itch.io

After skipping the tutorial (as God intended), I can now get a proper look at what the game's actually like. It's neat how many options you're given for how to approach combat, but it does feel a bit slow, with a lot of time spent waiting for the party and enemies to move to where they're supposed to in battle. I'm half-convinced there's supposed to be some way to speed that up that I'm just not aware of. It's made even more egregious with how big the maps are. Still, it's commendable how much there is in here for a game jam entry.

Thanks for clarifying; after giving it another try, I think I understand it better now. This time around I got a lot more out of the upgrades, especially the one that increases selling price. I still didn't notice much of a difference in production time after the first speed upgrade, but the second one I felt the difference almost instantly. I managed to make it to 20 days this run before I accidentally overlooked the whozit's energy deficiency (which tells me I could've theoretically kept going). While the early days still feel a little tight for my liking, I appreciate that I don't feel like I hit my skill cap and can't go any higher, which is how I felt when I first played.

You know what, I can spare a minute to make you happy

Edit: maybe these kids were grumpier than I thought

Seems like a fun idea (who among us hasn't wanted to scam people over the phone?) but even after reading the instructions in the comments below, I couldn't figure out how to pull it off. I got to the point where I call them on the phone, but they don't give any number. (Maybe they just wised up idk)

Unfortunately this game kept giving me an error during the tutorial section after I beat two of the three dummies. If there's any way to get around that, let me know, but for now I have little in the way of feedback to give.

Really like how this plays around with the name of the theme; not only do you have to manage resources in the form of your magic, but the play on words with mana + mage = manage? Incredible.

Though I have to ask, is there anything at the top of the tower? I tried over and over to get up there, but even the first jump perplexed me; sometimes I'd make it, other times I wouldn't.

I don't really think the tutorial does a good job of explaining how to actually play the game (as one other commenter pointed out it would have been very useful to know that you're supposed to put a bun out first), but once I learned how to play, I appreciated the escalation in terms of rent demands and customer orders and it made me want to keep playing (which made it sting when my browser backed out of the tab for no apparent reason).

Who made the music? Why is it so intense? Why does that fit so well for a game about paying debt in time?

Anyways, this one was overall quite enjoyable, with a nice balance between strategy and luck (I managed to get lucky with two diamonds on the last day and still didn't fully feel in the clear) that I imagine would make for good replay value.

I for one am not about to take "I did not try" for an answer. I'm willing to accept things like the lack of sound effects and the basic gameplay that just kinda amounts to waiting to accrue money as byproducts of rushed development. If anything really disappointed me, though, it's that the lighting (or texturing?) was so dark that I couldn't properly see most of the features I was attaching to the bowfallo, which kind of seems like the point of the game.

I like the idea of indirectly handling party members (and I especially started to appreciate it more when I learned how the stats work), although I feel like there should've been a little more to it; there were some long stretches where I didn't have any items (which is sort of a matter of luck) and was therefore just waiting around for something to happen.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice but it's Hotel Mario

Obviously a neat premise, but it's sort of let down by the controls and the lack of progression. There were quite a few times when I tried to interact with a mop or stairway but I needed to press the button again for it to let me do so, and it bugged me that the mops only dissipate or reset slightly after a key point in the animation, meaning you have to hold the button slightly longer than you think. I also don't know why there are visible button prompts for the mops but not the stairways. Besides that, I think the water shouldn't be so easy to dispel just by getting rid of the mops, because as is, you just kinda keep going back and forth up the tower and the water never fully rises.

I pretty much agree with the comments saying that the throwing mechanic, while a fun twist on paper, feels kinda fiddly in execution. I don't know if this part is just a me problem, but the max throwing arc in particular felt weird to me since there's the ever so slightest bit of gravity at play. There should probably have also been some hint about how virus disks should be thrown out.

Seems like other comments were thinking the same thing that I was, that I'd probably pay more attention to the actual scenarios if the stats of the outcomes weren't shown (and if you played up the parody angle a bit more).

Beat it on my second try, but I don't really know what I did differently from my first. The only thing I can think of is that on my first run, one bunny asked for directions to Disney World, but since I couldn't find it on the map I chose down (the direction to "pain"). With that in mind, the main thing I would suggest is more feedback for the player: more sound effects to punctuate actions, some visual cue for if the mouse is hovering over objects or buttons (especially the directional arrows), letting the player know if the bunnies are heading safely to where they need to go, stuff like that.

I arbitrarily named the kids GRU, NO, and FACE; that last one in particular made me feel like I was playing Wordle with all the letters knocked off. I perked up a little when I was done with the naming and realized what the gimmick of the game was; it was honestly really clever, and somehow despite the names, I still managed to make it through on the first try. Gotta say, though, those kids weren't as grumpy as I was expecting.

The presentation is a little cheap-looking, but the game loop itself is actually quite  solid and challenging. I maybe would've added some sort of time limit that replenishes upon making words -- not a super strict one, just one to ensure you're not waiting forever -- but I still enjoyed it regardless.

Pretty cool and surprisingly well-developed for the time frame; I was already impressed with how fleshed out the skill tree was before I even tried New Game+. Though, for whatever reason when I went into the menu with the cards (probably, though it could've been a different menu), I couldn't back out even though there was the option to in the top-left.

Okay you can't just have a game with the Deltarune explosion and then a choice prompt with the option "Proceed".

Other than that, this one rules. (Another Nice Cream banger, who knew.) I was originally going to say that I kept capping out at four jobs before losing each day and that I didn't have it in me to multitask further, but somehow the more I played, the more easily I was able to handle everything. I love when games make me reassess my capabilities in real time. (Though I guess some of the upgrades helped.) If I had to nitpick, the "retry" option doesn't seem too consequential; I feel like you should've either had the game go on for seven days or made the option set back your money. The janitor job also didn't seem to work for me sometimes and I don't know why. These aren't too big of issues, though.

