itch.io

Nicely done! I like the aesthetic.

I love the style!!

Looks gorgeous!!! I love this art direction. You're improving so much all the time.

Ironic that a dev blog lamenting honesty and the personal hits me so deeply and personally.

I wish you the absolute best on your journey. I've wishlisted The Ape Painting on Steam.

As a follow up, the issue seems to be if you pass a checkpoint without activating it, and then die.

If you fell owff at some points along the map, you can be respawned quite a while back, but the camera remains far ahead, which means you're pretty much softlocked. You should take a look at how cameras are handled.

beautiful

Where is the jump scare? Where is the ARG???

The sheer amount of content, style, clever design, polish... just... wow.

I cannot fathom making something this well-assembled within 48 hours, even in my wildest dreams.

This is absolutely, utterly nuts. You people are geniuses. 

Enjoy your top 20!

Refused to run on my machine. :(

I would love to play this, but I simply can't.

Just writing to let you know that I have tried, as part of our rate for rate! 

Not a bad little puzzle game at all! Enjoyed my time with this.

The mirror mechanic is quite fun, but the death condition is so unforgiving. I have to reboot the executable every time I lose my 3 hearts, haha. 

NIce sounds effects, save for the lack of repetition or variance. The art is also good, I was able to clearly discern what was what, and what I should be doing.

No music! Somewhat shocking for somebody called PianoPianist, though I'm sure making a jam entry in Pygame of all things left you with little time at all.

Nice submission, genuinely enjoyed it!

Really nice little entry! I am a sucker for narrative so it was nice to see a jam game really do that properly and give it a good shot. It kind of reminds me of Umbrella Academy.

The puzzles are really very interesting. It was a satisfying "Ohhh!" of understanding when it clicked with me that they both share an inventory. While some might call it hand-holding, I really appreciated the running text that told me what I can do.

Art and music clearly not the point of this game, and that's okay! They serve to get the core of the game across, which is very interesting and unique.

I really enjoyed my time with this!

Interesting take on the Greek myth of Sisyphus!

The music and art are nice on their own, but together I feel like they got across the wrong kind of atmosphere. The art says Castlevania, darkness, underworld. While the music says arcade fun.

The core mechanic was nice too, though the player gravity is wayyyy too low. There was sections where I was flying in their air for easily 10 seconds, just trying to push the boulder.

Not a bad entry at all, was a fun, engaging few minutes. Getting the boulder over the ramp was VERY satisfying.

Teamwork makes the dream work!

 The art style is extreeeemely reminiscent of Nuclear Throne, a game I'm quite fond of. The only thing about Nuclear Throne however is that it's full of enormous particles and crunchy, visceral screenshake, which I felt was sorely missed here.

I really enjoyed the core mechanic of shining a light to help your buddy shoot. Managing the battery level and carrying the power core was a pretty fun gameplay loop.

I felt that the enemies move slightly too fast however, not giving me much time to react to seeing them (I didn't play it fullscreen, maybe that's why?)

Also, no music! That was something I also felt was sorely missed.

A really fun little game though, good job!

Souls are a great game topic, eh? ;D

I thought this looked and sounded really really cool, but the gameplay itself is quite slow, and I didn't really feel like I was in control of whether my prisoners get captured or not. 

Great game though, particularly enjoy the atmosphere and audio!

Another really nice puzzle game! I enjoyed this quite a bit. I especially like the green, retro 1bit aesthetic of it all. Very nicely done!

Well done on 11 spirits!

Interesting that you mention the lag spike when spawning the first spirit. I'm not entirely sure why that happens, as the spirits themselves are not particularly technically demanding. Perhaps in future I could async the loading process to avoid a potential crash. But I have certainly noticed it myself.

Thanks for playing!!

Such a unique and polished game! I really like this. The bendy hammer mechanic and watching the fight rage in the background were probably my favorite things. The art also is very nicely polished, both in-game and in your cover art.

I really appreciate the freedom of thought and creativity put into this game. Well done!

I'm glad you had fun with our little game!

In writing the music, I felt I ought to add a whimsical nature to it, so I decided to use some borrowed chords and such. I'm glad somebody picked up on it!

We're aware of how difficult the box is to see, and it's something we'd like to fix in future. None of our pre-submission playtesters had an issue with it initially but once the submissions were closed and people began to stream it, we found missing the box was a common occurrence. Oh well! It'll be fixed once the voting period's over!

We also want to add some new game modes and perhaps even online multiplayer, but I can't say for sure.

Thanks for your feedback!

gigel

gigel

I don't know why I found this as funny as I did, but there's just something hilarious in rhythmically pressing shift to float over to the goal, completely ignoring the level :P

Art and music clearly not the main focus of this game, as both seemed very rushed. But in a sense this is good, as it let the core mechanic, which was very fun, shine.

Great work on this entry!

Not a bad game! Pretty hard, and clearly by purpose. It has the "Pat your head and rub your tummy" effect, where you're trying to coordinate your hands into doing something more complex than is comfortable. I was finding the game really easy up until a certain point, and then I just got all tangled up in myself. I think this is really fun!

