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I agree that the level design is quite confusing, with some extra time we would have liked to try make each area of the level visually distinct so there was less chance of getting lost (we still get lost ourselves).

This was my first game jam working in a team, and our main goal was to try some technical stuff we hadn't tried before.

The game involves you destroying a lab facility by wielding an ever-expanding pool of goo, which you can heat up and cool down by drawing magic runes in your spellbook!

Honestly its really cool to see how many people have commented on it and given feedback, and we've learned we should definitely try to set aside time to make a tutorial in the future! I'd advise reading the game's description to figure out what to do.

Goo Surge by Nijelous, JunkyX1122, HeavyMetalGameDev, benblack90 (itch.io)

Yeah, the damage feedback is definitely lacking, I would have liked to add some sort of screen burning effect to let the player know when they're being burned. Glad you enjoyed it anyway!

The game was actually supposed to have a visual to indicate which direction the spell was cast in, but it seems we accidentally did it such that it only shows in the Unity editor (silly, I know). And yes, the goo is definitely too unforgiving, we actually found a bug with the way it damages you right before we were about so submit so had to scramble to fix it, and I think that has caused a couple issues.

Thanks a lot for playing the game anyway!

I really like the perspective that the battles are fought in, its quite unique! I'm also a big fan of scrolling the map to look around the world instead of controlling a character, it definitely helps the game stand out.

We totally agree on those points, an arrow pointing to the objective was also an idea that I wanted to add but ran out of time to do. Thanks for playing anyway!

We'll probably do that, thanks for the tip!

Thanks, it took us a while to get it all working and I think because of that how "fun" the game was suffered, but there is totally a lot of room to make some cool stuff building on what we have so far!

A tutorial would have 100% improved it, I agree. As a team of programmers, I think we focused too much on making the mechanics cool instead of easy to understand. 

I also agree that finding things in the level is very hard and not clear enough, given the time I would have liked to add helper arrows that point to the next objective.

In fact, the "Destroy" objective isn't really an objective, just something you are being told to do! I think that was poorly communicated.

To interact with the goo, you have to cast spells on it by opening the canvas with right click and drawing the spell you want on it. Heating it up makes it spread faster and destroy things, cooling it down makes it slow and makes it more safe. The main idea of the game is to destroy the level until you find the schematics, then to leave the level.

I can't comment too much on the rune drawing mechanics as that was Nijelous who did that, but we wanted to try and make it quite lenient with the shapes since we only have two spells anyway.

Thanks for playing!

I think one of the main flaws is how confusing the game is, it seems like a lot of people are having that issue 😅 The downsides of not having any playtesting.

To cast spells, you hold right click, then draw the symbol for the rune you want to cast on the page that appears, and release right click to cast it! (The confusion may have been caused by the UI not scaling properly and parts of it missing, again our fault haha)

Ah that's a shame, none of us have ultrawide monitors so we wouldn't have been able to test that.

Unfortunately, I don't think we'll be able to get a WebGL build as we are using Compute Shaders for the goo mechanic, and WebGL does not support them (which is something we just decided to accept and to focus on making a playable, downloadable version).

Thanks for the comment!

The game definitely needed more playtesting, but we didn't find the time to do any unfortunately. The task list in the corner was quite a last minute thing, so I think that is certainly one of the biggest causes for confusion in the game. There isn't actually any way to check off the "Destroy" task, instead the goal is to find the schematics in the level (which unlocks the exit back at the player spawn) and to then reach the exit again.
Really appreciate the comment and we apologise for it being so unclear 😅

Yeah haha, the space thing was a debug that we forgot to remove :)

Thanks for the nice comment! The issues you mentioned with not knowing what to do was one of the ones we were worried about to be honest! We would have liked to have a tutorial level and multiple levels after that (instead of just one) but we decided to limit it to just the one for the jam. Thanks for trying it out!

https://nijelous.itch.io/goo-surge

Goo Surge, our entry into Pirate Software Game Jam 2024 is now out.

You are a goo wizard, an agent of the goo council. You have been sent to free the goo from the clutches of the scientists, steal the schematics of their so-called 'facility,' and then burn it to the ground... hopefully while also making good on your escape!

The gameplay involves drawing runes on your spell book to control the temperature of the goo, and to cause destruction while keeping yourself alive!

The main gimmick of our game is the simulation of the goo, executed on the GPU (Goo Processing Unit). This was done using Unity's compute shader functionality.

This was made in 2 weeks and was the first time doing a real jam for most of our team, so we hope you enjoy it!

This is the best thing since sliced bread

This game pleases the Goo Council.

Thanks!

The Everymovie is a small wario-ware inspired web game created for the NUCATS Game Jam 2023, with contributions from 3 people. It's also my first time publishing a game to Itch. It has minigames inspired by (well, parodying) classic movies, only using WASD and Space as a control scheme.

The Game Jam theme was "A Day At The Movies", and also had the prerequisite that it had to be a high score game.

Since it was created for a game jam (and we were also preoccupied with university work), the resulting game is small but I think it is a good proof of concept and a creative idea. Only 4 Minigames were added , with 2 partially finished minigames. The potential for more minigames is nearly infinite however (assuming movies continue to be made), and more minigames may be added if there is a reception for the game!

Nearly everything for the game was made by us, apart from some textures for the 3d renders and one sound effect, including music, sprites and programming, most of which was done by me.

You can play the game at this link, and feedback would be great!

https://funkyvalentine.itch.io/the-everymovie