Really nice puzzler. I love games where you draw lines, I must admit. Feels like this would go hard on the Nintendo DS! Would love to see an expanded game with more concepts and interactions if it's on the cards for you.
Also idk how to explain it but I just love the vibe. I like when weird nouns are used for things. Like lines are consistently "contradictions" and failstates are consistently "inevitabilities". It does a lot to immerse me in the expression rather than being overly gamic.
Like others getting a bit stuck. I'll try to document to help you resolve it:
Sure, I can imagine every player will intuit it differently! I gave up after not quite making it to the end of the second level. The platforming was just a bit much for me, especially after getting a migraine yesterday. Just not feeling up to pushing it on difficult games right now but wanted to at least give my thoughts on what I did play during the jam period.
Very nice, love the theme interpretation and style. Huge potential. I like how the pace keeps moving whether you get the "perfect" shot or not (not that I missed any until the baby at the end). Nice bookending with the first and last shots too.
If you're going for something like Unpacking, I'd encourage you to spend some time thinking about the narrative you want to tell. What made Unpacking great was the very individual story told through environment. The main character's experiences were resonant with queer themes, while not being overly stereotypical either. Cliche details like bringing home tacky souvenirs from tourist destinations were mixed with unique details like the interest in drawing and TTRPGs, interests which evolved over the person's life. I'd honestly go further and argue that a lot of what makes Unpacking work is reliant on queer themes specifically, due to the lack of safe spaces & normalcy otherwise afforded to queer people.
What I mean is that if you intend to tell a story that spans two generations of heterosexual, single-child family dynamics, there's an inherent reduction in the tension of that narrative. Please don't take me too literally here and think I'm suggesting making everyone gay, there are many other ways to introduce tension, and it can be subtle things too, a little goes a long way...
One thing I'd be interested in exploring with this theme is how people often use photography to hide the truth. I've seen a lot of group holiday photos where everyone looks like their having a great time, but in my memory of the day everyone was tired and grumpy from travel and spending way too long with each other! Hiding the socks in the basket was a good example of this.
Another game which might be good inspiration is "Little Problems: A Cosy Detective Game", which has a similar low-stakes daily life focus but manages to tell a nice story with a sequence of frozen moments in time, similar to what you're doing here.
A bit too stressful and precise for my tastes, but there's an audience for this type of difficult platforming game. I love your interpretation of the theme and the gradual addition of extra rules. and player needing to count down in their head.
As mentioned in the previous comment, I also got tripped up by counting whenever I got frozen. I can't put my finger on it, but I think it would be more intuitive to release the freeze one "tick" earlier so that it lines up with the tick where you would get frozen. I'm guessing it currently happens at the end of that tick because that's the window where you need to jump/duck, but I think you should just make the player immune from freezing directly after the tick. You could also show all in-play timers while frozen just to help the player understand, then hide them again once unfreezing. I'm sure the best solution will reveal itself with iteration and playtesting.
The cover art and banner art of the page go a long way to bring your vision to life, given the simple art style, but for the finished version, it would be nice to develop the visuals in-game a little. Simplicity and visual clarity are good, but I think it's just a little too abstract for the stakes of blowing up the world to mean much because it doesn't feel like an inhabited world.
Anyway, great work and good luck with future development.
The core concept is a nice idea for a puzzle game which I haven't see before, great use of the theme. I'd be curious to see how the countdown itself could potentially become part of the solution in later levels. Just the fact you have to sort of set up the level and then clear it in 10 seconds from a certain location is enough to get started with, but I'm sure there's more potential for the idea if you keep working on it.
It kind of reminds me a bit of games like Lemmings, where you need to set up the course for the mindless creatures to complete, except in this case the player also has to be the one to run the course at the end. 😅
First level is solid to introduce the concept. I think you could even make it simpler/quicker. Then, for my taste, the complexity and difficulty ramped up too quickly from the first level to the second. I'd encourage giving a more gradual introduction of concepts while avoiding filler (I'd suggest one new idea per level and one level per new idea), where a "new idea" could be a new item OR a new interaction from existing items.
The setup with not being late to invade Earth is cute & fun too.
On the visual side, look out for tangents, where a background and foreground element are lined up. These make it harder for viewers to understand the scene and are best avoided. Here's a good article on the topic: http://www.neilblevins.com/art_lessons/composition_tangents/composition_tangents...
