itch.io

9/4/23

The game logo has a great animation, though it doesn't tell you too much about the game initially, maybe add some of the physical attributes you get

The transformation of the player's appearance with power-ups is always a winning touch

> Powerups remind me of Risk of Rain with how it shows the stacks, programming this kind of system should have great carry over knowledge for more projects. Re-working to have different areas to go to like RoR could expand the game greatly. Certainly look to it for more inspiration if you want to push the project further.

More interesting movement would make me play longer since you don't aim to shoot, and would help make it feel more unique and engaging. I did notice a slight glide after holding the input but it makes you have to jolt and stop a lot and I couldn't tell if it was a bug

I liked there was support for keyboard only since you didn't have to aim, but it wasn't immediately obvious

Showing the nearest enemy to be hit would be useful

> Atomicrops kept enemies interesting by changing up their movement, sometimes they would spin in circles, or zig-zagging, which makes them more interesting to avoid, especially when one enemy might push you into the path of another's

> I had fun 100%ing Shutshimi, where powerups would change up gameplay along with bonuses to stats, say u get cannon balls, your projectiles now fall but do more damage, which works as a great way to keep content feeling fresh longer. I could easily see the powerups that show on your character each also having tradeoff effects that stack to make things more fun

Being able to complete the wave by adding time for killing enemies could be a nice change

Add time of safety after being hit, death is instant if caught in a group which is an awful way to end a run

I didn't realize for many matches that your currency was also health

The sound effects and number popups work great for feeling impactful

The environment is largely lackluster, giving the outer region any visual instead of black would be a huge start

I found myself wishing there were obstacles to work around, something like whales that move through could be cool, maybe you have to avoid that area after a warning, since just going wherever for the most part isn't as engaging

The shop menu works well and the selection out of three works great for this game, the bonus of discounts is awesome. Drop the minus symbol on the prices. It could feel less still with the addition of animations. Different colors could help identify when there's larger percent numbers

Piercing and bounce sound arbitrary, hard to tell what they do

After a certain point since the upgrades get more expensive and enemies get more health you go rounds without being able to get any powerups which made it feel improperly balanced

Fun game overall, would love to see it finished further. Had a great time playtesting and writing up this feedback

-Healz4Life 👽🤘

8/27/23

🎮 Dumpster Diving: What a mesmerizing itch page you've crafted! Placing the logo on top is a stroke of genius, and the background perfectly captures the essence of your infinite-scrolling game. Consider embedding the game on the main page for a snug fit without needing to go full screen; the aesthetics would surely shine through.

🌟 By retaining your name logo on the page, you'd create an unmistakable signature for your future creations – a move that ensures recognition and excitement for what's to come.

🌟 Flashbacks to the golden days of playing games on Cartoon Network's website as a kid – the highest accolade for evoking nostalgic charm!

🎨 The splash of color against the backdrop of black and white is a visual triumph. A flawless 10/10 for both color scheme and art style; the cartoon aesthetic is an absolute winner.

🦝 The concept of a trash-diving raccoon as a metaphor for diving deeper is sheer genius. And the execution is equally commendable – a masterclass in bringing a creative idea to life.

🛠️ Talk about a game jam marvel! Your creation is a polished gem from top to bottom, leaving me awestruck. If you're willing to share the magic behind your process, I'm all ears – how did you manage to craft such a complete experience, especially as an early submission?

🏃‍ The seamless progression of levels with increasing challenges caught me by surprise – a feat that's truly impressive, especially considering the time constraints of a week.

⚡ The sense of speed and the rapid progress achievable within a short span is an exhilarating aspect of your game. It instilled a fantastic rush of excitement!

🎯 The assortment of simple yet varied obstacles and power-ups is a stroke of brilliance. While the obstacles were straightforward to grasp, the source of collectibles remained a bit harder to keep track of where each came from.

🎶 The music establishes a thematic harmony, initiating the game on a high note. However, as playtime increased, the melodies began to wear thin and become slightly bothersome. A couple of alternate tracks and a mute option could effortlessly address this. Moreover, the prospect of varying tracks according to levels could add an exciting layer of dynamism.

