itch.io

Cool game! I like the idea of the spinning but for some reason the UI and at times also the direction of the weapon seemed to be severely misaligned with where it shot. The gun almost never shot in the direction it pointed. Not sure what the issue there was. (Played on Firefox)

Other than that. Graphics were slick and controls felt nice. A handful of waves in I did start to feel a bit bored and would have wanted something to change up the pace if the game was to be expected to continue much beyond that.

But overall i liked my stay.

I got to the part where you need to jump over an evil windmill while on a moving platform and it was pretty hard for me to get there tbh so being reset back that far felt a bit of a big ask. In part also because there were parts that needed redoing that basically just showed there are moving platforms. So if the skill check of that moving platform was right after a checkpoint it would have been fine. Or if it was part of a final high stakes dense skill check to reach the goal, that would also have felt like fine.

Other than that and some qol platforming improvements that others have mentioned, i think it was a really solid entry.

This was very addictive and hard. Very stylish and cool game. It feels very fleshed out and I’m not sure I have any suggestion for improvements. I don’t know if there’s any more twists and added complexities further down if you get to higher rounds. But I guess there would need to be something else too on a meta level if this would be expanded upon.

Great entry.

I had quite fun riding around but I do think, and maybe it is a skill issue but the fights were much too long, at least if the game is to reset you back to the beginning when failing. It would have been very nice if there was some effect when you got hit too because it was easy to miss. Ofc also if the character flipped direction when going to the left.

But otherwise a solid game.

I hate the dog. I hate the dog so much lol. Great game. That last level almost got me to rage quit tbh. But I made it through. I figured out after a while that it basically was the heals / where the legs connect that checks for grass collision which was nice in most feet placement since it gave a bit of a margin, but sometimes it also meant a large part of the foot was on the path and it counted as grass… but i’m not sure i have a great idea for how to make that feel completely fair to the player.

I played for a couple of rounds. I must confess I don’t know why I would go into duck-mode ever. Maybe there was something I missed. But it could have been cool if that was the only way you could pick up more ducks, or maybe you moved a little faster as duck. or could swim.

I get the idea of the spinning, but it took me a little to understand it and never got any good of using or adapting to it, so maybe if it was shooting and spinning a whole lot more and faster already from the beginning and even more with upgrades it would have felt better.

Solid entry though.

I played until I had revealed three tunes, maybe to be played but since they never indicated in the least that they were that nor what order, if there was an order, i actually quit when reaching the third.

I like the idea of the structure, having different characters that have different abilities, but after a while i did not enjoy having to spin for them. I had also not read the entire game page / missed you could stop the wheel… so having to walk a screen or two to kill the character and then, at other times the near absurd jump and movement speeds leading to some untimely deaths, it got quite frustrating. Having a way to kill all characters on the start screen could have helped a lot.

I was also very surprised that the barely submerged platforms that would only bathe the toes of the characters could harm them. This felt like break against the expectations of the world.

I would also very much have liked if the things that the characters could interact with had any anchoring in the world. I do like that their movement differences made sense with who they were, but the abilities felt completely random which meant I couldn’t encounter a thing and think “maybe the duck would be good at this.” Instead it was brute force to learn who did what.

So I think if there was more world-building and a bit better UX, that I would have had a blast playing this.

Very good dress up game. It took me a few times to complete the game. And I really like how you start with the clothing that goes in the middle.

Some random thoughts:

I think it would be better to just be thrown back into retrying rather than having to drag the mouse all the way over and click new spin each time.

Maybe the leaver could have been pulled by clicking anywhere. (basically streamlining players getting back into the game)

Also that I only got one chance at new spin plus! After failing it was back to new spin… that felt quite unfair.

But all in all very solid seriously spinning game.

A lot of mood with both the dialogue and the music with it. I enjoyed it to the end. I do wish the dialog was a bit slower or at least some stuff tended to just flash on screen and be replaced by the next line. Other than that. A very solid entry.

Great game. Honse! was victorious, but at what cost. If the game hadn’t been this serious, I might have complained about how the sword swinging timing with hitting or not was quite unclear. Visually it looked like I ought to hit but I was often too early. But as serious as the game was, that UX issue kind of felt intentional.

Also loved the settings menu.

