itch.io

I broke every healthcare professional code of conduct imaginable.

I liked that by replaying and trying different options you do start to understand the story better and can revise on your earlier misunderstandings. You take player expectation and turn it on its head in a smart way where the pictures take on new meaning when you have new context.

Nice polish and gamefeel overall, and it ran flawlessly. Not entirely sure why I seemed to have won at the end - I don't think my patients were all in particularly good places haha!

Frantic, chaotic, stressful, overwhelming - and really creative and surprisingly fun. I spent a lot of time on this, and tore myself onyl when I had to admit to myself that I really wasn't sure if there was an end in sight or what exactly it was I was trying to achieve on time.

But I really enjoyed the challenge of staying on top of each individual module, which took some time to figure out but the initial button mashing is so amusing that you stick with it long enough to get there and have that 'aha' moment. It's such a cool and fun idea, and definitely brings a smile to my face. The feeling of mashing buttons is so well translated into a game mechanic here and it's great how you work that confusion to your advantage and incorporate it into the gameplay.

Surprisingly fun, and surprisingly challenging! The gamefeel on this is great and I played for quite a while. Love the sound design on the sheep and the wolves, it's a great level of polish overall. Lovely entry.

Very cool, the puzzles are intuititve and can be solved in multiple ways, so I felt good about figuring things out for myself. I really appreciated that the game doesn't waste my time by making me guess at the correct answer and hitting play just to trial and error, I think it's nice to have the feedback of what will and will not work.

Sound design and game feel are overall great and really polished, and the artstyle works really well for this. I think the only thing that didn't feel like it quite absorbed me into the game was the music - it's perhaps a little quiet and repetitive and whilst it's non-obtrusive, I would have liked to feel it ramp up and lean a bit more into energetic focus.

 I played a whole constellation, great job at introducing new mechanics as the levels progressed! Fantastic entry.

Thank you sooo much, it was really great to watch you play through it. Oarc did some in-person playtests but I hadn't yet gotten to see anyone interact with it myself :D You can accept jobs with "E" or Space I believe, but I ran out of time to tutorialize that and wasn't sure how important it would be, but I totally see that yes, making it all keyboard would be much more satisfying. 

We were considering crashing the balloon island at the end but the work it would have taken to make that functional seemed just a bit out of scope sadly!

This is SO good, I think my favourite entry to the jam so far. It's fun, it;s intuisive, it requires my whole attention and it's immensely engrossing. Every interaction feels really responsive and rewarding, it feels so good to knock out an enemy. The concept and execution on this is just fantastic, and whilst I probably wouldn't buy it as a standalone game, I know that if this was the cardgame minigame in a bigger project I'd be spending a lot of time in that mini game.

Only thing I wish might have been added is some indication of whether there's more levels or similar left, I think I was just replaying a lot by the end, and sometimes I feel like I very nearly connected two cards but the line wasn't quite long enough, and it was a little frustrating to miss connections that I did fully make in my head and execute on.

Fantastic work!

Okay, I was just about to quit and comment that it's a bit tedious to take so long to make the first orange juice by clicking and dragging just to get a guy who does it for you, when I accidentally blended one of my guys and the game suddenly took on a very different turn.

Wholly unexpected, and surprising and fun from there - it continued being a process of discovery. Really appreciate the moodswitch when the visual style seems so unassuming at first, and though I felt bad proceeding this was really clever and amusing. Gamefeel and art overall really good, everything felt nice and responsive, I felt rewarded for experimenting.

Nice jobs depicting the credits too! Great job. 

Very compelling mechanic, casting new spells made me smile quite a few times. It works really well, and feels very exciting to discover.

I don't think I saw much reason to use anything but fire and walls to contain enemies, as these dont need to be very precise - it's difficult to map them well enough to use the lightning. I also think running out of ink wasn't super clear to me immediately, it took a while for me to catch on and better manage my resources.

