itch.io

Of course :-)

Nova Drift is pretty cool, if you are into Asteroids-like games and roguelikes, check it out! (I am not related to it in any way.)

“I would like to play a demake of Nova Drift, sure!”

The concept isn’t very original and the theme feels rather tenous to me, but I had a good time playing the game.

The controls are good, no lag or anything, I felt in control al the time.

The audio was simple, but fitting the aesthetics. I would appreciate volume controls though.

The graphics is nice, but the default screen size is too small and text is rendered unreadable, which makes the upgrade system unusable. Switching to fullscreen solved this issue. EDIT: forget to write my feelings otherwise: I think the pixel aesthetics were a good choice and I liked the graphics overall.

The enemy variety is good, the gameplay was changing over the course of the game. The upgrades are nice and impactful, except when I levelled up my gun I didn’t notice any change. Maybe it did more damage? I hoped it would get a faster fire rate or more projectiles…

I hoped for a boss fight in wave 10, but it was just the same wave of enemies as the previous waves. I think this is a missed opportunity. Even an enlarged copy of existing enemy with increased health would work fine for me.

Frankly, I implemented the music switch buttons to protect my sanity. When finishing the game, I tested the game again and again, and hearing the same song every time (even though I like it) drove me up the wall :-)

I was worried the default itch.io fullscreen button would interfere with touchscreen controls, and didn’t realize I could probably implement fullscreen switch in the game itself.

Having different animation (and possibly a point bonus) for clearing a fully watered row is a nice idea. I don’t know if I am gonna go back to developing the game, but if I do, this would be something to do.

“Tetris is one of those games I tend not to get very far in, because I start to get a little bored with it. You did a really good job giving it an interesting twist that made me want to keep playing longer than I normal play Tetris games.”

This is exactly what I hoped to hear :-)

I am impressed.

I couldn’t finish the game, but that’s on me: if the game looks like an action game, I am gonna play it as an action game, even if the game clearly warns me this is a bad idea :-). But when I slowed down, I got a lot farther: this shows the difficulty is real, not just a bad controls or anything. ADDED: scratch that, I just finished, with the druid of all things.

You implemented the theme extremely well, including the wildcards, nothing feels forced. When I started the game, I thought “the difference in abilities are gonna be just cosmetic”, but nope, every hero plays very different.

The graphics were clear, though sometimes it wasn’t obvious where projectiles are exactly, but I feel like this is me, not being used to 3D bullet hells. Otherwise, the graphics had a consistent theme, was colorful without being garish and generally pleasant to look at.

The only thing I have an issue with was the sounds. The effects weren’t very clear, esp. with the druid, I didn’t know which sound meant “you smashed a projectile” or “you got hit”. It also didn’t fit that well, you have a PS1-like graphics with NES-like sounds.

Also, the music slowdown effect was a mistake IMO: I often stopped to look around or maneuver around a projectile, and the result was a grating, disharmonic mess. Maybe an “underwater” filter would fit better? Not sure.

It would be nice if the game would save the world on exit, so that I wouldn’t have to start with the knight every time. But given the length, this is not a big issue at all.

In total, I had a lot of fun and was very pleasantly surprised. Good job!

There’s something wrong with the game, I can’t download it (“invalid upload”) nor it would run in the browser.

Please talk to the organizers and get it fixed, the theme sounds really interesting, I would love to try it.

This was short and sweet.

I like cartoon animals and the main character is a good one. I like how expressive is its face in the “cutscenes”, good job there. The graphics is nice, the only thing I would criticize is that there are multiple graphical styles that don’t fit that well together: the pixelated main character, the cartoon background drawn with straight clean lines, the landfill being just a pile of icons.

I feel the theme is kinda forced. The main focus of the story is on returning back to the old ways, that’s not really repurposing I think. The mechanics are more fitting, though in the end it was just a platformer with more-or-less ordinary abilities.

I had issues with the controls. The window for sticking to a wall is quite tight, I couldn’t reliably hit it (in contrast with the other abilities that are very forgiving). I would recommend to make it so that the player can hold a button and the character will stick when it comes close to a surface automatically.

Another issue was that I did go out of bounds several times, even without trying. (First time was in the sewers: I leaped over the trash pile, expecting to hit a wall, and had to reset the level instead.)

I also kinda dislike how the walkable roofs are not slopes but stairs and require constant jumping.

The chewing mechanic, though thematic, doesn’t add anything to the game, I had always plenty time to rechew my gum between ability uses, no rationing or tight timing (though I probably wouldn’t like high difficulty here). Too bad the chewing sound is the worst and most annoying in the game, as the chewing is the most frequent action.

At the end, I really hoped there would be an easter egg, that I could turn back and return to the forest, with a short cutscene showing my character chilling with the clock on the wall and under the radioactive lighting :-). Instead, jumping to the left got me out of bounds again.

Edit: forgot to add note about accessibility: the game is a very visual, it wouldn’t make much sense to add any visual-impairment-related accessibility options. The completely missing options are a problem though: I would like the ability to turn off the sound effects. The credits are problematic too, almost unreadable in the default window size. You have a lot of blank space there, use it!