Extremely serious game indeed! I got seriously hurt playing it.

I did find myself holding space also getting ready to jump, but it didn’t matter much, but it was hard to remember it was tap to jump when i was that focused on getting the spinning right.

One thing I noticed at times was that the level-design didn’t always make it very clear where I was going to land, so these times I had to jump try and see what happened. And since it was funny getting hurt and there were no real resets except for the trampoline, it didn’t matter that much.

Speaking of, I’m very glad it wasn’t but this could so much have been a foddian/rage-type of game.

Very good entry!

I managed to get to the end thanks to WASD also being bound, though it made it a bit cramped with XC buttons. Nice little platformer. I did accidentally land on the last coin so i didn’t get to read the dialogue for the last pirate down there in the well. Over all level design worked well also. My one gripe was that I accidentally re-triggered the long dialog of the captain(?) high up on the ship and there was no way of getting out of it. So a solid game all in all.

Congrats on making a game! I got to un-lockikng the O-row so I think that means I won? It would have been nice with some feedback there. Speaking of feedback, it was nice that the buttons were disabled when bought or not the next one to be bought, but it would also have been very good if they shifted in color or something when you reached the amount needed to buy the upgrade.

I think it would also have been nice if there was some visual effect on what unlocking these rows actually did to the spinning.

But great starter game!

I got to the sailing with kraken bit and enjoyed myself until then. And the sailing did feel nice too but the segment felt very unfair because i needed to get two turns on the wheel in before each tentacle to actually avoid them (don’t know if it is a mouse sensitivity thing mattering there) and there simply wasn’t time enough unless i pre-turned, hoping to not steer towards the next tentacle. I did manage to get about 9 tentacles deep once but being reset back to the beginning when the segment already felt unfair was a bit too much.

Otherwise a nice game with interesting spins in it!

What a wonderful game! I had very fun playing it. Extreme, purely distilled seriousness! Lovely animations and very nice graphics.

My two critiques would be that the audio is a bit short and repeating and it would have been great if it built up / added more layers as you build up speed on the wheel.

My other critique would be the ending. I absolutely love it, but I think it could have been dragged out a little longer to let the player live in the suspense of “what have i done? what will happen?”. Because with current speed you hardly get to see the stuff happening and formulate those questions before the game has ended.

Very good game though!

The mouse sensitivity was extreme for me. I could hardly look at the mouse without spinning around. I did manage to collect something like 191 dollars and got to the door. But there seemed like there was no interaction there.

I think if the mouse had been on a quarter of the sensitivity i could maybe have managed the level a bit better, but having to time the turret reloads and then so easily getting stuck on things made it really hard.

Also when out of range from a turret you basically have no reaction time or chance to know when it is safe to get into its range again. And you don’t know the range either.

Very nice character model though!

Unfortunately i couldn’t get very far because my keyboard doesn’t allow for reaching space with the left hand. You almost have all the movement mapped for controller. Left stick moves the character and Y jumps, but sadly the attack is missing.

For the little I got to play, I did like the intro, the ridiculously large sword is funny and the art looks nice overall.

I did notice there seems not to be any coyote time when jumping off from platforms (short time after collider leaves when you are still allowed to jump) and that there’s probably the same collision shape for physics as for determining if you collide with say spikes, and usually for platformers that tends to feel a bit unfair. We’ve been conditioned to be given a bit of margin/overlap and call that safe.

I did struggle a bit with the enemies in the game for various reasons. First encounter, it was mostly me not realizing the cherries were enemies… which I should have. But it was also very dark at the door so I didn’t even see my attacks. Maybe if the swipe animation had a bright outline to it’s black center so that it could always be seen.

Then I really struggled with the coin until I figured I could cheese it standing below the lowest platform and getting shots in from safety.

However then I was stuck. The jump isn’t high enough to get to the next platform here: . My feet only get about to the lower part of the next platform on the apex of the jump. So unfortunately i’m stuck.

Cool idea for the theme though!

The spinning was nice, I did survive to upgrade at least four times, i think, and I’m not quite sure what, if anything, the upgrades did. When spinning, I didn’t feel like there was much I could do to affect the outcome other than spin before the enemies arrived and keep on spinning. In one wave, I managed to get a single slow one left and could then run around for a while to regain health but kiting didn’t seem like an intended strategy as the dirt hit further than my stick. Or at least so it seems.

