can refill your health by leveling up? So you hit 4-5, get enough xp, level up, that gives you another five hearts to work with. The cost to level up keeps rising, but you also gain total hearts as you do. By the end of a full clear you're working with 15hp.

Other than that, main thing is that there's rules to where things are placed. Different creatures have different rules, figuring them out can let you know things that you couldn't just from basic minesweeper rules. Look at the screen after losing, you'll start noticing patterns.

Ah, TIL how the lovers really work. That should help my speedrun attempts.

That's gotta be pretty close to the maximum I think you could get (assuming we're not counting 800, surrounded by mines). If the top  left was a corner, you could get 10+7+7 in the top row, both 9s in the next row, then 8+8+11 in the bottom row, for a total of 69 in the middle. I can't  think of a way to top that without breaking some level-gen rule, and it would take incredible luck to get there. Getting three 8s would require giving up the 10, and that loses you more points overall.

You need to get a lot of gold and other "points for no hp", as early as possible - that means each Heart gives you more total HP. Getting the mine king as soon as you have 10hp is an important one, then hitting all the mines you can find, but there's still some luck.

I hit a crash that I think is different from the ones others have reported - after taking the "hers" option, a bit later it crashes with:

While processing text tag {n} in 'YOU — Shall we keep going with the counting thing, or..?{n}'.:
File "renpy/common/00nvl_mode.rpy", line 395, in do_display
renpy.display_say(

Exception: Unknown text tag 'n'

And yeah, it's a shame the game's not actually playable all the way through, because the writing so far has been excellent.

Great concept, but feels like it needed a little bit longer to cook. It's not so much a game as it is a comedy in ragdoll physics.

I'm impressed with how many levels you managed to include. I wasn't able to beat the last one but they're all pretty good.

Yeah, I just cannot figure out how to do anything. First time I didn't even find the phone, I headed off in completely the wrong direction and never saw anything but cones and mountain. Retried, found where I was actually supposed to go, but I've gotten completely stumped. I get that I'm supposed to recreate a certain song, but none of the bells seem to play the correct notes. One time I seemed to trigger something by walking through the columns, but I couldn't figure out if that was part of it or not.

If the game played faster, maybe I could experiment enough to figure it out. But when just moving between bells takes so long, and then you have to wait for the long audio sequence to finish, it becomes too tedious to play. I know you were going for some slow, spooky vibes, and you nailed that, but I think it came at the cost of gameplay.

I see we both had some similar ideas, even if we went in different directions with them. Your combos work a lot more interestingly than mine.

My biggest critique is that the early bits are very grindy. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but the second fight takes me absolute ages to get through, even though I'm never at risk of dying. Really, the only threats in the game are the dragon, and yourself. If I had a nickel for every time I've died because I combined a beam spell with the knockback-pulls ring, and sucked an enemy straight into me and instantly died, I'd have two nickels.

Still a great game. I'll probably keep trying it until I get a run through.

Pretty fun, although yeah, there's a lot of mechanics you clearly didn't have time to actually make use of. I only used the rifle/SMG after already beating the game pistol-only, I never needed to turn the NVGs off, the keypad doesn't seem to have a code anywhere, and the ammo pickups are useless since there's only like ten enemies.

But hey, it was fun enough that I went back and tried to beat it again, pacifist, so you did something right.

Was the "our base is under attack" scripted when you got past a certain point? It seemed to trigger even though no enemies should have seen me, and they went in a completely wrong direction.

I struggled a lot to figure out how to actually make a ring. Took me a while to figure out you needed to hold the hit button down to strike harder, and I'm still not quite sure how you control which ring shape gets made. I thought it was based on which ring you'd "selected" from the book but that doesn't seem to work quite right.

Cool idea though, and impressive quality for such little dev time.

I love how this looks! Pity there's no actual game here. You weren't lying when you called it barebones.

I'm not sure if I missed some mechanic, or if the difficulty is just tuned too high, but I could not beat the boss. I could get him stunned, sometimes, but he'd fly too far away to chain any other hits into before he got back up, and I was doing barely any damage.

It sounds like you're planning to keep working on it, and if so, I'll be interested in where it goes. Seems like it has some potential.

The prefix selector does check that there's at least ten words you can make with that prefix, at least one of which fills up the whole word. Your options were "zack", "zaire", "zakah", "zakat", "zamia", "zany", "zarf", "zayin", and maybe "zacat" due to some weird character encoding issue with "zacatón", I haven't actually tested it. And if you had six letters to use, you'd also have "zaddik", "zaffer", "zander", "zanier", "zanies", "zanily", "zapped", and "zareba".

No, I don't know what most of those words mean, either. I used an existing public-domain word list. "List every word in the English language" was well out-of-scope for a two-week jam.

RNG is just mean like that sometimes. There were several times during playtesting when it would come up with exactly one word I could play, and if that wasn't enough to kill, I was just screwed. Such is the nature of roguelikes, I guess.

Thanks for playing, glad you liked it!

This is kind of unplayable, which is a shame because the art is great and I think the idea is solid.

Not having any sort of death-respawn system means if you mess up, you need to Alt+F4 to try again. The movement seems very jank, like a jump catapults you skyward but you only inch along sideways or forward, so what should be simple platforming is a challenge. There's not even great feedback on when the bell is "recharging". And like Wuzey brought up, I had to turn my mouse sensitivity down to 5% of normal in order for it to be even sort of playable.

The game really needed more time to cook, I think. I like the idea, a platformer where you need to memorize the locations of invisible platforms could be cool. But there's so many rough edges we can't even feel the core concept underneath them.

Yeah, two weeks is not a lot of time to experiment with stuff. You got something done, that's enough to be proud of.

I'm seconding the STRAFTAT vibes. I'm not too sure how much the rings actually contributed - the health regen, sure, but I beat the final boss 12-0 without using the sprint and barely using the double-jump. Maybe if they'd been more splashy - a ring that gives your bullets ricochet, or explode, or something.

Yeah, the lag was pretty brutal by the end. Might need some way to auto-despawn enemies that are too far away?

I had fun though!

Oh yes, this is a game that knows how juice works. Simple concept but excellent execution of it!

Feels like there was supposed to be more. Multiple levels of building bigger and bigger rings, adding more moons that can help grab more ring dust, movement based on orbital physics instead of simple straight motion. It's a neat concept but it seems spartan, even for a two-week game jam.

Earth do need a ring tho.

Neat idea, simple but effective. Liked the keys being differentiated by shape and not just color.

First thing I'd focus on if you were to try to expand it, is polishing up the movement, I was always getting caught up on doorways.

I like the concept, but the game's pretty tough, or maybe just not well-tutorialized. I only managed to get through the first wave once, and I could only afford a few upgrades from it, not enough to survive the next round.

Very basic, but considering I barely had an idea in shape by the 36-hour mark, still impressive.

Is there an intended way to get the rings that are behind a wall? Or are you just supposed to tank that hit?

It was a very barebones parser! Just over 150LOC. It only handles paths, no other shapes, and it can't handle any sort of curves. If you manage to extract the SVG you can even see where I left shapes or text in there, for layout purposes. It definitely saved time when it came to creating art, converting things by hand into draw commands took literal hours.