itch.io

it's interesting that this song had to be muted in the monkey jam vod, i like the music and it's a shame it won't be heard in the vod.....

thanks for checking out our game! yea i like how our interpretation of the theme came out too, it was the programmer's idea and i tried my best to reinforce it through the designs. also really happy with how the game sounds...... thanks to our composer for the different versions of the main track and taking the time to find free sound effects for our programmer to work with.

tried the game on my phone and i find controlling the movement a lot easier on here but i never dash cuz it's kinda inconvenient where it's positioned. i wasn't dashing so much on keyboard either but it did seem easier on there, different trade-offs between both control sets for me. still not great at it but managed to get to purple with the mass explode orb which is quite satisfying....

also the music doesn't seem to work on my mobile chrome browser but i could still hear the call audio fine. tested on the android stock internet app and the music.... is crunchy and cuts out a lot. seemed to have some correlation to bumping into things (when other sfx would play) but not always. after dying i can still hear the static mice tho. this might be devastating....

decided to try this on a whim and, takes me a while to get a hang of the controls but maybe that's on my skill level. the rotation style of the controls feels kinda novel to me with the roller blade aesthetic + the snake-like caution tape is an interesting style of gameplay. speaking of aesthetic, i like the chunky shoes and the mice are cool with the sparking ends of their tails.

my more prominent concerns i'd say is that the intro being a rather long audio is kinda hard for my wee brain to hold on to especially without subtitles, i got that mice bad. figured out anything else while playing the game. and even with the clue on the start screen to grab the green orbs, somehow those green orbs both stand out and don't look collectable enough to me..... just time constraint things i'm sure but yea.

also maybe a little reward for managing to catch some mice when your caution tape is on red..... it'd be cool if clutching like that could extend the tape just a little or something just to feel good about myself 🤡

the music 🔥 🔥 🔥 thank you!

thanks, i feel controls can be tricky to get right in these jams but are so important, so i'm glad it felt nice!

wow that's great to hear.... i was worried about the game being cool but without enough to really spend some time with so i'm glad you think that.

thank you! glad we managed to make something that feels good in the time we had.

not sure i can give great advice on scaling here because i was kind of making it up as i went, i started off drawing the zombies at a 2048x2048 canvas and drew at that general scale for most assets, except when i realized that drawing things relative to the entire screen (helicopter frame, results box, the sniper in the corner) to that scale would be wayyyy to big for my comfort so i drew those on a 3840x2160 canvas. here's an image to show how ridiculous the scaling was in comparison.

this ended up being annoying when i wanted to see how things would look in comparison to each other so in future i think i'll stick to drawing from 3840x2160 or double that, which will get scaled down for most screens anyways. in general i think you wanna draw big, it'll give you more leeway to scale things around even if ideally you don't, but particularly with the tight turnaround of a game jam you'll have to accept that it might happen. in this case since the slasher and enemy sprites are put on a 3d plane to be skewed slightly to the camera you can't maintain the original image quality there anyways. and if you're importing into unity make sure you're exporting as squares with dimensions by multiples of 4, personally i want to get more hands on experience with the game engines so i better understand how to make easier to work with assets but if you aren't working with the programming yourself, i'd suggest asking the devs for their preferences!

there's actually very little shading on these assets, just around the heads of the enemies so they're more readable from the rest of their body and behind the ribbon on the results screen. i'm honestly not confident with shading and it also saved our programmer time not having to apply shadows on everything, but i'm glad the style seems to look great without. i tried to design with distinct shapes and in mind so they could be read without a lot of detail. you can see this with the sniper where i avoid detailing the limbs by posing them out from the body, and the bat where the square body leaning back and forth and shape of wings angled in and out have enough change between the poses to convey flying and attacking in just two frames. use references!! i didn't know how to draw most of this until i looked at references for what i wanted. and worth noting that our programmer actually moved the sprites in engine for the dying and swooping motions, otherwise the enemies are just two frames of animation. the thick borders were also their preference, and i think it helped the assets pop from the environment without shading.

