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In the Last Gambit, you send your units on expeditions to collect energy for your city, and materials for your researchers. If you encounter enemies, all you can do is distract and avoid them until you got what you came for, and then bolt for the portal.

This is a prototype, so I'd be keen to hear how people found the mechanics and concepts I'm trying out here. Playing until a win or lose is about a 30 minute situation. There's a WebGL build, but also a Windows build if you're so inclined.
https://jaco-van-hemert.itch.io/the-last-gambit

I enjoyed playing this! The narrator / main character has a nicely light-hearted tone, which meshes really well with the whimsical (and really good-looking) art. 

I also got a sense that the main character has no idea what they're doing, both through the dialogue and the way options like the ones in the cave are essentially made at random. So it gave an Alice in Wonderland sort of vibe where I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm moving forward somehow. Which was weirdly nice.

There were a few places where it felt like the text appeared in the wrong order, or more likely, was an older version. E.g. the snail calls you Thimbleton, which, if I were to hazard a guess, was the canon name of the main character before you put in the ability to type in a name? And I think when the spider first appears, the narrator says "this guy indeed has impressive long legs", which implies that we've previously talked about his legs, but we haven't. 

Basically, probably errors that crept in through iterations, etc. I.e. not a big issue.

I managed to get to the end. I just hope Lil Buddy doesn't end up being the big bad. (Also, I really loved the rat king's dialogue (and art!); I thought that was really well done with the different ones shouting out things.)

If you saw the credits, you got to the ending. There are some parts you can get to that you might not have gotten to, but the only way to actually finish the game is to interact with the "Give up" prompt. There's no other ending.

I wanted to play with the idea of a hopeless situation that just gets more hopeless over time and instills that feeling in the player, so having there be a "good" ending kind of played against that. I considered having a "good" ending where you can reach the Saint if you do everything really well (i.e. you know which things to avoid and which things to pull, and know how to avoid damage), but I decided that I'd rather double down on the tone/theme I built this around (and even if I wanted to, I wouldn't have had time to implement it!).

Thanks for playing!

Goes without saying, but the art in this is incredible. Spectacular. (Though I agree that the stark white square player was a bit jarring among all the beautiful scenery.)

The parallax also looked really nice, though I would have liked some damping on the movement. For my eyes/sinuses.

In terms of controls, I would have liked to have a separation between the clicking to find things and the moving; I was often clicking on things to see if it's a thing, and then moving. It's not a huge deal, but a little annoying. (E.g. having left click be for selecting things and right click for moving would have solved this.)

I also wonder if it would have felt cooler to have the player add the plants to the book by examining things rather than already knowing all the ones they're looking for? (Or a textual description, which turns into a sketch once you find it?) I think a sense of discovery is paramount to what this game seems to be about, so leaving a bit more mystery to start out with might have been good? (Also, I feel like my ability to come up with a good name for a plant massively improves once I see the poem; i.e. having the players "discover" new plants and only then sketch and name them would have been cool.)

I think I made it to the end; your description says I'll unlock a poem if I find all the plants, but I don't think I did (unless you meant the individual poems for each separate plant, which I did enjoy for all four). 

Anyway, what a beautiful and chill experience. Very cool.

(Played the jam build)

I like the idea of listening to a story and fighting off elements of it while it's being told. That was an interesting idea.

That being said, that was not obvious to me at all. I got killed by the first things, because I didn't realise that I had to fight things while the chief was still talking. In a similar (but less problematic) case, I also didn't know what I needed to do when the chief told me to go get equipped or whatever. Saying something like "go get some flowers, ale, and weapons" or "go talk to X, Y, and Z" might have been helpful to give the player some initial direction. Similarly, for the story, maybe the chief could preface that it will be dangerous, so be ready, or at least have someone shout out that there's danger when the things appear or something?

I also couldn't get the flower thing to work, and I'm not sure I know what the ale does?

Overall, a solid entry, especially for a first game. Well done.

Loved the art in this. And shooting the thread is really satisfying (both when you are jumping and manage to grab a piece, and just the shooting animation itself). I liked the mechanic of building platforms (and choosing which ones to build) by using resources you collect. It incentivises going and finding the resources, but also gives you a bit of freedom in choosing where to spend it. (I think this idea can be pushed a bit further by allowing different uses of the resources as well; but then you could end up with a soft lock, so maybe not.)

