itch.io

Geometry Wars was definitely an inspiration!  I found this game very shortly after submitting Techyon: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2105620/Sektori/

It's basically exactly what my vision for this game was (I haven't actually played it, but based on the trailer).  So you'd probably like it for the Geo Wars vibe!

ahhhhhh i see.  that makes a lot of sense, but i didn’t figure out why while playing!  now i want to try again…

Playing through again after the update!

• Love the new "hammer charged" sound!  It might be even cooler with something that plays as it's charging up too!  Everything else in the game has such good sound effects, that the charging period is the only "awkward silence" I can think of where something is "happening" but there's no sound feedback.
• I got very excited about the first new mouse NPC, and I managed to jump up to it straight from the ledge on the left, with a little bit of a boost from the player collider shape at the top.  This solution bypasses the breakable wall area entirely though, so it's possible to move on without having a chance to realize that that's a thing.
• The block respawn animation is also great!  It seems like it gets delayed by a tick when you swing the hammer with left click?  Now that I can time it precisely, I was startled by it "pausing" for a second right as I commit to a swing.
  
• The right click has to charge up like left click, which feels intended.  But if you right click to charge up (not held down), then the next action you take, including left click, makes you perform a right click action.
• I might have just not noticed this before, but from my first play, I had the impression that the hammer always sends out three shockwaves past where it actually hits, regardless of whether it goes through a wall or something.  I mostly feel this way because I'm used to the sequence of 4 "bang" noises that play after swinging.  On this playthrough I'm noticing that the sequence sometimes stops, maybe when it goes off the edge of a floor or hits a wall?  It sounded surprising when only one or two of the sound effects played!  But sometimes they do still continue anyways?  I think it makes sense either way but should be consistent.  The weirdest case is in the room with the first key--if you stand on the far right side of the platform above the bench thingy, and swing facing right, the hammer hits, skips the first chained shockwave, and then still does the second and third!  I would have expected the later ones to be dependent on the first ones happening.
  • I suppose that the shockwaves have to go through walls to be able to do the later levels!  So I'm curious why they only sometimes don't go off, then.  It's never prevented me from making progress, though!
• The new nail timing is great!  I missed a swing, had to fall back to the platform I came from before it was back, but by the time i jumped back up to it, it was back!  No waiting needed, but also no way to cheese it :)
• I died on the second triangle again, and very much appreciated the new checkpoint!
• The new checkpoints look cool--it has kind of an old fashioned telephone or electrical wire vibe--but I think the original design was more obviously a checkpoint.  The inactive version is pretty easy to miss visually, although it'd probably be pretty hard to actually miss them physically in the game as you progress, so not a big issue.
• I think I just realized the intended way to get the key out from the spike pit--knocking the nail with the key "stuck" to it back upwards?  I just jumped down to get it and died both times previously heheh.  I also got the second triangle and then died on the way back down, but kept it.  Perhaps something like Celeste would work here, where you need to return to a "safe space" before the things you've collected stay with you / resolve.
• I love the new animation upon getting all triangles!  (At least I think that's new?)

Awesome update, and great responses to the feedback! :)

I think that the focus on a few really well implemented features is hard to do but super important for a game jam with such small scope / little time.  You prioritized well and I’m excited to see where it goes with more time now!

Ok, this is my favorite game so far that I've played--the hammer jumping mechanic, and specifically the combination of left and right click having similar but different effects, feels fresh and super interesting.  There are good interactions explored here, and yet there's even more potential I'm sure!  I collected all three triangles (despite missing the first one not once but TWICE, so yes, I played through the whole game three times).  Since I like this one so much, and could tell I was going to like it from early on, I took some more detailed playtesting notes than I usually do!  So just know that I only kept track of every little thing I didn't like because the game is incredible :)

First, the more significant thoughts:

• One of the first things I felt, and continued to feel despite getting better at it through the game, was that timing the respawn of blocks was a bit hard.  I got the timing down by the... third playthrough... but it's pretty punishing to get it wrong in the "nail elevator" level leading to the third triangle, for example.  I think this could be pretty easily turned into a skill issue rather than a frustration by adding some sort of visualization of how long before the block is going to respawn.
• The player's right click movement is a little wonky if you aim on the same side of the nail as the player.  I feel like the player's movement should be determined by the angle of the line drawn from the player to the cursor, as long as a target is in range on that side of the player (the cursor's position in regards to the target would be irrelevant).  Also I'm not sure what the straight line of dots on the other side is meant to show--I think just the parabolic indicator of the player's movement is all that's needed here at least with the current set of mechanics (and that indicator is glorious, one of the most important features of the game, in my opinion).

