This weekend I was playing around with PICO-8 making a little thing for my Anbernic handheld linux retro-gaming console, and since you extended the deadline I actually got something finished-ish.

But... it's a remake of an old LOVE2d 1-hour prototype from a few years ago. I didn't look at the original code (not that it would have been that much help since I was switching from 1-button to 2-button controls).  So I don't know if it's something I should enter: still the same idea, just nicer controls and a bit more character (a bobbly body that swings around when you change directions, NPCs to send the mail, and they move stars occasionally).

https://joshgrams.itch.io/spacemail-chimp-plus

Hmm... so is The Orange Conundrum a game about a fruit-grower with a mysterious problem? Darn it, I don't have time for a jam right now...

Yay!

Any plans to make it frame-rate independent? It's just about unplayably fast on my machine with the 144 Hz display...

That's kind of charming and fun! Does it have an end, or does it just keep going indefinitely?

Sweet! Thank you! The vertical lines are off by about an eighth of an inch but it looks like the PDF is fine so I'm pretty sure my printer just isn't accurate in that direction, grr. It's still close enough to work.

Any chance we could get the Print N Play in 8.5x11? I'm having trouble figuring out how to print the 8.5x22 sheets as double-sided pages.

Nicely done! I might suggest that you put a special character (or maybe a double-dash or something if the font doesn't have anything good) at the end of each multi-part dialogue so you know you've reached the end without having to loop back around to see if you get the first part again? But other than that it played very smoothly.

"if the first image is not loading for you" -- this seems to be a case-sensitivity error: if I use the browser's inspector tools to change it so it's asking for "Map.png" instead of "map.png" it works for me...

Hmm...yeah, we should put that in the description: it was a deliberate decision not to constrain the form that far. So often you'll get complete nonsense. If you make the second and fourth letters the same you'll get rhyming lines since they come from the same source poem.

Very fun! It would be cool to have a way to advance to the next level with the keyboard... Love the letter-based animations: I think the owl is my favorite, though it's a tough call between that, the apatasaurus, the elephant, and Saturn.

This is unplayably fast on my machine. Maybe it's dependent on the framerate of my monitor? I only have a 144 Hz setting, no 60.

Nice! I got to...about 3872 on my first try. Always awesome to see other people translating real-time action to a turn-based setting.

Thanks! I've sketched out story *ideas* off and on over the years, but usually they turn out to be just settings, not plots. I think this is the first piece of fiction I've actually *written* since I was a teenager, so the positive comments I've been getting are like, "Woah! Very cool. Wasn't expecting that..." :)

Yeah, arrow keys might be nice as alternate bindings when you have two people to play it so your hands aren't so close together. But I'd have to actually think about the code to allow multiple bindings for each control, so I'll get that later at some point. But I did change the left player to WASD, since that was trivial.

If things ever get less crazy and you get a chance to play against another person, do try it: some of the strategy ends up being interesting and kinda fun...like you tend to race to drop your piece, but it's often a disadvantage to get there first. And it's neat that you're actually interacting with the other player instead of just dumping junk on them like most two-player brick-stacking games.

Anyway. Thanks again for playing!

Ah, I always forget how ingrained WASD is for most people, growing up we were always like, "that's dumb, put it under the home keys, and then you have more things you can hit with your pinky" and reconfigured things. I could certainly change it. Should I move IJKL over too, or were those fine?

Ha! This is fun. Like the upgrades. Man, those horned bugs that split into 4 are tough.

Yeah...I haven't really touched it in nearly two years, but after the Roguelike Celebration I'm thinking I should find time to make it into a bigger game. Map editor, more enemies, more interesting roguelikey interactions between things.

Re waiting: to some extent you have control over the game speed. If you want it to take less real-world time you can go "slowly" and hammer the space bar, or go "fast" and take fewer turns but more risk. In either case, it's useful (sometimes essential) to turn around ahead of time so you're already in position to stop. And the afterburner can help stop quickly too. You can only hold ten turns of afterburner fuel, but that's enough to save yourself a few times.