I would say though that the art is very plain and the audio was simplistic and poorly balanced. I had to turn my computer volume way, way down before playing, and the music feels like it's just a 5 second loop playing over and over?

Another thing I'd like to say is that despite the tutorial being heavily text based, it was still quite good and taught me how to play pretty much immediately. So great job on that!

Overall not a bad game! I enjoyed it.

Very fun and original! I had a good bit of fun with this. Audio could do with a little more polish; no variation and I could hear background hum in some samples, music was very very plain, but functional. Really enjoyed the feeling of snapping blocks together to get the pizza! Great work!

Quite fun once you invest enough time to figuring it out. The flat graphics and total lack of all audio knocked presentation for me a little though. I really liked the feeling of figuring out a mechanic, and one of the level victory text prompts shocked me quite a bit haha. Great game

Hey thanks!

Whether by our heavy post process stack or dozens of particles, we couldn't get the WebGL build to run reliably. The hit to total plays is something we're willing to take on the chin, but we're super glad you enjoyed it!

Upvote for the Irish accents. Represent!

The patch isn't much, there's no new content or anything. I just felt like fixing up the most annoying design decisions and bugs. I'm quite happy now to move onto the next few things; I have my closure :)

Thanks for playing!

holy HELL

This jam game absolutely floored me, truly and utterly. As I type this, I have the game active in the background, happily generating a soundtrack.

The technology is INSANELY impressive; generative music over a week long jam is no easy feat, but not only that; the visuals are beautiful, the story is poignant (twice I put my face in my hand, on the verge of tears; overcome with emotion), and the game itself as a complete experience is just so comfortable. It is the gameplay equivalent of daydreaming.

I honestly believe,  above all, no matter how hard anyone (including myself) crunched out their audio, it is you that deserves to win the audio awards.

You truly and utterly, honestly deserve them.

Thank you for taking me on a nostalgic journey through my  own mind.

EDIT: The game saves the pictures I took!!! That is an amazingly subtle feature!! Bravo on that!!

I don't know what to say other than "I really, really love this game, despite it's flaws".

It hit a soft spot within me. There are so many absolutely endearing aspects to it, the most of which being Jasper announcing their they/them pronouns, to Spike's stoicism and Farrah's grandiosity, all the way to the politics of the ending.

The gameplay itself was a bit... well,  I feel it lacked feeling, but it wasn't unenjoyable. The reloading had no sound, the animations were delayed and sluggish, I just felt like half of the things I was doing suddenly decided to not work every now and then. Also, the snipers don't seem to be very accurate at all, which helped hugely! I only managed to beat it because I figured I can rapidly swap between the cast to auto-reload! BUT, the enemy designs were amazing, and the environments are very pleasing to the eye!

I also should mention the incredibly helpful pause menu. It's often very hard in a game jam to make other people understand what's going on under the hood, but the pause menu laid out all the things I needed to know in simple, cheerful banter. I love it!

My absolute favourite part is without a doubt the 2D art. I absolutely ADORE what this 2D artist has done with these character concepts, enemy designs and the cardboard style environments. Really made the whole experience, I would go so far to say that the 2D art is the driving factor behind it's personality, of which I absolutely ADORE.

The sound design I felt unfortunately was quite lacking. The music didn't really fit the game in my opinion, and what little sounds there were, were quiet, maybe a little uninspired (besides the stink bomb sound; that's GREAT!) and easy to miss. 

Overall though, this game caught my eye early on, and I am glad to say that I really enjoyed my time in this funky animal kingdom.

My favourite overall aspect of the game has to be Jass. Not only have they the most powerful attack in the game, but they are also precious, and I MUST protect them.

That is hilarious! Internally we did this a few times to make funny screenshots with aswell. Jumping on the beds and over the bars can free you 😅

Thanks for playing, and I am glad you like the game! 
As you might have noticed, this game was made for the GJL Game Parade Spring jam, and was developed by 4 people in under a week. We had to take a few shortcuts to get the game released on time.

Thank you so much for playing and uploading your gameplay!

Was crunching since day 1 on a game idea way too big for it's boots. I'm pretty sure I'm starting to get  ill after it all, but we submitted with 2 hours to go, after cutting a few things that would take too long to make with too little reward.

As long as it's adequately open to interpretation,  I am personally happy with whatever. "Freedom" and "hang in there" and "awakening" among the other suggestions here so far have been really great examples in my opinion.

It's like the game version of John Cage's 4'33.

Thank you so much! I'm glad you enjoyed. You actually can in fact jump with left mouse button as well as spacebar! I should have been more clear about that. You can also move with WASD or arrow keys, and we have controller support too. Thanks again!

I'm not quite sure how my itch.io browsing session lead me here but I am SO impressed. Gripping experience from start to finish, bravo! 

Genius game, from the art direction to the game design. Had an absolute blast playing this! This is gunna be something I'll be referencing in game dev discussions for years, I can feel it, hahaha

Thank you so much! I'm glad you liked the game.

For the tomato, I wanted the red colour to always be clearly visible in any light condition, so I made it slightly emissive.

Thank you!