I had a lot of trouble with the wall jumping, particularly because the in-air controls are opposite of what I'm pressing when jumping off the wall (i.e. I'm pressing the direction the wall is in to wall jump, but then moments later, the in-air controls push me back towards the wall). Also, it felt like I needed a bit of coyote time  (or more of it, if there already is some).

Overall, a great-looking game with some interesting mechanical concepts. Nice!

I think there was a bit of a risk (and maybe an inevitability) in using unfairness and difficulty in an attempt to generate a feeling of hopelessness, since it can so easily become frustration. It seems like I should probably have put a bit more time into fine-tuning the controls so that the unfairness feels like it's the world that's unfair, as opposed to the game being unable to understand what the player wants. Maybe that would have helped?

Thanks for playing!

During the development of this, I wondered a lot about the viability of the direction I chose. Part of the controls issue is for sure a bit of unintentional jank, but I was also less worried about fixing any issues, since it added to the unfair feeling I wanted to create. 

So yeah, I think the feeling that you're too underpowered even at full power is exactly what I wanted (but it is possible to get to the end* of the level even after 1 death, I think, but definitely with no deaths). Ideally, I don't want people to feel that they're getting "good" at the game. But potentially that's a problem in and of itself. I appreciate the detailed perspective and recounting of your experience. I'm curious to see how many people will feel the same as you (I suspect it'll be a pretty big majority).

Thanks for playing and for the detailed feedback!

* It's worth noting that the "end" of the level is a jump you can't make that just kills you immediately. There's no "winning" this game; you can only finish it by giving up.

This was an amusing adventure; nicely done. I liked that there were little challenges for each of the knights, and I'd have loved to see the battle mechanics that you attempted to do, like Icarus taking flight.

Other than the shift from me being Sir Ravel to me looking at Sir Ravel from a third person perspective being a bit jarring, it was a nice experience!

The UI in this looks incredible. I know a few apps that should be taking notes from this 1-week jam. Really well done.

I also enjoyed the options I could pick from (and obviously I picked only the most ludicrous ones), and you get an extra star for writing out the terms and conditions. (Though I'm going to have to invoice you for a new scroll wheel after that marathon of slow-scrolling madness!)

This is the kind of thing I'd have wanted to maybe try out a few times with different options to see what happens, but the lead-up and long wait times decreases my desire to do that. (But at the same time, the pausing to "load" options and "process" information makes it feel very real and immersive, so it's probably worth the inconvenience.)

I think I got to an/the end, but it just sort of hangs there; I didn't get to any kind of end screen. It just says "reconnecting failed" and then I can't do anything. Is there something more after that?

This is a really fun concept. I liked building snowmen that fight for me while dodging the enemy attacks. I struggled to keep up with the enemy spawn rate though; pretty quickly got to a stage it wasn't survivable for me anymore. But I have fun getting to that point!

A cool visual style, and a nice setting. The climbing controls felt very janky, in that my body flailed around a lot when I was trying to get up, and sometimes I got stuck in a running position and had to jump to get out, which shot me into the air with reckless abandon.

I would have liked to see some complexity in the climbing mechanics to make it a bit more skill-based, even if it's very simple.

This was great! I liked the innovative level design, pushing the upgrades into strange little nooks over and above what I thought they'd be used for. 

The palette and graphics in general are also really nice, and the controls felt sharp and responsive, except for the wall jump, as had been previously mentioned, which I also struggled with sometimes. Perhaps it needs a more generous distance from the wall where it'll still work, or maybe the player should press into the wall rather than away from it to activate it?

This looks really nice, and it's a cute concept. The process of making the bulbs is interesting and complex enough to feel good. Not knowing which colour you'll make next added some interestingness as well. 

The layout felt very inefficient (though I guess that was deliberate?), and by bulb 6 or so, it started feeling a little bit tedious. But maybe if there were different tasks other than just making lights, that could be avoided / mitigated?

I like the variety in abilities, and the graphics were nice. The controls also felt pretty good (other than the buttons chosen for the abilities, which was a bit difficult to use easily with the other abilities).

I tried to use the "5" ability, but it didn't do anything? I assume it hadn't been implemented yet? The other abilities were all interesting though.

I really like the mechanic of having a little helper that does multiple things, especially because you can't use it for e.g. light when it's a platform. I think there's some interesting things that can be done with that.

I felt like Timmy moved a bit too fast for how little you can see ahead of you, even with the light out front (the size of Timmy relative to the screen essentially massively limits how much you can see more than the darkness). I also would have liked to be able to move the light guy up and down without sending it forward (e.g. at that second upwards platform before the spinny thing, it needs to be a bit higher, but the forward distance isn't that much). 

