itch.io

Game's an absolute audiovisual treat, with solid gameplay and one of the most interesting interpretations of the theme I've seen so far! Here's a list of thoughts and feedback in no particular order:

• Probably the biggest thing that stands out to me is the choice to not have any healing and to make death an instant restart from the beginning, and I don't think it's the correct one for this game. The core mechanics - weapon ordering and and overkill = levels - are begging for experimentation, to try out different things in different slots, to use big risky weapons, and generally just go wild. But then it's punishing in a way that forces you to play cautiously lest you risk losing all your progress in terms of built up inventory. Getting hit feels awful because the attacks on their own are easy to dodge, but the damage sticks and each mistake compounds on the last no matter how well you do in between.
• The enemies left = weapon selected is a super creative mechanic. I wasn't sure how fun it would be to play at the beginning, but it turned out to be super satisfying to craft your perfect inventory for different scenarios!
• The hooded crossbow guys are the bane of my existence and have probably ended more runs than anything else I've seen so far (got to around floor 120 before dying on my best run).
• Like another commenter mentioned, a bit more feedback on when you take & deal damage would be nice. Some of the enemy windup animations feel a bit droopy, and I've been hit by things that felt like they came out of nowhere in a crowd.
• If I'm not mistaken, the overkill is based on health before the killing blow, given that the same enemy gave me a different number of levels. I think that it should've been done differently, you can't see enemy HP to know if you can finish them off for max overkill nor do you know when your 12 damage weapon is going to give you no overkill because the enemy just so happens to have 11 HP left after taking some damage earlier on in the fight.
• The shotgun and the dual pistols are extremely satisfying in higher slots once you get multiples, just start blasting at the big enemies and then thin out the crowds once they get in your way.
• Enemies feel like they have 3x the health they should, spending a minute and a half hacking away at one of the big knight enemies who's too slow to meaningfully hurt you is not fun.

Spent like the better part of an hour trying to get an A rank in this game (Finally got it at 18 seconds!), there are so many little things about this game that are really, really rough.

• In general the controls are A) unintuitive and B) dumped all at once on the player in the description. Once I got the hang of it it was great, but the first few runs of figuring out what everything does was super clunky.
  • Wall jumps don't feel great, still not sure if the game wants me to hold towards the wall or away from the wall.
  • The dash only working in the air took me a while to figure out since the sound effect would also keep playing even if the dash was cancelled by hitting the ground. It's also super inconsistent in whether it'll slow your fall or not, and I'm still not sure how it's supposed to work.
  • Some of the vent hitboxes are wack. A little button prompt for vents and draining would've gone a long way to help with that.
• The camera is very snappy and pretty uncomfortable until you get into the flow and spend 90% of your time in the air anyway.
• You can get stuck in the vents if you swap out of bat form.
• Quick restart doesn't work properly, you end up stuck in the draining sprite on the ground and the music doesn't reset.
• The music and visuals are serviceable, but the UI in particular feels pretty haphazard and nothing really fits together.

But despite all that, I'm an absolute sucker for movement tech. At first I was wondering why the Count's run speed is so slow, why doesn't it conserve momentum from when I land, but then the game just comes alive. Soaring through the sky in bat form, dropping back into human form to save blood, charging up a dash, then letting it go just before hitting the ground and using the momentum for some insane wall jumps and bat form height... it's all absolutely viscerally satisfying in a way that's hard to describe. It's missing a lot of polish, but you guys have something great here!

This game feels like an absolute fever dream

Interesting puzzle game that had me hooked until the end despite my gripes. The blob is frustratingly slow until you get quite a few speed pills, the ending section felt like it could've been shorter (maybe a lifespan-reducing gate so the walks aren't so long?), and I thought the last bit with the three doors was trolling me and that I'd have to go through it three times to get all the speed pills (thankfully it was just once)!

Death count: 17

This game is missing that audiovisual juice that gives these sorts of games that little extra, but besides that you guys nailed it! Movement feels satisfying, difficulty felt just right for a jam game, and the enemy variety is enough to not get stale for such a short game. The sun being the final boss got a genuine chuckle out of me too !

