itch.io

Hey I used the word 'cool' too same same haha

It's a very fun idea to peer behind the curtain and give the player the controls to all the variables in the game. I thought this was a creative way of interpreting the theme and added a twist on top of the "overpowered means extra powers" tenor of many of the submissions. Playing around with them was fun, although once the player has the reins, things get - quite easy! But that's offset by the thrill of being able to command everything in the game and being nigh invulnerable. Great work! 

I do! I'm overthinking it for the jam context at any rate. I had a blast! 

Kind of nice to see an overpowered theme where the power lies in the opponent! The death loop is a great idea and builds on a cycle of continually building upgrades that I enjoyed. It is, to be fair, a little easy to cheese this by intentionally dying over and over until you become powerful enough, but the idea is there and it works pretty well. Also good to see combat where parrying is a must. Great work! 

I like the fun analog theme that ties everything together. The CRT effect is quite convincing and the inclusion of a little terminal for the main menu is a fun touch to immerse the player. It's a much more difficult game than it looks, as the rotation of the bullets is predictable but players always have to be on the move. I'm very much here for the chaos! Great work! 

Great variation in upgrade paths and a very comfortable climb from crawling through the abyss to feeling genuinely, insanely strong and holding off the hordes of enemies. Really well executed and has a good lifespan given the different enemy types - far, far beyond the scope I was expecting when I came into the game. I'm not sure there's much to add that the other jammers haven't already touched on - just a fun game and nice achievement for a few days of coding. Great work!

Very innovative idea of interfacing. I liked the aesthetics too - they have a unique Cruelty Squad style jank to them. The hand system is so detailed and offers a different way to attack; I think the trick is player buy-in really hinges on understanding the combos which can be a little intimidating at first. The supporting menus and tutorial really helped. Maybe for user friendliness there's a middle ground where players select certain actions, and then need to configure their fingers in certain ways singalled onscreen, like glowing digits, to proceed? Not sure! Please keep at this idea, it has immense potential and is definitely quite different from all the other titles I've played in the jam so far! 

The puzzle concept is nice - a sort of resource management where the placement of cables and reducers need to pare down the energy, but not so much to reach zero. It all gets very involved and complicated, especially by level six, in a way that delights the puzzle fan in me. I think the 'show energy' button is mandatory; the UI could also benefit from better guiding the player to understand where and when thresholds are met - it's all in the placement anyhow. There's a lot you could do to tinker with the concept here to add variation to the puzzles, but the levels showcase some interesting ideas around circuits or multiple generators/receivers and the fundamental design works really well! 

It's an enormous feat to create a procgen RPG in the time you had - everyone involved did a great job putting this together in the little time there was. Congrats on finishing your first game jam! It's immensely ambitious to have coded in a bunch of stuff - changeable armor pieces, stats and XP, and a selection of upgrades across enemy encounters. I found with the exponential scale the sensible thing to do was just scale attack as much as possible, although this doesn't work as well once the enemies get similarly buffed! I'm sure you're more than capable of expanding these ideas with more time so constructive feedback isn't so useful here, but maybe the layout and navigation of the levels could have varied a little more - finding a good balance between level variation and getting lost. A lot of procgen roguelikes use gated progression instead of openly exploring everything and picking off all the upgrades and skipping enemies, for instance. Great work! 

So many pies! I enjoyed the highs of using the jump ability to climb ever higher, and the crushing lows of missing a platform and falling so very far back to the ground. Adding a bunch of time and jump power-ups and random placement of platforms is good. Maybe giving players a little more control as the game progresses could help make their successes and failures feel more predictable, like a parachute that helps players control the speed of their fall? Nice stuff! 

Really unique subject matter about the Mali empire. I liked the management sequences, they reminded me a little bit of Crusader Kings and trying to juggle all of the needs of my ruler. Having a decision-making strategy and bullet hell is an interesting idea too! 

I like the arena-style combat and the game certainly ramps up! Using the abilities against hordes of enemies feels super satisfying and controls well. It would be good to have a more predictable way of collecting the power-ups and signalling to the player when they start and end. Nice work!

