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Ok here's the top tip for this jam specifically.

• Because this jam is a month long, most developers are going to abandon it and bail out long before the submission date.
• There's a roughly 10% submission rate and its been going down over the years because this jam doesnt really get much attention or support from the jam hosts!
• Publish your Game by December 1st, but vote until January 8th? 48 entire hours to announce the winners on Jan 10th?
  • You know what this means? Voting flatlines shortly after the submission deadline, and then everyone forgets about the jam and the results announcement is inconsequential because nobody cares and the forum is dead. Why this hasn't changed I have absolutely no idea.
  • Its great to allow developers a month to BUILD a game, but nobody actually wants a month to REVIEW games. 

Well, frankly I think this rating distribution is bullshit. 17.9% giving 1 star ratings? Which of you try-hards did that? And why is it not noted in the feedback below? 

I'd say the majority of games on itch disappear into the void very soon after being put on the platform and only really exceptional ones stick it out for a while, so most 'game jam' developers don't get any kind of prolonged traction here. That said a game jam can be used, as you implied, to develop some new skills, but also as a gauge for how successful a certain type of game or mechanic could be. I've done 7 of these things now and definitely detect some trends on what people enjoy and what they dont etc so its good in that regard. But I agree, if this doesnt shoot the lights out in terms of responses and overall scores etc take the lessons and move to the next project. For the swimming in this game maybe it would make more sense for the lines that you are swimming in to represent current that carries the player and you have to manoeuvre through the fast-moving water, while leaving the current actually makes you swim very slowly, opening you up to the risk of being eaten by the sea monsters. Thats probably quite a satisfying way to go if you have the energy for it after the jam. 

thanks for playing :) It's not a bug, its a feature, or rather a temptation! The upgrades stack up over time and the early levels require you to focus on building your army of turrets before you start upgrading them. Its pretty much designed so that at the end of the first round you have enough cash for a range upgrade - generally the worst kind of upgrade you can get in a tower defence game - and if you buy it that early you will lose the round. Rather if you save up and get a speed upgrade (the best of the 3) the latter rounds get a bit easier. It COULD be a bit more forgiving I guess! Thanks again for playing and rating :) I'm glad you had a bit of fun!

Wonderfully artsy and very creepy and scary. I actually feel the terror of swimming on an ocean filled with monsters and trying to stay alive. unfortunately I died many, many times without figuring out how I was supposed to escape or where I was supposed to go.  The swimming mechanic is also a bit tricky when you're swimming at high-speed and it doesnt actually feel like swimming. I noted that this is version 0.1 so Im hoping that this is something you are going to keep working on because it looks and feels beautiful - its the start of something really good. Good job.

I liked the look and feel and the sound you used plus the voice were great. I played the web version. It seems like if you get it wrong the first time then it drops it in again you just put in the number it told you it was to get it correct. So its a little 'cheat' I suppose. If you maybe gave a score based on how close a person got to the correct number over 5 rounds that might give more variability for a ranking etc. Just a thought. Overall great work!

yes honestly I didn't even see the E to start and I was wondering what I was doing wrong, so somehow making that significantly more clear would be good. The thing is once I figured that out that problem immediately goes away and the rest of the experience is great. Are there 3 endings? I got 2. Neutral and Good I think.

damn. What a great little game.  It took me a little while to figure out that I needed to press 'e' to stand up. Couldnt understand why I wasnt moving. But with that out the way it was great. I have to be honest I saw the little minigames and I was like "oohh...one of these again. Some simple games batched together" but the genius behind this is what happens when you play it the second time :) not giving any spoilers away here. I really loved the whole experience

Question: I know you did this in Godot and I use Unity but I loved the sound(s) that you used for the text appearing on the screen - how did you achieve that/what sounds did you use? Been trying to get the same effect in one of my other games!

damn. What a great little game.  It took me a little while to figure out that I needed to press 'e' to stand up. Couldnt understand why I wasnt moving. But with that out the way it was great. I have to be honest I saw the little minigames and I was like "oohh...one of these again. Some simple games batched together" but the genius behind this is what happens when you play it the second time :) not giving any spoilers away here. I really loved the whole experience

Question: I know you did this in Godot and I use Unity but I loved the sound(s) that you used for the text appearing on the screen - how did you achieve that/what sounds did you use? Been trying to get the same effect in one of my other games!

damn. What a great little game.  It took me a little while to figure out that I needed to press 'e' to stand up. Couldnt understand why I wasnt moving. But with that out the way it was great. I have to be honest I saw the little minigames and I was like "oohh...one of these again. Some simple games batched together" but the genius behind this is what happens when you play it the second time :) not giving any spoilers away here. I really loved the whole experience

Question: I know you did this in Godot and I use Unity but I loved the sound(s) that you used for the text appearing on the screen - how did you achieve that/what sounds did you use? Been trying to get the same effect in one of my other games!

I liked the aesthetic that you created. I liked the graphics you used and the parallaxed background layers were great. The movement and the jumping felt very smooth and intuitive. I really loved the effect you created of the intensifying TV static every time you collected one of the items. I thought the ambient rain sound was a nice touch as well. 

