itch.io

This is a really cute spin on the Slay the Spire formula! The idea of splitting upgrade paths between different schools of magic is really neat. I absolutely cleaned house with my permafrost boneling deck. It could use some tuning in the balance department, though, as the game is a bit on the easy side.

That was a neat puzzle room! It looked like there was more planned that you just couldn't find the time to implement, and it would've been really cool to see what other brainteasers you would've included given the chance. I especially liked what little bits of world building you included in the environment details. I'm really curious what sort of bonkers amoeba creature needs xenon, argon, oxygen, radon, chlorine, uranium, and literal fire in its environmental control system.

That was a lot of fun. The movement was responsive, the mechanics and the visual feedback from obstacles were super intuitive, aside from one thing. I couldn't get the diagonal dash to work with keyboard controls, so I ended up switching over to a controller, which frankly I should've been using from the beginning. It's crazy how many levels you managed to put together here while still having the platforming challenges be both exciting and reasonably difficult. Had a blast! I finished with eight flowers, though I suspect I missed a few toward the end.

Neat little game! As far as I can tell, all of the bonus effects seem to work as intended, except perhaps the enemy speed multipliers. That's pretty hard to pull off. My run eventually ended when one of my bullets started looping across the screen infinitely and caused the game to crash, which is probably just as well, since otherwise it might have gone on indefinitely. With a little bit of tuning, this could be the core of a really fun wave survival game.

Love a good old-fashioned zelda style puzzle/action rpg! I imagine it's quite a difficult kind of game to get working properly on a tight deadline. A few of the blurbs you get by examining objects gave me a good chuckle, and the restricted palette looked really nice, although it did cause a couple of issues. Reading text boxes was hell on the eyes due to the lack of contrast between the yellow and light blue, and it was often difficult to tell what pieces of the environment could actually be interacted with. The traps positioned right at the edges of screens were also quite annoying. Aside from that and a few minor bugs, I had a good time with this one!

This is a wonderful project. Considering that all of the visual assets were made within the 10 day submission period, it's incredible that you managed to make all of them, design a gameplay experience with a lot of fun challenges and a smooth difficulty gradient, and get the movement controls working so responsively before the deadline. This level of work is frankly aspirational. Excellent job, and congratulations on entering your first game jam!

This is great! Really excellent puzzles. Actually designing stages once you've got all the mechanics working is a lot of work, and you clearly put in the effort there. The conceit is super imaginative, and the transition from the sterile blue greys of the facility to the vibrant sunset in the completion screen made for a very effective send-off. Fantastic work.

Excellent game. When I booted this up, I was worried that I was going to end up sinking hours into this, but then it was over all too soon. The split between the overworld and randomly selected sub-stages is very reminiscent of Zelda II and similar styles of game, which when combined with resource collection mechanics and meta progression can make for an incredibly addictive gameplay loop. This scratched that itch just enough to make me reeeally want more. The movement and attacks were rather sluggish for a platformer, and I unfortunately couldn't figure out why wall jumps weren't giving me the height I thought they should, but the reverse high jump was a really fun inclusion and came in clutch a couple of times. One final note: for whatever reason, I was unable to explore the forest tile on the far right side of the screen. Just a heads up in case that wasn't just a time constraint thing.

Thanks so much! Cave Story is 100% a huge inspiration for me.

been listening to zealous star and jovian sunrise on repeat all morning fr

Cool multitasking game! The frantic energy here is absolutely spot-on. The controls and objective of the game are pretty obtuse, and the tutorial only really made things more confusing, but once you figure it out, it's a pretty good time. I still don't think I fully understand what the left click does. I think it just makes the target put down whatever they're holding? In either case, neither ability seemed particularly useful given how fast the little goblins can just go find something else to mess up. The game holds up just fine even without the mouse abilities, though. A very nice entry, all told. Congratulations on submitting to your first game jam!

Hmmm. I wasn't able to replicate anything like that. Did you try clicking on the pause menu buttons? I neglected to actually make the pause menu work with keys, so it unfortunately only takes mouse inputs. While I was mashing at the door with w and e, though, I did manage to find a different lock where the player character is stuck in the floating sprite and won't react to inputs, so that's fun.

Destructible terrain is a pretty ambitious thing to implement in such a short amount of time! I'm honestly surprised that I didn't fall through the geometry during any of my runs. Despite the simplicity of the graphics, the unsmoothed shading made them pretty easy on the eyes, and the cubic ores in particular are quite charming. This is the sort of concept that requires a lot of investment in a lot of different areas before it can really take off, but this is a very solid start.