It's evident that you know what you're doing, and the result is a game that stands tall as a true game jam marvel. Your ability to balance complexity and simplicity while delivering an engaging experience is laudable. May your journey continue to unfold with more such incredible creations!

-Healz4Life 👽🤘

8/27/23

📸 The cover image immediately hooked me; I couldn't resist diving in to explore what those intriguing arms could interact with!

🔍 The canvas is so expansive that I had a treasure hunt locating the fullscreen button! A bit of a challenge before the real challenge, eh?

🎮 Kudos on the slick menu UI! Though, to spare my eyes some travel time, slightly shrinking those longer texts would be grand.

🌟 Transitions that deserve a standing ovation - they really swept me off my feet and into the gameplay seamlessly!

🐭 Mouse-only controls: pure genius for a jam. The controls were as crisp and refreshing as a sea breeze. (Just make sure to change the space to begin to a click)

🔄 Missed the memo about retracing my steps to the start, only realizing it posthumously during a playful demise. Initially, I instinctively attempted a return after capturing both photos, drawn by the allure of the luminous water, a captivating effect that stole my attention, making me think there was more to find from it.

💥 The hurt and death effects were a spectacularly satisfying splash of creativity!

📷 While I was trigger-happy with the camera, I hoped for a photographic marvel featuring intricate pixel art wrecks or real-world wonders on the screen. A golden chance for a snap-worthy moment!

🌊 The environment style struck a unique balance, melding smooth landscapes with pixelated textures. A masterstroke that really came alive with the fine seaweed details.

🎶 Thoroughly enjoyed the musical ambiance; it was the perfect seasoning for the experience. Craving more, I found myself daydreaming about seamless transitions into different tracks as the journey delved deeper. If the project blossoms further, this could be a captivating addition!

🏞️ My adventurous spirit wished the first level had offered a sneak peek into the easy cave, with the rest of the levels unfurling into a cascade of challenges that escalated with every obstacle dodged. A rollercoaster I was ready to ride!

🌟 Noticed the absence of your name logo on the project page – a little personal touch goes a long way in leaving your mark on the creation!

📣 Taking a step further, sharing your masterpiece on the Brackeys Discord could usher in a wave of engagement and appreciation from fellow creators. A chance to exchange feedback and sprinkle some feedback love across the community! While I couldn't rate the project firsthand due to not submitting myself, there's an ingenious strategy at play – reciprocating feedback on others' pages. Pay it forward and nurture a garden of collaborative growth. Kudos!

Keep up the fantastic work, and may your next venture dive even deeper into the sea of gaming brilliance! 

-Healz4Life 👽🤘

8/23/23

I liked the mechanics added to this type of platformer with the fire jets and cannons you can fire, level design worked well. If the collision for the player was more accurate it'd feel a lot better, along with that also making the player still move when running up against collisions rather then having that sticky wall effect. The pixel art comes across as just being the art style because it was the quickest to make, if you make the resolution match for each object it'd highly improve the style. The idea of exploring deeper would be a lot more interesting if there was some kind of background showing what changes as you get deeper, although the color change was a good first prototype to show that's where that kind of detail could be.

Overall nice job getting as much done as you did regardless of what could be improved, but it certainly would be cool to see the effort made to have extra polish before the jam is over. Having something up that works before submission time is a feat of it's own.

Some good info to learn from and improve your work:

https://saint11.org/blog/consistency/

And for just finding a good color scheme:

https://lospec.com/palette-list

In-depth feedback 

(Since I enjoy breaking down mechanics and trying to figure out where the improvements could be, and felt like putting in some extra playtime)

Overall:

Great use of a maze game, allowing for a very repayable loop with easily trackable progression. Surprisingly completed for a early submission, I congratulate your team members for doing their part quite impressively.

