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I finally got around to playing this! Very polished UI and animations, and I was surprised to learn that you composed the music yourself during the jam. The achievements added a lot of replayability. It took me a good while to save over 50 dinos. I lucked out and got the jazz band upgrade and jazz counter rooms early on, and the rest of the time I just used the jazz band  as often as possible. My high score is 87!

I like that you can manipulate the counter in lots of ways so that its not always literally "counting down." The last puzzle was a nice culmination of all the previous mechanics, and solving it felt satisfying!

The voice acting is so funny, and that last level was really good, too! Even on keyboard, the platforming felt good.

I like the concept and core gameplay loop, and the animations are so expressive! I love how the goblins incorrectly identify human objects--it reminds me a lot of Pikmin. And the game also reminds me of the auction minigame from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Some music and a proper ending would go a long way to complete this otherwise very polished entry :)

This is a fun game and a fun drawing exercise! It really tests your composition skills. It's fun to try and pick out the most striking detail from each painting so that all the sketches don't just look like trees and frozen water, lol

Though I missed the voting period, I wanted to say that I liked how the player with the ball could lose it if they themselves performed a dash into the emptyhanded player. It could make for some cool moments where the player with the ball tries to dash past the other only to knock the ball out of their own hands.

I like how your spare time becomes your currency--I don't think I've seen that anywhere else in the jam. And because of that, time limit upgrades serve as both "health" upgrades and as money-making upgrades. I think you could do even more with this concept, even if this entry is a little rough around the edges!

Like others have said, I enjoyed the dynamic between the protagonist and the ghost, and the art is beautiful. And despite only having three hours to work on the sound, I think the sound design is still pretty strong, especially with that sort of wood block sound effect when you click into menus. There were some bugs/softlocks (pressing "R" seems to freeze the game), but the vision still shows in the end product.

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it! If you want an extra challenge, you can also go for the true ending by sparing the last enemy and letting them cross the board...

Thanks! I used the Unity Recorder package to make the cover image. It allows you to specify an output resolution and can directly export GIFs as well, so all I had to do was put my promo art in a scene alongside the animated background and particles.

Thank you! While brainstorming for the jam, I started thinking about limited resource mechanics, like a finite number of steps, jumps or actions you can take. One mechanic I imagined along these lines was having 10 different attacks that have to be used in a fixed order, each more powerful than the last, and after you use them all, you die. The original design was also more puzzle focused, with the goal of taking out enemies in pre-designed levels. To save time, however, I ultimately decided to spawn waves of random enemies and randomize the attack order at the start of each round in order to create more emergent puzzle-y moments. And while the theming of the game is very chess-esque, the original inspiration behind both the board layout and the enemy movement patterns was actually Rift of the Necrodancer! And I'm glad you liked the sound effects. Every jam, I basically just button mash in Bfxr until a nice sound pops out.

A funny concept with a great thematic intro cutscene! The short timer and the suspicion mechanic (especially the sound of the suspicion meter filling up) make the test appropriately stressful. I'd like it if the game was longer, though. I think you could get away with slightly longer tests. If you were ever to expand this game, I'd also like to see interactions with the other students that are rendered  completely inscrutable by the language barrier

Good job! It's impressive that you recreated so many of the Papers Please mechanics in such a short time for the jam. Unfortunately, I couldn't submit the forms in the bin in the bottom right, and I seemed to lose points for denying people when their ID didn't match the details in the database. Am I missing something?

I'm impressed with how many rooms and puzzles there are! It really does feel like a classic Zelda dungeon. I think sound + music would help set the tone even more. But if I could add one thing, I'd add a tutorial for the basic fireball. There were instructions for the melee and explosion attacks, but it took me an embarrassingly long to figure out how to cast a fire spell. I could tell from the puzzle layout that I required some sort of projectile ability, but I didn't know how to trigger it! It took me just about an hour to beat the game, find all the secrets and unlock the secret room. Good game!

Thank you! Yeah, I have a hard time describing the rules. I feel like it makes more sense after you play for a bit. I'm glad you enjoyed it!

That's a good suggestion!

I'm glad you enjoyed! And to spare the last enemy, you need to let them reach the left side of the board safely. So basically, try to avoid hitting them with all of your attacks.

I like how discarded souls retain the properties of the powerup you died with! I think that could add a lot of extra dimensions to puzzles if you ever added more in the future.

This is a uniquely literal take on the theme that I don't think I've seen anywhere else. It has a strong classic puzzle game charm to it and is just fun to play! The hold mechanic adds a lot to the strategy to the construction of formulas. Without it, I think success might be too dependent on the placement of numbers on the board. Great game!

Thank you! The difficulty was something I could have used more time to tune. I think that enemies with multiple hit points would be a natural next step in difficulty. For the purposes of the Jam, though, I didn't want to make it too hard, especially since there are two ending screens and I didn't want to discourage people from playing through multiple times to see both. That's also partially why I made a separate endless mode where players could simply survive for as long as possible.

Thank you so much for the kind words!

The high speed of the dust bunny was surprisingly responsive and fun to handle! However, there were a few cases in later levels where I immediately ran into a pink block upon entering the next room, and the pink blocks are already hard to avoid when you're moving so fast! I also didn't seem to get a game over when the timer reached zero.