The idea of an adversarial mini golf game is a lot of fun and subverts some of the expectations around the traditional browser golf game. Having power-ups to avoid or have to cope with is playful and pretty funny - a lot of the time I was like, oh damn, I don't actually want that! It fits the theme of the jam well without a generic "this game has good power-ups" design. The tradeoff is that a lot of the time, the player will just want to avoid getting them, so I think the more effective levels were designed in a way where players had to consider the risk of taking an unwanted powerup or going around the long way. Great work and a lot of fun! 

This plays really nicely! The animation is so nice for a little slimy guy - it feels really good to jump around and fits the game's theme so well.  The concept around using and trading around power-ups is a fun one and demonstrates how some combinations are beneficial or not so beneficial depending on the layout of the level. It's a little fiddly that not all levels require you to navigate and collect the power-ups first, making it unclear what to do on a first run, but this is a pretty forgiving game. It was great constantly being introduced to new abilities - i'd say there's a great opportunity for expansion here by designing levels with more hazards or features that require the player to think about how the abilities interact with each other, or explore a little more. Great stuff for a short-term jam. I had a lot of fun! 

This is a cool idea! I think you've leveraged the level design well to reflect the power-up and have it operate in new and interesting ways as the player explores the level. There is a little -vania flavour, in the sense that abilities open up accessibility of the world, and discovering you could just jump up all the way in the starting area was a nice discovery. The idea of having the cracked ceiling reveal more spikes, making subsequent attempts harder, was a very devious one! Check out Leap Year for a game that designs its entire experience around an ability like this that continues to use its level design in interesting and unexpected ways for the player. I liked the platforming and spike avoidance approach, but some feedback could be to figure out how to make this a little more precise - as the player is shooting into the air fast, it's hard to align a jump. Great work! 

Hey, congrats on starting your journey with game development! Unfortunately I get the following error when I interact with an enemy in combat, suggesting it needs a little bit of a bugfix. Looks cool though and hope you're able to fine-tune it! 

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "main.py", line 10902, in <module>

  File "main.py", line 10742, in run

  File "main.py", line 6087, in player_action_move

NameError: name 'sid' is not defined

Congrats on your first game for itch.io! This handles neatly and using shapes is a great idea to phase into creating a shoot-em-up title; the next step is to play around with sprites and assets that add a little more fidelity. Nice stuff!

Cute little PICO-8 game. I was not expecting the mouse to have a massive gun! Implementation works really well; there's some fun platforming ideas that come out of the approach of using the momentum of the shot. It was short and sweet and very easy to expand the scope of this. I liked there being an endgame boss and a scene of freeing the mice to give some closure! Game was super forgiving - resetting the states (i.e. blocks, enemies) would add a little bit of challenge if you're looking for more of a precision platformer style. Good work! 

I enjoyed consuming the world! Kinda reminds me of Donut Country except more combat instead of of puzzles and physics. This is a fun idea and I think there is plenty of potential to explore the idea further. Great minimalist presentation. The sense of slowly building the void to its overpowered state is left long enough to be slightly concerned by the horde of enemies, and then finding it easy to mow them down, which is a nice feeling. Maybe a gameplay loop or overarching element of challenge or strategy could help the game feel a little less like a linear experience - after all, the game gets easier the more that you play it. Great work! 

Oh this rules. By adding the RPG element, you've transformed a pretty simple and over-done puzzle game into an original idea, which is awesome. Adds a little strategic layer onto the top of the game too. I know the assets are third-party, but you've put them together very well in the time you had. I'd like to say this has enormous potential and could be refined and made into a broader experience, but...it kind of works perfectly and is creatively realized as is? The leaderboard is a fantastic little addition too. Great work! 

Thanks for clarifying! 

Really well-executed and simple matching puzzle grid idea. Before I get into that, I gotta say, the music was fantastic and an absolute bop that fit the theme of the game. Props to you for making that in Bitwig. For the puzzle itself, I think the idea's effective - the appeal is that there's always residual pieces, so the challenge of the game comes from cleaning up your own mess from loose parts, in a way. The atypical configurations made this much less Tetris-like and more unique, by making it a little more complex to consider how to pair things together. I found the game took a little while to see my errors pile up to a point where I had to start being more conservative with my placement, but the increasing levels and time limit get there eventually with the pace. The end-game grades are fun to boot. For constructive criticism - the player buy-in to the matching can take a moment. Even though it's explained at the start, it does take a little bit to remember what's what - an tooltip or onscreen element to remind players somehow could help. Very well done and great game! 