Initial intro:

Strong, setting a higher quality level right away with correct atmospheric music, complete with volume slider letting you know to enable PC sound

The cheese icon subtly indicates this game should be fun

The design of the mouse is cool and gives me an early 2000s vibe with something like an i-dog

Menu:

Since the main menu is already similar to the growth scene it could be nice to combine the two with a transition of the camera and fade into audio

The buttons having a wait period after clicking is slightly aggerating, but would feel more purposeful if the buttons were visually shown to not be accessible during the wait period. Since they are interacted with often it'd be nice if they had more focus on polish.

Text on the left showing stats is hard to read, should at least be bold

Particles when petting would be nice polish

The buttons make the animal seem more mechanical like you have control over it, but it leaves me feeling like the options should be more interactive, maybe by showing the device controlling it. If it's more sentient maybe interact with a pellet dispenser, have the cheese stacked up in a dish where you can drag them over, show a hand icon where you can pet, and have a 3D button with some glow that has dance taped over it.

Alternatively, using buttons with 3D object icons like the Dreamcast main menu would be fitting (worth the google search)

The science log should use a constant size and be on a scroll. Arrows could easily look nicer stretched taller, colored white, button BG hidden.

The options on what to level up only really left me choosing one the whole time, which was speed.

Main level:

Showing 3D rotating models on the screen for collecting cheeses would be more fun than numbers.

It'd be funny if the cheese models were partially the matching color but also resembled some small piece of an actual cheese, like a chunk of blue cheese.

I found myself wondering if moving towards the mouse might be more fun, which can also easily be replicated by a mobile joystick. Input system integration would quickly get this project available for other platforms.

The bushes look nice and add well to the PS era look well

Would be cool if the cat-dog thing was able to flatten bushes, the outside wall could be made out of a different material. I also liked the extra particles when they did walk though them. I also liked that they slowed down in them.

The audio for the cat-dogs walking through bushes was really smart to include as you can tell their position and it makes the NPCs feel more reactive making sounds around the environment.

I only for a moment cared about the cat-dogs as an obstacle as I just ignored them after the first few times, though their pathing and how often they came across me seemed well done.

The tail moving more dynamically would be a nice layer of frosting

Ending:

The ending was very abrupt, triggering before I even saw the exit

It was hard to tell if there would be an ending, but the notes gave a sense of progression.

I found myself wondering if there could be some kind of Portal moment with a gap in the bushes to escape, and some beautiful landscape to escape to with the scientist friend.

The camera could pan to first person where you think you have the option to escape, but then your heart still gives out since you need the upgrade to survive outside the maze.

I think it would make sense to allow you to return to the mouse training after the current win. Couldn't finishing reading through the logs.

It would be cool if there was another objective to collect all cheeses in one run.

The story:

The cat-dogs were never mentioned

Babs should maintain memory through generations as a plot point

The people checking the logs joke felt dragged out a bit

The characters described seemed funny and I still overall like the story told, while I also think the gameplay reason (in this case saving the world by training this mouse)  should be further expanded upon.

I've found ChatGPT can help come up with nice ideas for story when you tell it what your game is about, can also help write or improve upon story pretty fast by coming up with some alternate ideas to compare against.

Done quite well within the submission time! Nice job putting in some polish into effects, I like that when you kill enemies they turn into chunks of red. The WebGL canvas is set oddly, it's width should be smaller and you shouldn't need to use itch's fullscreen if properly set as you can use the other button automatically there. If you were to update the game, look into having the sprites move more smoothly as rn there's a lot of jitter, the camera is smoothed out nice though :) Ammo being a bar as it is now is a bit strange for shooting bullet sprites, I'd much prefer an alternative that shows a numerical amount better, same goes for health, I'd prefer something like hearts, and health where it only takes something like 3 hits to die so I can make use of souls more often. Very good project to build upon, lots you can do with it, it's interesting that it's a dungeon crawler type with more of a space shooter movement type, I'd lean into it more and see what you can come up with.

Great entry, very nicely done within submission time! Though the itch page should be given some love, I was surprised to see this game had so much custom art, I almost didn't play this entry because there was no screenshots. The Itch viewport settings were also set wrong and I can't use the good fullscreen button because of it, disable the other one if you fix the veiwport. An easy thing to change would be to downsize the UI buttons as I found they cover the nice art too much. The idea is nice and was accomplished well, but since the time countdown is a major part of it it'd be nice to see the timer always on screen, maybe the interactables (like the clock) can do something like add +5 time instead and you can have once for each level. Look forwards to seeing more!

