itch.io

Love how it's basically a tiny RTS, complete with juggling macro and micro.  Crazy ridiculous concept that made me laugh too.  The animation when the tardigrade turns to look at you angrily is absolutely perfect.  I would like if the game was a bit more descriptive about what stuff does with tooltips and such, but I got the hang of it through trial and error.  Was really fun bouncing my units off the tardigrade and shooting it to knock it all over the place and away from my base.  Fine work!

Wow, there's a lot of game here!  I know you said you used asset packs on the game page, but you did a good job of combining them all into a really coherent look and sound that's strong aesthetically, and that takes skill.  Really nice feedback on the jumping.  The puzzles were satisfying to complete, a nice different take on the portal dynamic where you have to find something that will kill you.  Really hits the theme well.  The only minor nitpick I ran into is sometimes I'd run into a collider or otherwise somehow get stuck on the floor and have to jump to get past it, but it doesn't actually stop me from finishing the game or anything, so it wasn't a big deal. In any case, great work!

Nice, I feel like this deserves more ratings.  Amusing punny spin on the theme, and a nice little runner game.  Love that it's a Wilhelm Scream type sound effect when you ram the guy.

Weirdly, I feel like I actually would have liked it more if you just restarted the level any time you ran into a flaming barrel, rather than having to lose all your momentum and fall so far behind.  Just a minor nitpick though.

It felt good smashing stuff and trying to keep your combo going long enough to reach the guy, and I liked the 3D models and environment.  Feels like with a bit more polish and refinement and a different control scheme, this is something that could go right onto mobile.  Well done!

Nice simple but effect indie horror concept, I could tell what kind of game it was going to be just from the covert art, haha.  Definitely got me, very well done!

Really liked this one!  A proper little FPS game.  I'm amazed you managed to implement so many movement mechanics like wall running, diving, grappling hook, etc.  Reminds me of the indie FPS games by Greylock Studios.  The gunplay / game feel was pretty on point, guns felt satisfying to shoot, and exploding the roaches felt good.  I think some mild improvements like hit markers (briefly flashing a marker on the crosshair when you hit) and on-hit animation reactions from the enemies would be nice further improvements.

For some reason I couldn't get the machine gun to work, I don't know if I just didn't find it or it was bugged or what happened?  The pistol and shotgun were great though.

Loved the rage mode to hit on the theme, very satisfying running around one-punching bugs.

Overall, very nice work, I had a lot of fun fighting my way to the bug boss and beating it!

Very interesting game.  At first it felt like it would just be an indie horror title where it's mainly about the jump scares and running away from something creepy.  I'll admit I found it a bit frustrating dying repeatedly and hearing the scream sound before I figured out the geometry of the place well enough, but I made it through that section.  Then afterward it morphs into something very different, very "games as art" and introspective and even weirder than the initial section.  I liked that later part more without the pressure of getting chased around, but I understand the pressure of feeling like that was something you were trying to express and was important to the piece.  Overall I really liked it, super creative and interesting.

Also, wow, you made a lot of level geometry and content for this.  Highly impressive.

Cool game, reminds me of old-school roguelikes and of course the Bomberman games.  It was pretty challenging going around and collecting all the keys and fighting the boss!  Great work.

I walked my dog so long the seasons changed!  Funny, simple game that's a good expression of the theme.  The "pops" and little VFX when you ran into things were satisfying.

 I think it would be cool if you expanded the idea in the future to include more elements.  Like, this is just me throwing stuff out there, but I imagined if you could let the leash out or pull it in, and had to let the dog go farther out to pee periodically, haha.

In any case, nice job!

Fantastic entry, I got to wave 37 so far.  I think the core gameplay loop is one of the best I've played yet in the jam, and the expression of the invincibility theme was also one of the best with the "reverse bullet hell" gameplay.

Some constructive feedback for things you could improve if you keep working: The game feel / reactivity / juice wasn't bad, but I think it could be improved by adding things like some mild screen shake, some animations (even if just a single frame) when enemies get hit, little things like that.  You're probably already aware of these kinds of effects and just didn't have time to work on it, just thought I'd mention it.