I appreciate an RPG with a weird combat mechanic, and I think this game definitely fits that description. It's sort of like creating a drum loop to set the pace of your party's attacks, which is cool! And I like that you have to keep clicking on the beat of the signal to maintain the pace of your attacks. I think it could make for some unique puzzle combat. However, it's hard to understand how the game works at the glance, and there's little feedback to tell if you're doing it right until you start actually dealing damage. But above all, I found the settings menu to be a landmark in accessibility and user-friendly design. It changed my life

Thank you for your feedback! I had drawn up some sketches on paper to get a feel for how the game might play, but until I actually got it working in-engine, I couldn't be totally sure that the attack patterns, the number of attacks available, enemy spawning/movement and board size would all come together to deliver that "miniature puzzle" experience. I'm glad you enjoyed it! And while I think more enemies, moves and board types could really extend the game, for now, there's always endless mode... >:)

It's impressive just how many high quality puzzles are packed into this game! Most of the levels gave me the classic puzzle game bait-and-switch: they laid out a set of tools that led me to a seemingly simple false start before I discovered a more clever trick that actually solved the level. And despite the complexity of some puzzles, they're all still built on fundamental mechanics that anyone can understand.

I like the concept of using different vampiric powers to control human behavior. When you get the solution working just right it feels like clockwork. I think it helps that there are multiple ways to beat some levels, so you can strive to complete each level as fast as possible and improve your times. I'd love to see more vampire types added!

The concept is unique but quick to pick up on. I like how health and damage are sort of the same resource, and the idea of the whole "dungeon" being created randomly by drawing cards is really cool!

I'm glad you liked the character art! I almost didn't even add the knight portraits.

Thank you! I had also considered adding a more difficult final boss, but really the final challenge is letting the last pawn make it to the end!

I struggled for the first few games, but then I got the Possession card >:) 

By the end, I had bought all the relics and amassed a huge army of pawns that trampled everything with Cascade. This game is super fun!

Thank you! I'm still polishing the game, so look out for the final jam submission.

As other commenters have said, the grading system is impressive and goes a long way to make your edits feel impactful. I'm sure there are a lot of interactions I didn't see! A great idea for a casual puzzle game.

Also, I wasn't sure which one was the Taylor Swift fan and which was the ex, so I just made more Swifts

It's like Cyclone + Cookie Clicker + Nubby's Number Factory! I love the look and feel of it, and it has a compelling loop, even if it's not too difficult. I think the negative particles add a nice wrinkle to the gameplay, but after a point, you gather so many that you just kind of have to tank the loss and buy more joy particles to compensate. Adding more strategic upgrades that augment the behavior of your particles (such as fields that slow/speed up certain types) could add a bit more depth to the gameplay. And some satisfying sound/particle effects could make the game quite addicting! Overall, I really liked it! Also, I thought the dialogue was pretty funny.

Great art and music, and I liked the enemy variants for all of the main classes! I managed to get to round 40 with the dagger character by waiting by the door for a bit at the beginning of each loop. That way, all of the clones from previous loops would stand by the opposite end of the room and I could defeat them all at once with a single use of Mara's upgraded dagger ability.

Really fun, and the audio and graphics are perfectly refined! Although it's up to luck whether or not you can make some shots, it's always satisfying to try a wacky angle and just barely make a shot that seemed impossible (and it's understandable why you wouldn't be able to guarantee solvable setups). I think it might be cool to have some powerups in the game that could maybe save you from a hopeless situation, though I don't know what form they'd take. The game is good and polished as is, though!

This has the potential for some tricky puzzles! The last one threw me for a bit before I realized that:

a) The first three instructions cancel each other out--mirroring over y, then rotating 180 degrees, and then mirroring over x produces no net change in the image. This was a nice "aha!" moment when I was solving it. You could use facts like these to make puzzles that look more complicated then they really are.

b) You can solve any puzzle by first placing the tiles such that they form the completed image in the frame and then applying each operation to the tiles in order. So if the first step is to mirror the pieces horizontally, you swap the tiles with their horizontal neighbors. Then, if the next move is a 90 degree clockwise rotation, you move each piece one space clockwise around the board. Following this strategy, the completed image will form the full loop, though it may be rotated.

Also, I noticed that the mirror operations in the last level seem to be flipped. So the horizontal mirror operation was flipping the pieces vertically instead. Still, I enjoyed the game!

My mom had an idea for a knot tying game. I'm sure this is not quite what she had in mind, but I bet she'd get a kick out of it!

Also, are the rings mentioned in the tutorial present in gameplay? 

I like how you enforce the rule that your past selves are not allowed to see you--it's a good twist on the past-life clones idea and is intuitive to understand if you've seen basically any time travel movie.

The puzzles ramped up in difficulty nicely, especially when the characters started getting more than one go each--it forces you to think two or more steps ahead at times. And every time I made a mistake, it usually felt like it was my own fault. However there were some times where I placed a block just a pixel too low, preventing the next character from walking under it, and the characters sometimes move too quickly to make minute adjustments to block placement. A grid snapping system and tweaks to character movement would go a long way to help make the gameplay more consistent. But still, I really enjoyed playing through all of it!

At first, I wondered what the little fly was for, but I realized near the end that it turned red whenever the lasers were firing in any level! That's a super cool little touch that makes the game much more fun, as you can focus more on trying to combine all the level layouts in your head and less on trying to count out the laser cycles.