Props getting it to run on WebGL after getting my request to! Can't say I've seen a turn based game around the idea of going through walls as a ghost, which matched the theme well as a twist on a genre. Cool you were able make use of custom assets, sounds, lighting, and the materials for the points of interest. It'd be nice if your skybox was set to color black btw as long as the lighting isn't connected. Would be cool to see more levels, but nicely done finishing with a playable one and main menu in time for the deadline :D

I also like how your submission page looks, I could see that art style being pretty fun in another jam!

Nice job completing this in time! I liked how the controls felt, and noticed that moving things animated smoothly. I noticed you could collect the skulls when a unicorn is by/behind it and speedran a gameover because I didn't know that I wasn't supposed to but had fun. I played through it again doing it the way I was supposed to and it didn't appeal as much. Maybe lean into it more somehow, have something you can collect that spawns overtime to do it with and make the skulls not be sucked up by the player. Always appreciate custom art for projects, a drawing of a long tongue that's moved with the tongue and masked by the red rectangle would make a great addition so that all art is custom, and it'd be nicer to see just painted/penciled instead of only some digital if it can't all be done in time. Also wondering how the cursor ended up only working on part of the screen. Nice entry overall, made a good minigame.

Fun submission to come across! Consistent and polished art, always nice to come across jam games that don't need to use placeholders. Can't say I've ever played a game that used these controls, a quick tutorial at the start to swipe to the side once and space once before it starts would be a great addition. Also noticed this was submitted to multiple jams and realized death being good wasn't really seen in this entry, but regardless.. Look forwards to seeing more, love the bonus memes!

Nicely done, I'd say your team ended with some fully prototyped ideas and it was cool seeing what you thought of using them. These puzzles remind me of some puzzle areas throughout Undertale, I could see myself playing something where these happen on the occasion but it was a little too relentless for me to finish. Would love to see this with some more love put into art consistency as well. Overall the improvements I can think of would mostly just be polish though so once again great job for getting it to this stage by submission time and I wasn't expecting the mechanics! Cool twist on controlling multiple characters by having to make patterns with them as well :)

Finally BioTech updated their website!

Would make for a great mini-game in an open world game! Cool entree :) Really cool keeping up with what you come out with, if you want some extra help for a jam lmk!

Cool game! Would love to see this expanded upon more :)

Maybe do some more goofy shenanigans to the other normal twists onto these types of games like Atomicrop's farming and bosses every few stages

cat is forever

Only was able to get out a little demo in time, many of the features weren't finished, but it's still a little something to show. Other then selling items, you can throw gold around, and test out the weapons. Glad you liked the art style :) I also think my teammate did an excellent job on it.

Awesome!
It's astounding you put this together in a week as a solo entry.
Only thing noticeably buggy was getting stuck on collision when trying to jump over things.
I would totally play more🤘Keep up the great work.

Hey thanks for the comment! Only was able to get out a little demo in time, but after doing a few things in the van, the player will be put into a bank heist. We will totally continue working on this and I can let you know when we get to a more finished version!

"Making everything from scratch is not mandatory..."

Didn't get to try this out since I didn't know this would be multiplayer only :P
On the itch.io app the install isn't working btw.

What are you talking about?

No problem! Good to hear that there will be a post jam version.
Something like the right enter key could be good :)
Keep up the good work.

Cool game, more fun then I was expecting! Is there an ending?

Very well done, quite surprised on how polished this is, while also having well thought out levels.
(* ﾟ∀ﾟ)ﾉｼ

Nice job! Game was well scoped and I fully understood how to play it start to finish. I also like that there's faces on everything :)
The player sprite is strange and that's usually fine but it got in the way of me understanding where the sprite collides with things.
Arrow key support would be nice, the R key wasn't the best choice for enabling water, as I couldn't both press right and R at the same time comfortably.
The different death messages were a nice touch, keep up the good work and I look forwards to seeing more!