The look and feel is pretty good but I think it could be pushed to be a bit moodier and atmospheric and witchy, with a more intentional colour palette perhaps. It's well illustrated but doesn't yet feel really designed. 

I think enemy health could also have been a bit better communicated. But this is such a cool start, and well worth expanding. 

I couldn't figure out what to do with this, though the art and concept look nice at a glance and it feels like there would be promise to this if only I understood. The map feels quite big and overwhelming when I see three guys running around and don't know what to do with them initially. Something certainly happened - grass guy appeared! Water seems to be sucked up by rock! But I don't really know why or what for or how.

Really cool entry, it was incredibly intuitive to pick up, to the point that I didn't even look at the controls properly by the time I'd started picking up and interacting with objects. It just meets expectations of how things should work precisely. 

The puzzles feel engaging and satisfying to complete, and I enjoyed the variety for quite a few levels. I think this would make a lovely bigger puzzle game! The sound design and responsiveness generally also feel quite good already. I think the art and visuals are a great start. I think to me the pixel art is not quite polished and refined enough to really draw me in yet as a selling point, and if they were refined to jump out at me more, I would have happily checked this out on steam as a commercial game.

Interesting premise and mechanic, very cool main character. I don't think it's very clear at first that your candle is out, because the sprite doesn't seemingly change. It took me a few tries to understand why I couldn't light another candle. There are some ledges where falling off into darkness feels very punishing when it's not clear what's around you. I think more could be done with the idea, but at the moment it doesn't yet feel too responsive. Music and more feedback generally would be great!

Lovely art, very confusing controls that don't feel very responsive. As others have said, it's really unclear how movement works from one place to another, and I pretty quickly got my crow stuck off screen and couldn't do anything anymore.

Game feel would also be improved a lot by more tween animations so menus and the like don't just pop up - the base art is nice, but it doesn't feel very intentionally implemented yet.

Nice, quite fun to play and overall good presentation, would be really nice to polish out some more!

Some minor suggestions:

- A counter telling the player how many sheep are left would be great

- It would be nice to vary the pitch of the dog's park to be less repetitive

- the music base rhythm feels a bit repetitive to me after a while, and makes the energy a little more frantic for me than I think suits the game.

- the tree artwork and background don't feel quite cohesive with the character, bush and fence art, which is all really nice. Having the background look more organic and polished woud improve the look of this immensely

- I'm not sure the shrub-eating where it wasn't part of a puzzle added much for me, I found it a bit more tedious for having to wait for sheep to be done doing that when they could have just walked past it. 

Very cool, love the atmosphere and the mix of 2D and 3D, the mining and improvements feel really satisfying, amazing sound design also. It all feels really immersive and i would consider buying a commercial version of this if it came combined with more of a story and a deeper progression system, just something to break up the main gameplay here and there.

I was unable to further upgrade anything on the right-hand-side after a while, despite having lots of money, and don't know if this was intentional or a bug - i kept playing to try and be able to do that so if it's intentional, maybe that could have been better communicated. Loved this, really good job.

Using the sliding puzzles like that felt quite compelling, I like the idea! It was introduced very intuitively too, and I love the title screen using that design as well. I could imagine this being adapted into a larger game theoretically.

In practise, I think the concept is a bit removed from being really 'fun' yet, but I believe this could be ironed out. The platforming parts feel a little clunky: movement not super responsive, not enough coyote time, sometimes you can slide off a moving platform by landing funny. And when you fall and have to redo puzzles or just repeat a platforming element that doesn't feel that satisfying, it's frustrating more than satisfying.

The enemies in this vein only frustrate and complicate the more tedious part of the game.

I would suggest either not making 'falling' a real risk so that the level is more about being streamlined from one puzzle to the next. Or improving the platformer elements and introducing a diffeent way of handling two-sided puzzle boxes. I could imagine for example the interaction area turning into a button after completion, so you can choose to reset the puzzle to the solution you arrived at from that side, and same from the other side, and only have to do the actual solving once. These too could be enhanced with more in-depth platforming mechanics like double jump.

