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Thanks for playing! I definitely was aiming for that idea, so I’m happy it got across

What a fun take on the theme! I really loved the layer switch mechanic, it felt like I was playing a microscopic submarine or something. The vignette and translucent sprites really sold it. I did notice that the hitbox of the player seems to be a little wide at times, as I would occasionally hit things that were ~0.25-0.5 inch away from the sprite’s side. Great submission!

thanks for checking it out! Heard a lot about your game, looking forward to giving it a play

Looking back, I probably could have just instanced a small button under the room you circle, like a “are you sure”. Or maybe just make the player circle a room with their mouse. Thanks for checking it out!

Great work! There are quite a few systems at place here and they meld and work together very well. I really enjoyed the chest minigame, it was well executed. Art style is fun, always love seeing a hand drawn artstyle for jams. The description of “smelly chests” made it pretty obvious to me where to dig, but putting that info in game in a simple intro text may have given some background to the story and helped understand the goal. Loved the piecemeal story from the journal entries.

I liked how the bombs operate somewhat like landmines, not blowing up until it hits a body. Would have been cool for there to be a burrowing creature that attacks from below the character, but can be led to dig into a placed bomb. It’s understandable that there is only one enemy though, it’s a jam after all.

Nice work!

Great concept, great execution - not much else to say. Loved the block snapping mechanic, clearly lots of soul in the game. I could easily see the mechanic being grown into a larger game, nice work!

really great atmosphere and overall feel! Loved the box art you made as well. I love the idea of unseen threats, fun game!

weird, I’ll look into that. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for playing! Looking back on comments so far, definitely seems like tutorials / teaching the player is something I need to work on a tad (I’ve had that feedback in past jams too lol). Glad you enjoyed!

Thanks for playing! I struggled for awhile on the kills, trying to make it “good writing” while not being too edgy. I agree that the UI could have used some work, definitely was a weird one to develop. My thought process for the room / map view was to make it feel like a board game, would have loved to push that across a bit more. Glad you enjoyed!

Just in case anyone else gets confused on how to play (I’m bad at building in-game tutorials):

• When on the blueprint map, click a room that you wish to enter.
• When you have selected your room, click continue
• Once zoomed into your room, you can interact with NPCs and items by clicking their tokens.
• At the end of each hour, NPCs may move and you can select a new room to enter.
• Goal is to dispatch each guest

Fun little hack and slash!

You might have noticed lag spikes when you first attack an enemy and when you kill one. That’s caused by the particles (the blood and death gib effect). If you want to avoid those lag spikes in the future, you just have to instance those particles into a loading screen or the main menu before the level, and activate them there. That will load the particles into memory before the level and prevent the lag spike occurring during gameplay.

Was a fun time. No camera issues on my side. Solid!

If the game is pixelated / font hard to read at first, use the fullscreen button in the bottom right. Should help

Just to check, did you try the full screen button in the bottom right of the popup window? Sometimes Itch’s popup window after you click “Run Dinner” can be a little pixelated, but clicking the full screen button makes it better

Thanks for playing! I am a little disappointed I didn’t get to flesh out some of the rooms. Just for reference, some of the ideas I has were:

• Basement (bottom room) would have cells where guests could be kept if they were successfully framed
• Staff Quarters would have been used to interact with your staff privately, I basically wanted them to be “teammates” since they knew what was happening
• Kitchen would have had resources. At first I had the idea of the dinner itself being an event ~2 hours into the game, so the player could feasibly poison it or something

Fair point! Looking back, I probably could have given the rooms a hover animation of some kind to help guide the player into clicking the rooms. Thanks for playing!

Still, very impressive!

Happy I found this one. Watched your progress in the discord server throughout the jam, fun take on the theme!

This was really fun! Gave me huge nostalgia for web flash games like Swords and Sandals and duck life. The speed quickly gets huge, which is fun. The ending surprised me, especially the letter. Nice work!

turns out my memory is horrible! Really inventive idea for the theme, and a solid amount of levels too. Gives great phone game energy (in a good way). Nice work, really creative!

Only issue I had was one word seemingly not registering, but that’s all

Fun idea for making the menu in game!

Great work, loved the slanted POV of the level. it was a smart way of separating the level from the background. Great pixel art!

Nice art on the sprites! Good game feel overall with the movement of the assets and music. I’m pretty bad at it, but overall had a good time. Nice work!

Glad someone opened the options menu lol. Thank you for checking it out!

What a fun entry, nice work. I’m honestly shocked you got the web export to work without any issues (at least, I didn’t experience any). There is quite a bit of game here.

