itch.io

FYI, the twitter link on the Starless steam page is broken.

Yeah, I guess that would make climbs look better and give me clearer jump distances for level design.

Thanks for playing!

Fun powers! I’m pretty terrible at asteroids, but advancing through the powers was a good hook for a jam.

I often didn’t want to get the next fruit because I wanted to play with my current powers for a bit first. I particularly liked the plum’s spear arms. Chili fire was great too.

I liked how the trail effect indicated the current power.

Music is great!

I think I scored around 26? The game over screen had some white text that I guess was my score but I couldn’t read it.

A chaotic physics take on the order up genre. I like the way plants sprouted their fruit over time (so it wasn’t immediately available) and grabbing stuff was fun, but I was rarely successful at tossing vegetables across the store. I tended to grab what I needed and swim closer to my target which meant I grabbed a massive load of food, but firing it didn’t always satisfy my customers. So blasting isn’t a good tactic, but even blasting two of the same item at a fish didn’t always make both of them hit.

I wonder how much leniency you could give on a throw to let the player throw more and dash less.

I also found that I really had to focus on the food types on fish to identify them, then gather, then look hard again to see where they go. Would be interesting to try making specific fish have specific desires and see if the player can work faster by memorizing their diet.

Game looks really nice and the music is a good fit.

I scored 2675!

I didn’t understand the hunger or nets mechanics, but I enjoyed the game!

I got 4 x $hungry - 70 = 30 so I guess I want that number as small as possible. But another day I got 4 x $hungry - 82 = 72, so I guess going fast made me more hungry? I feel like when I do better, that number gets higher. One day I got 18 - $new_nets = 20 which really confused me! Did I sell nets somehow?

Regardless, I really like the mechanic of switching between going slow for easier harvest aiming to going fast to get more done in one day. I’m not sure there’s much pressure to go fast, but I want to do it anyway.

I played with gamepad’s analog stick which made it a bit imprecise to vary position without changing speed, but I found it easier to follow the kelp with the analog than the dpad.

Feels like cutting everything flat was a good strategy since it makes future days easier (but they don’t all grow back at the same rate, which is smart). However, maybe there’s a downside to cutting the dark green parts that I wasn’t seeing. Reading the description, I see why the blades numbers were on the $new_nets line, but I still don’t understand that math.

Music is great!

I won my run! Kelp Harvested: 269, 79. Nets broken: 1.

Itch now has a project setting for SharedArrayBuffer: https://itch.io/t/2025776/experimental-sharedarraybuffer-support

(And this project has higher PageRank than leafo’s post, haha.)

I really enjoyed this zipline and ice breaking mechanic! I think adding some interesting things to discover in the ice caves and smoothing out the controls would make for some fun adventure! (But maybe that goes against the Adventure Manifesto.)

Really nice presentation. I wasn’t able to successfully complete any of the commands – the duck and jump never lasted long enough to make it past the obstacle.

I don’t know any Valyrian words, but this is a neat idea for trying to teach yourself a language.

I made the room clean and still couldn’t use the elevator. Not really sure what’s going on.

The room changing is pretty effective – the colours and mix of gory pixel art and bizarre (painting) and swapping them to extremely normal really felt like a big shift.

This is a quirky idea and has very nice presentation.

I never really figured out how to build a good contraption or whether there was a way to avoid “you crashed”. I got several components that can be activated, but activating them didn’t seem to do anything.

I wonder if trying to crash and break off components (to better fit new ones) might be a way to make the landing part more interesting.

The dialogue sequences are great and I love that mouse click to start the level. I got a bit frustrated at the toast, but I think this is really well done. I think I’m a bit on tilt from playing other jam games, and this one requires some patience to learn the patterns and watch enemies instead of racing through the level. haha.

Great work!

I like the progression of items you’re collecting. The projectiles were a good amount of challenge to dodge and I ended up going down to my second last life because I wasn’t careful when getting the last coin. I think I made it to the end on my last life.

Nice work!

The independent movement on two axes to pick a thing that gets put where your cursor is feels like a rub your belly and pat your head kind of control scheme that could make for interesting chaos if some elements react poorly to being placed together.

Tough to balance frustration against chaos mechanics. Good luck!

Gravity flipping is a neat idea, but the procgen often overlaps webs, spikes, or platforms with gravity toggles and that makes it hard to tell which way they point.

I didn’t find any gems. Maybe the ones in cP53hg.png or the coins from tbj_platforming_tiles.png would be more identifiable.

The game page says “The developer has not uploaded a game yet.” I think your html5 build didn’t upload.

