itch.io

Hah, never too little time! Until midnight.. or if I fall asleep early, lol. I just rated yours and left some feedback, I think it's a really good foundation and I hope to see you flesh it out a little more when the time constraints aren't such an issue for ya! Very cool. Also the art is great!

You have got a lot of solid feedback already and it seems you plan to maybe update the game after the jam ends, I think that would be a good call because it seems you've put together a really good foundation here (although a bit buggy/unfinished due to time constraints, as you mentioned). I do think with proper time and TLC this could be really cool. 

I also wanted to say, the art is really good, and your implementation of the various menus is impressive too, I do imagine that took quite a lot of effort for something that kinda flies under the radar of most players as it seems like a "given" for a game in the genre

This is a cool little game overall, congrats on your first jam submission!

Good  job, I liked the movement and the dash generally. I will say, the dash is pretty floaty when you use it to go up in the air, and spamming upward-diagonal dashes to move around seems to maybe be the best way; I just skipped most enemies like that haha

I see you've gotten a lot of great, actionable feedback from others already. I didn't dig too much, but also don't wanna repeat too much yet again haha. I didn't see any mention of the boss you implemented, and I think the animations and art are awesome but the fight itself could use some tweaking. The boss runs very slowly, but it's still quite hard to beat because it seems to have a lot of health (cannot tell due to the web build issue you mentioned in the game page). Also, the animations are maybe a bit confusing, oftentimes I would get the boss locked into his attack animation one way, jump around him, but then he is hitting me while I'm behind him. Since I couldn't see his health and I felt like I had hit him quite a few times, I ended up giving up on that section actually, I hope I didn't miss too much of the game

Overall it's a good start with some potential for improvement, great job on your first ever game jam submission!

Thank you for playing, & thanks for your feedback! Better feedback makes total sense, there is definitely some good improvement opportunities. I am really glad you liked the foundations though, thank you :D

Thanks! Yeah a feedback system makes total sense, it was too far down my TODO unfortunately. I learned a lot about prioritization this jam, haha

I do feel like there is some potential there too for a fleshed out FPS Roguelike, that sounds fun to make. Although I would certainly remake it from scratch because right now there is a LOT of spaghetti and jank shoved up in there. Especially from the last 2-3 days when I was tired of grinding and just trying to crank stuff out. I remember at the very end I had to touch on the system I made first, and I laughed at how nice & tidy it was lol

Thank you for playing & for your feedback!

Thank you! I really appreciate your kind words and encouragement :D

Thank you! Yeah the wall running was interesting, I had never even thought about what all goes into a wall run before but suddenly there is a lot of vectors and dot products and "oh the player is running forward but I need to redefine what 'forward' is" lol.

Thank you for playing, and thanks for your feedback! 

Yeah I definitely should have prioritized feedback better, it is great to keep in mind going forward haha.

Thank you for your kind words and encouragement, this was a great experience for me in the end.  At the start of the rating phase I was hoping nobody would see my game since I am a perfectionist and was embarrassed by it, but ultimately this community has been really encouraging so far and I'm very grateful for that. I definitely do think I will continue

Sorry about the GPU Drivers issue, I think I mentioned in another thread but that wasn't even on my radar hah - out of curiosity, is your GPU AMD? 

Thank you, yeah ideally I wanted to implement some kind of mechanism that would encourage the player to actually look FORWARD most of the time but ultimately I wasn't able to do that (except some enemy spawning logic that is barely noticeable haha), definitely a good thing to keep in mind, maybe I will try and update it a bit sometime.

Thanks very much for your feedback & kind words!

Thanks for sharing! I just rated yours and left a comment. I am not generally a fan of 2D platformers but I liked yours, the wall creation mechanic really has a lot of potential and the rest of the game is polished around it pretty well (except maybe the level design which I saw you noted already). Really cool game, good job :D

This game is really good and unique. The music and visuals are solid and overall it's really nicely polished, if a bit short.

One thing I would say, I never actually used A or D because my monkey brain kept brute-forcing the simplest approach (S platform for everything) which worked very well in this case. I do think maybe there should be a limitation, like each stage could have a set amount of each platform type available?

I actually quite liked the speed of the character (only because the responsiveness is good enough to match), though I understand where the other commenters are coming from in saying the speed is too fast. I think it's because the level design is pretty tightly packed with spikes; right now, the spikes are the main lose condition of the game, so it makes sense they would be hard to avoid... but it can be a bit frustrating.  I think if you implemented the "limited amount of each platform per level" and then redesigned the levels so that running out of platforms would be the main lose condition, then the player speed would be an asset here instead of a liability. But I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Overall, very cool game and quite polished, I'm impressed you did it in only five days!