I made it to the waterfall puzzle and stopped at this point because I couldn't figure that one out.  

This is really well-polished and the art and sound design come together nicely. The mechanics are explained and tutorialized in a nice way, and the environments feel engaging.

I think this has the potential to be really fun and would maybe work really well for someone better at this kind of game than I am - though I can't entirely tell if it's me or if the controls are a _bit_ clunky - I feel that sometimes being killed by a waterfall at the edge of a platform you're supposed to be on can be a bit punishing, and sometimes felt like a jump I thought should register didn't - maybe for lack of enough coyote timing.

 By far the mechanic I struggled with the most was the shoot-jump with space and right mouse. I could not consistently get that to work at all, so maybe I was missing the exact sequence required here, but wish some of the button combinations had been a bit more generous with me. I tried to get past the waterfall section many times but ultimately couldn't hack it without getting frustrated because when I thought I'd be doing a high jump I'd instead get nothing to work and landed in the water too many times.

Thanks for your feedback! We balanced the ship back and forth some to a point where it felt to us just maneuvrable enough to be fun but still not so quick and easy to remove all obstacle. But the controller is definitely something more feedback is needed on to get a clear consensus, it's probably something we don't have the best perspective on after so much testing it ourselves.

Well-chosen music and the gameplay is really intutive and self-explanatory. Watching the horde grow is fun, and turning people quite satisfying.

I didn't enjoy the game myself overall, which may in part just be because I'm not a fan of zombies, but I think I felt that it became a bit tedious quite quickly. The first level felt too long for there being no pushback  - you are just collecting people until you've filled up a bar, with seemingly no pressure. But even in further levels it felt that the challenges were somewhat irrelevant. I was never at risk of losing - the horde always absorbed enemies quicker than they could shoot me, and the enemies themselves activated their own land mines (which is funny, but meant that I didn't struggle with them one bit.)

Once this was clear it felt too much like I was controlling the mindless horde quite, well, mindlessly. But I note that others found the game really fun and it may just be a genre that I'm not familiar with and don't get much out of, so this could definitely be a case of me just not at all being the target audience. 

Really nice artwork on the game, and the beginnings of some cool platformer mechanics. These were largely communicated really well in spirit with the theme. I think the throwable cone could have benefitted from another interaction reminder that E picks it up and E can also throw it - this wasn't clear to me quickly enough.

Overall however the controls felt very clunky - jumping especially just did not feel good, and I didn't get far in the game because the elements requiring you to jump onto small tree platforms frustrated me a lot. In part this is probably because the character controller is long rather than tall, and the animation doesn't communicate a jump too well. 

I wish there had been a bit more feedback when attacking an enemy that clarifies that I hit them, and also more feedback when they die. 

Otherwise on the feel of the game, I would recommend adding music to improve the feel significantly, and personally I think I would rethink the concept of the enemies some. The concept of a dog, who is also so nicely designed, trying to rescue its owner is great - but this being set in a medieval fantasy universe felt a little out of sync to me. The wolf character felt a bit more appropriate as a medieval pet perhaps - there is just something that doesn't click for me between the character and the world.

Lovely entry, the atmosphere was fantastic and I felt quite tense and anxious playing. I like the initial intuitiveness of finding a slot of the light tube and then exploring the other modules as they draw your attention. Running to keep the thing filled up was also a nice addition - but I'm not entirely sure what it did. Keep the light on I think?

The challenges at the actual cockpit I think looked great but I wasn't entirely clear of their point. I couldn't tell if there was some indicator other than the sound of where I would be pushing the holographic icons. Holding the button down after when the next panel opens also could maybe have been a bit more interesting. 

I think I got game over and didn't entirely understand why - I suppose time ran out and I didn't solve it quickly enough, but I wish there had been clearer indication of that time running out somewhere. That being said I loved the anomaly, cool way to die.