Pretty fun, makes me wish more people made bullet hell style games for the jam. I'm not sure if I won by fair means, though, since the eyeball just stopped when its health bar was depleted. It's also weird to me that you have to press space to fire but move the mouse to aim; the left mouse button just feels like it'd make more sense.

I think what could've benefited the gameplay loop here is if there was some sort of end-of-day quota of money you had to meet, so there'd be more of a reason to keep putting them in the trucks (besides the boxes just piling up too much, but others have pointed that out already).

Thanks for giving it a try! In hindsight I do sort of regret not letting players put down the key anywhere, or at least giving them the option to place it in the shelter earlier on in the day.

...that being said, I might have just given a hint as to what you are supposed to do with it.

Somehow I feel like Cthulu shouldn't be this easy to appease with money

STYLISH. ACTION. POGO. STICK. 

If those words alone don't sell you, I don't know what will. To me, it's self-explanatory that a Tony Hawk/Jet Set Radio styled score attack game where you pogo bounce off walls is just plain fun; I don't even know what else to say.

Ended up getting a final score of 110! I will say it's a little obtuse that the background colors are what you need to sort the test tubes by rather than the color of the liquids, but once I figured that out I was surprisingly hooked by the gameplay here; it escalates in a natural way while still feeling manageable.

A bit overwhelming to me; the tutorialization felt like it was giving me a lot of information at once without me fully understanding it, and even when I got ahold of the basics, the map feels a bit too large as others have said. The UI could also be a bit more streamlined in places (off the top of my head, I wish unlocking the camera didn't reset you to the same place each time, and that centering on a certain object involved smoothing so you could easily see where it was in relation to the rest of the map). Still, I like the chill vibe it's got.

Looks and sounds great (I enjoyed the funky music especially), although the gameplay is a bit hard to judge. I thought it got too basic and repetitive after a while, but then I realized that guests were leaving messes early on and then just stopped doing so after a while. Not sure what happened there.

I basically just resorted to trial-and-error for the final puzzle, but up to that point I really enjoyed it! I'm kind of a sucker for unique puzzle mechanics, and there were plenty of levels to push this one pretty far.

I like how there's a bit of an unconventional combat setup here with the ball-and-chain thing; it was fun to fool around with. Unfortunately, this is a case where I quit before I lost once because it was just going on for too long without any escalation. The lack of sound effects and somewhat repetitive music didn't help much. Still, the premise is at least funny.

Fun for a bit but could've used more polishing and fleshing out overall. The basic sound and lack of music, the lack of conveyance on what some of the items do, the ammo not being greyed out or anything when you've maxed its output out, and the fact it just kinda stops unceremoniously after a while makes it pretty clear to me that it needed more time.

Goal reached in 533 days! While reaching it was a matter of time more than anything (and I probably would've gotten there faster if I had known earlier that you can level up your stores), it was pretty addicting to try and see what formations would get me to the goal the fastest.

I suppose I'm a good enough typist managed to make it a good few days, but then I rage quit because nothing I did could get the game to register that I had typed an apostrophe correctly. While I wish there was a larger pool of text blurbs from the game to pull from, I liked the typing/roguelite combination well enough, though I'm not sure how it ties into the "manage" theme.

Pretty fun premise that's unfortunately a little prone to breaking on itself in its attempt to lean into the chaos. The procedurally generated levels work against the game sometimes, and I occasionally found myself in situations where I simply wasn't able to make progress with the boxes because the way to the goal was detonated. Also, the boxes would often clip out of bounds if I was standing too close to a wall when throwing them.

So this game seems to be partially a matter of rote memorization, which I'd be willing to put up with, except that the level progression itself seems botched in a way that I don't fully understand. Every time I died, the upper-left text said I was back at level 0 even though it didn't look like I was on the starting level. The levels don't seem to be randomly generated either (not that I'd want them to be), as I'd get the same level three times in a row before progressing to the next one, only to die and get sent back. If it was as simple as restarting the level you're on when you die and the UI telling you as much, I think I'd have gotten much further than I did.

This can't be healthy for these kitties o_o

Cute, though the pink cat stopped wanting things at some point and I'm not sure why. Kind of wish there was a time limit, or some penalty for choosing the wrong food, or both, but maybe that's just me.

Made it 9 days! (Though it seems like one was added after losing to bankruptcy.) A lot of charm to this one, mostly with how everything is named, though I feel like the management mechanics could've been better. My biggest problem is that the upgrades aren't as consistently useful as I would've liked; the one that makes the Whozit work faster only seems to affect his movement speed around the room, while the amount of time it takes for the machines to make parts, which was a much more prominent bottleneck, didn't seem to change at all. Having higher energy capacity also doesn't feel very meaningful when it subsequently makes it take a lot longer to refill energy, and that just makes upgrading the water cooler seem like the strictly better option. Not bad, but I wasn't as won over as others seem to be.

Thanks for playing! I had considered adding a camera rotation feature, but it was one of those things that was cut for time.

I'm not sure how to rate this theme because it really didn't seem connected to it at all when I was playing, but then I read the description and was like "okay that's cute". This whole game was cute, really, and it kind of surprised me with how you go back and forth between areas for upgrades. The main blemishes with polish are some oddities with the UI: the meters in the top-left didn't seem to update appropriately, especially the green ones when I got them; and there was apparently one frog I could talk to but I couldn't figure out how.

Very nice art style with the pastel color palette, but the gameplay felt a bit basic for me. You can pretty easily get the jellyfish tank to sustain itself infinitely, making me wish there was a bit more strategy.