Awesome, thank you! I am sorry that it caused a hassle for ya, I appreciate your effort though

Out of curiosity, did you have to update or revert to previous drivers? And AMD or no? I might have to buy an AMD machine for testing in the future, wasn't even on my radar somehow haha

Yeah, Unreal Engine cannot make web versions - oh well, no worries. Thanks for checking out the page

This game is fun, was a bit difficult for me though admittedly, hah. It's not a genre that I'm used to, that probably contributed.

The art is really good, I liked the music too. And I really appreciated the admin/polish of having a nice main menu with music & sfx sliders in the options, etc. There is a lot of good QOL things here, on top of a solid game. Very cool!

This game feels very polished, I like the music and the visuals and such, it's all very cohesive. I agree with the other commenter about level 4 though, the pattern is very easy to understand and intuitive, but the way it's laid out is a bit cumbersome... the level is pretty lengthy compared to the ones before it, and having to click 3 more times just to loop around to what you need can get tedious after dying 1-2 times, suddenly it's more about finding & clicking start than platforming, haha

Overall, this feels like a demo for a really good & polished game, I'm impressed! Very cool game

Well, there is just about 10 hours left.  I wanted to start this thread specifically to help get visibility on some games that don't have many ratings.

If you have <20 ratings, share your game here. I'll definitely play it & leave rating/feedback! I also encourage everyone else in the thread to do the same for each other, let's pump those numbers up :D

Here is mine, please consider rating it & leaving feedback too: https://itch.io/jam/shovel-jam-2025/rate/3738252

Downloadable games welcome, I know it's rough out there lol

Hello, please consider playing mine & rating it / leaving feedback if you have time:  https://itch.io/jam/shovel-jam-2025/rate/3738252

I'll check yours out now, too!

This game is cool, and educational! I wish I understood it better, though. Like when I buy a guppy, their "food" value seems random (sometimes it is 3, sometimes it is 49, etc) and when I feed them it doesn't seem to change - I think I am just not understanding haha. All my fish kept constantly dying, I flooded the tank with filters and tried to make sure not to over or underfeed them but yeah it was a fishy graveyard real quick. Then the game hard-crashed in a weird way, I had to kill it from task manager; that happened when I placed some food down. I dunno why

All things considered, it's a nice cozy game. I like the sound design, also the visuals are good (especially the bubbles from the aerator were really nice to watch). I think this has a lot of potential to be a real educational and cozy game with some more polish. Great job for a first game jam submission!

Hey, I played yours & rated it just now!

Could you please rate mine and leave feedback if you get a chance:  https://itch.io/jam/shovel-jam-2025/rate/3738252

It's tough to get a decent amount of ratings with a downloadable game, haha

This is a cute little game, for me it was a little frustrating though haha. I've not played any ball rolling platformers before, so it's hard to say - but yes, it's very difficult to stop rolling. Also, in the levels where depth matters (i.e., the circle pits in the last 2 levels) it is very hard to see where the actual incline begins, I think maybe it's because the ground is dark colors in those stages (black and dark green).

Also, I did not realize it wasn't necessary to get all the seeds until I beat the game and saw a seed counter for each level, whoops

Anyway yeah, this is a really cool submission and something to be proud of as your first ever game jam game. Awesome job!

I liked the visuals (especially the fire and the explosion effects), the music was good but a little loud maybe. SFX was good 

I agree with the other comments, I think having a "coin pickup radius" upgrade and cranking up the difficulty to accommodate, would really help this game to feel more smooth and definitely more survivors-like if that's what you're going for. I also think there is a lot of potential for varied enemy types, like one who stands still for a few seconds in the back and then shoots from long range (but has very low health), or one that heals all his allies in a given radius so you have to take him out first, etc. 

Overall this is a cool game and a great job for your first game jam ever, nice!

The player controller feels pretty good generally, and the foundation of the game is good, but there is also some good growth opportunities too that could be improved. Like adding more feedback/juice for the player actions, or adding sounds/music/visuals, etc.