Nice game though and nice use of the theme.

nice relaxing game. I guess there’s depth to it when chasing records but my gut feeling is that what matters most is finding the “correct” path rather than being super efficient with the cogs. But i might be wrong. Anyways if that is true i think it might have been even more fun if the game telegraphed the intended/fasted path as there’s no great way at the moment to get any overview of the levels.

Solid game!

I really enjoyed floating down the river. It was surprisingly confusing which direction to pull the stick on the controller, but by always drifting to one or the other direction it became simpler.

Some of the UI seems to not properly work: the counter 00 in the top corner, not sure what it was meant to count. At one point it just became a single 0. And I was assuming the yellow arrow was meant to be the active direction, but maybe that actually was a left-right hint? If so it was looking a bit too much like an activation of a UI element.

Very well made first game!

Very serious game indeed!

I didn’t get my mayor elected but I did indeed decide I did a decent job and was no miracle worker.

I understand the gamification of the chained wheels but I felt like they either were too complex to keep track of or caused the game to become a waiting game for them to align.

At one point I think the game thought I clicked (must have been an accidental double click) so it stopped the spin right away. And one word just kept spinning forever.

Really nice graphics, funny spin on the theme and well written prompts.

Playing on Firefox (Linux) if I press maximize while in the menus the game just goes blank/black. Also The UI:s do overlap so I cannot see the other games you were listing:

I wasn’t very good at spinning and flinging the things. But i did enjoy it.

It took me quite a while to notice i could grab on both to enemies and their projectiles, but when something was possible to grab i never really understood. (I played without mouse.

I also got a bit confused where the lightening started because at the beginning it seemed like i couldn’t go down the ramp thing towards the enemies, so i thought i needed to attack them from afar. But then somehow later i could.

It would also have been nice when you died that the game stayed there for a second instead of instantly transferring you to a you died screen.

Good game though.

I played for three levels, then it felt like I got back to the same as the first one but it said level 3 which got me quite confused.

It took me quite some time to get my bearings and figure out what I should do, so on the first level i collected all chests, which probably was good but I did so because i missed that i was supposed to go back to the drill. Then i just went for drill and waited next to it and game got quite a lot easier that way.

It also took me until the third level that i realized my drill was possible to use as a melee, i thought i was gonna drill for something while fighting enemies.

One critique about the enemies, I spent a whole lot of my time just staring up in the sky and not at all seeing the level. And that didn’t feel like it did any service to the levels you had built.

Fortunately jumping wasn’t needed because i have a split keyboard where space in only accessible from the right hand side. so i would as a general suggestion also urge alternative control schemes or preferably rebinding of inputs.

Over all quite satisfying dodging the enemies while being so slow yourself.

Hi so this looks cool but it is unfortunately 100% impossible to play for me. My keyboard is split and space only accessible with right hand which means I either have to give up mouse or moving and while i did try that a bit i still didn’t manage to hit any enemy a single time. So in general with any non-trivial control-scheme, you really have to have at least alternative bindings or preferably the possibility to rebind controls.

One thing I also noticed was that the spinning didn’t reset when going from the intro scene to the first level.

My hunch is also that the first level should be absolutely a safe place to learn the ropes and the two enemies got me cornered a bit too easily. Might have been a combo of having to basically play the game one hand at a time, but it might also be that it would have benefited from having more loops and less dead ends.

I did very much like the look of the UI though.

Thanks for the feedback. I actually think the reason the pedaling is a bit harder than it should isn’t as much communication as the physics of the legs making fighting against the pedal motion. But yeah I considered recording some “Left” “Right” voice lines and adding them in, but ran out of time and energy.

This one played smooth as butter! As expected tbh. Looked fantastic. That curved shader and the bounce at the end of the movement. The music was also really good.

So if there’s any reason for me to complain really, then it would be that it is playing it a little safe. Which, I mean, it is fine, but I would have loved seeing some evolution on the spatial puzzles of last year, a bit of enemy variety and I guess more cool stuff.

Still a very, very well made game. About perfect in length, even if it leaves me wishing there was more.

