itch.io

Not sure if text would be the best option actually. I really like the game's aesthetic, and more text might disrupt that and make things too cluttered.

I'd recommend you try other visual ques, like changing the game's border colour to indicate that the dash is recharging.

Incredible game! Felt really frantic, the artstyle and music worked super well too.

My only gripe is that it would have been nice to have some visual indicator for the gun and dash cooldown. It wasn't that big of an issue though, all things considered.

Very funny game and incredible use of the theme!

This is so cool!

It felt very fast paced and frantic, I was on the edge of my seat the entire time I was playing. The combination of mechanics is incredibly creative and unorthodox too; if you had just explained the game to me I'd assume it wouldn't work because of that and yet it works phenomenally. No idea how you pulled that off.

I did think it was a bit tough, and getting sent all the way back to the beginning after dying also felt a little unforgiving at first (though I'm not sure if that should be changed, since it does work well with the other mechanics). But this is likely just a skill issue, and it didn't stop me from continuing to play the game.

100% coming back to this one again after the jam, amazing work!

Very nice puzzles and creative mechanics!

sorry i already spent it all :(

Very creative use of the theme! Really like the atmosphere.

The puzzles were a lot of fun to figure out, you managed to get a ton out of the game's mechanics! There were a few moments though where I had figured out a puzzle, but it still took quite a few attempts to get the exact positioning of the mirrors just right. This is more of an issue with perspective that all 3D games share in some way than it is an issue with your game specifically, and the laser sight helped immensely, but some kind of free cam mode to inspect the level layout without losing my position and aim would have let me focus more on puzzle solving than precision. This issue ultimately didn't hold the game back all that much, it's just my only real criticism so I figured it was worth bringing up.

I'm pretty sure if you're getting sunburned that quickly it's because the sun is actively detonating and no amount of shade will protect you.

Neat idea for a game! I thought it was pretty fun, though somewhat difficult. Level 3 got the better of me unfortunately.

Visually this is pretty great, and the narrative/motivation is pretty funny too.

I noticed the shade collision could act kinda weird under certain circumstances, particularly when two distinct shade objects are next to each other or overlapping. If you leave one while in the other you'll start taking damage. No idea how unity works, but if I had to guess I'd assume the game only recognizes that you left a shaded area and not that you're still in one since it would have last received the signal (or whatever the unity equivalent is) that you left. Didn't hold this against the game though, bugs are almost inevitable in jams, and it was pretty easy to avoid once I realised what was going on.

Fun game! alarmingly addictive too.

I have to agree with Kekko that some layout variation would be nice, but this is still great as is.

Really interesting concept!

It felt like it was a bit too challenging in its current form though. It's very difficult to know which stations may need more bikes or have too many, so I would end up letting a problem build until it ended my run without knowing what happened. The most obvious solution (to me at least) would be to have some kind of hud telling players which stations have too many/few bikes, but that could also go too far and take all the challenge out of the game.

Very fun arcade-style game with a surprising amount going on!

Visuals are great, the basics of the gameplay are intuitive, and the leaderboard is a nice touch (though there's no way I'm getting into the top 3, best I could manage was 7th at the time of writing this).

The only real gripe I have is that while the core gameplay loop is easy to grasp, some of the extra mechanics (like how some of the powerups or enemies work, along with health) felt a little less intuitive. Some kind of legend that the player could quickly reference if needed would have gone a long way to making everything a bit easier to understand (similar to how the minimap is a toggleable popup - great feature by the way). I don't think a traditional tutorial would work however. I actually really like that this game just drops you into the gameplay as soon as it loads, it's a bit unconventional and caught me off guard at first, but it works astonishingly well and I don't think that should be changed by forcing a tutorial into the game.

Great work with this!

Thank you so much for the feedback and the playthrough video!

You're right I could have done the tutorial better. There's two reasons it is the way it is; jam games tend to have low retention so I wanted to make sure that people who may leave early would still at least be aware of the game's mechanics (especially refreshing, since I knew that one would be fairly unique), and I wanted people to have a basic understand of their toolkit before being asked to use them in puzzles (somehow I figured that would be less confusing). There's better ways I could have gone about this of course, like shifting some of the tutorial elements to the level select area (eg, maybe level 5 could only be accessed by using a mirror/bounce square, since that's the first place those appear after the tutorial).

To answer your question about the reset button, it was R for most of the game's development, but CTRL+R is a browser refresh shortcut, and the overlap in controls and mechanics confused one of my playtesters, so the input was moved to T.