Overall as I say, it's a good game. Although the level design seems brutally unforgiving even by Fodian standards, lol. There is a lot of sections where one mistake sends you back literally to the ground floor, followed by big chunks that only send you back 5 seconds, then more sections that send you back to the very start. I think many games are a bit more reserved with those "fully wipe your progress" sections, but what do I know tbh

Overall it's a good game foundation with some solid potential too

I think I rated yours before already, but if you wouldn't mind rating mine and leaving feedback then I'd appreciate it! Here is the link:

https://itch.io/jam/shovel-jam-2025/rate/3738252

I just played, rated, and commented on yours - I liked your game, the minigames were fun

Here is my submission, if you wouldn't mind rating & leaving feedback then I would appreciate it :)

https://itch.io/jam/shovel-jam-2025/rate/3738252

This was a cool idea for a game, and the minigames were fun & interesting. There is a bug where sometimes two different minigames would start at once and break, I think it happened because I was spamming spacebar too quickly during the airplane one, lol. But overall I did enjoy the game for what it was, just a short little time-waster kinda project. Great job, and congrats on your first game jam submission!

This game is actually so fun, lol. The songs are fun (both the sound and the play patterns), the difficulties are impressively balanced too. It seems like you had a lot of good playtesting sessions, or your intuition is spot on.

I think adding a little bit more juice when the player successfuly hits a note (a sound, or a visual effect, or something) would go a long way - maybe the visuals could be improved generally. But overall, the game is already really fun. I definitely think I will be coming back to it sometime and trying to master the highest difficulty, lol

Dang, no problem. Thanks for the reply anyway 

It's tough getting ratings as an Unreal dev, that's what I am learning haha - c'est la vie!

This game is fun, it's also a little too relatable haha. But wow, this person sure goes through a lot of laundry for someone whose only two activities in life are doomscrolling and putting away laundry!

I had a lot of fun with this actually, the frantic nature of scrolling to try and find which ones are good, it really surprised me with how good it ended up feeling. Awesome game, good job!

This game is really cool, I genuinely felt like a baby bird with no idea what to do at the start. Except instead of a horrible death at the hands of gravity, my only punishment was waiting 5 seconds for the hatching animation. Phew!

This game feels very polished, it really feels like it accomplished what it set out to do. Awesome job, especially for a first submission!

P.S.,  my brother and I have always wanted to start gamedev together, too. But I could not convince him to actually help me on my submission, lol. I think that is super cool that you guys were able to work together on this. Keep going!

Here is mine, I would appreciate feedback if you get a chance: https://itch.io/jam/shovel-jam-2025/rate/3738252

And I will check yours out right now, too! :D

Thank you! I appreciate your kind words

I spent a long time learning about sounds/music and how to get it all working together in Unreal, honestly after like 3 hours I was kicking myself for not focusing on higher-priority TODO items. So I am really glad you mentioned the sound was a plus, lol

Thank you! This is helpful feedback and I appreciate your kind words. I do think a bit better level design and an easier difficulty curve would help a lot... if you could believe it, less than 15 minutes before the deadline I tweaked the difficulty and made it much easier (e.g., tripled the starting player health) lol... definitely should have taken a more proactive and playtest-driven approach there (and not left "difficulty curve adjustments" on the backburner of my TODO for so long...), lesson learned for sure hah

Thanks for your feedback and kind words, I appreciate it!

Yeah once you hit ~30 seconds, there is supposed to be some big permanent text in the center of the floor that says "Kill 50 to free yourself" or something, I'm not sure if I ended up getting that working or not. Truthfully the whole narrative and text bits got added less than 1 hour before the deadline, I was just pleasantly surprised they were kind of working haha, didn't do a ton of testing there...

Adjusting the sensitivity is a great idea, I remember thinking of it and throwing it on the TODO list and I think I just forgot tbh, oops. Thank you for the reminder. And thanks again for playing & your helpful feedback :)

Yeah that makes sense, instead of resetting the timer I was thinking more like... if you reach the 50% checkpoint with only 6 seconds left, then each time you respawn there, you have only 6 seconds. This could maybe recreate the fun you had in the development stage when you were able to start from any section, while also not trivializing the point of the game. Then of course eventually the player would want to go back and reset to do the first bits faster and get more than 6 seconds at that 50% checkpoint... I dunno if that makes sense, and maybe it's a terrible idea hah.

I also left level design way, way on the backburner. My current level in my game is what I threw together in 45 minutes on day 2 and said "I will fix this jank later"... never happened, lol. I totally get it

Still, this is a good game and a great start to game dev, nice job!

This is a cool little project. The art is nice as others have said and it's cohesive, music is nice too.

I really liked the direction you're taking the movement, though it could do with some fine-tuning maybe, and being able to swing in mid-air would be great.