Re distance to the wall: yeah, I'm aware of that as a problem, but wasn't quite sure what to do about it. All the collision volumes are a circle that fills a full hex: the size of the shield circle. Except maybe the baby jellies? And this was the font size where the characters all fit, but of course they aren't round. Hmm...maybe an option that shows the circles for everything. All the walls are centered on their hexes, so you can use the background hexes as a guide, maybe?

Glad you had some fun with it!

I figured that one out: you have to get the yellow glowing enemies to zap the pillar, then it lights up and opens the door. But...then later I thought I was going to fight the skull king and the game teleported me to a gray area with a throne in the center and the walls didn't work; I could just walk off the edges in all directions, and no skull king showed up and the display was all glitchy when I did walk off the edge.

Did you actually try it? It's 100% designed around screencheating: your opponent's grid is rotated 90 degrees from yours, but the tiles are still drawn "upright', so it's much more disorienting than just rotating the view. There aren't very many landmarks, and you can zoom-in your display so your opponent doesn't have as much to go on. And of course your opponent is invisible on your screen: you can't see them even if they're right next to you. It seems like you'd be able to get good at it eventually, but I found it very tough to think about the map in two orientations at once.

On Itch, a game has to be created by one person, but if other contributors have Itch accounts and want it to show up on their individual pages, you can do that, though it's a little convoluted.

If the person who uploaded the game goes to the game's edit page, under "More" (from the tab list, after Analytics, Metadata, Interact) there's an Admins page where they can add other Itch.io users as admins.

Once you've done that, each admin can go to their profile (click on their avatar or username at the top right) and choose Edit Theme. At the bottom will be the list of games, and they can toggle Hidden off so it will show up on their profile page as a game that they created.

If you'd rather do Inform 7, I wonder if making some parts a choice-based thing with the Hybrid Choices extension might make that more viable?

Don't hold your breath. IIRC for last year's jam they took about a day and a half after the jam "started" to announce the theme.

What the heck  does the bot do? It seems like sometimes it moves blocks so they're next to other blocks of the same type, but most of the time it just beeps and does nothing.

It would be tricky to fit the mechanical feel I had in mind into a historical setting, I think. It's fine, I don't need a game jam. It just seemed like it might be a good excuse to make this thing now.

Thanks,

--Josh

'Cause I finished up with the GMTK jam yesterday, saw this jam's title and thought, "great! That's a perfect excuse to prototype the mental-calendar-math game I've had in the back of my head for several years." But it doesn't have anything to do with ancient history...

"Curly" was the second level we created and I think we were both still in that "heheh it's fun zooming around the curves" phase.

And the last one...yeah. It really needs two or three levels of tutorializing. There's just no good way to learn the techniques and yeah, it feels like random chance otherwise. And then going forward is so touchy that I still fail it at least half the time even knowing what to do. I thought about making the tail longer to slow it down a little, but we were near the end of the jam and I wasn't sure it would be a simple fix.

So yup. Typical game jam misjudging-the-difficulty stuff. Thanks for playing!

I keep starting to comment on this and then scrapping what I've written. I think I really wanted this to be a somewhat different game. The only two ideas that might actually fit your current game are:

I wished that the spacebar would auto-re-route the power the way W/A/D do for the engines.

And that there were much fewer (probably bigger) rocks and no fast-moving ones. With the wrapping, it doesn't take much (at least for me) to overwhelm my ability to keep track of where they will be next. My brother's fancy Asteroids clone starts  with only three "rocks" and new players still usually die a lot. And the power re-routing delay means that you can't react quickly to anything, so you have to plan ahead even more than usual in an Asteroids game.

Nice concept, though! Just a little too hard for me in its current form.