Sharing my personal best times! Reply with yours in the comments!

• 0% items in 0:39
• 100% items in 1:37

Am I missing something?

7200 is very low to be coming into the boss fight with, and the only way I could get that low is by finishing in the wrong gear. Keep in mind that most of your RPM for the blade battles comes from the RPM at the end of the race, i.e. how high the tachometer dial was, with gear and time bonuses being minor in comparison.

Stage 3 is a little counter-intuitive in that you should almost always be finishing in 4th gear instead of 5th gear, getting your last upshift in after the bridge and just before the final corner. This is because the final straight is too short to build up enough RPM in fifth gear, you might get more gear bonus (1600 in 4th VS 2500 in 5th), but you're throwing away an easy redline in 4th (7000+ RPM) for a very mediocre finish in 5th (~4000 RPM).

The blade fights felt really unfair because it seemed like any input I made with my cursor weren't responsive enough, and any dashing movements would constantly overshoot.

The blades will follow their inertia and the contour of the bowl more than anything else, any non-dash movements will make relatively minor differences. And, unless you're attacking, a dash is best used perpendicular to the bowl's radius to be able to pick up speed and orbit around the bowl. If you dash directly towards or away from the centre, you're either going to overshoot or just rock back and forth as an easy target. And for the record, the NPCs use the exact same movement behaviour and physics with a virtual cursor, so you're on an even playing field in that regard.

I really wanted to finish the game, but I couldn't.

Let me know if you manage to finish the game, or at least beat Titan Blade, after reading this!!

This was a really fun game, and the in-game tutorial was pretty good for how unconventional the mechanics were (although I've nerded out on enough hard sci-fi to know the basics of orbital mechanics). Only thing I don't think was mentioned was that the goal is to do the orbit in as few moves as possible - I know it's called golf but it took me getting zero stars with 14 moves and not being able to go to the next level to actually get it.

I have no words for this

Brøther

That makes a lot of sense, and I can see how each one of those decisions makes sense in the context of being tight on time and not having enough external playtesters from outside the dev team! And like I said, it's not that all of the things were major problems on their own, it's just that all of them together were overwhelming.

Thanks for taking the time to answer as well! I'd like to think we're all here to improve our craft, and going into such detail on the why's behind your ideas does help!

I gave this game a couple of tries, but I found it difficult to the point of not being fun - and this is coming from someone who rarely takes issue with a game's challenge. The basic movement is extremely satisfying, as is the combat against the different enemy types, but the design of this game keeps on punishing you the worse you do.  I'm not sure if there's something I'm missing, and if it was just one or two things I wouldn't mind, but I was constantly replaying sections I'd already beaten because of:

• The arenas being so flat makes it much easier to throw yourself off the edge accidentally. Most beyblade-like games have bowl arenas where the edges are much harder to climb unless you get knocked, giving you a safety margin against accidentally ending yourself with a bad move.
• Not having guaranteed retries. The 50/50 continue/main menu (instead of something like two retries per stage or something) feels like an absolutely sadistic choice - if I'm playing poorly enough to need a retry, the last thing I'm going to want to do is to risk getting booted back to the main menu. This feels like an idea taken out of a challenge mode, where players have already mastered a gameplay loop and are looking to show off their skills, and added to the default mode, and I'd like to know where it came from because I feel like I'm missing the intent here.
  
• The dash is a really cool move, but your only defense also being a dash means that the rebound from grazing an enemy on the side, a miss on the edge (which is where you need to be to knock out enemies), or the first boss knocking you into the air before a dash, means near-guaranteed doom.
• The first boss doesn't seem to have a cap on the number of red enemies it can spawn in the later phase, nor does it seem to ever slow down when there are more enemies out. So stopping to clean the enemies feels unproductive because more keep on appearing while you're in the middle of it.
• The boss also has a really long health bar for the amount of attack variety it has, and the damage dealt felt wildly inconsistent between hits.
• The cloverleaf arena being very small compared to the player's movespeed making the flat arena problem even worse.
• In a game about building momentum to slam into things really hard, the jumping enemies that appear in the cloverleaf arena force you to not slam into things and completely break the flow IMO. 
• It's possible for the return to main menu to pop up just where you were about to click to try and save yourself with an airdash.
• All of this combined had me playing extremely safe and passively, which is kind of the opposite of what I'd expect from a game with this aesthetic and concept.

