itch.io

I loved the use of parallax and flipping through the layers to find and avoid. The shapes in the dish were also masterful, especially with the alpha merging of the alternate layers.

I think maybe a little bit more time spent balancing the damage (even on level 4 I didn't ever really fear dying, as I was almost always healing faster than hindering myself, and could even ignore where I was going on levels 1-3). Also, I wonder the final strand of DNA seems to get to be a "where's Waldo" sort of game against the clock - I don't know if that was the goal.

Nice little stealth game, I liked that there were two types of objects in the level (static blocks and moveable vats) to make for different strategies. I believe there might be a bug in the current iteration of the game where the "play" button won't work if you first go to "settings" and then hit ESC.

oh, now this is what games should be! Delightful.

Nicely done - very clean, good use of the theme. Impressive for a week's worth of time.

Very polished, crisp and clean look, good sounds - nicely done. I was even impressed by your font choice.
Only thing I might wonder about is - would it be more interesting if there was a cost to just spamming down the fire button as fast as possible? (eg; a negative score for any bullet that leaves the screen without hitting an opponent, or having a clip reload timeout so that it makes sense to make every shot count).

Nicely done, good atmosphere, coordinated art, vfx, good collection of mini-games. I'm worried that I might be too dim to understand what presages a monster attack - I kept listening for sounds, or trying to spot clues as to when I should have my eyes shut - but I failed to understand just what I needed to be looking/hearing for in order to help me know when to close my eyes.

But damn, that's a nice jump scare... well done.

Like the music, and admire the amount of work I know went into setting up the track(s) in only one week. I think I would have appreciated a little more room to get to the target speed for the first speed trap, and for those gates I just had to keep playing the game over and over to remember where they'd open as my reflexes were not nearly good enough to avoid them. :)

Nice work with the card animations, and I like the robo-rally like card emulation.

I felt a little cheated with the implication that I should use my own graph paper to draw out the maze, as that's the exact sort of thing that a game is well suited to do - the player would still have the trial and effort of programming, and having to retrieve data recordings, but I'd think the slow resolution of the maze in front of the player as they experimented with random hands would be an interesting game loop.

That's the pain of game jams, there is never enough time. :)

I suspect your friend has much better reflexes than I do. I've never been able to launch with a better than 68% power (and, really, you don't want to know how many times I've failed to even clear the warp circle). Apparently my accuracy on the angle is much better, sometimes getting within +/- 3 of the optimal 45 degrees - but that doesn't seem to be enough to get the momentum for the flight time.

I tried again, and got all unlocks at green, but just never managed to get both accuracy and power close enough to optimal to get enough burn to reach the anomaly.

"Two guards? In this economy?!" hehe

What the others have said bears repeating, really nicely done - polished, professional looking, stylish, and the core game loop is solid. 

Nice take on the genre, loved the idea of a pigeon mafia. Good jobs the with models and the layout.
I was a little confused about "being seen by the neighbors". I saw the red lights turn on, and often they turned on right when I was in their area, but I saw no effect of them (as I quickly ran out of the red area). If they were a two phase event (eg; you get caught if you remain in the area past X seconds) I would have liked it if the danger area had a ramping up effect to help telegraph the effect.

Nice work on the tank and scorpion models - and the death animation was a nice touch.

Optimization wise there's a bit of a lag when a bunch of enemies die at once, I'm wondering if you're not already using object pooling for the scorpions if that would improve that performance a bit (rather than destroying enemies, just hide them and switch their position to off screen until you need them again for a respawn). 

Design wise I think I have to agree that the invisibility seems a little underused in this game, as besides at the very beginning it doesn't seem to help much. I wonder if there could be unlocks that could pair with it to make it more valid (eg; phasing - where you can pass through enemies when invisible, plasma shells - where you can still fire when invisible). Also it seems like maybe more iterations on balance (slow down initial enemy growth waves, rate of fire & AOE seem to ramp up really fast to be the solution to most problems, etc...)

Oh, a very satisfying progression game, nice use of sound effects and graphics. I enjoyed playing to the end. I think there might be a minor bug with your buttons as the "add seeds" and "add juice" buttons, if pressed mid-lemon-de-seeding, will have their text vanish but will remain bright green... They were disabled, and the text did change, so it wasn't a big deal.