Controls wise, I usually prefer having movement and jump on different hands, which made P for platforms a bit difficult to use, but that might just be me. Also, the arrow keys that are given as an option early on work for movement, but not the light orb controls?

Overall, an interesting concept hampered somewhat due to controls/platformer physics. 

The idea of the opponent is that they have their own required ranges for the three global parameters, and are trying to reach those. We probably should have added something to show what the opponents goals were; it can get a bit unclear if their required ranges are similar to yours. (Also, the AI is pretty basic, so they never use missiles or nukes.)

But overall, it looks like you guys figured things out through trial and error for the most part, which was cool to see in real time! Thanks for playing!

Maybe! I do like the concept, so we might expand on this in the future (no immediate plans yet!).

And yeah, the idea of having a different set of base tiles is interesting, and I've been thinking about how the two terraforming entities having different base tiles that interact and need each other could be interesting. There's certainly more cool things to explore with this!

Thanks for playing!

You might not even need to make them slower; if there was just some way to round them up, that would solve a lot of the issues. After giving it some further thought, I think part of the reason why they're so frustrating is because you end up having to hunt them down one by one, even if you have enough speed upgrades to catch up to them easily. And the fun in this game feels like it's when you're trampling a bunch of enemies at once -- it feels perhaps a bit tedious to have to do this little chore of killing each one individually. 

Maybe having a little stun if they get trampled on so you can capitalise and kill the one guy without him running away? Or some kind of herd script that keeps close-by fireball casters together when they flee so you can squash them all at the same time?

I've tried various settings, but it still doesn't work. I should mention that the crashing happens after the main menu actually. After I click "start", it flashes some kind of splash screen on a black background for a moment, and then closes.

I liked the concept, as a sort of tower defence game. The variety in the stuff you could put down was cool, and I liked the limited number of each thing as well. Some of the items weren't super intuitive to understand though (e.g. the spike barricade didn't seem to damage the zombies, just block them off), and having to click an arrow to get to new ones was a bit tedious, especially with the real time element.

I felt like I often didn't have enough time to properly defend, but that's me in all tower defence games. Like someone noted below, I sometimes had trouble placing the things where I wanted them, but if I stayed far enough away from the house it worked fine, so maybe that was deliberate? I also would have liked a bit clearer indication of ground covered (e.g. I sometimes thought I'd blocked a part, but then the zombies would just wander through a gap I couldn't see). 

The controls were pretty good, and I liked that you could build the walls as well, and thus control the shape of the house as a whole.

I had a bit of trouble seeing the furniture I was placing, partially due to the zoom level (would have liked camera movement) and partially due to the heavy green colouring, I think? I think camera movement in general would have been a really nice addition (though I know you noted that you ran out of time, and this is a 48 hour submission).

Running on Windows. I did get that screen, but then when I click "Continue", it looks like it's loading in for a second, and then disappears.

I found an EXE file, but like the commenter below, I also couldn't play the game. It crashed when started.

This was a cute little game. The level design was pretty well done, and for the most part the character felt pretty good to control (though a bit floaty on the jumps). 

As for the primary gameplay loop, I imagine it's not fully implemented as you intended, since you don't lose if the hunger bar depletes. I will say that there isn't really a requirement for you to go and walk around, since the chickens respawn fairly quickly. Having some kind of system to avoid that (even as simple as not respawning any chickens in an adjacent area) would have been helpful in pushing players to keep moving. Better yet, if there was an end goal, and no respawning of chickens, it would in itself act as a bit of a timer.

I liked this game to start with, but no matter what I try, it always eventually ends up as me running in circles waiting for mushrooms to spawn while a million melee guys swarm behind me and more and more fireball dudes appear.

The mechanic of the player dealing damage damaging themselves is a hard one to pull off nicely, and I don't know if this was it. But it would have been okay if it hadn't been for the fireball casters. I hate those guys -- they run away (and scatter in different directions in a group), run pretty quickly, can run off the side of the map, do a lot of damage, and have weirdly high HP pools . It essentially always ends up with me not being able to handle them fast enough.

One of the comments below seems to suggest that jumping is an attack of some kind? I think I got a 10 damage thing once, but I could never recreate it, even when landing in a swarm of enemies, which I would expect would remove any positioning problems I could have had. Maybe if I had figured out how to do the jump attack, things would have gone better for me.