All that said, this game has style. Others have said this, but the visuals are striking, the sound design is *chefs kiss*, the UI is beautiful, and it all fits together in such a "00's radical" sort of way. I really wanted to like this one, because I found everything but the gameplay absolutely top-notch :(

One of the things I wish I had time to implement but had to end up scrapping were little cutscenes between the race and blade phases where the enemy would appear and the player's car would transform into the blade, just to give it that extra bit of narrative connectivity. Like the player's car slamming on the brakes and drifting off-road into the arena to fight Grey Blade, or Titan Blade dropping out of the sky like a meteor and blowing a crater in the middle of the road.

To be entirely fair I played this on an RTX 4070 Super, I'm sure if I tried it out on my iGPU laptop it wouldn't have been fine! And as for the final boss... I saw another comment mentioning safe zones - I though those were just decoration!!

As for the music resetting, I can see that being annoying - what if instead of resetting the music, you just don't change directions on the first beat? So people have a beat-and-a-bit (but always at least one) instead of a fraction of a beat to get their bearings after respawning.

MAIDEN: LESS

yeah this is a 10/10 no notes from me bud, favourite game of the jam so far.

Finally got around to playing this one, and what a treat. Everything is so tight - one of the best tutorials I've seen in a jam game, the slow unravelling of the anime edgelord plot, the writing (!), the dead-simple controls, the little screw from your charge attack having a hitbox, the subtle health regen that's enough to prevent some unnecessary restarts but not enough to trivialize fights (I thought it would, then I got hit three or four times right as I was about to finish off 'Nam Guy and exploded), each boss having its own gimmick that slowly escalates in difficulty until the final boss...

This is also one of the few games I've played so far that really takes a genuine shot at being serious. A lot of games have either not touched that part of the theme or just did some lampshading in the title or something, but this game goes all-in on the adolescent weeaboo angle - it's not serious to us on the outside, but every child, teenager, and unstable veteran taking it so seriously is so charming.

Been keeping my eye on this one since I saw the in-progress pics in the Discord. Extremely cute game that's deceptively hard. I love the aesthetic, the vibes and the general gameplay. The lasers' framerate bug on the web version actually wasn't that bad on my end, I managed to get by without having to refresh. The only other things I have to say that are at all interesting are a few nitpicks about some of the difficulty feeling cheap, but these are minor in the grand scheme of things:

• Dying doesn't reset the beat at all, so you have a variable amount of time to move to the current beat. I ended up just waiting for the next one after dying because otherwise I'd die, move, get caught off guard by the fast switch, and immediately die again.
• How to beat the final boss was not immediately clear, took me a while to even be able to reach one of the pylons to notice that it was interactable.
• On that note, being able to die after the final boss is absolutely cruel :(
• The death noise is one of the funniest things I've witnessed all jam

Pretty neat concept, incremental games aren't usually my cup of tea so I don't have much to say about the gameplay, but I did find a bug, probably a floating point precision error that didn't get rounded away, where after getting a high-enough multiplier it started rendering as x40.00000001, with the text being so large it grew a vertical scroll bar and took up the entire screen.

Really liked this game, great audio & visual flair and, as someone who doesn't play puzzle games all that often, frustratingly difficult but not in a bad way (managed to beat the game after much trial and error). It took me a while to learn how to visualize where everything would end up (I ended up counting tiles and rotating that count in my head), and I agree with some of the other comments' QoL suggestions regarding undo & visualization, but I have no complaints besides that.

Good game, not much to say besides the art being beautifully quirky and the core gameplay loop being generally fun! I think the tutorial and player onboarding could have used some work, an interactive tutorial would've worked really well for this kind of game, and limiting the item selection to begin with would've helped as well - although I know those aren't easy to fit into the constraints of a jam game.