Some comments on the playthrough:

• Really interesting solution to level 1! You essentially used the red swap point in the way I had intended the yellow one to be used (specifically as a way to traverse between the two halves of the level). I hadn't thought of that.
• You were really close to the intended solution of level 2. There is a way to complete it with more forgiving timing by shooting into the upper row of red squares at the red swap point a little before your stored bullet hits the yellow swap point. I can see where the confusion came from, and I probably should have put the red swap point on the left of the red squares, rather than the right.
• Level 3 was mostly meant to be a reminder of the refresh mechanic, since it wasn't used in levels 1 or 2, but is used in the intended solutions of the last 3 levels. Wouldn't have been necessary if the game was better at introducing its concepts, like you mentioned. At the very least I probably should have copied the comment about the mechanic from the tutorial and pasted it into the level.
• I actually think your solution to level 4 you mentioned around minute 21 could have worked (you were just missing needing to refresh to get the red swap point back to its original position). Some real life stuff meant I didn't have most of the 4 days to work on this, so most of the levels were designed in a couple of hours, and as such have a few unintended solutions which are way more efficient than the intended ones.
• Interesting solution to level 4. Cool that you found a way to beat it without refreshing (even though some of those angles looked frustrating).
• Wow level 6 is broken, you're the second person to find a solution to it with 4 shots left, and it's a completely different solution too.
• You did reach the end of the game after level 6. The idea is that you've successfully 'repaired' the game, and the "break the game" button is just a reset so you can play again without clearing your cache. If you hadn't pressed it, it wouldn't have crashed after the countdown finished. You didn't miss much though, all the countdown does is halve the enemy spawn time and double the next countdown. I barely had any time to throw the ending together, but in hindsight I should have made the reset button only appear after a playthrough of the top down shooter 'game' you fixed.

Thanks again for uploading a playthrough! The feedback is invaluable.

Always a tragedy when a jam game can't be finished on time.

Also you're not smooth-brained, I've just never made a proper puzzle game before so the difficulty is all out of whack lmao.

Thank you for the feedback. I'm really glad to hear you enjoyed this so much.

Thank you!

Not sure if you're still stuck there, but don't forget that you can press T for a full reset.

Love that even the ai is so fed up with slop it gets you to make the art lmao

Really funny game, I liked how animated everything was despite being fairly straightforward visually. It's amazing how polished this feels.

As soon as I saw the window all I wanted to do was find a way to jump out of it (I am fine, by the way).

After doing that and some brief experimenting I'm fairly convinced it's possible to properly jump out of bounds in a way you may have not intended since the jump, crouch, and collisions seem just janky enough to allow for that under the right circumstances. I haven't yet found those circumstances though, but I'll come back if you make that post-jam version and keep looking.

Astonishingly I also managed to beat the first minigame as 'intended' on my first try, so I did hear some of the unique dialogue for playing 'correctly'. Never managed to replicate that though.

The sun is a deadly laser

Fun little game! Astonishingly readable despite how small everything is, and the brief 4th-wall break at the beginning was funny. Great work!

Really funny writing and voice acting, this is the most complete feeling incomplete game I've ever seen. Also, great reward for getting all the coins!

I got 2 endings (not sure if there's more), and had a good time trying to break the game in as many ways as possible. You accounted for an alarming amount of possibilities.

The only thing I'd adjust is the beginning section by adding some way for returning players to bypass everything up until the first countdown room. Maybe there could be a hidden dev-door that's only seen at the end of the game. The beginning is a great introduction to the game, but during my later playthroughs it felt like more of an obstacle I had to wait through before I could really try breaking things. Granted it's possible I missed something that would allow me to skip it (I am not the most observant person), and I can't really fault a jam game that much for having one slight issue with pacing that only becomes apparent after your first playthrough.

Great work with this!

Wow, that's smart!

Must have been a nightmare getting the shots lined up though.

That's really interesting!

I noticed a way to beat the last level with 1 shot left right before submissions closed, but 4 is wild. No clue how you did that.

Thanks for the feedback!

"the countdown being a limit move and just that fits the brief but doesn't go beyond"

I'm a bit surprised no one else has mentioned that so far. It was a thought that was constantly in the back of my mind while developing this. Definitely wish I found a better way to use the theme. At least there's the initial countdown until the game crashes.

"Ruse" is also in the url.