Very charming, I thoroughly enjoyed playing through this lil game!
I would usually add upon this, but it's perfect as-is :)

Amazing job with this! I've tried to re-create Run 2 before in Unity and know how tricky some of this stuff can be to figure out, very impressive that you were able to do this for a game jam.
The movement is quite a bit floaty, it would be nice to be able to do smaller jumps, and hold jump for bigger ones.
I look forwards to seeing more of your work!

Yooo! I was able to finish the game this time, awesome to see that you patched it so quick. ⭐
Game def looks a lot better, creature at the bottom looks pretty sick. 🤘
(The outside sprites seem to not be set to point still though btw)
First time around I only used the first generator, lol, the first door opens from clicking, so I assumed the rest would too.
The shaky creature made me think I couldn't get the gear next to it without doing something else first.
Great job, and keep up the good work. 👍

Idea was scoped well and the game felt well done, I used to play games like this as a kid, so it was cool to play your version. 👍
I wasn't expecting the level theme to change, and was definitely surprised in a good way, it could be cool to have the colors change as you get further or something too, or some sort of change up, like how subway surfers has different sections you get put through.
I liked the tan color theme the most, maybe have the game switch up the colors to a every new run, so people playing notice it, as it could do the same one all three times they decide to play.
I could for sure see you having some games up on the app stores soon!

Hey, fun game, I definitely liked the progression of difficulty throughout the levels as well as being able to rotate my gear on any surface. 👍
I didn't actually get how the bubbles worked until the third level, and just figured out I can hold space and up to jump a bit higher after a while.
I'd say keep the hold longer jump thing if it had it's own level explaining it, as it could be a good mechanic, as shown in stuff like Super Meat Boy, which this reminds me of.
It would be a major plus if the bubbles respawned after something like 3 seconds, so you don't get trapped in the second room, or maybe have one type that respawns and one that doesn't, and then just show you can press something like R to restart the level for the ones that don't respawn.
In the last level being on the moving gears made it to where it was hard to just press jump, I thought maybe they were there so you could get some momentum before going on the bubble but, it seems like you just cant jump if your moving on one of them which was strange, maybe make a level where it explains where you have to stop to move on them? Also the jump from the bubble to the wall was a bit too far I think :P
I look forwards to seeing more in the future, I could see you being a master at level design if you stick with it!

Haha, good job with this game! It was easy to understand what to do which I appreciate, and a nice quick play.
I won in my second try since I cheated a bit, I'd recommend along with the random projectiles falling, also have one every once in a while that falls right where the player is, so you can't get away with staying in one spot.
The simple scoped gameplay works well, and made it to where you got a good finished product in time, I look forwards to seeing more!

The perspective used feels quite unique, and the HTML version actually worked perfectly for me as far as I could tell 👍.
Something a bit tricky was trying to figure what I was supposed to do, I thought okay, maybe I'm the square, and I tried pressing the arrow keys, I then read the description and realized I had to use the mouse, but still didn't get how to move the square, eventually I moved a gear and was like oohhh, lol.
Locking the gears in place could be good, but I think it might be more interesting if you find a way to make the gears moving around like that a feature, it was kinda funny they kept popping out of place, making me have to rush to get to the next set of gears.
I look forwards to seeing if this gets improved upon, and get some more levels in the future, cheers!

Hey, spooky game 👍, sound design works well with the gears over the whispers.
I noticed a few small you could do to make playing the game a bit smoother:
Change the sprite Filter mode settings from Billenear to Point. (This should get rid of the blurriness on things)
On your itch project page change Go to Edit page, then to the section called Embed, then change "Embed in page" to "Click to Launch in fullscreen" so that the game starts in fullscreen, as it's scaled a bit funny otherwise.
Either showing what the controls are in the project page description or in game would be very helpful. 
Most of then doors when I click them seem not to do anything, making it to where I can't finish your game :P
Neat game, and I look forwards to seeing more games from you in the future!

I won 👑