I also ran into a couple of bugs. The page had some scaling issues for me, in fullscreen I needed to either zoom out or scroll up and down to be able to see both the ingredients required and the actual ingredients panel, and on the second loan shark interaction, the text box was empty and clicking it did nothing.

Yeah, I don't know how you got this one out in a week, and with a level editor too, but this is insanely well done. I have very little to say that others haven't said already or is super nitpicky- that torque feels redundant when RPM is always an exact target, the UI is beautiful but the text is a bit small in some places, the gears should snap in the middle instead of the top left corner, the tutorial text for each stage disappears too fast, blah blah blah.

This is the first time in any game jam where I've played a game and thought "Yeah, I would buy this if it was a full release". Second 5/5 in all categories I've given out this jam, well done!

Thanks! Glad you found the mechanics engaging, and I hope the tutorial was clear enough on explaining it.

Audio sliders is one of those things I knew I should add, but ran out of time since I was still wrapping up the stages and NPC behaviour on the last day. Playing through more jam games, I'm definitely missing that little extra bit of polish and flair that some of them have, but I'm glad I got this far anyway.

Glad you enjoyed the game!! The last couple of blade fights are supposed to be pretty hard since they have unique patterns that need to be exploited to be beaten, but you should be coming into them at 8000-10000 RPM. During playtesting, facing the same boss when you're starting 7000 vs 11000 RPM was a night and day difference in the difficulty, mostly in how many mistakes you can afford to make.

Love this, I wasn't expecting such a small and simple concept to be so addictive!!

For me, it's been learning that software isn't king or the be-all-end-all of gamedev. I work as a programmer in my day-job and make games on my own for fun in my free time. This is the first time I've actually been actively in the community during a game jam, and it was eye-opening seeing all the artists, animators and musicians in the discord, as well as programmers like myself. This is also the first jam where I really put a lot of effort into the art and music and general presentation, and having to juggle that alongside designing, programming, playtesting, etc, was exhausting and left me with a big appreciation for the craft that goes into game development besides just the code.

I've also been getting more into board games lately, so that planted the seed of great game designs and systems existing outside the medium of software, and this just hammered it home.

Really juicy and enjoyable beyblade-like. Things that stood out to me in no particular order:

• The dash panels and scoring/ranking give off real Sonic vibes, and I'm all for it.
• The game feels a bit punishing overall. There are a few too few checkpoints for my taste, the damage can chain out of control fast (overcharge into enemy into spike ball into wall is like 60%), some of the platforming in levels 2 and 3 felt a bit too precise (the enemy on a narrow bridge just before the final checkpoint in stage 3 felt particularly cruel), it got a bit frustrating but still overall enjoyable.
  • Speaking of the enemy on the bridge, point trails are usually something that guides the player, took me a couple of plays to realize the one before that section with the mine right next to it was actually a high-risk high-reward opportunity rather than the intended path.
• I got to cheese the final boss a bit by hiding behind a spike ball and two of those blue hammers, and watched as it kept on running into it. I think it could've benefited from a health bar as well, for some feedback on how well you're doing given how long it is.
• The charge icon is small and, being in the corner, forces you to take your eyes off the target just as you're about to attack. Not sure how intentional this extra difficulty of landing a perfect hit is, but another visual cue could've helped.
• Graphics are simple but I really like the style, especially the UI! It's cool seeing a 3D web-build game in such a short jam!

Very solid game that I don't really have much to say about. The movement is good, and the rhythm you get into dodging the different kinds of cats until you can break away is almost trance-like. There's a good diversity of power-ups that always keeps you eager for the next one to appear, and there's clearly been thought put into the design with regards to the level design/ordering, tutorialization and onboarding in general. Besides that, the music and visuals get the job done, the UI is clean, and besides the web canvas being a bit small outside of fullscreen, no bugs. Good job!

Well in that case congratulations, the only mistakes you made were classic beginner mistakes! Playtesting early and good tutorialization are so important for gamedev. We all have our own biases and blind spots with regards to our own games, we understand our creations from the inside out, but our players don't have that context so we need to give it to them so they can come to appreciate it and enjoy itthe way we do. 