Anyway, this was a nice game with a dash of humour; I just couldn't avoid getting to a frustrating portion eventually.

Cool idea and nice presentation. 

The chasing from Baba Yaga adds an urgency to a resource management game that was quite interesting, though I had some trouble with it. Sometimes the requirements for moving was so high (e.g. every now and again there'd be a 7 wood requirement) that I'd have to just sit there and collect wood while Baba Yaga attacks me (and spend some turns collecting food and water, since those runs out too.

I would have liked some options, so that situations like that could have alternative strategies that didn't feel so futile. (Also, an indicator of when food and water was going to be subtracted? The level of light obviously played into that, but I was never quite sure when it would happen.)

There were animal symbols on each tile you can stand on, which I assume indicated something (maybe what kind of resources you could get a lot from there?), but I couldn't really figure it out. 

All in all, a cool concept that feels like it needed a bit more leeway and direction. Maybe having more starting resources could give the player some more agency in what they want to focus on, rather on them immediately needing to be focused on what's needed for the next move.

A fun little game! The arcs of the throws were weirdly satisfying. Some other objects would have been cool, and maybe different ways of disposing of them?

As for the bottle bug noted below, I had one bottle miss the basket, but the rest worked perfectly.

First off, love the title of the game.

There's a lot of choices, and I had fun going through all the options for the purchases. I eventually got into the habit of just doing a bunch of contracts in a row until I had a bunch of money, and then making some purchases. Not sure if there was supposed to be some mechanism that would drive me to evenly spend time between contracts and purchases.

I see in the screenshots that there appears to be some kind of progression, but it didn't seem obvious how to do that; or at least, I couldn't figure out how to make it happen.

I don't know if this was deliberate, but the way the placements worked, I had to essentially pick up and drop things multiple times to get them on the right spot because of the camera angle. A placement indicator might have been helpful here.

Otherwise, this felt pretty good to play. I liked the combination of sort of cosy game combined with an assassin game, though I'd have liked to see some more mechanics for the contracts (e.g. even something simple like getting a description in the contract and having to find the right person, rather than just having them marked eagle vision style).

Cool idea. I like the two types of cards, which gives a cool bit of variation. Also, the cards gives it a good bit of randomness, though it also seems to be a weakness in this game (at least for me). I was often stuck just discarding card after card, trying to find something to bump up energy and not finding it. I also often seemed to get the same card a couple of draws in a row (very often the interstellar loan), which got a bit frustrating.

I also couldn't really find a good end goal to aim for. It seems like it's a "try to keep the colony alive for as long as possible" sort of game, but it felt to me like it needed some kind of goal or end point maybe.

I like the concept, and the interface works really well for how this plays out. The buildings were really cool; I was pleased when the first one popped up.

I was quite ravaged by Mars quakes the first time around, getting several in a row, which was pretty disheartening. Maybe having some kind of delay before another can proc would be good? That said, in my second run, I could really rack up the buildings and had a very high output, so maybe it needs to be like that.

Interestingly, my strategy became very anti-people despite me eventually getting the "good" ending where you've maxed out Homeliness. Since everything is worse with more people, I would generally set up a supply generation situation for a bit (maybe +40 per turn), and then time after that when my supplies hit zero (because of the increased population because of the high amount of supplies), I'd just let them die until they get back to the equilibrium.

I also felt like it was very necessary to take every defence upgrade you can get, since that's by far the most dangerous problem. The first time, I didn't really use the reroll, and got to a no-win state since I didn't draw enough defence cards.

Basically, this was fun, but maybe some balance is needed to avoid a sort of singular solution kind of situation that I think might be happening here.

The humour in this is on point. Music fits well, and the gameplay was very easy to figure out and understand. At first I thought the rental application part would be pretty easy, until I realised there is a scroll bar.

I'll note that I never really rotated objects I put in the homes. There wasn't time, and most of the time I didn't really matter anyway. Having a slightly longer time limit might have been useful, since that would both give people more breathing room to find good angles, and create more filled apartments, which would necessitate rotating things more.

In the rental application bit, it seems as though missing one piece of information automatically gets the application rejected. While this isn't an issue, missing something early on means that you have to sit through the whole rest of it even though there's no point. Maybe just cutting it off once you miss something would help? Or, in a more complex solution, having each missing element affect the chance that you might get a callback? I.e. even if you miss one, there's still incentive to get the rest, since it'll increase your chances of getting a callback.