This was really great. Suffering through several deaths at the hands of different enemies and then getting weapons that were better at dealing with them, good level design that rarely got me lost but didn’t feel like a corridor, good checkpoints that saved me right when I wanted to give up if I had to retrace my steps, and a tough battle at the end.

I particularly loved getting the bombs and dropping them next to those terrible green aliens. And the particle explosion for enemies is great too!

What an incredible achievement! Making this kind of 3D game in pico 8 with only two buttons and directional movement seems like quite the challenge. The game works surprisingly well. I found the flickery wall sprites made my eyes hurt a bit after playing. I didn’t really enjoy the combat until my second play when I figured out “hold fire to strafe” (thanks to your gifs). After that, I got to gun 4 and really started enjoying combat (even tricky bits against high enemies). The final room was great – tons of power ups and less frustrating jumping than the earlier jumping puzzle.

Nice work!

One question: what is that constant bam bap bap noise? Sounds like an enemy is walking against a wall somewhere.

Nice work repaletting the sprites, I didn’t recognize Capt Neato at first! I love the big sword swing, but didn’t get the hang of it the timing of it against the quick enemies. I enjoyed the platforming puzzle of avoiding fall damage, but the enemies were too relentless to make it far. (I swear some of my in-air sword slams to ground don’t make contact when they should.)

Regardless, pretty impressive!

Thanks so much for fixing this late in the jam!

I’m not going to have time to switch to it and undo my uppercase only hacks, but hopefully it helps someone else!

Thanks for trying it out! My word list is only ~5000 words and is more suited for creating potential questions rather than exhaustively validating guesses. I guess I could have used some dictionary service and queried for whether words were valid…

I added those words to my list except for iran. I added a note to the jam page that there are no proper nouns.

threefonts.png (I think from one of the trove zips) is missing lower case r for the bottom font. You can see that its z doesn’t line up with the other fonts.

I’m not sure there’s much that can be done now, so I’ll just use another font, but for anyone diving into fonts now, beware!

Thanks! That mostly matches what I have except for jump. The frames I was using in format {column range, row}:

{
win  = { '5-7', 6, },
jump = { '4-6', 5, }, -- not looping
fall = { 7,     5, },
land = { 8,     5, },
run  = { '3-6', 5, },
idle = { '1-2', 5, },
}

(In love2d, I use anim8 and these are the values I pass to it.)

I think you’re right about climbing, but I don’t have ladders so I didn’t try that one.

I guess the sliding one is meant for you to rotate it to match your slope.

The blocking is the one that confused me the most, but I guess it makes more sense as a reskin of the knight.

Looking at the Capt Neato sprites from here, there’s run, jump, flip (?), climb, dance, fall (?) animations in rows 5-6.

I’m not entirely sure if I have those anims right or which ones go with which animation. I’ve never used pico8 and I’m using love2d for the jam. I tried opening tbj3.p8 in a text editor and pico-8, but I don’t see anything in there. Seems like it’s a bitfield for gfx, but I don’t see how I’d explore that in pico-8.

I guess I’ll just put together some frames and see what works, but is there are right way to do this?

Possibly chele: A pincer-like claw of a crustacean or arachnid.

Although I haven’t seen any answers that are so obscure.

It’d be helpful if the 16x16 were in a different part of the sheet than the 8x8.

Vertically, s4m_ur4i_huge-assetpack-tilemap.png starts with 8x8 palette, then does some 16x16 blocks, then a bunch of 8x8, then more 16x16 blocks. This makes accessing the 16x16 blocks awkward since you can’t slice with a 16x16 grid and need to either edit the png or slice 8x8 and make all your 16x16 objects out of 4 objects.

Yeah, eventually I came to the same conclusion – Projects created with “Upload game” are automatically submitted to gamejams. I filed a bug about making this more clear.

Similar to this suggestion, I’d like to be able to follow a jam so I’m notified when it’s over. Sometimes I see a gamejam that I don’t want to enter (or the rules exclude me or whatever), but I do want to play the games when it completes.

For now I guess I just join jams without intent to enter, but I feel like that does a disservice to the jam runners who may get excited by an inflated number of jammers and disappointed by a relatively low number of submissions.

Found this from your post in Eggplant!

Nice platformer. Looks good, plays okay. Nice work! Too bad there’s no gamepad support. I used Steam’s “Desktop Configuration” to make my gamepad emulate keyboard inputs and it was much more enjoyable to play. I finished it!

I found the levels get frustrating at the first level with a key. There are challenges without any safe practice earlier in the level, so I have to pass the initial gauntlet, trial and error, die, repeat. (When I see the three green squares I think “is my dash long enough?”, jump+dash, and sail past the platform and die. Then I think “I can probably just dash”, dash and walk off the edge and die. Then I just jump.) However, I thought the introduction of guns and long unlock blocks were both well done.