I really really enjoyed this, there is so much to this. You've found so many clever ways to explore the core mechanic, and there is a nice sense of discovery as levels progress and new tools get unlocked. The art looks good and everything feels great, and I like that the player's mode of attack is to frantically bash little enemies with a rock.

It was not at all clear to me that your warriors get delivered in breakable boxes that you need to open first, and I was nearly about to call it a day with the game when I couldn't figure that out - luckily I did eventually think to try that, and after that everything was verry intuitive. The combination of tougher enemies and little flies that you can harvest more gloop from is great.

Unfortunately level four completely beat me, the spiked enemies are in my opinion far far too difficult. They take your warriors out in seconds and I couldn't figure out a way to stop them from sending the spike. In that level, your only warriors are ranged as well, and getting a second takes far too many coins to obtain. With better balancing though, I think I would definitely have wanted to play all the way through and I'm sad in fact that I couldn't make it past such an early level to experience the rest. (I'd definitely be back to play a post-jam update if this was addressed!)

Overall fantastic job, the game design in this is wonderful and so charming.

One last thing I'd note is that the concept (haunted boardgame) didn't really come through to me. Perhaps I don't know enough boardgames that use little toy gatcha machines. I think more could be done to style the background like a boardgame, even if it's largely just around the edges, like a ring of boardgame tiles, or the faint indication of a playboard with the heart at its center.

I really liked the puzzles and the general attention paid to the immersion of the experience. The sound design worked quite well even without music though I generally feel that a little music does just add that extra bit of enjoyment, even if it's not on the whole time. 

The puzzles weren't immediately obvious to me but that's okay, the point of a game like this is to figure that out and then do everything in order of course, but with that being the case I think I would have preferred for the reset time to be a lot shorter when you die.

For example, start as you fall into the water rather than by panning over the whole ship again, and definitely once you're in the vehicle at the end it feels punishing to have to redo the puzzles just to have another go at juggling them all.

But I had fun figuring things out,  and the narrative was well-handled!

I like how losing resets me to the practise room because I very clearly need it. Amazing, this feels and looks really good. Very fun!

Thanks so much for taking the time to post the first, and for checking out the game! I'm really glad you liked it despite the occasional stress.

Just checked the update out very briefly, wanted to say the controls feel sooooo much better now, and the item collection is a massive upgrade! Now flying feels fun from the start and combat feels down to my own skill and risk calculation. Flying around collecting resources is much more joyful to me now. Great update!

Thanks for your feedback! :D Yes, that is a bug, and choosing hirelings, as well as being able to level them up and understanding how their stats impact the job was definitely the intention. I've got a post-jam update ready with those things and fixes, unfortunately I ran out of time to implement them on the last day.

Pretty pun platformer, and very well presented! Adding a jump sound and a different sprite whilst jumping and I think the game would feel quite polished! There was a good variety of mechanics, and I really like that the game is based around having a chance to do a level carefully first, and then having to speed-run it on the way back.

A bit later in the game I found the time to rush back a bit too short for the complexity of the level, but in a lot of instances the balancing was just right.

Some bits of feedback:

- The music is really repetitve, and grew frustrating for me rather than complementary. Something with a bit more length and energy, given the comedy of the setup, would be great.

- It's not always easy to see which things can be jumped on and which can't. The picture frames in early levels at times resemble the outlines of jumpable platforms, but aren't. I think it would be good to better communicate what is solid and what isn't, either by changing the outline colour on non-interactable background elements to something that isn't black, or giving the level more depth by making the whole background object appear more faded.

The art style and concept are really cute, the intro made me smile, it was so charming! And it does a great job at communicating the stakes and the objective.

Great work!

Really fun to play, and quite challenging! One of those small jam games that picked their scope really well to arrive at a solid execution. 

