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My teammate already played and rated this game with our account, but I just played it for the first time and cannot believe how good this is! This is the most fun I think I've ever had with a game jam game. Absolutely phenomenal job!

Peggle was one of our primary inspirations when designing the gameplay -- we're so happy that we managed to evoke it for you! 

Also, I agree. Blair did an amazing job on the final animation -- it was 57 frames! :)

Thank you for playing and commenting! 

This concept is a welcome sight, the idea of finding a loophole is just inherently very fun. I definitely did not get all 3 for each level, though. For a final version, some kind of feedback on the logical inferences the player is making would be very good.

Thanks so much! It was absolutely crazy to see it be the first game on the stream. I was so confused, since I had the page open on a bunch of other tabs. Took me a second to realize he was playing it!

Yes our artists are awesome. The person who animated the ending had never done any animation before, and then she dropped that 57 frame beauty on us. We're so lucky!

Nice score! Yeah honestly I'm pretty proud of the go-up-the-waterspout section concept. At least I think it was my idea? Well, if not, then I'm proud of the teammate that came up with it!

We actually considered a turn-base approach in the very early stages! Though personally I think in its final form it would approach something like Peggle.

I don't know which member of our team took that screenshot, but 48 absolutely crushes my high score 😢

Thank you! We were initially going to lean into the Itsy Bitsy Spider theme for the name, but we kept on accidentally saying "on the fly" when referring to the quick decision making on the web and it stuck! (The name, not the fly)

Oooooh this is a good one! I had two issues:

• on Pinball, whenever I held both shifts at the same time, I could only release one of them. The other would get stuck, and I'd have to do a full press and release of that shift to correct it.
• on the final level, on the last stretch to the goal, I consistently fell through the floor. This was after every interactable part of the level

BUT you guys implemented a skip level feature (which honestly for jam games with levels should probably be a requirement). So I really cannot find a single fault with this game.

The player model is adorable, the level art is everything it needs to be, the music is a jam, the conveyance is great, the gameplay is FUN, and the finger-twisting absurdity gives your premise the crescendo it needs to leave an impression.

This is a stellar entry. Kudos!

Took me a second to figure out why platforms were disappearing! Very creative concept.

Definitely feels slippery for how important precision ends up being. Skidding an extra step can more or less kill the run. And maybe I'm just bad, but it doesn't seem all that possible to do more than, like, one or two loops? Even constantly jumping as far as I could, there just wasn't enough safe space to land on.

I think I'd want to see a LOT more pathways at the start. It would be a lot easier to get invested in a run if I felt like I had the ability to be strategic about which route I took each loop.

Part of me wishes the modifiers changed up. Part of me is very glad they didn't!

There's a lot you could adjust to get a very different effect. Make the instructions a little bit quicker each time? Start leaving off the first part of the recipe? But I don't know if that would be better, just different.

Don't think I've seen someone interpret the theme with Simon Says yet. Very creative!

In all seriousness, I think this is pretty much the perfect jam game. You introduce the premise, ease the player into it, then ramp it up to the point of absurdity. You take what is in reality an extremely merciful shape assessment system and make it feel like a parent who's "not mad, just disappointed." The music is a bit grating, but I feel like that almost adds to it. Trying to finish wrapping gifts before the in-laws come over, and the dog is barking in the background.

Absolute bullshit. Just the worst. Frustrating, unfun, mean-spirited, petty, and demeaning.

It's perfect. <3

Very cool concept! I was playing on a large monitor, and the window was extremely tiny, which made it extremely difficult to be precise enough. I hit my limit at two balls. Maybe a thicker shape outline and a larger brush?

I love the design, though. I feel like every jam, I'm always most impressed by these minimalist concepts that do away with all the bells and whistles and just find an elegant core premise!

>::::)

Thank you, we're glad you enjoyed it!

Thank you! Fun fact: the napkin animation at the end was that artist's first animation EVER!

Thank you! We talked a lot about the nature of loops in gameplay mechanics, and we decided that the interesting thing about them is that different opportunities arise at different parts of the cycle.

So if you were to break the loop up into sections, each section should offer something that the others don't. And that was how we came up with the idea of the climbing portion, and using it to give the player time to assess and strategize that they don't have when they're actively falling. If a cycle has rising and falling action, the falling action shouldn't just be dead time. (Of course, in our case, the falling action and the rising action are reversed!)