another thing, and this is just my preference i'm no expert, but i notice sometimes when art is scaled down to playable sprites the lineart looks too thin when you see it ingame. if you have time outside of jams you could do some practice sprites in different brush sizes to see how they look on a game screen and go with what you think looks best. i'd also watch out for assets having visibly different line widths from each other ingame, i'd try to draw anything meant to be on the same plane with the same brushes or at least being able to check them side by side to the scale they'll be on screen. i personally don't think lineart on backgrounds should look thicker than on assets in front (things further away look smaller) but in the end it's your own style so just try and see what you like. 

maybe the programmer can tell you more about pixel texture filter, if you're talking about assets looking kinda pixelated in our game. i don't know why they're like that, it probably has something to do with how it's rendered or set up in the engine.

sorry if some of these answers weren't as helpful as you wanted, i'm frankly not so experienced with all of it myself but i threw myself into the deep end with this project and you can see how it turned out (good i hope....) in general i think there's a lot you'll learn just by trying and seeing what you like, so just try things! and if it looks bad you'll be able to learn from and correct it moving forward.

i managed to rate this game before the voting period ended and am writing this comment based on memory. i tried this one on my phone which was pretty tricky because i was in bed with the lights dim so the game had a hard time detecting my face. this is partly on me and once i started playing with the lights on it was a much more smooth experience but perhaps if you were to do face tracking for a game again, maybe the game should be done in light mode to help put more light on the player's face....

so my experience with a lot of the game was pretty rough but i did try to make it through without the magic wand as much as i could. i do feel like.... the blinking mechanic could have worked better, but i see where you were going with it. i feel like to achieve more of a freaky friday, glimpse into the pov of a pal feel, maybe you shouldn't be able to see the other circles at all until you blink and switch into one of them. i feel like that could make for a more immersive blink mechanism and even lend itself well to its own puzzles. but yea idk that might be too tricky. i thought the puzzles as is were interesting but kinda stressful having to blink as they were all moving.

a small thing that could've improved this one would've been naming the other circles after connor's friends, or something more personable because the other names felt kinda random and forgettable, and i think you want the player to feel more connected to them. also the sound design which i'd only realized existed halfway through as my phone was kinda on mute, the dying sfx is kinda too human and since what the player is seeing are circles, i think it'd more fitting to have a more beepboop kinda sound to it. 

just played the game again so i could complete it and no more crashes!! tho i think a sticking point for me is how i'd rather just avoid the birds instead of taking them down. this is partly because on keyboard moving from spacebar to J doesn't feel very smooth and i'm more inclined to keep moving instead of lifting my hand from the jump key unless necessary for progression. but also they're pretty easy to avoid, you can just run past or over them, even the red ones just jump over you lol, if they knock out one of my monkeys i can get them back easy. so maybe a banana reward (since they are supposedly stealing the bananas) from taking them down, or other incentive would be good there.

this was a cool little toy to fiddle around with. like someone else said, being able to pin down your points or generally let your changes stick do you can bend the faces in more complex ways, would've been nice, but i imagine the face warping mechanic was already a lot to figure out during the jam. the buttons around the sides are nice, fun to have different options to switch between and it looks like this works on mobile? that's cool. music was kiiinnda too loud but it's cool that the music changes with each different character, that's sweet though it didn't notice it at first, so..... still cool once i found out though.

i like this barrels of monkeys linking idea and the character designs are quite cute, particularly mouse with the eyes. the background noise was rather..... eery, with the echoing monkey noises. maybe not the best for vibes. it's kinda annoying to have to take your hand off the keyboard so the mouse can click next, if there's no other mouse controls then letting your menus be controlled by keyboard would be best. controls are a bit hard for me to read in just text without relational positions, like i don't recognize A and D just like that but i'd recognize their positions in relation to WASD so a visual of those keys with just the A and D highlighted would make it easier to read. the hands release thing was a bit hard to get a hang of but i did figure it out. it's just a bit trippy because you kinda expect to follow the momentum into the direction you press so sometimes when i want to launch right i'll default to right key instead of left. but when it got to level 6 it was kinda easier this way to swap hands with the guy on the left. still frustrating though when the hands didn't line up well enough to grab. it was a little later i realized i could click to also grab and release which felt a lot nicer for me since it seemed to work more often. kinda gave up at level 7 though. this was a cool concept but with more time could've made the mechanics feel much smoother.