Hey, it was exactly what it said in the title and that's awesome. I liked exploring the game world you created and trying to find as many of the power-ups as I could. The game does a lot with a little and the visual style is pretty consistent. There's a bit of repetition of assets, but the scale is good for exploring, and I liked that you considered a vertical element by allowing the player to find new areas through hopping on the top of the treeline. It would have been cool to further a broader objective than finding power-ups; it was unclear whether there was something else I should be doing or looking for other than finding all the bars. Still a lot for a very very short jam! 

Glad I came across this and I really encourage you to keep developing it. I love the claustrophobic atmosphere and the dim, dingy presentation really feels appropriate for the trenches. There's some good visual flourishes here - the death animation is very well-done. Getting shot and dying and going to pitch black with that sound effect grabbed my attention too. I think you've done a lot with what's at your disposal in the limited time for the jam. Nice stuff! 

Interesting control concept! I like it because the dual action of pulling and pushing adds a little bit of strategy - the player can't just knock things in the direction they want like golf, they need to think about how their cursor will influence the current position of the cat to a new position, and then push it out from there. It's a little unorthodox but makes it a bit more unique. I think having a par on top of a limited meter adds much more challenge, but also makes it a little more compelling than, say, just counting the number of hits and giving you a pat on the back. The simple and cutesy art style works quite well too. Congrats on making something solo in Unity too, although it sounds like it was a bit of a pain! 

Hey, a fellow developer making a retro-themed computer game for the jam! I like your BIOS and startup sequence much more than what I've tried to do in some of my games, and you did a great job at convincingly using effects, sound and visuals to convey the idea of a bug in an old computer. There's some nice little coding references in there too, like how health is represented as a set of commands to delete the player to the bin. I did not expect whatsoever I'd be playing a shoot-em-up from the outset, and it's a nice surprise that handles well. There's some decent quality of life design choices here like guiding the player and tooltips. You honestly could easily make this into a full experience and flesh out the environment in creative ways as the physical and digital spaces you could imagine inside computer infrastructure - like how you've done with the creative ASCII in the kernel security boss. Hmm - for feedback, the only thing is thinking about the grid based movement, which is true to the design of a retro game, but also atypical for a shoot-em-up which usually demands freedom of movement to make the player feel like they can fairly avoid bullets that don't follow the grid. But it's a very valid aesthetic choice. Congrats on getting this out in so short a time, and it really is something I hope you can build on - or something similar! 

Thank you and great observation on the RNG - a bad roll can basically make the progression super easy or wreck a good run. I need to think about a feature that leverages the power of the "increase value of die [x]" better - currently, it's not really useful to try and buff up a one, so getting a bad roll is just...a bad roll. Definitely will think about how to create more synergy and strategy to the game instead of "select big multipliers and sixes, win game". Thanks again for the thoughts! 

Nicely rounded for a shoot-em-up and the game's superhero concept fits into the theme. Having mutliple heroes and different models helps replayability a bit, and I really liked quickly discovering that the power-up abilities were insanely more useful than the laser. The flavour text on the power levels was a nice little comic touch. For balancing, I wonder how you could gate the use of the power-ups progressively to make the player slowly ease into the sense they're becoming insanely powerful? I felt invincible pretty quickly, but I gotta say, it was a good feeling! Nice work! 

Wrangling 3D in Godot is a nice achievement at any step of the development process. I hope you're able to keep on with the concept after the jam. What sort of things were you thinking about doing with more time? 

I'm working on a sokoban game at the moment and it's always a delight to see how other developers innovate on the classic puzzle formula. It's a cute and nicely presented-game. The real winner here is basing the puzzles around the power-up, but varying how it applies. Discovering some of the unexpected interoperabilities of how the game works is a complete joy - for instance, the laser power-up pushes the player a set number of times, or nullfies when walking over ash. Some of the greatest puzzle games like to test and experiment with player expectations about how the game's systems work together. I think you demonstrate some of those qualities in a really smart way with the puzzles. If I had to think of an aspect of feedback, I'd maybe say the actual sokoban element, which is really hard to execute anyway, could have a little more of a role - there's not a lot of "a-ha" with the block pushing. Great game and a really cool little puzzle concept that works so well! 