As others have said I think you could benefit a lot with simple things like (perhaps) a sound for walking, jumping and collecting the items. And then perhaps a simple mechanic like when you collect all the items a weapon spawns and if you collect it and press 'e' at the right time you banish the ghost and win, kind of thing. I appreciate how difficult it is to get everything done in just 7 days though and I think what you submitted is really good so well done.

It's great to see another Tower Defence game in the jam! I enjoyed this a lot. I liked that you had a couple of towers to select from and that you could upgrade them multiple times. I suppose similair to my game, I found the first couple of rounds quite challenging (nearly lost all my candies!) but later rounds I seemed to scale up my pumkins ALOT and it became much easier. I have no idea how many rounds I did - but I played for a while. 

Things to consider: It was very difficult for me to work out where I could and couldnt place a tower, and a few of the spots didnt really seem to make sense. Also if there were pumpkins that dropped behind a tower that I tried to click out, it would bring up the tower upgrade menu which made it hard to get the pumpkins. Mechanically though this is a very sound game. I enjoyed your choice of music and I appreciate the effort required to make a game like this, so great job!

Great game, great ambiance and I love mechanics that use 'light'. I'm a big fan of puzzle games so this was a nice find. I didn't really find much of an alignment to the 'theme' of the jam but maybe that's just me - that's really the only point I can criticise. Beautiful art, simple but perfectly placed sound effects - great job guys.

I thought the take on the theme was really excellent and to turn static on a TV into an incremental game is very creative. I enjoyed everything about it - it was fun, it looked and sounded good and the mechanics and incremental choices were fantastic. It's easy to just play round after round. 

I think the music on the main screen could be a bit different. While the vibe is good it seemed to be very short and repetitive and having to listen to it while going through the instructions got a bit distracting for me. The only other criticism I had was the screen you used to pick your upgrades didnt always display very nicely, but these are really minor points. Overall the polish is excellent and its a great entry. Excellent work. 

"more time" are the keywords there. Balancing this kind of game is quite the challenge as I learned during the course of making it (too many zombies = too much money?). I went through several iterations of tuning it and where it landed is probably the best it was throughout development - challenging at first, but not hard to master with a go or two. I think the speed at which the fastforward is set should probably be the default speed, and then a speed-up would actually be even faster than this. I think some visual indicator on how many zombies were spawning in a wave would help it feel less like a "when will this end??" when you get to the last few waves.

Theres a big backlog of stuff I couldnt get to and I've come to realise thats risky for this type of game in a jam because there is always going to be something 'more' that you could do, but I prioritised with the time I had available. The good thing is that as a basic template I now know how to make tower defence games lol. Im thinking of making a Christmas inspired one next and provided I can find the assets should be able to do that pretty quickly and produce a more polished result than this. 

Thanks for playing and hope you had fun. Oh, and good catch on the Thriller vibe - that was the brief to the musician who did an absolutely incredible job of creating the vibe. The game really started to feel like a game as soon as the music was imported!

Edit: I also purposefully made it so you could do other things while you kill zombies xD go watch YouTube or whatever and the game will keep going. So my genre mashup includes "idle clicker" hehe.

Good job! Me too, but it was 7 days

It makes me so happy to know that you had fun playing. I really try to create an experience that people will enjoy playing. Thanks for trying the game out :) I will check yours out as well.

yes I figured it out but I just think you could just either a) use f on the door with the key and leave the room, or have the door at least open so you dont need to press another button to exit the scene - you can just walk through, or b) use E and because you have the key the door opens - this sort of thing. Let the player press Enter to close a text box instead of clicking the mouse for example. These are small things that will get players to think more about the game and less about the controls they need to use to play the game. But its got lots of potential to be a great adventure game so Im wishing you all the best for it and looking forward to your next patches.

I hope you had fun :) Thanks for playing!

Hey man - great little game here. I could only manage to get 100 points. Is there a way to get 800 that I'm missing? Took me a couple of tries to realise I could just spam the special kill to win. I enjoyed this experience and there's a good base here to build on if you so choose :)

Very cool atmosphere and attention to the effects you're creating. It's nice to see a simple concept re-imagined and executed so well. Its got a perfect horror/halloween vibe. Great work.

ok this is an interesting one guys. I'll get the weird stuff out of the way first. The control system needs work. It feels sort of unintuitive to have to use e and f and sometimes you use f before you can use e - like use a key on a door, then use a door etc. When you get a screen up, pressing e or f doesnt seem to do anything. I had to mouse click away. So there are so many ways you have to co-ordinate yourself to work the game which I think you can make better. Then, I put the reactor component in the reactor and suddenly got a Game Over screen with a weird sound. No explanation as to why that happened? Im confused about that. 

Now the good stuff. The ambiance and the atmosphere is top notch. It feels great. I love the artwork and the look and feel of the game. The sounds are very good as well. The story-telling with the notes left around all over the place is such a good touch - you've created a great vibe. I previously submitted my own 'one-scene' point-and-click adventure to a jam and it had a few parallels with this, but playing yours have given me ideas as to how I could address some of the challenges I had in that game in terms of movement and items and so on. 