The good thing is that your eye for that sort of thing gets better with time. Now that you know about it, it's easy to double check next time you make a game. I made those exact same mistakes for the first games I made, and if it weren't for volunteers in the JuniperDev discord and for my friends, I would've missed some important issues with my own game this jam as well.

Oh man, this is a rough one. The presentation is spot-on from before you even start the game, from the thumbnail to the corporate email with what we all actually think about those things crossed out in the description to the bulletin-board styling of the main menu and the goofy music - this is a silly game about fishing that presents itself with all the seriousness of an anime showdown, and I am absolutely on board with these vibes.

Then I start playing and I send the hook way out, grab the big swordfish that it landed by, watch it barely move as I spin, watch it get loose, and then wonder if I'm doing something wrong when it happens a couple more times. I got the hang of it eventually, but I ran into so many little things like that that just made it... not that fun.

There's no audiovisual cues on whether you're spinning fast enough or not, or how close a fish is to escaping, so when you mess up the lack of feedback makes it feels more confusing than difficult. After you mess up it feels doubly bad since not only did you lose time having to cast again, you also lose progress as the fish swim back to their original spot. Bigger fish are harder to reel in and are more of a challenge, but they're the easiest fish to reach since they're not as deep down so you don't need to wait for the hook to sink (so it's more likely that someone will get them first or because they're in the way). All the waiting you have to do in a game with such a strict time limit. The way the hook sinks in an arc shape makes it hard to figure out where to cast for the deeper fish. The seek radius for the fish is tiny and I'm convinced is larger when the fish are swimming in one direction than in another. The way the space level has so much more "water" so you're spending even more time just waiting to reach a bottom fish.

All of this adds up to a game that just feels unpolished on the gameplay side - fishing is a tried and true gameplay style but this game is missing the mechanical refinement that the overall presentation is asking for.  Which is a shame, because it's just so good. The game is beautiful, besides maybe some pixel dithering in the sky textures there is absolutely nothing I would change about the art, with the Juniper-looking suit lady, the little chibi protraits that react to fishing and scoring, and the dreamy cloud-like star background that covers some of the moon in the space level being some of my highlights. The music is great, and while I mentioned a lack of cues before, the sound design is otherwise without issues. A great but flawed game overall - which is the kind of game I said I would have the most to talk about :)

You guys really polished this up since I got to playtest it, great job! I don't remember if this is your first game jam or if you're more experienced, but there are a lot of subtle changes you made that really improve the experience that speak to a strong intuition on gamefeel. Some random thoughts about the game in no particular order:

• The tapping-button control icons make all the difference in the world in tutorialization.
• I like that you simplified the design of the first level and moved some of the complexity away to later levels, no loops makes navigation clearer, and you introduce concepts one by one.
• I do miss how dynamic the text from the playtest was a little, the vibrating white on blue wasn't the most legible but it had its charm.
• Like I said before, the music and sound effects give it this wonderfully silly vibe. I feel like most people either ignored the seriousness part of the jam or did it ironically by just putting serious in the title and lampshading it, but this game oozes genuine whimsy and charm in a way that makes me respect the seriousness of its sincerity.
• I like the theme integration of this game, it's Spin to Win in more ways than just the most obvious one(s). Your engines spin, then your mouse spins, and when you inevitably mess up, your boat spins out of control and boing-boing-boing.
• giant turtle was a jumpscare
• Like another commenter said, I expected another challenge with the A/D controls once I got all the parts.

I could nitpick, like the godot backgroundless void in one of the corners, or the first turtles being a bit fast, or the giant sprites not technically being scaled properly, but it does not matter at all for what the game is trying to do,  and successfully does mind you. First time I've voted 5 stars across the board in the jam so far, again, great job!

I didn't end up implementing leaderboards, but I'd love to see what high scores you guys can reach on each stage. Sharing mine so far - you can find the list in the level select:

Glad to see this one out! I don't have any real feedback besides what I gave in the playtest while it was in development, especially that the gameplay felt more suited to auto-runner controls instead of platformer since there's not much point in going left and the record imparts forced movement anyways, but it's still a very solid entry in all regards.