I think it would also be really neat to do a little more with the blocking bullets mechanic, like having it power up an ultimate move over time, or reward you with currency, anything like that.

Other things I did love: Lots of enemy variety for a jam game, I exclaimed out loud when the Nebuly boss appeared.  The "pick one upgrade" system is always a welcome addition to games like this, and I enjoyed getting to customize my character build that way.  Gives it a lot more replay value.  Everything was very clear visually and behaved the way I expected it to, whenever I messed it up it felt mostly like a skill issue, not a problem with the controls or mechanics.  The difficulty escalated at a very nice pace, started off easy as I got comfortable with the gameplay, and gradually got more challenging until I was really sweating trying to stay alive by the time the boss fight hit.

Awesome work!

Probably the juiciest and most-polished entry I've played yet, fantastic job.  Everything is reactive and built with so much care and attention toward game feel. This feels like a game that would already do well as-is on mobile or other casual platforms.

Was hard to pull myself away from "just one more round" to come leave some feedback.  Reaching for things to criticize or suggest and try to provide something constructive to improve...

I felt like there could stand to be a bit more differentiation beyond the splat sprite between dealing damage to an enemy and killing one, especially early on as you're trying to get a feel for the mechanics and which things to prioritize.  It gets so chaotic visually, especially later on, that I'm not sure how you'd make it clearer when things actually died amid all the chaos, but I think it might be a bit helpful for the player to contextualize what's going on.  Maybe could be fun to add a mechanic where the player can tap/click on an already-placed ball once it slows down to get it going again once per round or something like that?  Yeah, I'm really struggling to think of much to improve this!

Phenomenal work!

Nice expression of the invincibility theme and a cool little platformer!  I always enjoy when these kinds of games encourage you to go fast, so I personally liked the timer.  I will say I felt like the player movement/controls could use a bit more fine tuning if you keep working on the game, I enjoy going fast, but movement speed and jumping had so much sudden velocity that I found it pretty hard to control at times.

Other things I liked: It felt really satisfying to bust through the blocks.  The levels, especially the early ones, felt good to play and bounce from potion to potion.  Having a grade system with up to three stars was really fun and encouraged replaying levels.  You mentioned you used other assets and that anything bad was yours, but I didn't see anything that stood out in a bad way, the visuals were coherent and worked together well.

Nice work, you have a fun game here!

As other people have said, I encountered some bugs with hits not registering, not being able to kill enemies, that sort of thing.  I will say I enjoyed the little platforming sections and when my hits did register, I thought the feedback to the player was good with the blood effects and the hit markers and everything.  The guns sounded great too.  There's some real potential here, you did a lot and I can see you put a lot of thought and care into making the gameplay feel good!

I will start playing and rating some of these other games in the morning, thanks for linking them!

Thanks so much for the feedback and playing the game!  Really glad to hear you liked the wheelchair movement, it's probably what I spent the most time on and I still wasn't sure whether I'd done well enough by the end.  Lots of little hacky things to get the vehicle physics to behave the way I wanted them to.

Thank you!

The intro where you have to re-type all of the code is one of the  strangest in the context of gaming but most mundane in the context of my actual life things I've ever seen, haha.  I'm still not sure whether I liked it or hated it, but I can honestly say it's the first time I've pressed the backslash key during gameplay in a very, very long time.  I do think it could stand to be about half as long though, it overstays its welcome a bit.

The actual main core gameplay loop, the idler/incremental game, I thought was well done and I personally haven't seen it done on a grid this way before.  It was interesting thinking about all the different modifiers and where to put things until they leveled up to avoid negative effects and things like that.  As addictive of a game loop as ever, of course.  I got to the end, which was very funny.

Nice work building a whole proper game like this for a game jam!