Great puzzle game, love the visual style. One suggestion would be to let players step backwards a second at a time rather than resetting. There are many moments where the player has already had the puzzle's "aha" moment, but just needs to trial-and-error the exact timing. These might be only 10 second lulls, but it adds up and just means a small proportion of the player's play time is engaging with the best part of the solve.
OMG I loved this! I am such a fan of shortform weird games. The level of friction in letting the player figure things out for themselves was perfect for me. Good mix of puzzles. The decision to take the already low-res PICO-8 screen and draw yourself an *even smaller* screen to work with is also inspired. Also I did not know about the CRT filter in PICO-8 but I will look that up because it's a nice effect!
Favourite moment: turning into an L-shape!
My only complaint is that it was over so soon, shortform is great, but I would be down for about 2-3x longer before it would start to overstay I think. Would be cool to see more out of bounds weirdness towards the end.
Thanks for the comment! The trick with this one is that most of the visuals are actually written in code rather than sprites or spritemaps. So each parallax layer is vertical lines drawn each frame with the height given by a wave function which is re-evaluated every frame based on the distance of the "camera". Not gonna lie, it took a good chunk of the second day to figure it all out but I can see myself using this technique a lot so it's time well spent.
I learned that devs love to use "Perlin noise" for this kind of thing, but I think it's a bit much for the PICO-8 processing limits (maybe it would be fine here in 1D, didn't try). This cart literally just uses two sine waves: a low-amplitude, high-frequency "ruggedness" function on top of a low-frequency, high-amplitude function (for the overall mountain shape). Then each layer just uses slightly different amplitude and frequency values to feel visually distinct and of course a different scroll speed to help sell the illusion of depth.
I'm glad you noticed the wobbly pixels on the most distant layer! For that, I just forced everything to use half the effective resolution by halving, rounding, and then doubling again (so the height always jumps 2 pixels at a time). Basically, lower res = "blurry" = "further away"; it's crazy what we can trick our brains into believing from such simple images! I should have done something similar for the x-axis, but I guess I got sidetracked.
Thanks for the comment! Glad you like the art and music and agree that teaching the player how to play is a priority for future development.
I have a confession: I've never driven a car in my life, not even a lesson! Does that mean writing the code for car physics for the entire first day of the jam was a crazy idea? ...yeah, probably! 😅
Anyway, for now here's some tips: in order to win the race, you need to make it further than the rival on the same fuel tank + one nitro boost.If you just go straight for the boost, even if you time it well, you won't make it further because you didn't get any distance out of your regular fuel tank. In order to change gears in that initial section, you need to accelerate to a certain speed before switching up a gear or the engine will stall (it plays a sort of grinding sound effect and you slow down), but in order to hit your max speed you need to shift up the gears.
To start with, try holding accelerate until your speed stops climbing and the needle on the RPM counter (big gauge) is in the red zone, then press UP to shift to the next gear, and repeat that until you hit 5th gear. Don't start your boost until you're almost completely out of fuel (small gauge). Then, to improve, you can try to time it so that you switch gear before hitting the max to make the absolute most of your limited fuel.
Perfect gameplay would be:
1. Switching through your gears efficiently to get to gear #5 ASAP without stalling.
2. Using you full tank of fuel, with the nitro boost starting as soon as it hits empty but before you come to a stop.
3. Timing the boost well down to the last possible moment.
Note that the power of each boost scales inversely with the random timer you get assigned. A short boost time will be faster to make up for it, so in principle it's not too RNG-dependent (in practice, I'd like to test this some more and see how in plays out.)
For this jam version, I set the rival a set behaviour to play decently well but not perfectly, so it should be winnable once players roughly figure out how to play, even if they don't perfect it.
I'm not sure what you mean about sharing the video, because the "share-your-progress" channel is locked, but I hope this helps you (and anyone else feeling stuck) get a victory! ⭐ Good luck! 💛
Aww that sucks but it happens. Still celebrate making them! I also spent way too long in my game on the code for the starting lights as a reaction-time feature. But I couldn't make it feel good so ended up just locking the player's controls until the green light. So, I know the feeling of developing things that didn't make it into the jam version.
Thanks for the comment! 💛 Request for higher difficulty noted. 🫡
If I do take the game further, I'm hoping to add a series of races of increasing difficulty, maybe with a playable tutorial to kick things off. I think even a short 5-10 minute "career mode" like that could give some nice structure to the player's learning curve and then wrap up before overstaying. I'd be tempted to add something like upgrades between races, but it's a good point that the simplicity is a feature so perhaps I should avoid adding too much.