i really like the look of the mouse sprite in this one, strikes a nomadic vibe with the hair down and simple cloak. i was quite charmed by the very toy phone sound effect of the health stand, cute friendly vibes. keyboard prompts on the screen were cute and helpful in understanding how to play, though WASD to move with the Z key to shoot is kinda awkward for my hands. i also didn't understand the Q W prompts at where we get the tnt guy, didn't seem to do anything but i progressed anyways just shooting the stuff. the death hitbox for falling was hard to register when it seemed to happen so quickly, like i didn't realize i'd lost a life there cuz it just looked like i bugged back up for some time, so maybe letting the character fall further and more feedback on losing health would be good. speaking of, i later realized that Q and W were for switching between pals, maybe a sound or more movement with ironmouse or their icons at the top would help. i was kinda bad at using the grappling hook but managed to spam my way with it. sometimes i think the character bugged after falling and would spawn back over the ditch. switching between tools and using them both feel a bit awkward while moving, double so trying to do them at the same time, so i feel like some technique is kinda lost there but i did end up spamming my way through the boss fight, though i think the boss music may have bugged with the way i did it. scrolling credits were nice, and some humour in the lack of a proper reset and quit button were nice, it's nice that they aren't empty misleading assets.

didn't realize that carrying the sentry would make it so they'd be shooting above the enemy, i thought it'd be cute if there was the dynamic of carrying the sentry so they could shoot for the other. but the dynamic of throwing them was also fun once i got the hang of it, though a little micky mouse at the same time. the dying monkey sound was kinda unserious it was funny when they died from my mistakes. i found the puzzles fun, though at times felt a bit frustrating having to pick up the sentry over spikes or accidentally overstep into them. also felt a bit weird that shots only killed the robomice on the face. i liked how in the ironmouse level i figured out i could grab the sentry from over the spikes and still run a bit with them and throw from there, that felt cool. unfortunately at some point something might've crashed which messed up webgl in my browser (firefox) and it was black screen with the sound effects playing. so i couldn't finish the game :( but it was quite the cute concept, nice snippy sound effects, cute and consistent pixel art style and fun dynamic between the two pals. this one could've done with a flashier thumbnail though.

this is super impressive art, the designs make all of connor's friends look badass. i like the pixel sprites too, the connor one is cute and the varied designs on the different enemy monkeys are cool, though there could be more cohesion between the two styles. text on the scroll for save a friend too small at the set browser viewport but i guess this was made for full screen. the distinct archetypes of the friends and their abilities were nice though for a while i kinda missed that i could do a big charged attack and if i wasn't paying attention i would forget again. the presents were cool but i never tried keeping the presents for myself so idk if i get a small buff from that or not, maybe the trade-off could've been made clearer. i did appreciate that they made a sound upon being dropped so i didn't worry as much about missing them, though the sound could've been more fitting. i like how you drew ludwig's quoof of hair and how that translated into pixel, very distinct and rather ludiwig-esque. unfortunately i wasn't that good at this game and got impatient after having already restarted a few times, getting to ludwig, unlocking his saiyan form fairly quick, then dying from barrage of attack. it wouldn't be so bad if there were checkpoints and the rooms weren't timed so long, but i'd probably try again if i had more time to rate these games. overall decent concept, very cool art but lacking overall polish as a visual package (ui and cohesion) and what could be a nice gameplay loop if it felt a bit faster.