A fun take on the "eat all the things" casual game genre!  The game looks great, love the appearance of the city and the froggy-looking dragon.  I did run into some bugs/issues with the tongue not registering, but I was still able to accomplish my goal of becoming absolutely enormous.  Nice work, especially on the visuals!

A fun take on the "eat all the things" casual game genre!  The game looks great, love the appearance of the city and the froggy-looking dragon.  I did run into some bugs/issues with the tongue not registering, but I was still able to accomplish my goal of becoming absolutely enormous.  Nice work, especially on the visuals!

Surprisingly large number of monsters for a game jam game, and lots of stats to sink your teeth into and try to figure out the best combos and how to deal with your weaknesses.  Addictive stuff, nice work!

It was very cool how it closely it followed the actual patterns of one of these boss fights, and seeing the AI you implemented for the player do realistic things players would do.  Really fun inversion of the stereotypical situation.  I managed to get to 5 player kills and it was actually pretty difficult, took a fair bit of strategy.  I think it might be nice to be a little more transparent with the player about how the abilities work (show the area you can use it in, the cooldown, etc) if you were going to improve on the concept.  That's my only real critique, everything else was nicely done!

As somebody who also made a top-down 3D shooter in Godot (with a very different vibe), I salute you.  The concept here was hilarious and goofy, reminds me so much of something you'd see on the NES in the 80s, although of course the gameplay was much more modern.  Extremely frenetic and chaotic, but a lot of fun!  I can't believe you managed to implement customizable character design in a game jam.  The actual gameplay was almost too fast-paced and got extremely challenging in the later waves, but I did have a lot of fun with it and managed to beat the boss.

It might help a little bit to make the enemies stand out more from the ball pit, although it's difficult when you're using so many different colors, I'd imagine.  I also felt like the music was a bit too loud by default, but that was easily fixed with the settings menu, so good job on including that.

The expression of the theme was great, you hit it on multiple levels.  The prequel memey spin move was fun, ducking down to reload and  hide was a good mechanic.  I also love dodge roll type dash moves, but everything felt so fast that I rarely had time to use it.  It felt good when I did though.

Anyway, cool game and nice work! 

As somebody who also made a top-down 3D shooter in Godot (with a very different vibe), I salute you.  The concept here was hilarious and goofy, reminds me so much of something you'd see on the NES in the 80s, although of course the gameplay was much more modern.  Extremely frenetic and chaotic, but a lot of fun!  I can't believe you managed to implement customizable character design in a game jam.  The actual gameplay was almost too fast-paced and got extremely challenging in the later waves, but I did have a lot of fun with it and managed to beat the boss.

It might help a little bit to make the enemies stand out more from the ball pit, although it's difficult when you're using so many different colors, I'd imagine.  I also felt like the music was a bit too loud by default, but that was easily fixed with the settings menu, so good job on including that.

The expression of the theme was great, you hit it on multiple levels.  The prequel memey spin move was fun, ducking down to reload and  hide was a good mechanic.  I also love dodge roll type dash moves, but everything felt so fast that I rarely had time to use it.  It felt good when I did though.

Anyway, cool game and nice work! 

Really fun idea to express the theme!  I loved how you could shoot other nerf darts out of the air and pick up yours when they hit something.  The game plays pretty well too, although I think I'd like it if the player character moved a little faster and/or the view was a bit more zoomed out, to make it feel a little easier for the player to respond to attacks.  Another thing that could take this further would be if hit enemies call out their hits with a satisfying little "sit down" animation instead of just disappearing.  Anyway, I'm a sucker for top down shooters and this was fun, great work!

Thanks for sharing all the links everyone!  I'm working my way down the list in order, if I haven't gotten to yours yet I still plan to get there today as I find the time.

Beautiful writing.  I really felt the emotional weight without it ever coming across as too sappy or overwrought.  I also loved the little poems interspersed throughout, they were very well-composed, and I think it's an interesting way to use interactivity to add other dimensions to literature without pulling you out of the story the way it might if you had the protagonist actually, in the diegetic narrative, showing us their poetry.