Some less important thoughts:

• Nails making the key spin in a big circle is interesting but kind of unintuitive.  Everything else in the game makes way more sense so this feels a bit out of place.  Maybe the nail could push it through a chute or something to make it pop out in an accessible place, if that's the goal!
• The second triangle challenge could probably use a checkpoint under it.  That's the hardest platforming puzzle, and the two jumps to get back to that screen feel extra annoying when you're dying doing something significantly harder up above.
• Nails could pop back up a little faster.  I don't see a reason why they should remain unusable for long enough that I sometimes had to sit and wait next to it for another attempt when I smack it the wrong way. Maybe long enough that you'd have to be really creative to hit it twice before touching the ground again.  I think it could be about half as long as it currently is and be totally fine mechanically.

Some very unimportant thoughts:

• Dying while in slo-mo takes a long time haha.  I think exiting slo-mo if you die would be nice!
• If the starting guy is reached again before obtaining all of the triangles, he could give the player a hint towards the ones they missed!  I don't think it's possible to reach him without having had an opportunity to obtain them all, so the player must have missed something.  I didn't mind going back to search for the last missing one, but the third time got a little annoying.  But I really wanted to see what the guy did when I had them all!!!!
• Checkpoint flags ding every time you touch them, but really they should probably only ding when your spawn point actually changes.
• The ding sounds (checkpoint and hammer charge) are a little harsh, but I only say this because the other hammer sounds are amazing
• What are the little brown benches everywhere???  I was convinced that they were going to have some secret associated with them but they never did anything as far as i can tell.  :(

All that said, I loved this game.  The mechanics are great, intuitive, and well taught through level design.  I made an explicit note that learning to pop the nails up into the air and then hit them for a "double jump" is VERY satisfying, both to figure out and to execute. I think the "nail elevator" level (as I've been calling it in my head) is an absolute masterpiece.  The process of raising the nail is clever, but the way that it ends up going back to the bottom to get you out of the room is genius.  And that process gets started by the double jump to unlock the door.  Big chef's kiss on that one.

I put this straight into the same category as Ooo, with easily as much potential, where the mechanic is fresh and can be explored over several hours of gameplay.  I think your level design is clearly good enough to fulfill this potential as well, so I really hope you continue with this and give it some more content!  Amazing work!

Yeah... its funny how cool stuff ends up being a lot harder... the universe is mean like that.  Good work, though!

I see, that's a good idea!  My feedback is to perhaps make that happen sooner or in small steps more often, then--I had probably decided that nothing was going to change around 45-50 seconds.

Nice prototype!  I was sad that there wasn't more content, but that doesn't mean it's a bad project, it just means that it has potential!  I think the dual-vision mechanic is cool, especially if each mode has its own benefits and weaknesses.  I'd love to see a more realistic sound mode, which sends out a pulse like you have, but that actually interacts with the environment.  That would be cool!

Good work!

Beautiful game, reminds me a lot of Gris.  The main character might be a little too similar but everything else just has the same vibe!  The watercolor effect on the dress is nice, and I appreciate some of the little details like letting go of the jump button to stop rising immediately, and the cool voice visualization!  The characters are interesting and there's some mystery around what's going on here.

I got stuck at the bridge by Kitten sadly, but I see what I missed from other comments here!  I'm gonna give it another go!

I like the mutant fish sprites, and a variety of hazards!  The gunshot sound is a little loud though, I think.

Adding discrete stacks of velocity instead of a continuous force to move is interesting--I think it actually works for a space game where momentum is conserved in zero-gravity!

It felt pretty easy to dodge all of the kittehs, and even when I hit one it didn't typically spread the disease to anyone else.  Perhaps there could be a scaling difficulty or something, where more cats spawn if there are a lot of healthy cats, and some cats die if there's too much plague?

Once I realized it was tank controls, the game runs super smoothly!  Death is a little sudden--maybe there could be lives or HP of some sort?  A reason to move around could also be cool, like randomly spawning powerups around the ocean, or different types of fish that need to be dodged.