the E button asset constantly pressing itself made me accidentally skip half of the story panels so maybe watch out for that. i don't loove having to press E when i'm already using WASD to move. my brain is rather slow so i didn't realize i had to open the crane claw myself even though the space input is there right on screen for me, my expectations of how a crane game work had put me in autopilot to expect the game to do it for me. for an idle game it doesn't really let me be truly brainless with it if i have to manually open and close the claw, though it is more satisfying having the control over grabbing a couple of things at once and dropping them into the WIN (at least when i haven't accidentally sent the claw down there too and have to wait for it to come back) if you're going to have E as a confirm button i feel like Q should be the back button. i didn't realize until way late by chance of my mouse happening to be in a spot before an item moved over it than that would display info on it. the art for the toys in the crane machines was cute, the connor funko pop too. once i was able to grab two bears at once!! but then one fell out and the other stuck to one of the claws and i had to lower them into the box. the bananas kinda bottlenecked i got to the point where i was too tired to get more bananas for an attempt at the monkey push and connor was too slow at finding coins for me.... i did try to leave the game on to farm while i played other games but uhhhhh one of them messed up my browser's webgl and i refreshed before remembering to check back.....

the art on the story graphics is soooo cute!! there's this weirdly timed pulse at the start though but yea, very cute style. the overworld style is less polished but in a charming way at least. i like the border and shadow stylization on the boxes. i would've liked the viewport to be bigger so i could see everything better, particularly action text with the key inputs and hp/ap info were hard for me to process and remember so i had to look closely at them every time. wish the key inut boxes that appear on obstacles could've been used for the action circle too.

the controls are, hard, and don't feel great to play for my toopid brain. i feel like just the one input for a character to dodge would be difficult enough from managing multiple at once. but it's also kind of weird that Z X C V correlate to different characters in one part and different actions in another, my brain has to switch gears every time and i end up not feeling like trying different actions because they felt awkward and i didn't fully understand what they did. my strategy ended up being try to group all the characters together so i could just try dodging them all at the same time, but that didn't work for long and doesn't seem like the sort of loop you're going for.

after talking to the shadow monkey in overworld i thought the game had freezed but i guess the dialogue box was just positioned partly off the screen so spamming keys got me out of it. still the game does crash a bit much, i kept trying to play it a few times so i could make a more comprehensive review but when i crashed again sometime during shadow monkey fight i wasn't really feeling the gameplay to defeat buff all over again. thanks to your description though i can give you more points for the apparent solution to the boss fight being quite indicative of the theme.

oh yeah and i was expecting the game to be more of a slap-off, per the name "palslap" which, besides being a palindrome, i don't particularly understand what it means.

having a unique loading circle is really awesome. i was kinda confused at first trying to click the volume stuff and it jumping me right into the game. feels odd to have mouse register on a keyboard or controller only input. sound effects were fun! reminded me of yoshi's island. collecting bananas especially felt satisfying, made me want to collect every single one. music was also fun, different tracks felt distinct the way different tracks in mario kart might, but it kinda sounded like i was on a nintendo playlist than an ost for the specific environment, even if it was fitting the vibe. but they were fun and kept the game not sounding too repetitive which i imagine was the aim. i wasn't prepared to have my other hand on the keyboard for J so that was a bit awkward. i like that things feel fast and snappy once you're moving. feel like the birds could look more evil? idk i thought they could be friendly at first.  i can lightly hear them which is cute, but i kinda feel like the moncrew pals could be a bit more audible so you really get to hear that you've got a whole crew behind you. maybe you guys tried that and it sounded really annoying but it kinda felt toooo quiet when visually it looked like it shouldn't. also feel like killing bird button could've just also been spacebar? unless there's a reason which i'll discover later but—at this time after trying to jump on a bird and rescue one of my monkeys the game crashed here.

i had to get task manager to shoot it out back that's how hard it crashed.... tried to play it again and got softlocked here.

so i think that's enough macacrew for today.... i did kind of feel like what was the point of taking down the birds, like i wasn't sure if there was a particular benefit to killing them over just avoiding them besides the satisfaction of it, and i was hoping to get far enough to get a sense for more of the progression but i am a bit impatient and want to give other games a try too.

immediate impression was that everything feels too small on the screen including the ui, looks awkward and a little hard to process what i'm looking at. i spent too long fumbling around not knowing what to do before consulting the description and then i was still confused..... eventually read enough comments to clue me in and the puzzle system does seem interesting. feel like with some workshopping you could come up with a theming that feels more intuitive for it but of course this is the nature of jam ideas sometimes. it does make me wonder how you got to it though, was it chaining mechanic first or idea of bringing pals to the lost bar? there is a nice motion on the getting rid of structures the way it wobbles, seems like you intended to have more of that kind of feedback throughout, but it's nice that there's a bit of something still there.