Also a little bit more direction could go a long way, like an indicator of how many more enemies need to be killed for this phase, etc. (like maybe start with ~20 skeletons on the ground, then as an enemy spawn one gets removed, it could be visual feedback that the player is progressing, just an idea)

Overall this is cool, good job and congrats on your first game jam submission!

The art and music are great, this game has a really good atmosphere. The gameplay loop maybe needs more polish / bugfixing / playtesting - I had a lot of trouble picking up items from the containers and would have to jump around spamming E sometimes, or the "disappearing as it goes on the plate" bug noted by other commenters, or just the pacing. But I saw you addressed this in reply to other commenters where you mentioned having a bit fewer team members available near the end than anticipated.

Overall this is a cool little project, I think with some polish and a bit more time in the oven (hah!) it will be really neat!

I think this is my favorite game from the jam, every aspect of it is really great:

   - The writing is really good, I laughed several times and it feels very polished 

   - The music and visuals were awesome, as soon as I entered the dungeon I knew it would really be a great experience. I can remember 3 different songs that were awesome, and the "graphics" section was super cool, as someone else mentioned

   - The gameplay is great, the 2D menu sections and the 3D dungeon 'platformer' sections (for lack of better word) are both really awesome. There is a ton of juice, it's obvious that a lot of intentionality and care was put into this. The only bug I encountered was at the very end, I started the "game" and clicked all the way to 1,000 points... then when I went to exit from the main menu, it wouldn't let me and said "at least try the game once!" haha, I had to Alt-F4. Not sure if that is intentional though

This game is genuinely inspiring, it makes me want to keep leveling up my skills and then find a team someday to hopefully contribute to a cool project like this. Incredible work, especially for a first game jam submission!

This game has a lot of really nice aspects to it. The art and music are great, I really liked the writing and the responsive reviews system was impressive. Like giving the mouse a strong wind potion instead of a cool wind potion, he gives 3.5 stars and explicitly discusses the exact one you gave him & why it's different than what he wanted - really cool, haha

The writing was also really fun, seeing that scammer's review after day 1 hit me lol. The gameplay loop is fun, having to figure out the right recipe based on a description is a great system.

Only thing I would say, an options menu to lower / disable volume would be nice, the entrance doorbell was so loud and I wanted to turn it down, but I also wanted to enjoy the music haha. Maybe I just missed the setting though!

Overall, this is a great cozy game and has a lot of potential. I can really see it doing well as a fleshed out game with a few months of polish, maybe after some time you get a new shipment of ingredients that adds another layer of complexity, etc. It's a great idea for a game imo, and this jam submission was well executed. Nice job!

Oh gotcha, that makes sense - my bad haha. I'm sorry I didn't finish the level, I might have to give it another go. I had just run into another bug where the camera didn't follow me properly to the next area, so I was too quick to think "oh, it's a bug"; oops. 

 Sorry about your internet, that sounds frustrating for you & the team. But you shipped a game at the end of it all, and that is really cool! It's a really neat little game with some good potential.

It's fun, there is a lot of really great aspects like the art, animations, and music in particular are very cohesive. The game is fairly basic in general, but I mean it's a jam game so... it lives up to expectations hah.

I know it's meant to be difficult, and the difficulty curve of the level design is good. However, after losing 1-2 times near the end, it feels kinda frustrating/tedious to trek back through the easy bits again. I think a checkpoint system that also leaves you with the same amount of time you had when you originally reached that spot, would be nice. (And you could fully reset to try and speedrun to add more time to your checkpoints I guess).

Also another aspect regarding the difficulty, it's pretty harsh that each death loses 10 full seconds, I think. Maybe a progressive system would've been good, like one death loses 3 seconds, then 5, then 7, then 9, then 11, etc.? With a system like this you could curate how many deaths a player could have, too. As it stands, I think you could have 6 deaths with perfectly play and finish with a couple seconds remaining. The floaty movement contributes to the difficulty, I found myself having to stop every jump early by holding A mid-air, which is fine. But it did eventually become a point of annoyance due to the points mentioned above

I don't mean to talk about the difficulty so much lol. I beat the game in 5 tries, with 39 seconds remaining on the last one - I don't think it's that hard. But I could see that the difficulty seemed intentional, whereas a lot of the other aspects of the game are pretty basic or repetitive so I didn't know what to talk about, haha. 

Overall for a jam game, and especially a newbie game, this is really good. With a little polish it could be great, excellent job!