My few bits of feedback are that I think the items do feel too small for the scale of the hand, which just ends up making it look less intentional and immersive, and the visibility of the items isn't the best as a result either.

And I'd also personally look for a different music soundtrack - the music feels quite mysterious, whereas the tone of the rest of the game is more hectic and comical.

Nice entry with quite nice pixelart and presentation. I think the core gameloop has potential and the rags-to-riches, or at least rags-to-healthcare, sounds fun. I played long enough to get an idea of the gameplay I think, you gotsome cool elements implemented!

Some feedback if you want to expand on this:

- I think the intro is too slow -letting the player skip the text would make that a better experience

- nighttime is a bit too dark, I can't really see what I'm doing. 

- It would be nice if the player house was visually much more distinct. the 'your house' text is only visible from certain positions and very hard to spot at night

- Having to keep a mouse key pressed down to carry items can be bad for accessibility, as some people get repetitive strain hurt from holding keys for long periods of time. I'm not sure this mechanic added much.

- Better ingame communication of how interaction works would be nice. The interaction icons for stealing and interacting look the same, so I didn't understand instinctively that I was looking for a different control here entirely.

- I don't think the police quite worked, it didn't do anything to me despite catching up.

Well done for all this progress in nine days!

The art and animation in this is really cute, the fishing animation looks so good! I really like all the character designs, they make for such interesting world building and give the setting a unique vibe. Very relaxing and cozy.

This works well for the short experience it is! Only feedback I'd add is that when you succeed at fishing a wallet I'd have liked a bit more visual or auditory feedback that I succeeded, as the wallet on the animation alone can be a little small. Even just a bounce on the score number might have drawn my attention to that element of the UI sooner and clarified that I was doing something right!

The score, but especially the time counter, don't have enough contrast with the sky to be easily readable.

Lovely work!

This is a lot of fun!! Super well polished, very intuitive, the card game makes immediate sense to me - the tutorial did a great job! The fight aspect and the roguelite elements feel wonderful, the map works so well, upgrades are exciting, I love all the character designs and animations, this is just solid all round and I'd love to see an expanded version.

My feedback is minor and focused only on some UX bits that could be brushed up, which you might already be thinking of anyway:

- Take this with a grain of salt, maybe this is just me, but I'd switch "accept" and "decline" around when a minion is offered and make the accept button stand out better. I wanted to accept, but my mind was naturally drawn to the decline button as more accessible, and as I expected the more accessible button to be 'confirm' I lost that minion. I think I expect 'continue/confirm/forward/yes' to be on the right, maybe due to reading direction.

- It would be nice to have an option to cancel out of the 'remove card' option if I end up not wanting to remove one. (that being said, by the time I finished playing , I had a better idea of what I was hoping to do by purging and didn't mind that it committed me to the intention. Since you randomize what cards might be purgeeable I understand that option represents a calculated risk. So scratch that, works great as is.)

- When we get the chance to replace a minion, it would be great to get to hover over the name of the existing minions to be reminded of their effect

- Generally, it would be nice to visualize more when a minion effect jumps into action. I saw it happen once with poison and it was very cool, but it was only after that I put together 'oh, must have been the viper minion' - a little popup animation for them jumping in to aid or something like that would be cool. Similarly, I dropped to below 0 a few times and don't know why I jumped back up again. I finally properly died in round 13 :D

- I realized only later into the game that you can stack the multiplier muscle cards to get multiple multipliers on the same damage card - it made it fairly easy to do 400 damage to some enemies in the first couple rounds. Given the pace of the game that might be fine, but some of the bosses seem underwhelming with taht mechanic in mind, and I don't know if there shouldn't maybe be a cap. I'd at first assumed only the cards right next to each other interact.

This is so so so so cool, I had a lot of fun. And I should really get back to work now :,)

Solid start, the idea of car jacking game is nice and you got some good core mechanics going! I did do a better job the second time I tried to play but the driving still feels a bit clunky and difficult, to the point of frustration.

