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Thank you for playing, and for the detailed feedback!

r.e. jumping, I agree that it's not quite there - I'm tempted to pull some footage of Super Mario Odyssey and look at the timings of the regular jump. I have a hunch that part of it is just a case of tweaking the numbers (how long does the ascent/hang/descent last, how fast can you move during each phase, et cetera), but I think that the animation is probably a factor, too. My character "winds up" their jump while they're already in the air, whereas Mario snaps almost immediately into his "punch the sky" pose. I'm also missing some particles that I imagine could help improve the game feel.

It's the same story with the camera - both of them do the job, but not elegantly. Definitely something to explore in future.

And yes, there will be a post-jam update! Nothing revolutionary, but a few snarls fixed and a bit of refinement added here and there.

I genuinely found myself getting hooked on this for a little bit. I like the mechanic of swiping to the edge of the screen to change rooms, although it fights a bit with having the menu be so far from the center. I'd love to see this get more developed after the jam!

Really goes to show how far framing can take a game! You could make a game that is functionally identical to this one  with nothing but blocks and numbers, but without the sense that I'm controlling units on a battlefield, it wouldn't be nearly as engrossing. Great stuff!

The mark of any good puzzle game is that it takes a simple concept, and makes it work for a decent runtime - which is what you've done here. I really like the 1-bit graphics and the way the tiles shift slightly, which combined with the audio, makes the world feel delightfully strange and alien.

My only criticism is that I'd like the game to have given me an indication of how far through I was - apart from that, this is a very solid entry.

As someone who feels the pressure to make his games' controls as versatile and forgiving as possible, I really appreciate a game that says "no, you will commit to your jumps". The greyscale visuals and the subtle 3D effect work really well, and combined with the audio, it makes for a really relaxed vibe that counteracts the occasional "noooo don't fall down!" moment. A really great entry all round.

Wow - I had no idea you could do that! It's pretty fun to see people break your game in ways you never realised it could be broken. Thank you for playing!

I agree that it's fun to find ways to cheese the game, but in hindsight, I wish I'd made the "proper" solution more obvious. Thank you for playing!

I had Sunshine on my mind when I was implementing it! Made me appreciate how much fun it was to aim F.L.U.D.D.. Thanks for playing!

Mouse sensitivity and volume adjustments are in the settings menu, available from pausing in-game. The mouse cursor is a bit of a weird one - the game and browser seem to be fighting for control of it. Pausing and unpausing fixes it, I find, but I agree that it would be preferable to not have to deal with.

The ichor is a part of the same shader used for rendering the terrain, with a splatmap determining whether or not the floor is lava. For the most part, it's a signed distance field, but I had to draw on top of it for some last-minute alterations.

As for the top... the tower seems to have a few cracks, doesn't it? Perhaps if you were to strike from really high up... ;)

Thanks for playing!

The spritework here is excellent! Fairly early on I got a ring that increases my attack speed after every attack, so in the final battle with Satan himself, I turned into Mr. Turbo Stabby Man, which was very fun to see.

I enjoyed reading the emails to get a picture of how the crisis started, and having those two choices was fun - I imagine the original intent was to see a payoff for them? The Game Boy aesthetic is a nice touch, too.

It's rare to see a game with a historical setting like this! It would be helpful to know before you interact with a turtle what the outcome will be - I think I softlocked myself because I only got up to level 3, and the only turtles accessible to me swapped with me rather than adding to my level.

Has a bit of a cinematic flair at the beginning - nice touch! I really enjoyed the pixel art, and the player character's monologue is a really clever way of giving clues as to what needs to be done next. I encountered a slight bug where I was able to push a rock out of the area, but that was about it. Great stuff!

A very unique take on the theme, and one with some real staying power - I'm impressed by the number of levels! The UI is really well-implemented, the key and death markers are some brilliant quality-of-life additions. The "copyright safe mode" gave me a good chuckle, too.

The moment I saw that Godot now has an AudioStreamInteractive, I knew I had to give it a try. Thank you for playing!

Honestly, valid. A well-designed game should explain itself. There's one entry in this jam - I won't say which - whose Itch page is so long that I immediately said "wow, that's a lot of words. Too bad I'm not reading them."

I really should make it a habit to have gossiping NPCs in my games more often. They're not too much effort to add but they go a long way to preventing a game's world from feeling empty and lifeless.

Thank you for playing!

That's a fair comment. Initially I had planned for the game to have multiple stages where the mountain would mutate in a different way each stage (and the player would have to upgrade/mutate in order to compensate), but - say it with me now - I didn't have time to make that all happen.

Thank you for mentioning the performance, by the way - that was another thing I was aiming at from the beginning. I even pulled an old laptop out  to profile it so I could be sure that people could enjoy it regardless of what hardware they were using.

Good to see you jamming again, Philou! This reminded me of the first phase of Spore in a really good way - I ended up playing for a good few rounds, because it was fun to try experimenting with different stat distributions. The randomly generated map is cool to see, too!

Thank you very much, Philou!

It wasn't intentional, but once I realised you could sequence break, it seemed more fun to reward players for thinking outside the box - that's why one of the NPCs will call you out on it if you get into the tower without the upgraded stomp. I didn't expect so many people to find that route, though, which suggests that I should have made the intended solution more obvious. Thank you for playing!