Hello again, friend! Thanks so much for stopping by! Yes we are so proud of our artists.

We were so close to implementing new web layout generation! But we deferred to a single level instead to keep ourselves focused on getting the systems to work right. I think if we kept pushing in that direction, we may have ended up with something sort of like Peggle? Pretty interesting to imagine!

Thanks for your thoughts! See you next year! Lol

Good feedback! Initially the spider's hitbox was much larger, but we found that it was too easy to grab bugs from other routes, and made it too easy to collect everything. We ended up revamping the collision system so that you only collected things that were specifically on your route -- but as you noticed, maybe that doesn't gel so well with the current sizing. I think future revisions would involve a lot of fine tuning with regard to size, speed, distance, and camera zoom.

Thanks so much for leaving a thoughtful comment!

This was such a delightful game. I was confused at first, but the moment that I started to understand I got so excited and felt such satisfaction in solving all the puzzles. I loved the details of changing into different chess pieces. Honestly I think this game idea has a lot of legs and could be developed into a full game. Amazing job!

The title card illustration of the ouroboros is gorgeous. I really liked the concept of this game - super creative!

This was such chaotic, funky fun. Our team was all giggling and laughing at the combination of the goofy art with the music and sound effects. Amazing jam entry with a great sense of humor

Wow, I think that beats all of ours by a fair bit!

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, our artists are amazing.

This was a system that we found changed drastically with just the slightest amount of tuning (space between nodes, camera zoom level, fall speed). We limited ourselves to 48 hours and so we didn't get the chance to dial it in how we would have liked. But it means a lot to us that you played our game enough times to reach what I believe is the current world record!

Love the art, love the concept! The game is fun to engage with, which is the most important thing.

I couldn't help but feel like every round just came down to keeping my inventory near full and dropping stuff as it came in. The first few opponents I was very careful in picking my team, thinking about synergies ("victim, jalopy, nuke, and stun/censor/photo/fan.  I'll slow down their advance, let my cannon fodder feed my favor while the nuke clears the board to make up for my lack of offense!"). At a certain point, though, I realized that none of that really seemed to be as important as just dropping things mindlessly to flood the board and winning with numbers. I found that my eyes were on my inventory the entire time, and practically never on the stage itself, or even the favor bar.

Super exciting entry! If there had been 3 times as many opponents I probably would have played them all. The 20 minutes I spent playing flew by

Think this is the only "Loopholes" take on the theme I've seen. Which I think is technically a play on words more than something related to the theme of loops? But then that in itself is something of a loophole.  But then, that circular logic is something of a loop.

Charming in its buggy incompleteness. Got in the car and shot miles into the sky. Delivered a package and fell endlessly through the ground into space. But the smooth tracks had me enjoying the ride all the same.

Favorite of the jam so far! This is a great concept and a fantastic take on the theme! As soon as I solved the first one, I was like, "Yup. This is it. A puzzle game concept that can get a ton of mileage and that I haven't seen before." I dunno if it was meant to stop after the third level or of that was a bug, but either way, I desperately need this to be a full game.

Nice! Very simple, very easy to understand. The constant rotation of the boat introduced just enough randomness to make hitting the ducks feel like a real accomplishment -- and getting multiple in a single shot feels great!

All it needs is a high score or something, it's a very solid design!

Really like the idea, and the aesthetic is very very cute! What we really needed was some conveyance here, though. It was very tricky to figure out what a "loop" meant, and what the rules were for how to fill them. The Loops Remaining text was always obscured by the squiggles and was very hard to read. By the time the moving guy appeared, we were completely lost about how to proceed with the level.

This game needs a tutorial, or a How-to-play in the game page description.

A very unique entry! I think I know what it was going for, in terms of the system rewriting its own memory and getting caught in a reasoning loop? I like the investigation aspect, but it was pretty easy for me to just follow the daisy chain of highlighted words until something happened, and if I hadn't caught up with the narrative within my own head, I kinda missed the opportunity once the records changed. A knowledge check aspect, where you have to apply some deductive reasoning or synthesize some information, would mean you could gate progress behind understanding one of the story's secrets.

Or maybe that's already there and I just didn't deduce it!