Hey, thanks for commenting! It's honestly staggering just how many different edge cases can slip under the radar if you're not careful. I think this is what they call a teachable moment? I've uploaded a modified version of the game if you're interested in trying it out! (new controls in the description) https://hexafoil.itch.io/toggle-101

Very cool. Having the puzzle elements be color coded based on whether changes made to them were permanent was a great choice. Very intuitive. The true ending was cute!

Really awesome game! Best puzzles out of any I've played so far by a mile. I really liked level 7 in particular. Great job making the blocks seamlessly fall out of the ceiling, and the screen shake and particle effects when they hit the ground are an excellent touch. Also, 2D platformer with primary action mapped to left mouse click gang represent.

I love love looove Darkest Dungeon, and by extension the vibes this game is serving. Playing as the demon lord? Pretty good. Kael? My GOAT. There are some pretty sizeable flaws with the game balancing, but that's a pretty much inevitable consequence of the amount of content packed in this game outpacing the time and effort it would take to playtest everything. I'm sure other people have mentioned, but accumulating turns was, in my opinion, a bad choice for the health of the gameplay. It was also often difficult to glean important details about the gamestate from the ui. All that said, this game really grabbed onto me while I was playing it. Some excellent work went into this, and everybody involved should be proud of the result.

Oh gosh, the artwork here is so charming!

Very well put together project. All the moving parts function as they should, and the scope is nice and realistic. Parsing the ui did take some getting used to, but it's really easy to just ignore details like that entirely, so good on you for putting some thought into what information was important to convey.

I have no idea how you managed to put this together in just nine days. Absolutely incredible. No notes. I bet I could learn a lot from the programming architecture behind this.

Oooh, that's cathartic after the development period. Simple, but effective. It's pretty satisfying to save a beam power-up for one of the triple cannon enemies and then pop it to immediately get another one. Doubling Encreedem's comment, though. Adjustable volume settings would be very good to have.

Neato! Pretty bare bones, but all the most important pieces for a functional platformer are there. You included a coyote jump and everything...

Etty's design is really adorable, and I appreciate the sentiment of taking care of yourself before external considerations. Self-destruction is not the wellspring of creation.

Ooh, great fun, this one. It's tough without feeling super unfair, although it seems like the game will always  ramp up to the point where damage is unavoidable before too long. It feels like close attention was paid to the bandits shooting timing so that they don't just kill you instantly if they catch you on a reload, which is much appreciated.

Very cool mechanics here. Multitasking under time constraints always adds a lot of excitement to a game. The balance could just use a little bit of tuning, particularly with the amount of maintenance demanded by the second screen. Still, a lot of fun, and really stylish visuals!

Cute game. Great music. Fantastic visuals. I only wish the numbers weren't at the bottom so I could see more of the customers' sprites.

...And that my numpad worked on this.

To be honest, I find the "look in every nook and cranny until you find the one thing you're missing" style of puzzle to be really unfun. It would have helped to know that there were four pieces, yes, but even after I knew there had to be a fourth, it took me several minutes to find it. If you were willing to put even more work into this game than you already must have, then my recommendation would be to lock it behind another alchemy or mathematics puzzle. Those were really neat! But if that's too much, than all I can really think of would be to put it in a less concealed spot.  Then again, nobody else seems to have had trouble with it, so perhaps chalk that up to a difference in sensibility. I reiterate, though, I loved the game on the whole.

I was initially put off by the visuals, but I very quickly became hooked by the gameplay here. The exploration of trying to figure out what aspects to invest in for each type of business seemed very engaging. However, the fact that the business creation menu doesn't pause the income, in combination with just how quickly a run can just end with a few missed notifications or a few quick mistakes, really dissuaded experimentation. Since there's no real benefit to diversifying your businesses, it quickly became apparent that it was much easier and safer to just keep making the same type of business over and over until you win, even after unlocking the larger sized businesses. That said, there are the bones of an addictive and strategic tycoon game here. Keep up the good work!

Full disclosure, I decided to try this out based purely on the title. It's the sort of title that a theme song forms itself around in your head when you hear it. The game itself absolutely delivered as well. Definitely one of the most viscerally satisfying I've played thus far, especially once you get into a groove. The graphics, while simple, are very stylish and well-designed, and the tracks are absolute bangers. Great work on this one.