ooh i like the style of this! i'ma a sucker for pixel style and this has a really fun one, a fan of the lanky monkey with big head and ears. the immediate start of just text exposition with no sound feels like it could be more engaging and make a better first impression (the preface is not very memorable to me sorry) but after that things look and sound great! i did accidentally skip the tutorial by reading half of it and testing out the second line before i'd read the rest, maybe something to keep in mind.... i also wasn't sure what to do after i'd bought something, feel like you could've re-used the green text on the floor there even as just an arrow or something. money goes down weirdly slowly.... makes it a bit harder to budget. i feel so broke in this game.... everything so expensive so i get super focused on trying to collect the money before it disappears which i think is a nice extra layer of something to worry about while shooting. and i'm pretty bad at it. the enemy spawns seem well placed because they really get in my way. it's a nice challenge i'd probably spend more time trying to overcome if i wasn't trying to get through more games for voting rn... i like that the pal abilities make sense for the person, like mudan relating to speed, and their sprites are rather charming.

yeah idk i think i have a normal screen?? it's fine when i set it to fullscreen i just don't automatically set these games to fullscreen and didn't realize at first that i should change it. here's how it looked in my browser.

cool how you had a reveal with the controller page coming into view with the camera or as your character moves off the barrel. from the look of the game i was able to intuit that i should move without instruction, though the console controller when i wasn't using one threw me off a bit, why not draw the mouse as well so you have that in visual form? also found it a bit hard to read (can climb other monkeys) it kinda looked like "icon club" until i got real close.

the toy design of the ape mates is quite fun to me!! in the screenshots it's cute to see them arranged in playful arrangements, like a kid has been playing with them. the movement of turning over like a toy and spam clicking to jump off each other seems silly in a charming way, and concept of sending out more ape mates to help each other up seems cool and pal-like. although, i do suck at 3d movement, so unfortunately i kept losing my monkeys on the floor and got too impatient to go very far. 

2) yeah true i did do the spam click thing in my restarted runs.

3) feels rather tough to come up with good object scenario puzzles within such a short timeframe with enough time for everyone to deliver, so i totally understand how it's the way it is. but, maybe with experience or something there's surely a way to make better puzzles still with the limitations in mind.

but well, good luck on what you do next! would be cool to see you cracked the code next monkey jam maybe 😳

pretty cool! some charm to the aesthetic. cdawg difficulty did get a laugh out of me, it'd be great to get the streamer reaction on that. the default viewport is weirdly small and messes with the ui, i'm surprised no one has mentioned this so it could just be me.... but if it isn't i feel like you could just set a better standard viewport? idk how it works...

thought well drawn henya meant card drawn and not, art drawn, and that was a little amusing to find out. biblical sunflower greed was fun joke though besides the greed part i kinda feel like the ability could've been more, aligned to what sunflowers even do (having too much of something?)

pretty impressive system though. the movement with the cards was slick but in future you might wanna be careful about how the overlapping cards can cover part of the text on the one you're looking at, wasn't an issue at this scale but idk it was on my mind. the lose screen is funny.

my toopid brain kinda glazed over the "x damage, x times" texts partly because the tiny viewport cut part of it off but also because i hadn't intuited what it meant, my brain can be a bit slow without icons. is there an incentive to ever skip the cards? maybe if the buff is specific to another card you don't use so you'd rather not skew the rng? but idk i didn't get that.

these greedy monkeys the bananas keep bouncing off their full bellies.... impressively difficult, little too tedious maybe but it felt satisfying to get the shot. i got into the habit of restart spamming so i almost feel like you don't need to limit the bananas so much at least at the start where they only need one banana anyways. i was compelled to keep playing but the review grind.... round monkey sprites are cute.