My only minor critique, and I hesitate to say this because I don't know whether this is fully fiction or based on real life events happening to a parent (if the latter please ignore this comment), but I did feel that the ending was a little bit abrupt.  Not to say, I suppose, that we needed to find out what happened, but that there could be a bit more weight given to the not knowing?

In any case: The writing, storytelling, and emotion needed to really stand out given the medium/genre you chose, and they truly did.  Wonderful work.

I think this is the highest rating I've given yet on theme, you absolutely nailed "invincible" by going in this direction.  Really creative and cool core gameplay too, and the soundscape stood out, very immersive.  This feels like with some more work and polish and a little more to it, it could be a legit arcade cabinet or something.  Fine work!

Haha, this is amazing.  So funny, and a great core gameplay loop.  Not easy to get combat like this feeling good in a game jam game, but you've done it, and Ioved the mechanic with the three health/energy bars and the way it tied in with the taunts.  Made it all the way to the copium and had a great time doing it :)  Nice work!

Wow, this is absolutely adorable and really creative.  Very high skill ceiling and very difficult, which I personally love, but some players might find frustrating.  I do think it might be nice to have some kind of visual indicator of when your mouse is in the right spot to jump, that threw me off initially, but I eventually got the hang of it. In any case, I had a lot of fun.  Great work!

Thank you!

Glad you enjoyed it!  I totally meant to add a restart option and polish up the collisions and aiming (it just detects an intersection with the mouse and the geometry to set the Y axis, a polished version should be "smarter"), but was still crunching to get more-critical things done late on the final night.  Also, truth be told, the game doesn't have a "real" save system because, again, I ran out of time, but I felt like I had to have some kind of checkpoints so players wouldn't have to replay the whole game every time they died on a difficult section.  In any case, thanks so much for playing!

Thanks for playing and for the feedback!  Agree completely, some things to address in the future.

Thanks!

Trying to put together a list of games to check out when I get up tomorrow.  Looking especially for any others who are struggling to get ratings/feedback.

I've encountered a couple where I couldn't get it to run, so if your build is broken for me, I'll tell you, so at least you'll know some people are struggling with that!

Here's mine if you want to check it out:

https://missingmiddle.itch.io/utmost

I'll admit straight-up I was prepared to not like this, but it was lowkey some of the most fun I've had so far in this jam.  You implemented a lot of different platformer mechanics and used them well in your level design, the movement feels intuitive and "right" in a way that a lot of platformers get wrong, and all of the levels feel like they were carefully designed to escalate the difficulty and present a variety of challenges without being too difficult.  So great job!  To really take it to the next level my small suggestion would be to spend some time in the future on giving more visual/audio feedback to the player, like particle effects and sound effects when the enemies die, screen shake, little things like that.  Anyway, fun game, thanks!

Apparently the answer to how to kill the 30-50 wild boars in your yard is to double click on them.  And don't forget to feed the cat, but that's a given.  All joking about old memes aside, I enjoyed this more than I thought I would.  Simple concept, but the multitasking is fun and the player feedback is good and it looks nice, so good work!

This was incredibly silly and I loved it.

Love the steady trickle of new mechanics and concepts.  The game looks good, too!  My only minor critique is sometimes it felt like the game wasn't registering my jump presses, and I had some deaths from just running off ledges.  Possible player error though.  In any case, nice work!

Concept reminds me of something like Ikaruga, in a good way, and very on-theme.  Pretty unique and fun that you fight by just ramming into things.  Cool game!

Fun cute survival-crafty goodness!  Looks great, and very humorous and well-polished.  Nicely done!

As a sucker for both incremental games and old school dungeon crawlers, this sucked up way too much of my time.  Got all the way to 20 and beat the boss! Lots of good juicy feedback and the style was cute and fun. One small quality of life feature that might be nice if you make the full game would be to give the player an option to walk a little faster and/or provide more speed upgrades earlier, so the "watching your guy walk to the next location" doesn't take so long. I did appreciate the atmosphere in the forest though.  Nice work!