Excellent work. There's not much on display here, but it's more than enough to convey the ideas you're going for. I really appreciate the subtlety at play with the theming. It's really cool how you managed to make such a coherent and appealing visual aesthetic with so few art assets, and like Juder said, the unique mechanics in each section do a nice job of keeping things interesting. Congratulations for what you've accomplished here!

Very nice. I'm a sucker for gameboy green palettes, and the spritework is really adorable! I appreciate that you kept the scope manageable. It's a short experience, but solid and enjoyable all the way through. My only gripe is that it's difficult to know what the game wants from you sometimes, particularly during the cup and chess sections. That said, this would be exceptional work for an experienced jammer, much less a first-timer. My hat's off to you, fellow newbie.

The look of this game is really cool! A lot of inspiration can be seen in this project from a lot of sources, but for me it seemed to be giving Soul Reaver more than anything else. People have already commented on the movement bugs, so I won't go into specifics here, but I would like to bring up that there are certain places in the map I have no idea how I would've gotten to without using the super launch. Maybe that's what the wall climber ability was for, but I couldn't figure out to get that to work. Otherwise, the movement is pretty responsive, and even if it was a bit overtuned, grabbing onto ledges felt relly nice and snappy.  Great work!

It seems like there were a lot of features that were planned for this that never materialized, which is perfectly understandable. In its current state, the game is pretty much just a brisk walk. Given the breadth of the map, the pixel art, and environmental effects, though, it's an absolutely gorgeous walk. A gorgeous, hungry walk.

I love escape rooms, and this one is great! Nothing too high-rent, but a great variety of puzzles and reasonable difficulty for a game jam game. I can see why it comes recommended so highly. That one electronic part nestled on the floor between two boxes was a bit rude, but other than that, I had a great time with this one.

This is astonishingly feature complete given the development time frame. Having a short and simple gameplay loop that iterates many times over the course of a playthrough is a fantastic way to coax extra time out of a project, but you run the risk of making something overly repetitive or tedious. This project did not suffer from that. Having to piece together the mechanics of each crop kept things engaging all the way through. It was really cool trying to intuit how some of them worked after just seeing what their names were and then actually getting results. I also really enjoyed some of the cool implementations like the queue that forms when interacting with several plots in a row and the neat rotating clock in the ui. Excellent work all-round.

Totally delightful. All of the client portraits are really cute, and the opening cinematic is completely bonkers. The sense of timing and playful motions and screen transitions are to die for. I can only imagine that making the assets for and fine tuning that cutscene represented a huge chunk of the development time. Minus one point for making me remember esoteric filename extensions.

Thanks so much for the kind words! The sad truth is that I probably only thought about all of those small qol features because I've spent years and years theorizing about what goes into making games and never actually doing it. But that's what this jam is for, right?

Speaking of qol, I appreciate the warning about the length of The Botanist of Blossom Hollow. I would have been in trouble if I'd started on it tonight.

Very nice gameplay loop. Didn't run into any major bugs during my playtime. A bit more variety in the minigames and upgrades, and perhaps some scaling difficulty, might really put this over the top. I can appreciate why those goals may not have been feasible, though, of course.

Super cute and fun! Mad respect to anybody that submits a 3D platformer for a game jam. One minor gripe: the movement is a bit floaty for the way the obstacles are placed. In one instance, I accidentally skipped a few wall jump platforms because the normal jump just took me all the way to the top. So it could use a little tuning, but hey, that's a jam for you.

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The artwork certainly seemed like it had a lot of effort put into it. The character portraits looked like they could have been drawn in different styles or at different times, though, which left the final result looking a bit disjointed. Sadly, the story wasn't really my cup of tea. Next time, I would definitely focus on getting the dialogue to advance with input so that players can read at their own pace, or walk away from the screen for a minute if they need to. In any case, it seemed like you guys learned a lot during the jam. I hope that's useful to you going forward, whether you try to flesh out this project or try something new!

I'm gonna echo some of the other sentiments in these comments by saying that this game looks really nice. The music is sweet, and the visuals themselves snag the game some crazy style points. Unfortunately, the lack of meaningful progression or any clear goal sort of make the artistic aspects of the game the only real reason to stick around, which is a shame, because the driving controls seem pretty solid.

Also, I'm not sure if this was some kind of oversight, but the tutorial seems kind of -- I mean, it's good. It's a good tutorial, really. Just, I think I saw a few typos, maybe?