I had some difficulty with the movement, I feel like a little more velocity would have helped clear some of the jumps and flow the movement together a bit more. Other than that, I was really impressed with the look of the game, shader use, etc. Great work!

I’m a hugeee fan of the art and color palette you used, definitely a style I want to approach at some point, though I feel like the vision cones don’t match the color palette as well (may just be me).

I loved the UI for the shuriken recharge, and the camera movements in the “inside” levels was a cool change.

One thing I personally missed was Coyote Time (being able to jump a few frames after leaving the ground, to help avoid falling off ledges due to input delay).

Other than that, I loved how you expanded on the game mechanics throughout the levels, and kept things fresh. I could definitely see the vision, and how you could theoretically expand it more if you had more time. Nice work!

Happy I found your entry, loved seeing your progress in the discord server.

• Art is really great, the animations give a good sense of movement and the style is maintained throughout. Really liked it.
• I really liked the splash screen at the start, well made
• Nice work on the progress report at the end
• The UI responsiveness with small animations and sounds was great as well!
• I loved the little mini games, although I’m not sure I understood the basketball game. Some guidance on that may have been nice.

What a fun take on the theme. Great work!

Thanks for checking out! I love putting stuff like the “cut content” in my submission, makes it feel like a devlog lol. Thanks again for giving it a play, hope to see more from you during next month’s jam!

Love the bounty ideas, thanks for playing & reviewing!

I love the art! It’s almost desaturated, reminds me of older pixel art when we first started getting color screen handhelds. The puzzle mechanics are lovely, and I overall had a great time with this. You expanded on your mechanics well and had a really steady progression throughout. Top tier

Fair enough on the distance between islands - I likely should have included some decoration, sandbars, uninhabited islands, etc to break up the travel. Typically, the pirates stick around the islands and make trips to Nassau every so often - at the start there is ~1-2 dozen, but I’ve had some feedback that the respawn speed seems to be lacking for them.

Water shader is heavily based off of this shader here - https://godotshaders.com/shader/pixel-art-water/. I had to do some tweaking with the noise textures, foam, etc to get it to work at the world scale. I’d recommend looking at the example project in the comments there, as it’s application is somewhat complicated vs more standard shaders.

Great idea on the acceleration for turn speeds! It currently is a static value based on the current sail level, so def feels a little weird.

Currently, combat is basically optional and more of a hurdle to jump during trade routes. I originally wanted ships to possibly drop trade goods (some of them have unique movement which travels between islands as trade routes, so prob defined by that) - but just ran outta time on it.

Thanks for playing!

Totally agree on the UI - I’m typically pretty bad with UI feedback and I left most of the UI this month to the last second so it’s all pretty boilerplate lol. Planning to do something pretty UI intensive next month, so we’ll see how that goes. Thanks for checking it out!

Great work! The character controller was really impressive and had a great sense of momentum and weight. I loved how if you hit stuff too hard or got hit by an enemy, you would plummet. Great work on the visual style as well

Very cool! I’m extremely bad at it, but I love it! I think the only thing holding me back from being able to get past the first bridge is some visual representation of how much weight is leaning to one side and how much “strength” my inputs are giving to the counter lean.

I thought about it for a bit, and a cool representation might be to make the backpack clear, so you can see the sand shift to the sides, and know what direction it’s pulling you. Then to represent the player inputs, you could just do some kind of bar or maybe arm movements of the character. Overall, loved having a few tries at it and its a really cool take on the theme!

Great work on having visual responses to in game events like buffs, damage, etc. Makes it really easy to get a feel for how combat is going without bogging the game down or slowing it down. I definitely see the dicey dungeon inspo, but a lot of unique touches to make it your own. Pixel art is killer too, love the character designs especially

Visual style is top tier! I struggled a little with aiming jumps, but I loved the sense of progression that you all built into the game! Really impressive game design, planning, and execution. Great work!

Great work! You really set a wonderful mood here, every element complements each other.

Solid! I really enjoyed the mechanics overall, and the side blown particles were a really good touch. image.png. I like how you didn’t limit the swinging, so you can still do full loops and gain a lot of momentum. I noticed that the momentum does die off very fast after release though

Totally agree! I left any tutorial-ling / tips to the last minute, so it’s lacking a lot of initial direction due to that - thanks for checking it out!

Very fair point on the trading, thanks for the feedback! I’m hoping to update it after voting to improve some of the trade UI and HUD, which hopefully will make trading more informative. Thanks again!