Nice take on a progression game, and I wish I could have explored it longer, but I was locked behind hitting the anomaly - I had tons of credits, but never the skill to get the angle and thrust exact enough to make it to the anomaly, so, sadly, had to give up on the game when I suspected it was only just beginning.

I really liked the idea, and would have loved to dive into the hypertext, but I felt that the real time drain of sanity and battery were at odds with enjoying reading the text - I would have loved an option to link those drains to active scrolling rather than real-time so I could have time to think about each post. I loved the artwork and the direction of the piece, but would have loved to have more time to appreciate it.

Oh, I loved your use of the cursor, nicely done. The embedding of the UI to be elements around the central game map was also well done (and the little touches like the marshmallows in the coco and the power bar). I'm not sure I quite understood the game loop, and there might be a slight shader or asset loading hang right around the time you're selecting which spotlight to turn on (if it's a shader it might be fixed by pre-using it invisibly in the title screen) - or that could have just been a slow down in my browser.
Oh, the artwork was also really well done, very cozy.

Oh, very nicely put together. The smooth way the UI elements came out of the side and the combination of the sound and the text with the dialogs was very polished. Sadly platformers are not my forte, and my lack-of-skill stopped me a little while into the first level.

Really good use of illumination - the ping, darkness, and sound effects really gave a sense of tension to the exploring. Sadly my lake of skill at platformers probably stopped me from seeing much of the end game - but I really liked the feel for what I did see. If I had one wish it would be that the echo lightening effect would emit out from the player over time (so that the brightness would start closer to the player and then move outwards away from the player... to help give a feeling of pushing away the darkness).

Given that I was just praising another dev for adding an easy mode in their platformer game (I am HORRIBLE at platformers) I can see no flaws in your suggestion, you're absolutely correct.

Your comment makes this programmer very happy, thank you!

Thanks for  the feedback - and the pitch shifting is a good idea.

In hindsight we probably shouldn't have accepted the integrated UI when we didn't have an artist on our team and were just using assets. We kept struggling with a good way to indicate when you had a full brace of fish. Right before the deadline it occurred to me I could implement having bands of gold appear on the fishing rod with each fish caught, but it was so close to the deadline I wasn't going to risk implementation before the deadline.

As a programmer, you noticing the rope physics made my day. Thank you!
Also, yeah, I realized only too late that the sneaking should be a toggle - we did manage to add CTRL and SHIFT as alternative buttons to the SPACE BAR, but too late to change any of the dialog.

We had planned to have tons of mini-games for the various different fish, but, as ever, ran out of time. We were happy to have fit in at least three different ones (regular, ring, and the rare red-bubbles)

Oh, I certainly shouldn't be anyone's litmus test for platformer difficulty... the last time I was any good at them was around '96 with Mario 64. :)

oh yeah, time always gets away from me in these jams. It's almost amusing to look back on my notes at the start of the jam and to see all the things I thought I'd get in my game compared to what I actually managed to get in. Fortunately, there's always time after the jam. :)

I wonder if having a slightly different sound for the creature's impact, or maybe a growl right before it's impact, might help clue in the pilot that something's out there and gnawing at the ship.

I enjoyed the design of the ship, and the atmosphere of exploration.  The sound was also really immersive. Also, nice eel.

 If I could ask for two things to add they would be:
 
a) more variety of decorations in the various rooms so that I could mentally map my surroundings more. I got really lost in level 1, and even after three deaths worth of exploration I didn't know if I'd only been driving in circles, or seen most of the level.

b) some way to see behind me or know that the eel was right behind me - I was killed twice by being eaten from behind, and at first thought I'd bumped into something but only after my first death did I realize no, that the monster must have eaten me.

Oh man, so good. The atmosphere, the graphics, the sound, the game loop... all top notch. I kept wanting to go one more time, and eventually ran out of things to buy in the shop. Nicely done.
I did run into two very minor bugs - the first is if you're in the shop or the fishdex and hit S then you instantly drop your hook, but the "fish again" menu is still on the screen (no biggie, it can easily be dismissed). The second has something to do with the way the lightness/darkness as you descend - in a couple dives the light level changed quickly, which made me think that maybe a tween was being destroyed and reset (not at all sure that is what's happening, but that's the sort of effect I was seeing).