Yes, I definitely should have made the stomp move clearer! Thank you for playing - I have added an invert look option that will be in the post-jam update. :)

If there's one thing I've learned from The Legend of Zelda, it's that saving the world is much more fun if you have the opportunity to be a stinker along the way. Thank you for playing!

There will definitely be a post-jam update, as I've already made some minor bugfixes and tweaks, but we'll see how much further it goes than that. There is a lot that I originally planned but didn't have time for. Thank you for playing!

I'm really glad you enjoyed the cutscene! Honestly, working on it was a real second wind moment - taking the time to make ten seconds that just "pop" is a great way to stay motivated, I find. Thank you for playing!

There's supposed to be an NPC who tells you, but the fact that I can't remember where they are suggests that it fell through the cracks. "You need to explain this better" is a recurring issue for me, it seems - perhaps I should make it a goal for my next jam entry to focus on onboarding the player as gracefully as possible. Thank you for playing!

The protagonist from Journey was, indeed, on my mind as I was modelling the player character. Thank you for playing!

I like the concept, but given how slowly the character moves, whether I manage to make it to the top of the level or not feels more like a matter of RNG than skill.

Really enjoyed the presentation here. I thought I'd discovered a winning strategy, until Bae showed up and absolutely wrecked me.

The battle theme reminded me a little of Blinded By Light - was that intentional?

Great take on the theme, but man, my prototypes were determined to win a Darwin Award!

It's like playing Papers Please over Ceefax! I don't know why, but "vaguely creepy thing in a situation not acknowledged to be creepy" always gets me, so the Red Death plant was pleasantly offputting. I love retro computer aesthetics so the presentation was very welcome, and I think it's a really neat take on the theme.

I think I had a bug a couple of times where the plants were reported as being in YB, but the map only went up to YE. Maybe I missed something.

Unfortunately, it seems I rejected too many good crops and my colonists got sick of the intermittent fasting.

Thank you! I'm glad it came out that way, because making something with a unique visual style was the primary thing I decided to try with this one.

Malistar, a PICO-8 reimagining of 1983's Sinistar, is out now!

Like the arcade game from which it draws inspiration, Malistar is a fast-paced space shooter in which you must rush to make yourself ready for a frenzied fight against a vast and viscous foe. Gather bombs, stock up on health, and master the new phase ability - but do it quickly, because you have scant time before your enemy awakens.

This entire project began because I wanted to recreate the iconic voice lines of the original... only to then realise that I didn't have a prayer of cramming all six seconds of audio into a PICO-8 cart. But by that point, we were already halfway through making the game, so I settled for just including the scream (which, alone, fills almost the entire map!).

I hope you'll enjoy it - we spent a lot of time tweaking and tuning this game to ensure that it had the intensity of its forebear without being quite as murderously difficult.

Hello everyone! Quantum Reindeer, following its launch as part of Madvent 5, is now out as a standalone game! It's a holiday-themed shoot-'em-up with a full cast of voice actors and oodles of challenge.

You play as Santi, newly-qualified sleigh pilot, and leader of her squad of quantum reindeer, as she delivers presents to the nice and coal to the naughty. The game's USP is that you can switch between your four 'deer, each of whom have their own strengths and special abilities. Given my love for Star Fox and Metal Gear Solid, I couldn't resist giving them plenty to talk about, so I brought in a team of voice actors, every single one of whom knocked it out of the park. And as you can see below, the game features some amazing pixel art from D4yz, whom I've had the pleasure to work with many times in the past. 

Frustratingly, it seems like Itch doesn't like animated GIFs at present, which is a shame since the game looks even better in motion.

I actually never intended for it to be this big of a project! I intended to have it done in a month, just to see what it was like to be part of a community game collection like Madvent. But scopes did what scopes so often do, and before I knew it, it had become probably my biggest game to date. I really hope you enjoy it! Thanks for reading.

https://johngabrieluk.itch.io/quantum-reindeer

There's something very, very brilliant about this. The crude dots, the beeps and hums of the machine - it all adds up to a very engrossing, very immersive feeling, as though I really am using this clunky, unwieldy machine to play with the very fabric of nature. Really, really good stuff. (And thank you very much for the reference.)

A wildly original take on the theme, and one that I really enjoyed, despite some jank in the controls and the physics engine. I persevered to the end, but there doesn't seem to be an ending? Just a black room with no objects to suspend.

The art and music here both suit the theme really well - it gives everything a delightful sense of grunge.

Share your findings and the passcodes from your playthroughs in this thread! Xenolith is a game that cannot be played alone - you must begin from where someone else left off.

The starting passcode is ILNIELLL.

I wish the game had saved! I played up until I got the Phase ability, then tried to pause the game to find which button it was (C didn't seem to do anything), whereupon it crashed. It's a pity, because I was enjoying it up to that point.

Thanks for playing! I agree, Ctrl wasn't the best choice. I've just added a keybindings menu for v1.1, which will go up after the jam ends, and I think I'll change the default binding to be Shift while I'm at it.

Clever take on the theme - and I like the grappling mechanic - but it's pretty tough! I wasn't able to get very far, I'm afraid.