alright i finally got to play it, i got soooo confused trying to figure out how to play though cuz i was clicking on the chocolate flavour sign the whole time....... I DIDN'T NOTICE THE TRAY ON THE COUNTER AT ALL!!!! i feel like it would've been easier even just moving the tray of ice cream to the space underneath the flavours sign, you know how ice cream they have in that refrigerated space you can see through, but i'm sure that sounds tough to model. you made the models all by yourself? rather cute chibi style.

ui and sound design with buttons tends to fall by the wayside these jams but wow they made a nice (not crazy but nice) impression at the start and i appreciate that. i'm rather charmed by the banana peel dialog pointer. even the inventory has the vines on the frame and ease motion on the expand..... the art style is quite cute and pleasant, some people could have looked more distinctly like themselves at a glance (chris paul ludwig) but that's just me being extremely nitpicky. 

unfortunately the game design fell short in comparison, me and a friend watching me play luckily managed to get through it without most of the tutorial (besides finding the rock.....) but i did have to restart it to get the microphone back and it was rather fiddly dragging items to the exact correct object (eg: vines only right near the wheels? rope down the hole but not on the bike) but it def seems like a time nerf 😞 😞 😞

puzzle design was also, bit too formulaic and convoluted overly convenient but, well. anyways a small thing i think you could've done to make it feel better was up the speed on text and movement around the scene. and also might've just been how the puzzles had us looking around for stuff but some backgrounds looked like you might be able to go to another room (left of the podcast and down to the campfire) but regardless. props to the ui it did stand out to me.

thank you for the interest! i want to take some time to write up a response so it'll have to wait til after voting grind, but if you have something specific you want to know about the spritework and animations i can focus on that?

not necessarily confusing just many people aren't gonna know you can do something if it isn't indicated to them somewhere, the info box at the start says nothing about moving around despite having plenty of room to do so. my main issue anyways was that it simply felt bad to play, no confusion there just not fun.

feels like a lot of things you just didn't have the time for but nice work getting something that works and has art and progression and variety within your limitations!!

hello! wow two siblings as a weekend project still with school to attend to, it's really cool that you put something together for this! all considered it's impressive how many different monkeys with distinct abilities there are. i was overwhelmed by their descriptions at first, coupled with the moving background is too much i think, but i shouldn't have been so worried. game feels rather chill, i don't think i'm good but i was thinking it could do with some more challenge. i thought this and then a wave or two later i died so. after playing for a little longer i do feel like, more of the challenge comes from trying not to walk right into an enemy spawning but, it's not like i got that far, ended on wave 11. the movement of the pals swaying as they walked with you was rather charming, they're like waddling.... sound effects sounded quite satisfying for how minimal they seemed. tonally it feels like it could be more, something? feels a bit too relaxed. your *IMPORTANTs on the submission form are quite funny to me btw very smile.

oh shit your art looks hella sick wtf. glad you liked our game!! i'm personally quite flattered. couldn't stop playing...... that good?

thank yewww!! all 5 stars is seriously wow. seriously??? yup you could play this one fireboy watergirl style, apparently people have already been having fun with their pals on this one and it's so cool to hear. twitch plays could be fun but, i imagine chat can't be too helpful with all that delay..... but if it's like, chat could register as multiple snipers that average out their clicks across the screen, i could imagine a rather chaotic streamer chat dynamic from that. or evennn, chat is collectively sniping the streamer 🤯 which isn't very pal of them but i could see that being quite fun.....

thank you!! i love the cute hat :> do you recognize where it might be from..? 🤫

ok this one looked interesting but the sound effect of getting zoinked was kinda freaking me out and it's late at night so i'm afraid to play more rn..... i kinda got stuck on the third? level? it felt very interesting going through and mirroring movement even though that's super basic, but it's a really interesting way to channel pals. i don't think i even got to the hard stuff those lab guys were fuckingggg fasst on my ass bro omg it had me freaked. i got stuck at the dead end..... didn't see where the rooms would connect. anyways i might come back to this during the daytime (tho lowkey probably not the review grind is brutal) but it honestly seemed interesting!! i'm just a bit of a baby. but you get points for freaking me outtt (tension seems like it'd be quite high in this game)