Looks like most of what I'd suggest has already been said...and answered, but I'll repeat anyway:

• Visual and audio feedback as to when enemies are about to move (some people don't see as well, some don't hear as well, or play with sound off).
• Separate keys (or buttons) for each action and for pause would make it (I think) a lot easier to learn. Most platformers require you to learn a bunch of buttons: not so many that require you to use a menu in the midst of gameplay. And you have several levels that require you to jump twice in a row, but if you want to do that immediately from a pause it seems like you have to cycle all the way around?
• I didn't notice anyone else saying this, but I'd like 'R' to restart the level directly, rather than kill you and then you have to press it again to restart.
• It's a little weird that you can kind of use the jump ability multiple times, but I don't see that there's anything you can do about it: it enables a lot of good level design.
• Checkpoints might be nice, especially in that last level. Different people have different tolerances for how long they're willing to go without a checkpoint and some games demand that you go a ridiculously long time between checkpoints (especially boss fights: Hollow Knight and Cuphead, I'm looking at you). But this one pushes the limits of what I'm comfortable with and you could make it more fun for more people by allowing them to take it one piece at a time. And you can always turn some off in a higher difficulty mode or something.

But yeah, those are polish things: for a 48hr game this is excellent. Jam games are almost always too hard and a little unpolished.

Haha, actually I think Slime Castle is nearly as difficult: I died 150 times and spent nearly an hour on it? Fun though.

Thanks! I keep getting distracted from actually trying Slime Castle: I'll go do that now.

I'm afraid that for me this falls into the category of "it isn't actually more fun with only one button". I kept getting off a little bit and then having to restart the level. Maybe with a quicker respawn time? (though the death animation was a lot of fun). Or checkpoints? A nice start, though. And the level design was well done.

Hmm. It seemed like in the fourth wave there were the green barrel-throwing guys over in the bottem right where it was hard to shoot them, and then I ran out of bullets because they were all over there.

And even in fullscreen, the game was fully surrounded by black and it still wouldn't fire if I clicked outside the game area? So fullscreen didn't make the mouse control better for me.

But yeah, clever concept, and nice art.

--Josh (part of teamwintergreen for the jam)

Yeah, what olinkalex said. I'll be curious to see the new build. Also I think it would be more tense if your torch just slowly got dimmer, rather than the blinking-out more and more frequently thing. It would be more like a battery dying. Ooh. Maybe you could even shut it off yourself and then when you turned it back on you'd have a little more power.

Ooh, ouch! That sucks.

Yeah, it was mostly the last level of your game that was beyond my ability to track everything in my head. I was just about to break out the pencil and paper or give up when I finally figured out the strategy. The others were challenging but simple enough for me not to get too frustrated. But I also usually do pretty well at puzzle games. Maybe you could have an "easy" mode where you have a key to switch planes without actually moving. Or maybe you can do that, but it counts as a move so your score is worse?

As for Filament, yeah. Philippe did most of the level design, and he kept making levels that were fun for us but very difficult for new players. We have a farm, so Saturday and Sunday are usually work days for me and I didn't have anywhere near as much time as he did. I tried to make a few easier levels but mostly spent my time adding some bits of UI and visual feedback (things like the switching-between-levels code), which seemed more important at the time. Thanks for playing!

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/unrated shows the 100 (?) games with the fewest ratings: currently they mostly only have two ratings. Let's give some of these people some feedback...

OK, played, rated, and commented on Operation: One Shot. Sorry that took so long. I live in rural Maine with slow internet...

Huh. Either this was seriously buggy for me, or it's mostly unfinished? The mines seemed to teleport me around but not reset the boss's health so...does that count as actually dying? The game didn't end when the boss hit 0 health: it just kept counting negative. The "beam" was a really slow-moving ball that just stuck to the boss and didn't seem to do anything.

It took me way too long to realize that the boss was up in the air. "People never look up", heh. But that's on me. Though maybe there's some way to do a directional flash of light or something that would point to him?

And 1000 health just seemed like too much when you were only doing one damage at a time. Even when I cheesed it and got him just over the corner of a building so I could stand there and just hold the fire button, it took what felt like several minutes.

And...now that sounds hopelessly negative. I actually loved the concept,and even in this state it was surprisingly fun to play for a little while. I could see where you were going with it. It just seemed like you ran out of time to finish it, or maybe it's just broken on my computer.

Cool! I mean, I felt pretty stupid when I realized what the arrows meant, but somehow I managed to be obtuse enough not to figure it out for about 45 seconds. :)