There’s also some blind drops without communication of safety. In that first key room, you drop into what looks like a spike-lined room but it turns out there’s a safe place to land. If the safety was visible before you drop, I wouldn’t try to dash to the side to anticipate the exit.

A few issues with dash:

• it seems I’m unable to dash out of a wall slide – which sometimes caused me to fall to my death.
• I think dash takes the direction you’re currently holding without any leniency to change direction after you press dash. I’m usually trying to push both at once and often don’t dash in my desired direction. (Forgiveness Mechanics: Reading Minds for Responsive Gameplay is a talk on the subject.)

Regardless, nice work and congrats on shipping!

Thanks!

Yeah, you can double jump and get an extra jump when you collect a bottle.

You have a little bit of control of the platforms because they won’t go up if you’re standing on the front piece (you block their collision). One of them also tries to get down to your level to avoid boring waiting time on the floor. But interaction is all indirect – no input reading.

Working that control more directly and visibly into the game sounds like an interesting direction for further developing the concept!

I liked this idea. Juggling the different packages and pick/drop order was a fun optimization problem.

The interface made that gameplay cumbersome and frustrating: looking at a courier required clicking their packages tab and their profile tab, no view of all courier + new packages at once. Not sure if that’s part of the challenge. I liked the imprecise location of the couriers as an intentional awkwardness, but I think you want other things to be streamlined.

I only played enough to realize why wisdom matters and then my week ended after two days. :D

You’re right, it is very slow. I’ve sped up the player enough to outrun the platforms which should make it less frustrating and feel more empowering.

Thanks for the feedback!

Glad you stuck with it enough to reach that mastery point. The web version still lags so much that it makes it hard to reach tight control, but I guess I’m satisfied with where I was able to get within the jam.

Thanks for playing!

This was fun. Great subtle tutorialization. Good difficulty curve.

I found it a bit frustrating that I couldn’t break the grapple and sometimes it grabbed something offscreen, but I love the contrast between floaty and grapple.

Really generous checkpointing helped a ton.

Nice work!

I won! This was awesome!

At first, I found the “only use potions in combat” frustrating, but I theory crafted it as the enemy’s attacks showing you how to cut harder or dodge better and got over it. Venturing deeper into the cave to fight more and more intimidating creatures and then growing in power (over 50 ATK 50 DEF) and slaughtering everything was an incredible arc. Fog of war was a great choice to give mystery to the cave and I love the readability of the enemy design.

I died several times before I figured out how to balance health loss with “learning” so I could buff my character up. At first, I was trying to get potions and retreat to easier enemies, but I think once I figured out how much a chicken got me and kept an eye on my hp, it was smooth sailing (but my rampage was still engaging).

I didn’t pay much attention to enemy atk/def values to calculate how many hits I could take – my formula was initially stay above 1 and after some maxhp became stay above 8. I wonder if getting hit for 4 damage would make the game more interesting or overload me with math (presumably that was possible, but my def got up fast enough that I don’t think I lost more than 2 in one hit). I guess it would have been welcome towards the end.

Well done! One of the most impressive jam games I’ve ever played.

The game hung for a while for me after going through a door, but eventually loaded the level after a few minutes.

I haven’t played Legend of Grimrock or even older 4-way dungeon crawlers, so this was a novel experience for me. The ability to look around away from your facing direction is interesting, but makes the gun seem overpowered. Dual-wielding is fun (but awkward on a touchpad).

I played through to the third level. The potion effect is wild although I immediately wanted to pick up my dropped item.

Stone is an interesting music game experiment. It doesn’t have the high tempo of other music games to give you challenge and instead it’s a zen experience with a slow beat.

Playing around with X to mute the note to turn your whole notes into eighth notes made it a fun, relaxing little music experience.

Eventually, I was hoping for more ability to change the sounds. Like if the stone I landed on selected a bar and I was piecing together generative music – obviously a much harder approach to get right.

Looks nice too.

Got 10/10!

It’s interesting how the maze obscures what’s around the corner so you’re travelling around finding things and mentally keeping track. It’s like an alternative version of the classic game Memory.

I wonder if texturing the walls would draw your attention even more down hallways. Or how you could expand on this to add other mechanics: puzzle, using pieces for unlocking, collapsing sections of the maze, …

Really great arcade game.

Art is simple but effective. Although I don’t understand the swords and didn’t realize what the power ups did until I picked up rollerskates which replaced my no walls power up – for a few levels before, I thought I’d played 9 levels without realizing the ends looped around. haha.

Fun and challenging and does a good job of introducing new obstacles as you progress.

Made it to level 15.