Oh, I loved the artwork, but would have also loved for just a little sound and music to accompany the game.

Are you planning on adding additional items to the shop, or did I just not get far enough in the game (I only saw Oxygen)?

Nice clean implementation - with a good use of contrast with the B&W 1 bit artwork and then the red hazards revealed each time you died.
Sadly, I am not at all skilled at platform games, and had to throw in the towel far too early, but nicely done. I liked the music as well.

Oh, I liked that there were a bunch of mini-games all within one larger game - and yeah, agree that it would be interesting to see humans implemented on the inside of the houses as well for that extra challenge of moving around inside. I was a little confused being sure, after the second chore, if I was completely done or not, as you're not told you should go back to the tree house until you've committed yourself and stepped outside the house. If there was a clearer signal that all chores inside a house were completed that might remove that bit of hesitation.

Oh, I love the use of light and sound. Very evocative, especially that laugh, I love a good evil laugh.

I'm pretty bad at platform games, so I was very appreciative of an Easy setting in the options menu. Sadly I didn't make it far past the acid level.

Nicely done!

Oh, I liked the parallax, and all the excitement of the other racers.  The music was nice to race to as well.

Mowing must be a young man's sport because I could never control the mower enough to get past the first level before all the gas ran out. Still, great graphics, interesting concept -- just wished I could have seen the rest of the game with the gophers and moving things out of the way.

Very nice graphical presentation of the cards, and an interesting mechanic. I agree with the other posters that a drag mechanic could help, especially if there was some sort of visual & auditory confirmation when a block or attack would be successful if played out.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that put forth a challenge where you erased some of the player's power as the game went on - nicely done combining it with tower defense. I never found out how to place new towers with the points spent, but I enjoyed the challenge of figuring out just which towers were least contributing to my success each wave.

One of the features I most wished to have is the ability to increase the run-speed of the game.

First of all, wow, that art style is really clean and works well with this game - nicely done. Second, well done on making a complete game in a single week, very nice. FPS is not normally my jam but I powered through two dozen levels of this game... woot! I also liked that the projectiles on both sides were slow enough to dodge, and yet still felt really satisfying in the throwing.

The primary thing I would want is a little more balance - I'm a horrible FPS player, but even I found the first dozen levels pretty easy. If it were me, I'd experiment with dropping the HP of the early level foes, but increasing their damage by a bit. You might want to check on the pathing as well, as there were a couple times that groups of foes seemed to be stuck behind a cluster of rocks or trees and they didn't unstick until you came around and shot them. Lastly, hiding behind cover seems to be way too rewarding for the player, maybe add an enemy that is a fast moving melee that will flush them from cover? or enemy grenades that will force a player to move before they explode? You're the devs, I'm sure you'll think of something.

Oh, there was a loading hitch the first time you hit an enemy... I suspect if you pre-load/use the shader before the combat portion of the game starts that should eliminate that.

Oh, I did like the sounds during combat - the integration of the FX and the sound brought the combat to life.

I like the fact that in mining the target tile heats up before it breaks, and this means that if you're trying to mine during an attack wave you can return to mining when there's a break in the enemies, and haven't lost all your progress - nice touch.

I searched for the shop, but never found it, and eventually died when I ran out of bullets.

Nice straight forward game design, which, frankly, is rarer than you'd expect. Well executed, and put together. I originally thought that a tutorial would be needed, but on reflection, playing a first game was all the tutorial anyone would need, the play is the explanation - so, no notes there. :) Nicely done.

Nice presentation - clean graphics and sounds. Well done. I think I would have appreciated a bit of tutorial or instructions before the first game, or even tooltips that appeared somewhere when a piece was selected. I also was not sure how to un-select a piece once selected but then had a second thought about using it.

That is a complete and polished game... in one week. Nicely done. Very nicely done.

Solid game mechanics, nice UI, nice UX, easily understandable, good presentation.

Seriously, take a bow, well done.