Very ambitious to consider adding in an online component to the game! It's a big arena and you could definitely do heaps with the space to add in enemies and environmental hazards to shake it up a bit. I like the idea of progressively adding in more power-ups until they get insane, although a little more control over them at the start could help pacing. I wonder what would happen if the power-ups were designed to work together with each other - like having combinations of them that form different effects? 

Love the idea a lot! Sometimes all it actually takes is a really good concept to create appeal for a game. An arm flexing itself to move is a pretty original movement mechanic and creates some fun ideas and potential for how to flesh out the game - pun intended. The execution is a little bit janky, but adds to the charm. Some ideas could be that swinging the outer fist segment could damage enemies without needing to flex - that way, you have a punch up and a movement system working in concert! Always a blast to see fun ideas in jams being experimented on that you wouldn't see anywhere else. Cool stuff!  

Deliciously cynical game that leverages the incremental genre to make a point about the proliferation of slop in jams. It's a nice and simple idea and a clean execution as the player slowly goes from placing in various jams to scaling exponentially fast into something out of control. In that sense, the game uses the jam's theme super well. I kept thinking the game was over and stuck, and then lo and behold, various upgrades of an even more comically extreme nature would appear. The ending text made me chuckle. Great work and a highlight of the jam! 

Congrats on making your first game! The design of the robotic character is fun, and I like the little bit of heft they have when they jump. You integrated a lot of platforming classics, like wall-jumps and shifting the gravity, and I found them...actually kind of challenging which makes this game a bit of a precision platformer! Finding the right balance between difficult and impossible in the eyes of the player is tricky. The "robot breaks things under it" idea is quite original and I wonder if there's ways to integrate that into puzzles in a platformer: maybe the player's weight breaks some platforms after a time, causing them to be quick on their feet? Nice work! 

Nice prototype for a farming and crafting game. Reminds me a little of poring over my little farms in Stardew Valley. Part of the fun of these kinds of games is the slow but progressively profitable development of the farm and the weird and wonderful things you can plant in it - it would be easy to add a bit of progression! I liked the inclusion of combat to give the player multiple priorities too. Some suggestions: as it's a fairly cursor heavy game anyway, having the player direction reflect the cursor can save the player a bit of time; alternately, the game doesn't seem to like keeping the momentum of player movement when they turn direction after holding a directional key. Plenty you can do here and hope you're able to keep on with the prototype! Good work! 

I liked the idea of hidden passages that aren't immediately apparent which reflects the ancient tomb premise and adds a little more exploration to the maze game design. The music has quite a muzak quality to it, doesn't it? 

Hello! It may be just me, but I didn't see an executable - how am I able to play the game?

Same as below, it took a moment to get a feel for the gameplay, and then realised the neat idea. You use the mouse buttons to alternate between detecting and clearing green and red chickens and foxes from the radarlike space. I like the way you added in various ways to make the game more interesting challenging over time, like the spin attack affecting the rotation, increasing the tempo and alternating in the red and green, so you have to keep on your toes and check the radar to see what's coming in. Singalling all of this quickly to the player is tricky when the screen is a little busy, but the UI is very much on the level of intensity the gameplay and music aspire to. Nice stuff! 

Enormously developed for a 48-hour game. The building blocks of a 2D combat flight shoot-em-up are all here in droves: I like the inclusion of a narrative cutscene, upgrades tree and gameplay loop to provide a structured experience to the game. Commendations have to go to the flight behaviour, which ekes out a nice balance between feeling realistic and float-y whilst being roughly precise enough to not get in the way of the shooting action. The reddening hue of the sky is a nice digetic way to convey the time limit to the player, although it was a little confusing with the bar at the top until I realised it represented the goal state. As I played more, I realised what you'd done that was really cool: made a progressive, almost incremental-style game where the slow accumulation of resources expands the time per round, upgrades, and inches the player closer to the end. That's a really addictive gameplay model and I could have played this for much longer. Great work! 

Thank you so much! Those are some good items of feedback. Hey, for the time being, "use it or lose it" for the die and powerups is kinda funny.  Agree I am keen to test out removing some of the retro whimsy of the game and focusing on balancing and developing the core idea for a fuller desktop and mobile title. Cheers again and look forward to checking out WizBot!