Good work!

hahah yes, that's fair on the economy feedback.  I scaled the prices back a lot just before submitting, and I probably overshot by a little.  I'd rather it be a bit more causal for the game jam audience though, with so many other games to get around to playing as well!  Thanks for playing mine!

Thanks for the feedback!  I put out a bug fix patch, and included increasing the contrast a bit for the enemies--I think you're totally right that they were a bit too dark.

Thank you!  I had a larger vision for this game originally, but then I discovered a recently released game that pretty much does exactly that: 
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2105620/Sektori/

That said, I think that there are some other directions that I could take this game, so I will be exploring those ;)

I'm having trouble finding a solution that doesn't go through buildings, sadly.  I think this is such an amazing idea for a game though--building complex waveforms as a sum of simple individual waveforms is very interesting.  I think making this more of a puzzle where several different waveforms are available to be summed into a path, and time doesn't progress until you "commit" to a path through the space you can see in front of you.  Hearing the "solution" as a synthesized tone would be a nice touch on top of that!

Very fun!  With such a simple set of upgrades, I still felt like I needed to make decisions about what I needed most after each day.  The price increase from 1 to 3 might be a bit high--it's a bit silly to buy a 3 cost before the other 1-costs--but this also encouraged me to try each of the upgrades quickly. The sound effects really added a lot to the feel and mood of the game too!  It took a bit of experimenting to figure out how it all worked, but I got there after a few (very short) runs :)

I think the fuel gauge needs to be more linear--it felt like it ran out very quickly on the final quarter, while the first quarter lasted a long time. If there's something affecting how quickly it runs out like threat level or something, that needs to be more obvious.  I kept making a bit more progress than last run and wanted to see the end of the game, but kept suddenly running out of fuel despite focusing on managing that.

Great work!  One of my favorites so far!

Fun game!  I was ready for it to be unplayable given the description, but it worked just fine for me!  I enjoyed trying to collect all of the additional scenery to fill out the background. and I like the variety of foods too.  It was fun to see what they turned into after the first time seeing them!

One feedback mechanism that could be improved in my opinion--I couldn't tell if I was cooking any faster by pressing space more than once while the bar was in the middle green area.

omg that escalated quickly

nice little game for only 3 hours!

I forgot that I needed to turn the knob at first, but very clean game!  I think days could be a little shorter perhaps, or could change throughout the course of the day to mix it up... it started feeling a bit like a desk job by the end of day 2 haha but maybe that's the point!

all i do is spin spin spin no matter what
got kings on my mind, i can never get enough

Cool game!  Reminds me a bit of Firewatch.  Looks great, sounds amazing!  I'm not sure I quite followed how to apply logic to choose the right responses, but I think there's a lot of potential in being the "radio operator" of the park to keep everyone (and yourself!) safe, both by applying park knowledge available in the watchtower as well as seeing through deception.

Very nice!  I managed to smuggle the first three orbs through most of the game, which might have cheesed a lot of the puzzles... but I love how Naya changes colors to represent the components she's holding!  I'd love to see more mechanics than just solid / not solid blocks!

Yeah, this is really a 2D game.  I've been learning 3D tools in Unity recently so I forced it a bit on this project ;)

I see.  That's also a great point, it's currently what your mouse is pointed at, not what you're holding!

Very cool!  I didn't realize that the selected planet mattered for where the new orbit is created initially, but I realized how neat this concept is after discovering that!  The funny, brief descriptions of the types of planet add a nice charm to the game too :)

I think a parallax effect on the background stars would be really nice when dragging the screen view around!

I'm not sure how the speed of the newly added planet is determined when you buy it...  It seemed like some orbited at a normal pace, but some were very slow or not moving at all.  I was worried I had placed them in a "bad" spot initially, because points are awarded per orbit, but they seem to award points regularly despite not having moved much in their orbit, so it's probably a visual bug.

I think the pseudo-chaotic motion of planets nested in several layers of orbits is the most interesting part of this game for sure!  I'd love to see something like an area-based buff that you can buy (like a static nebula or something) that encourages you to try to make wild geometric patterns of orbits to make strong planets pass through or stay within a particular global space more often.  Or even to buy if you *notice* that your wild solar system makes a particular planet stay almost still relative to the sun.  This could give some deeper strategy to the structure of the solar system, beyond what you already have with the "inner orbit" multiplier!