Note about the jam version: I made several mistakes in the last scenario (Power plant):

• The manager and Samuel speak about Mark, but call him Victor

• the body description should say the body lies on the shaft of generator 3

I checked rest of the texts and currently believe there are no more errors of this kind.

It’s still possible to complete the scenario successfully.

we ran into a problem with the ballista being unsuitable for close combat, so we instructed the zombies to jump onto the ballista slowly in an arcing trajectory

That's awesome :-D

A game about shooting zombies with a ballista. Why not.

The game is simple, but feels complete. There's upgrade system, simple story, several types of enemies, sound and music. The UI is clear, the pictures nice.

I really liked the the small touches, like the zombies jumping at you giving you a last-minute chance to hit them, or the fact that in the tutorial level, I managed to hit a bird (completely by chance) and it actually was hit and fell down. I think I even made a dent in the ground :)

I also found the scenery in the actual levels weirdly soothing.

I like a lot of things in this game. The graphics is nice, the UI clean, it's easy to know what to do and the sound is OK (which is non-trivial achievement, given the limitations) and the theme is very strong in it.

Sadly, the game just isn't fun for me. The  game play is just too simple (I mean, not that I can last too long at higher speeds, but that's not engaging me in an enjoyable way) and I kinda hate a mindless grind in video games. I am convinced you achieved what you wanted: it's just I hate it.

At least, it's a stark reminder why not to get a job at manual assembly line.

I gave the game only a 15 minutes or so, but I liked every one of them. 

The sound is good, it's clear what's happening and the music isn't grating (unlike many of the other games I tried, sadly).

The graphics looks really nice. I had some issues recognizing what's dangerous and what's just a scenery, but some issues like this are probably unavoidable in this low resolution. You most definitely go a lot of bang out of it: the game is really nice to look at, and the screen is busy but not cluttered.

Frankly, I am struggling to find anything negative here :)

Hi, that's some high praise, thanks!

I was afraid the difficulty would be out of whack: we finished writing the cases late in the night just before the deadline, so we had no time for human testing.

I would like to return to the game after the jam ends; I will definitely need some distance to see problems. I actually thought it might be too easy, because, you know, the cases I wrote were clear to me ;-). The first one (the mansion) was meant to be mostly an extended tutorial, so if you want to try again, I would recommend that one. I wrote the last one (power plant)  with a specific goal to be hard, even making sure there's a red herring solution that's gramatically correct.

We had some ideas how to make the game more playable. One of the more important was to split the word list to several categories (verbs, nouns, adverbs) and allow selection of the right one only: this should cut the confusion and make the UI more pleasant. I am also considering getting rid of the 84x48px resolution, just to allow using a more legible font. We aimed for maximum information density, but the trade-off is we just didn't have enough pixels to draw nice glyphs.

I am really happy to hear the descriptions are good. We both are playing pen-and-paper RPGs as game masters, it seems the years did pay off :-).

If you want spoilers, the GitHub repository linked at the game page contains complete source code, including the solutions. Open the 

the-grind-2025/scenario/<name>.py

directory and search for DeductionScreen - each one defines a list of words (in the correct order) that are the solution.

I hit a bug that prevented me from playing, and then I found another. I have to dock some points for that.

I really like the idea (I mean, I made a detective game for this jam too ;-) ) and I thinks it's original too. Simulating the phone's UI is brilliant. The game feels complete, even without music: given the limitations of N3310, I think it would get grating quickly and I would turn it off anyway. The ring tone was spot on :-) 

Probably my biggest complain is the font: it's just too small. I completely understand wanting to get high information density in your detective game, but it's your main user interface and it's just hard to use. If you are gonna work on the game in future, please, add at least one row of pixels.

Small game with clear focus. Visuals are clear, enemies have clear identity, background is nice to look at. The first level was very easy, I made mistakes only when the game started to be monotonous. I switched to the lvl 5 and it got hectic quickly :-).

My only real complain is the music. There's a reason it's off by default: it got grating fast.

How to rate a game that violates the rules, e. g. uses sub-pixel movements or runs in a wrong resolution? Should we lower the rating, rate it as hard zero or not rate it at all?

I really like this! It's simple, but it has a zen-like quality I think was the author's goal. Also, I really didn't expect (in the positive sense) this kind of game in Nokia jam.

I have two issues:

• The controls are too simple. I would like a better way to choose a plant. I think menu would be against the spirit, but give me at least a way to go forward and back in the plant list.

• The tunes are not that interesting and over time become a grating noise. I had the game running while writing this comment, and I had to mute it.

Even with this said, I see this as a success.

Hi, I wanted to rate your game but it hangs on the "hello pardner" screen. I tried both Firefox and a clean install of Chromium with the same result. Can you please advise?

Is it mandatory to use the sounds linked in Nokia Jam Resources? Can we edit them, e.g. speed up, slow down, cut or loop? Can we make our own 1-bit bleeps? (I would like to have more noise-like sounds)