Great concept and it's lovely to play something a little simple & chill! It took me a couple of tries to figure out the strategy is to end on a low or high number to give yourself more options. The additions with two sheep falling together was a fun surprise. I think with some more time juicing the animation and audio it could be really solid. It would probably do great on mobile because you could play with a touch screen. Great work.
Best score: 31 sheeps in 3 attempts
One of the most genuinely fun puzzle/mystery games I've played in the jam so far, and I think part of the reason that's so impressive is because it's really hard to balance the difficulty of these things without time to playtest and tweak things. I nearly gave up a few times from the frustration of being kicked back to the menu, but the fact so much progress was knowledge-based made it feel like I kept making just enough progress to stay motivated.
Loved the vibes too. Great work everyone!
Nice concept! There's potential here, though it still feels quite undercooked. That said, it's already a fun and functional game, great job!
Feedback:
Creative concept and beautiful art, even just the main menu. It really stands out, feels unique, and looks polished. Incredible that to have made this for a jam! With a little more time in the oven to develop the gameplay loop, I can see this being a successful commercial release, if that's your goal.
Nice concept and visuals!
Feedback:
Okay so first try, accidentally softlocked myself by intentionally detonating a bomb on the spawn location to see what would happen, then spawning back inside my own dead body unable to move... this really is a metaphor for my real life.
Got it 3rd try; great game! The concept is clear and well-executed, and I appreciate the 4th wall breaking messages. It's honestly just very nicely put together so I don't have a lot of feedback, let's see...
Feedback:
- Will just echo others that the controls & hitboxes are a little floaty. For me the rapid fall speed combined with my reaction times just really stressed me out more than I think was intended. In a game like this where every death counts, then losing a life in a way that doesn't feel "earned" can feel particularly frustrating compared to a typical action game.
- The high-res numbers don't match the art style, would be nice if they were also pixel art.
- If wanting to make the game a little more forgiving, then keys could be saved between retries, which would help automatically modulate the difficulty to match the player's ability since players would have more "lives" to tackle the remaining sections on the second pass.
Great concept and execution of the theme. Async multiplayer is underrated! Final time was 6:02 in my first attempt. One thing I considered was that if the leaderboards have many people replaying, then their times will obviously be much shorter. It could easily get to a point where it’s practically impossible to escape on your first attempt due to the state of the leaderboards. I’m not sure how you could prove it was someone’s first blind attempt to really keep the stakes high but fair.
Feedback:
Nice core concept for a puzzle game, needing to think about using your resources in the most sensible way to carry more to the following room. There’s a solid atmosphere and mystery about the game and I enjoy learning how the mechanics work through experimentation rather than explanation. The undo button is also a welcome tool to correct misclicks.
The addition of out of bounds tricks was a cool moment, but after a while it started to just feel too floaty as a result. I got the black key ending, then restarted and played up to the grey key door followed by the blue door, but I only have a red key. I’m guessing there was a point earlier where I should have used the red key to retain the blue key for this moment, but I don’t really want to reset the game or tap undo 200+ times to try it, so I’ll call it there.
I think one approach to tighten up the gameplay would be to ensure rooms are independent. I’d suggest playing “Bean and Nothingness” for a good example of how to weave together independent rooms into a larger exploration & narrative. Your game has a somewhat similar energy so I think it might be a good inspiration for you.
Of course, this approach negates the meta-puzzle of needing to solve earlier puzzles in such a way that sets you up to solve later puzzles, but if that's important to you then an alternative solution would be to replace the fast travel with time travel, where the player can go back to change how they solved a previous puzzle to bring different resources into the future. It might not be possible to make that work without breaking things, but I just think asking the player to replay large sections in response to hitting a wall they couldn’t have predicted is too much to ask.
As someone who lives this ADHD-flavoured experience a lot, a daily-life game about time-blindness and executive dysfunction deffo came to mind with the theme, so I’m happy to see someone went in that direction!
Though I was expecting a relatable character, I swear sis is running an unlicensed hamster-breeding operation out of her mum’s basement. No wonder the living room is full of unidentified black pellets… 💩
Feedback:
Protip: suck the hamsters up in the vacuum cleaner and empty the bag into the cage, takes out two tasks at once \jk
1st try: 174/240
2nd try: 230/240, got the heart 💛