3 minutes are very short when sometimes you randomly spawn at the other end of the map from your extraction point, and have such a long distance to drive, whilst other times the spot is quite close by. It would be nice I think to make sure that, if the timer runs so short, you're always within a reasonable distance.

A few small polish elements could improve the experience a lot. For low-effort improvements, I'd suggest randomizing the car colours between a few colours (using a white base car and the self_modulate property) and adding a few sound effects. Music and sound improve a game considerably, and if you spend an hour on that you can already get in a lot!

Nice work, you've implemented a bunch of cool systems!

Solid start, the idea of car jacking game is nice and you got some good core mechanics going! I did do a better job the second time I tried to play but the driving still feels a bit clunky and difficult, to the point of frustration.

3 minutes are very short when sometimes you randomly spawn at the other end of the map from your extraction point, and have such a long distance to drive, whilst other times the spot is quite close by. It would be nice I think to make sure that, if the timer runs so short, you're always within a reasonable distance.

A few small polish elements could improve the experience a lot. For low-effort improvements, I'd suggest randomizing the car colours between a few colours (using a white base car and the self_modulate property) and adding a few sound effects. Music and sound improve a game considerably, and if you spend an hour on that you can already get in a lot!

Nice work, you've implemented a bunch of cool systems!

I quite like the simplistic art style of this project, and the fight mechanic of jabbing in either direction. It felt challenging and like it could potentially have some good game feel.

Audio would make the world of a difference, as at the moment not enough is communicating what is going on. I'd love more clarity when I'm hurt, too - there seem to be bars in the top left corner, but this is too far removed from the centre of the action for me to pay attention to easily whilst also navigating the platforming aspects and enemies.

I think it might also be a better experience for the player to always spawn on a solid piece.

Okay, yay! That was great, very fun playthrough. Everything is very intuitive and nicely sound designed, and the challenges were a good level of difficulty to keep me engaged for the playtime. Great entry!

Gotcha, I must have just gotten turned around dozens of times and never chanced upon it haha

Really great work, the artwork and polish are fantastic, everything feels and looks really good. I especially like the little face animations for the devil, wonderful detail. And the animations of his finger moving the cards around!

The cardgame is quite fun once I got into it too, though the tutorial felt quite long. I think I don't really see stealing as being that big a part of it, so the take on the theme remained a little obscure to me. And ultimately whilst the cards are negatives, it plays like most cardgames on pairing high cards together, so I don't know that it feels like a distinct mechanic.

But in any case it's a lovely entry, very well done!

Thanks so much, I'm really great you enjoyed it! Because it was for browser playing, I decided not to put a hard end on it since that just kind of makes the game freeze on the page. So glad you made it all the way through!

I see! :D Yes , that's my bad, that works, I didn't see that in the description. I really like that minigame, that's very well executed, pulling back an item feels really smooth!

Really great take on the theme. I had a lot of fun playing this. I restarted once and managed to get to the end once I'd better udnerstood what I'm doing. A bit more tutorialization would be great to avoid that frustration, letting the player know a.) the drag and release mechanic and b.) that you have limited flicks that carry over into the next scene.

A lot of the sound design works really well and overall the graphics are quite good. The game feels polished! For the art, it would be lovely to see a pass where the icons and items are drawn at the right size for how they'll show up in the final game, as the image sizing and the outlines on them sometimes felt at odds with the restof the menu and artstyle. 

I think the map worked fantastically and finding a path was fun. That bit felt great.

My biggest piece of feedback is to figure out a better way to deal with exiting a room - it felt very punishing to be sent back into the room by an invisible wall I couldn't predict outside of a door, and waste one or more flicks getting back out yet again. Maybe the outside area could have a 'slowing pad' so you can still get back in if you want to, but aren't likely to be catapulted there if you don't want to be?

Overall there is so much here for a nine day jam, really well done!