I genuinely cannot believe you're comparing this to Oneshot. That was my biggest inspiration when making this. Thank you!

Thank you!

It is actually kinda unfinished (even though I'm only calling it that in the title to make the abbreviation work). There was so much more I wanted to do with this, but due to some real life stuff I had to cram the majority of the development into the last 24 hours. I was somewhat worried that the real game would seem almost as unpolished as the fake game, so reading this was really nice.

This is awesome!

Everything about this is really impressive.

Fun minigame collection!

If you had a bit more time to work on it, it would have been interesting to see other aspects of game dev (or specifically game jamming) incorporated. For example, no one in their right mind would stay up the full 96 hours (I hope), so sleep could have been a mechanic to trade time for reduced stamina drain. But what you managed to complete in the time limit is impressive as it is. Great work!

Very cool mechanic to build a puzzle game around!

The visual presentation is also really solid. Great work!

Nearly 50 days in. I'm starting to think there is no end.

I wanted that golden mango, man...

Really interesting way of doing an incremental game. I like the amount of strategy involved (at least until you get to the point where you can spam gold infused blood), I wasn't expecting the order of my purchases and the timing of when I made them to have such a big impact on the game. I actually don't know if I've ever seen a skill-based incremental game before.

Everything else is great too, art is cohesive and well animated, the sounds and music worked nicely, and I thought the player's motive was pretty funny.

The only thing I'd change is rearranging the profit and quota tabs so that the respective numbers are always in line (ie, each digit of the profit is directly above the corresponding digit in the quota). Doing this would make it easier to see how much you have compared to the quota at a glance, which in turn would allow for quicker decisions on whether to purchase something.

Incredible take on the theme!

I found it was a bit challenging to figure out how to optimally choose which sheep should become ammo, which got me into an unwinnable situation early on. It might just be a skill issue on my end, but I feel like the conveyor system could use some refinement.

Otherwise this was great. The visuals are fantastic, the narrative is hilarious, and the mechanics are really fun. Great work!

Great little puzzle game!

I have to agree with the comment below mine that more levels would be nice. Although I can't really hold the low number of levels against the game due to the time limit (and the fact that my game has the exact same issue). But the mechanics are pretty interesting, so it could be cool to see how far you can take them.

Looks and sound great, the chess scenarios where fun too, I enjoyed playing this!

The main mechanic did seem a bit underutilized though. I realised that it was much more effective to run down your opponent's clock by quickly making aggressive moves, since they'd waste their entire time limit on defending. Maybe the opponents could be adjusted to use less time during their turns if the player hasn't cheated in a while?

Regardless, this is still very well made. Great work!

Thanks.

I don't have that, so testing on my end may take a bit. If you have another browser (ideally one of the one's I've listed) you can try that since it should work.

From a bit of googling I did, you may have a setting enabled that automatically clears the game page's cache as soon as you refresh, which would make the game effectively unplayable.

What browser are you using? Also is there anything in your browser settings that may prevent the game from creating a cache? This game heavily relies on saved data, so if it can't create a save it won't work.

I've tested it on firefox (both regular and incognito), edge, and chrome.

This is really creative!

The fake advertiser's website is awesome. Everything about this is very well thought out. Great work!

What is this "Friends" thing and why can't I hire a "Friends" agent?

Anyways, of the trillion dollars I spent, a little over $1000 trickled down to my 436 employees, so clearly the system works and everyone needs to stop whining.

This is such a cool idea for a puzzle game!

It was quite fun to play, great work!

Incredible art and sound design.

There's an unbelievable amount here for something made in a few days, it feels very polished.

I did notice though that sheep would still be affected by whatever the player was currently holding. I have no idea if this was intended, but I'm glad it's in the game since it led to some hilarious puzzle solutions.

Great work with this!

This has awesome visuals and a very interesting gameplay loop, but I'm not really sure what the cards do and the R ability appeared so often it was active nearly the entire time I was playing. Still solid overall though, great work!

Really interesting automation game!

There's a surprising amount of strategy involved, it was fun figuring out what layouts where most optimal.

I kinda wish you could do a bit more with components you no longer want, like some way to scrap them for cash or trade them for other components. But the current system works well, especially for something made in a few days.

Great work!

Really fun, I'm amazed at how much you got out of such a simple concept!

It could be interesting to incorporate deck-building mechanics so you can affect the timer and opponent attacks, similar to what the opponents already do. Obviously that's a bit outside the scope of a short game jam though, and what you've made already feels very complete.