Love the art for this one! Had a lot of fun running back and forth, that animation looks great! I found the level design to be very punishing -- health depletes with time, health depletes with enemy damage, health depletes when using your power, and several jumps that require a good bit of precision and/or a perfectly placed freeze to get right (or else fall and lose time or die).  Going back to the very start many times made this one tough to stick with -- which is a real shame, because I was very excited about the four powers and how they would work into the level design.

Music was an absolute bop!

Thank you! We completely agree! We limited ourselves to 48 hours this year, and we definitely had some features and improvements end up on the cutting room floor. Thank you for playing and sharing your thoughts!

Thanks for playing and for the kind words!

P.S. I love your avatar.

I absolutely love the blob animations. Getting to max size and eating every human, car, and rat in sight was a blast! You did a good job adding multiple mechanics to really take advantage of the change in size like the elevators, destructible blocks, tiny gaps to squeeze between, etc. A really strong use of the theme and a fun game overall.

Our team actually had "giant blob that eats everyone" as one of our initial ideas before we settled on our game--great minds think alike!

It means a ton to us that you remembered our little game from last year and came back to play this one. Thanks so much for following us. I'm off to play your game right now!

Yes! That's the experience we were hoping to create! Thanks for your feedback!

A very good point, and one we considered! Like many jam entries, we felt the siren call of making the game as difficult as the systems would reasonably allow, but we ultimately opted to give a bunch of extra padding for accessibility and to allow a non-stressful experience for the player.

Originally, instead of money, we had a turn limit that was fine tuned with each recipe. However, balancing was difficult, as a series of unlucky draws could make success trivial on one test, and nearly impossible on another test of the same round with the same turn limit. Blackjack has the same problem, but makes up for it by being composed of numerous very quick rounds that deal with smaller numbers. By switching to a money system, we made it more thematically intuitive to do stuff like give refunds, and have the savings from a lucky round carry over as a parachute for an unlucky round. And for a jam game, we made do with that.

Personally, I think the final form of this as a released game would look like an endless roguelike where the demands of a round gradually overtake the rewards, kind of like Balatro. We actually had it set up to procedurally generate rounds, but we opted for a more defined experience for the jam. If someone's going to only play our game for a few minutes, we want them to get the idea, get rewarded for using the systems we created, and leave with a positive impression.

But you're right that things like appraisal cost need to be fine tuned. We went back and forth on it. If it's cheap, there's no real reason not to do it every time. But if it's expensive, at a certain point it becomes more worth it to spend that money mining more for smaller ores, and then there's no point to there even being an appraisal tool! Interesting problems that we didn't get to solve because we were adding particles. That's jams!

It's the best concept I've seen so far from the jam.

It's so simple, in its art, in its premise, in its execution. It takes almost no time to grasp the rules, but it takes careful thought to figure out how far you can go within those limitations.

It brings to mind Baba Is You in its minimalist aesthetic and high implications. It brings to mind Line Rider in its potential for creative self expression. It brings to mind all the fun physics-based puzzle flash games of the aughts in its accessibility.

It would feel just as at-home in an art gallery as it would in an engineering student's software kit.

Scroll wheel zoom is backwards, and sometimes drawing on the edges of the frame will instead pan the screen, which in itself is a functionality that doesn't feel great to use in its current state. These are problems that can be fixed in a few lines of code. Those lines are all that separate this from being a complete and fully realized product.

Absolutely, utterly elegant.  Dots and lines. White and black.

L E W D

Not the prettiest game, but probably the most enjoyable I've played in the jam so far. Something about these games where you outcompete everything around you and slurp them up through a swizzle straw just feels really satisfying. There's not much challenge (so long as you prioritize offense and don't grow too big too fast) but I'm happy to see a game that realizes that driving the premise is more important than challenge in a jam game.

Though of course, any game based around "scale" invites potential problems of optimization. I decided to hang out around 38" height and try to pump up my upgrades as much as possible -- the game eventually slowed to a crawl. The only thing that should have been increasing load at that point would be the increased bullet count, but the slowdown persisted even when not firing and no enemies on screen. Could be drawing all those vines and spores and particles is just too much, or could be there's a memory leak somewhere. I played the .exe, not sure how the browser version performs. Something to keep in mind if you decide to expand the idea in the future.

All in all, I'm glad Mark showcased it. It's a very yummy game, and of all the games he's streamed so far, this was the first that made me want to go install it myself.