In summary I would really like to see you keep working on this and refine it a bit as it feels amazing and it has great potential. Great job.

glad it left you wanting more :) Thanks for playing!

Thanks for playing! I think one of the drawbacks of game jams (especially for me as I try to stretch myself to learn new skills) is that there is never enough time to fully polish a thing unless you keep it very simple. This was a lot more complicated than I thought it would be and I didn't get to implement everything I wanted. Simple stuff like scene fade-in/fade-out are on the backlog. I was struggling to get sound limiting working 10 minutes before the submission deadline and ultimately left it out.  I would love to totally revamp the UI and have indicators for Tower Level/Damage/Speed/Range; Zombies per wave and Zombies left to kill; Zombie Health bars; Tower refunds; random coin pickups after a zombie death etc etc. I would love to have had another week lol but Im not sure the position would be different honestly. As long as you had a bit of fun its all good. Thanks again for checking it out!

Lol in the last wave the zombie health goes from 1,080 to 1,800 iirc so you did the right thing by getting those upgrades hehe 

Thanks for playing. The turret upgrades actually make a significant difference from wave 6 onwards and I'm not sure how far you could actually get without them. Different turrets would be great, so would different enemies, and more UI, but it's a 7 day Jam so tried to focus on creating once cohesive enjoyable experience. Hope you had some fun and I'll be sure to check out your game.

That doesn't sound like it would impact any of the voting criteria. So it wouldn't make it look or sound better, it doesn't introduce new gameplay mechanics or directly make the game more or less fun so I think this is fine to do. If you've put in the effort to create a game the least you can do is make sure players know how to play it.

Its so interesting that you say that, because the brief to the composer was "Make it like Michael Jackson's Thriller, more fun than scary,  but 8 bit and retro! " I think he absolutely nailed it. And yes, you picked up on a key limitation of placing a tower on an outside diagonal. There are a few spots that are not very effective for the money! Looks like you managed just fine though :D Thanks for playing and hope you had some fun!

wow this was difficult at the start while you were getting the hang of it but once you get it its fun. I loved the look and feel and all the nice touches with the tuning, the instructions etc. Great look, feel and sound. Great job and well done.

I like the intelligent enemy AI. As a base for the game that you are working on it looks like you have the start of a solid foundation here. Obviously, there are a couple of things missing - sound, music, story - but what is here is the start of something good! Good job on the submission!

Now that the people that REALLY wanted to participate have participated and developed their experiences, how about a free course @GameDev.TV ?? Maybe for the top 100 overall or something? That would be pretty great...

great effort :) Wave 10 is a monster! I find that I only place towers as I need to in the rounds to collect as much money as I can. I only place a new turret if a zombie breaks through. Then I tend to balance my upgrades mainly on speed and damage, however, I get enough range so that if you see the middle 2 rows that the back row of towers has enough reach to attack with the front row of towers......if that makes sense. but yes Wave 10 is pretty hard. 

As a hint, don't buy any upgrades before wave 4 :) just use the money to place turrets and initially place them close together to get though the waves quickly.  I think if you can get to Wave 5 then it scales in your favour and you should be good! I would like to build a mechanic to refund say 50% of the turret cost but it was just too far a stretch with the time. I actually ran out of time with a fairly long list of things I would still have loved to implement.

Thank you. I'm so glad you enjoyed it. I would highly recommend building one if you are interested. It was A LOT more complicated than I thought and I really used every second of time I had available to produce what you played. There is still so much on my backlog that I didn't get to do and most of it is simple UI and look/feel stuff that I couldn't get to because I had to prioritise fixing bizarre bugs. I will check your game out a well :)

Must have missed that - thanks for the heads up. First time poster in this forum. I've added a screenshot.

This game has been in my projects list for a while and I'm very proud of it. 55 levels of casual but challenging logic puzzles, designed to test your brain in a gently escalating difficulty. I built this game because I was so tired of similair games that just farm you for ads, so there are no ads in this one. Enjoy (and let me know what you think!)

https://miniaturegiants.itch.io/pull-the-pin-hero

thanks so much man. I have fond memories of Lemmings from my youth and nothing really scratches that itch these days. I wonder if I turn this into a full blown game if there'll be enough of us 'old timers' that want to support it. I'm going to find out I reckon. Congrats to you as well on your game getting a great finish as well. It's a pity I didn't see it during the ranking window but Im going to go and give it a spin :)

Thank you to everyone that rated my game. I think I might have something worth pursuing here. Thank you guys!!

no worries at all :) I wasn't looking for more ratings anyway....just providing feedback on games I really enjoyed. Congrats to us!

Im squeezing in some last minute ratings! I'm glad I found your game. I just loved those sound effects lol. Somehow this took me back to the PS3 days of playing 3 on 3 NHL arcade! I thought the sort of vignette effect you added was very cool as well - simple but well executed. This was fun - great job!