I could say it's missing yarn spinning noises or more gameplay or praise the goofy little visuals, but you very clearly accomplished what you set out to do in a day and a half with this so 10/10 no notes.

I could say it's missing yarn spinning noises or more gameplay or praise the goofy little visuals, but you very clearly accomplished what you set out to do in a day and a half with this so 10/10 no notes.

I'm not sure if this is a broken build - if it is let me know and I'll come back and re-rate this later - but it's pretty much unplayable right now.

• Window for the web build is mis-sized, it needs to be a little larger to not crop off the top and bottom of the screen.
• The player is hard to differentiate from the NPCs given the dark desaturated colours on both of them and identical trails.
• No information on the controls, not even in the description, I had to guess that movement was WSAD.
• No audiovisual feedback in general.
• Turns into a non-interactive red and black spinning screen with no text or information on what happened or what to do.

Congrats on your first game jam entry, this game feels extremely juicy and satisfying to play. The art is basic, but the sound design and the shaders do a lot of heavy lifting, everything spins, glows and pews way better than I came in expecting. Roulette is a very basic implementation of the theme, but the player's jumping and reloading animations give it that tiny bit extra that makes it feel like yeah, this is a Spin To Win game. The roulette spinning at the end of each wave is pure dopamine and I could not get enough of it.

The game controls well, despite the incorrect info in the description and other minor gripes. The only real issue I have is with the dash, putting it on E in a game with WSAD movement is a mistake, it should either be on left shift or space so you don't have to take your hands off the directional keys to do it. It also felt way too fast to be practical, one press and I'm across the map (or off the map in one case). That said, it didn't detract too much from the overall enjoyment, and things that are a bit unorthodox like the enemies being able to juggle you add a spice to the gameplay that I think would otherwise be sorely missed. The only weird thing I actually dislike is not being able to shoot through walls (even in a limited capacity such as it reducing range for example) in a game where the enemies can, so you have scenarios where the enemy is adjacent but in a wall so you need to reposition them before shooting.

I also think the game could do a little bit better in communicating to the player, but I don't know how much you could feasibly do that without slowing it down and throwing off the whole vibe - it works because it's flashing and bright and always popping something in your face, and adding lots of tutorial text would absolutely ruin it. Things like knowing what my current stats are after a roll, or whether a bonus is positive or negative could be communicated visually or audibly in some way without much issue and would help deciding whether or not to reroll, but others like knowing how exactly some of the more unclear modifiers work just have to go unspoken.

My only other criticisms are minor polishing nitpicks like the music not looping perfectly, but those are minor in the grand scheme of things, this is a very good game - you took a very basic concept and absolutely nailed the execution.

PROTIP: To defeat the Titan Blade, spin at it until it dies.

In all seriousness, Titan Blade deals very high damage but, unlike the other blades, is also very slow. If you manage to dodge its attacks, you have a wide window to charge up a strong counter-hit of your own.

Thanks! I put some extra effort into the tutorials this jam, but one thing I realized I never mentioned anywhere is that all movement is done with the cursor. Even when you're not dodging/attacking (which is 100% accurate), you have some influence over the blades' movement by pointing where you want to go. So you can slide away from an enemy preparing an attack, or approach them if they've missed and you're in the middle of charging your own attack, for example.

You launch far by default, tap Down/S in the air to switch to high, tap Up/W to return to far. If you were using a controller, it might've been a snapback issue, I only found out after the deadline that the default deadzones for analog inputs in godot are a bit too small for discrete tapped inputs like these.

Although rhythm games aren't exactly my jam, this was really nice (and the penguins were cute). Good job!

Here's mine, a 2d puzzle-platformer: https://itch.io/jam/shovel-jam-2025/rate/3738044

A fun riff on 8values that got a few really hearty laughs out of me with some of the questions, good job on your first game! My only gripe is that there could be some more feedback for your actions and some better tutorialization - things like knowing what the win/loss conditions are, or how much funding impacts results vs aligned answers,