Anyway, here's my incredible layout for my new apartment:

This is really impressive; it feels very realistic, but also pretty easy to understand and interact with. Or well, I'm not sure I completely knew what I was doing, because I couldn't manage to make it to the last, secret island. It just got to a point (pretty early on while the island was still a long ways off) where I would just capsize to the one size despite standing on the edge of the other side (thought probably too late). 

I liked the way you split up the gameplay into voyages to each island, rather than just making it one long thing; it gave me things to aim for, and the checkpoints were lifesavers, since I almost always capsized nearly directly after reaching a new island!

Awesome job with this!

A very strange experience. I couldn't really figure out how to see what's going on very well; it feels like the camera was underground half the time. Maybe I'm missing some information on what to do?

The sensitivity of the controls felt a bit too much, such that I didn't really feel in control of where I was going, so I couldn't really make the most of the skating physics.

I liked the lighting and mood of this combined with the soulless eyes of the dummy on the skateboard. As noted below -- very surreal.

I liked the varied gameplay here, making the player rethink everything with each new level -- very well done. I couldn't manage to finish the 2nd level (it felt like I couldn't launch the ball with enough force to make it go around the corner, so maybe I was missing something?), but the rest went okay. 

Got stuck in the last one for quite a while, because I was so focused on trying to follow the wooden track that I didn't notice the steps behind me! The zombie flinging was fun, but very buggy, such that 60% of the time I tried to grab one, it didn't work, and the throwing seemed very random in terms of where it would go.

Overall, a cool entry; I liked the narrative and the world design, and the music fit nicely for the atmosphere. Nice job!

An amusing concept! Took me some trial and error to figure out what I was trying to do, but the level design was pretty good, so it was quick to figure out.

The disco level seemed to have a switch in controls, which was a bit confusing, though I liked the new challenge of it.

Overall, I had a nice time playing!

The gameplay and design felt pretty solid (if a bit short!), but I had some issues with controls. The sensitivity was perhaps a bit too much? I also had some issues with seeing where I was going while holding a block. 

In the third level, I had some troubles getting the crates where they were supposed to go, and there was a place where it felt like I could get stuck (specifically, accidentally dropping the crate on the wrong side of the fence).

Having more polished controls would have gone a long way in making me feel like I was more in control and thus focusing on solving the puzzles more than fighting with making the character do what I wanted them to do.

The progression of floating background things in the background to show height came out really great, and the number of UFOs made combo hits go off nicely, which is always a lot of fun.

I had some issues where I don't go into the shell quickly enough after shooting or something (or maybe it's just that the gravity pulls down the upwards velocity so fast he unshells again?), such that I struggled to destroy any UFOs from below at all, unless I'm bouncing off destroying another. So I had to always do a sideways or downwards attack to ensure I destroy them.

I'm also not sure how the scoring worked. I see there's a multiplier, but it seems to just always go up to 2 and then stay there for the rest of the time. (Also didn't notice it at first; a "10" or whatever popping up in the explosion might sell that more?)

Also, I feel like we talked about this in early playtests and there was a reason this couldn't be done, but having the mouse go back to the centre when the player clicks would have been very helpful. I kept going off the sides of my screen, such that I couldn't always make full stretches.

Anyway -- this came out great! There's a great satisfaction in chaining a bunch of UFO destructions, and a nice sense of upwards progress. Now you just need something at the top!

This was fun! The aiming felt good, and it was a nice challenge to try to get all the levels' holes in one. It did sometimes feel like the friction on the ball was more than it should be (the number of times my ball stopped at the very edge of a slope was too many to count), and I was a bit disappointed/annoyed by the empty sky that just sucked up the ball into the nether when a big arc would have been great; I'd have liked either a ceiling (like in the first level), or preferably, space to do a big arc if I wanted to try to get that right.

But anyway, nice, clean graphics, and a fun time. Nice!

Really funny, and the graphics and music really sells the Bollywood element!

I still feel like I'm not really in control of where I'm going. I eventually figured out that if the top bro points up/back as far as he can, I can get forward momentum much better, but sometimes it's a lot more or a lot less than what I was expecting. I also found it quite confusing to turn the camera with the bottom bro rather than the mouse; I feel like having more usual third-person shooter controls might help make it feel a bit more controllable (though maybe that's not what you're going for!)

The tigers and traps and things were really good. Having to constantly deal with them prevented me from getting too comfortable in lining up my jumps (though a bit of level where there is jumping but no enemies might be nice for the player to get used to the already challenging controls for just moving around!).

Love how this turned out!