i did have a bit of fun (i think....) but it was always like dangit i could be having more fun if i wasn't fumbling around with these fruits..... maybe i'm just imagining fun through the frustration. but many have said they like the challenge so i may just be skill checked. i really want to have more fun with it but i suck at getting those fruits!! anyways glad it's no worries, i was afraid i'd come off too mean 😭 😭

since the game opens in full screen it's not as easy to see the controls in the description and the info panel at the starts seems.... rather empty. it wasn't clear that i could move or aim at all so i was rather confused as to what i was supposed to do when i could only throw random fruit at one weird angle. i also didn't read the text at first (my bad) so i was wondering why my monkeys were such lazy bums!!! 

as expected, the art on this looks amazing, the monkeys all have fun and distinct designs, everything is so cute and fun to look at. but things like the very empty text boxes, fruit counters blending into the wood of the trees so it's hard to see them, a health ui that's kind of small and not intuitive to see at a glance how many lives you still have, that makes the overall visual package feel less rounded to me. the bindle to get rid of monkeys is cute! but i might have to look up what a bindle is instead of just seeing the icon next to what it does? i also didn't see any reason to ever use it anyways, there doesn't seem to be a scenario where you would want to get rid of a monkey since they're not so easy to replace. i tested it, in case they could save a monkey on low health or something, but no.... 

another thing is that despite the distinct designs, it was still hard to intuit what each monkey did. unlike plants vs zombies where you can visually see that plants like sunflowers have nothing to attack with, peashooters and cabbage-pults have something to send out and cherry bombs and squashes face us instead of the zombies since they're temporary nukes that don't stay to attack ahead of them, most the monkeys don't have anything on them to indicate what they do. even the large apple gorillas, which i think were the best at intuiting they were big and beefy and meant for the frontline, there's a shield one and a bonk one and i didn't even realize until later that you could tell them apart by a red band they had on so i was pretty much gambling on hoping i got the right one with them. the two blueberry monkeys particularly tripped me up, i discovered one of them self destructed before i even realized the others attacked in three lines.... but what's the connection between the two of them? in a panic it's really easy to accidentally waste of those bombs placing them in the backline. i'm still confused about what the orangutans are good at, and what's meant to be good counters to specific machines.

honestly, these controls. the controls do noooot feel good to me. i neeeed this game to be entirely drag and drop, let us drag and drop fruits on to the monkeys, that would've felt soooo much better. even just changing the E input to spacebar so you can do it with your thumb instead of switching between movement and action with the same fingers. focusing on walking to the right fruit and grabbing them with one hand, then lining up to the right monkey with the other hand, then back to the other hand to throw, felt soooo awkward and fiddly to me. often, the fruit i want is on the other side of the screen or hasn't spawned back yet. and then i also have to drag and drop these monkeys to the other other side of the screen, there is wayyy to much distance having to be traveled between both inputs and juggling them at once is just :( not fun :(((

i'm pretty bummed that i can't have more fun with this game!! i'd really like to strategically manage and arrange my monkey units against the different enemy types but i can barely pay attention to what specific enemies even do when i'm chasing down fruits like this.... i could see this being an interesting challenge in trying to optimize against the awkward (dare i say terrorist) controls, and i'd like to see what happens when you defeat the final boss. i want to defeat the final boss, but with so many games in the queue and how frustrating it feels to play i don't really want to keep playing. i kept trying it again anyways because it seems like i'm in the minority here? i do like the style and concept, and i don't wanna blame the game for my own skill issue, but i still can't feel good about the controls. sorry :(

thanks for the clarification! settings menu is cool but with or without it i think it's best for your game to start up with decent volume if possible, i'd use connor youtube videos playing from my browser as a frame of reference for what standard volume should sound like.

for dummies like myself it'd definitely help to make those pal mechanics clearer, maybe the first pal that finds a rock has the text prompt of "a pal is calling for your attention" or something. sorry for the negative feedback, i hope it doesn't demotivate you from trying more jams and improving these skills.

it's really cute that you voiced them yourself! feel like that could be mentioned somewhere because it adds extra charm to the sounds, but that's just me.