Thanks for the feedback!  I totally agree, having an indicator for how far you are would be great to judge whether it's time to end a session or not.  Also a level selector from the title screen, so once you know the "name" of each puzzle from the indicator (even if it's just a number), you can come back later and jump straight to where you left off!

Thanks for playing!

Thanks for the feedback!  I totally agree that the pulse movement and effects need some player-controlled configuration.  Some people want it to play longer, and some want it shorter!  Being able to click to skip is also a great suggestion with very little downside to include.

Thanks for playing!

<3

Thanks for the feedback!  I agree, having the ability to rotate with the mouse would remove the need for a keyboard at all for core gameplay, and make the game much more mobile-friendly!  I think I would add it to left-click, rather than right-click, because this maps better to the mobile platform.

Thanks for playing!

Thanks for the feedback!  I agree, having the ability to rotate by clicking on a block would remove the need for a keyboard at all for core gameplay, and make the game much more mobile-friendly!

The pulse speed also definitely needs a slider that lets the player have more control over the pace they want.  I band-aid fixed this for some levels like the four-leaf clover, since it was painfully slow haha.  But the pulse should really move at a speed proportional to how far it's about to travel, perhaps.

Thanks for playing!

Thanks for the feedback!  I agree, the camera angle could easily be higher, maybe even close to vertical.  Thanks for playing!

Thanks for the amazing feedback!  You've hit pretty much every theme that I've seen brought up in different ways across other playtesters, and it's all definitely worth thinking about--especially the "back of the grid" control issues and an indication of how "optimal" a solution is, given that there are several in many cases, for the hyper-optimizers out there :)

I'm curious what you mean by "more snappy"?  If anything, I feel like the way blocks snap to the grid when hovering over it is as snappy as it could be / too snappy, in my opinion.  Maybe you mean snapping in place before even reaching the grid, when coming from outside?  That could be interesting to experiment with.

Thanks for playing!

Maybe!  My previous jam games were fun to make but weren't inspiring me to work on them any more.  I really like how this one turned out though, so it's possible!  One mechanic I was excited for but had to cut was blocks that rotate 90 or maybe 180 degrees right after the pulse moves through them.  I think this would add a cool dynamic aspect during "runtime" of the pulse.

Thanks for playing!

Thanks for the feedback!  There's definitely plenty to improve with the visuals in general.

As for the controls, one theme I've seen coming up in other feedback is that dragging blocks around near the back of the grid (farthest from the camera) can feel a little hard to control, or that the blocks get returned to the table when it felt like they should have locked into the back row.  I think it has to do with the camera angle and how I raycast the mouse position to the puzzle's grid (which is very low to the table, while the blocks are tall), but I'm not sure how to improve it without making placing blocks in the *front* of the grid feel equally janky.  Having a more vertical camera angle is probably the easiest solution!

Thanks for playing!

Thanks for the feedback!  I totally agree with the tedium of placing the blocks once you already know what you want (especially the 4-leaf clover level... I built that one so many times while playtesting haha).  The last comment I replied to suggested a way to "draw" the path, and use available blocks automatically, which I think would be hard to implement but really cool if it works!

Thanks for playing!

Thanks for the feedback!  I totally agree that the pulse speed could be faster across the board, and should probably have a player-controlled slider to adjust the speed even more.

Drawing the path is a cool suggestion!  Building the path can be tedious (especially for levels like the 4-leaf clover) when you already know what you want.

Thanks for playing!

I love that!  I got some feedback that a "minimum blocks required" note would be fun for the players that like to hyper-optimize their solutions, but a "maximum usable blocks" could also be fun!

Thanks for playing!

I think that's a great suggestion!  There's no action tied to just clicking on a block, or to the mouse wheel, so this would make a lot of sense to include as an option!

Clicking to rotate would be particularly useful in making the game more mobile-friendly, which a few people have mentioned would be a good platform for it.

Thanks for playing!

I totally agree on the pulse movement being a bit slow in general.  I got that feedback in some final playtesting and sped it up on several levels (I'm looking at you, 4-leaf Clover), but didn't have time to tune it evenly or make a slider so that people could change it themselves.  Thanks for playing!