Play-through with more thoughts:

I really like the setting and the quite unique game play. I was a bit confused about some parts but I did manage to get to the end after a little break. The game also crashed on me, but I’m running in a VM on linux so maybe not that strange there are hick-ups.

The style was cool, the cats cute.

More feedback and discussion on what confused me in the play-through:

No last year I was still on Windows…

Yeah with Ludum Dare during the voting period of DCjam it’s quite hectic tbh. So many games to play now! Did you do something for LD too?

Glad you liked the clicker/stanley parable-esque act of the game. It sounds as you played that to its end, which is actually a false end. There’s a way to progress to act II through interacting “correctly” with the clicker part that then hopefully also explains why you are destroying those computers.

Yeah the exclamation marks are on a steps-timer until they return. It was our fast solution for not soft-locking players in the clicker act if they were unlucky and ran out of easy enemies and still needed some.

The DPS calculation in the UI is based on rolling the outcome a few number of times, because I don’t know the math to actually calculate the expected average of this system. Way to complex. So the estimation error is unfortunately quite large in this build. We’ve fixed that already for our next version so that the error is much smaller.

Yeah that beginning is on the top of our todo list! Glad you liked it.

Thank you very much for your extensive feedback!

We totally agree that the on-boarding early in the game needs a lot of work and is something we’ll try and fix after the jam as well as balancing the difficulty so that it’s not that unforgiving early on and easy during later stages. And at least ensure fights will always end. You might have been able to spend the time upgrading your equipped weapon to max and then get somewhere with dealing damage, but I agree it shouldn’t be like that.

Very glad the creature was scary to you and honestly we sort of ran out of time and what we in pure panic made as an ending does have that implication yeah.

I liked the vibe this one gave out, the retro-futurism was strong in it. The movement was a bit on the slow side, but having a relatively small map, and being able to keep forward pressed made it maybe even a good choice as you tried to get away from the robots in the hallway.

It was a bit, or rather very, hard to know what to do. I know there was a long list of steps on the page but unfortunately as I was about to check that out I got cornered and killed.

Play-through:

I really want to try your game, but I cannot get it to launch on linux inside my linux vm using proton/wine. In the off-chance you have some idea this is what the logs output:

I think there’s a quite superb little jam-game in here, but for me there’s one major thing holding it back. To the extent that I was getting quite grumpy in the end of my recording ;) The map is huge, and it requires you to backtrack and that really, really, requires the movements to be snappy. Instead they are on the slow side. And the way (and I understand why you wanted the tweening to look more like a step) stops between each move just doesn’t work. It might have worked with that tween and a 1/2 or 1/3 movement time (or a running mode when continuously tapping stuff making movements go fast).

I like the wall and floor textures quite a bit, the dungeon layout was cool too with the small airlock-type rooms.

The dragons though, I felt like they clashed a bit with the pixelated but detailed backgrounds. Maybe a transparency with outline shader or something making them look more other would have felt better for me. Or just more detailed.

Still, I did like it enough to try three times and at least get to see the boss / a boss?

Play-through:

I very much like the art direction of the game. Cardboard and hand-drawn is a sure way to stand out.

The movement was fine, the camera perhaps a bit high up. The grid alignment felt a bit off at times, but it didn’t much hurt the experience.

I also think the game was more or less perfect in length for its content.

Play-through:

I got to the end!

I found the key-mapping quite unhinged, so it was quite the struggle to just move around. I would strongly suggest using WASD plus QE as turn as a baseline. Then have attack, doors, and looting that chest all be done with space. The camera position also made navigation problematic.

The enemy animations were funny though, and it was short enough that the input scheme didn’t cause too much problem.

Play-through with more detailed feedback:

Yeah it was a pity that I only got to see that cut-scene for a single frame :)

And I did totally feel that each enemy was at puzzle, it was just the boy’s role in the puzzle and the streamlining of the whole thing that needed work. The actual puzzle of them felt quite intuitive and nice.

Oh I never noticed that exit. Yeah, the darkness might be from my monitor, but also felt like there were invisible walls in some places around the village edge, which probably meant I needed clear ways to walk to trust them.

I think what threw me off with the inventory a bit was that the compass ability was gained when just being in the inventory.