itch.io

This is a pretty fun timing game! I played through most of the levels. I’m not sure if I was doing something wrong, but Roberto felt out of place as level 2. The boss seemed to require perfect timing, as one hit would stunlock me until he knocked me out.

The graphics were very nice. The pixel art was clean and legibile, and the UI looked good. I also noticed a lot of game juice, such as menu clicks and UI shaking on impact. Little things like that add a lot of polish to game jam games.

The game design was simple, which is fine for a game jam. If I were to think about a longer game, I would focus on player skill expression. The skill floor was low enough that I think most people who aren’t averse to rhythm games will pick up quickly. The skill ceiling is not much higher than the floor, which means once you’ve figured out the mechanics, there’s not much room to differentiate a skilled player vs a non-skilled player. It would make replayability less viable without adding more expression.

Overall, a great game for a game jam. Thanks so much for making this!

It hasn’t been published, so I’m unable to rate. Can you publish so others can get access?

I really liked this game! I’m not super into interactive novels, but this one held me for a good half hour. I especially enjoyed the branching narratives. They didn’t feel forced, or that a choice was always a false choice.

The content warning was good as well. I think having those are really important, as it helps a lot of people decide beforehand how the story could affect them.

I don’t have much feedback, as I’m not well-versed in capabilities of Twine. A fade between dark and light colors as the background changed would be less “flash-bang”. It’s a minor thing, but was a surprise the first time I had it happen.

I did run into a missing ?alias?tag? thing near one of the endings. If I remember correctly, it’s where you argue with Sam but then end up sitting with him. The UI popped up a missing element. It was minor and didn’t affect the experience, because it was the end, but I just wanted to let you know :) (I had a screenshot but itch decided not to save my comment, so I lost it)

I also liked the ending summaries - death of the …. I thought that was a great way to wrap up each ending.

I think this is a great entry! The game is simple, the art is cohesive, and the game feels responsive. The start button pop animation was great. I also loved the bell tolling the instructions. Getting caught reminds me of a FNAF-lite anti-reward. The art for it is so different it works well. 

Only thing I can think of is getting more feedback on the progress of the couch. You could incorporate progressively damaged couch, or have it dynamically damaged depending on where the cat was.

Aesthetically, when the cat isn't scratching, it could be doing "innocent" cat things to help sell the ludo-narrative.

Sweet game!

That was a great glow-up from the 15 minute version! Excellent use of assets to reinforce your main mechanic. I know it's not Godot, but some pizazz like animation around clicking the button, or more unhinged screens as your health goes down could improve.

Nice work

I really liked this game! It was a fresh take on a classic game design. I didn't finish the game, I'd always die transitioning to the third screen.

Adding some feedback for the things you want the player to do can help reinforce the direction for the player to go. Something as simple as a score that increases, or particle effects/noise on the player killing a worm.

You can increase the intensity by adding some kind of visual or audio cue that a worm has decided you are its lunch.

Congratulations on finishing your game :D

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to play it, as the unity engine wasn't playing well with my linux system. It looks like  a fun game, maybe if you get some time you might try out a web build so that I can see if it plays better from the browser.

Specifically, the game launches, but I am unable to interact with the UI at all. I tried alt-tabbing as well as installing through lutris.

I loved the art style! It has a coherent art direction where everything seems to fit the aesthetic.

Some UI tips that I thought of when looking at it. The font chosen is great for a title card, but it can be hard to parse on things like UI and buttons. Try to find a good match for the fancy font.

The UI is pretty spread out for the kind of game it is. You could wrap the whole window in a margin container to help squeeze it in a bit. The bars on the edges were hard to scan when looking at the middle.

For the UI, it was a little small, which made the white font on a white background difficult to read.

The shop was pretty good. Especially the sound that the shop makes when it opens. I wasn't sure if the time slow was working, as I wasn't able to select it.

For the mechanics, they felt really fluid and matched up with the art. Great entry into the jam!

I really like the idea of bending the tropes of the buying from a store. 

The art is really good, and I hope you save it for future use.

I think the core concept has some legs, closing it in a core game loop would make this a lot of fun.

Maybe some feedback on the fact that something happened would help with the guidance. I didn't realize I had used the door to steal his key until the second time I played it. The feedback could be as simple as a specific noise, particle effect, etc.

Overall, a great entry :D

Great entry! The store adds to the rogue-lite aspect of the game, while the Ultralight does indeed mean it's Rogue Ultralite. 

Tweaking the exit to the store would be good as it's hard to keep in-between the posts otherwise.

Great flappy bird clone! A smoother transition out of the store would make it an even better experience. Fuel seems to be less important, there may be some balance to incentivize picking up fuel.

Hey! Been working through simulation and management games made in Godot and I came across this one. I really like the idea. You have kingdoms who are trying to survive and thrive while pitting themselves against each other.

I feel like this game needs more insight into the systems in order for it to pull off what it was trying to do. I saw that the jam them was "The game is a liar", but without any visibility into the systems, I couldn't tell if the advisor was being truthful or not. At that point, I just ignored what was said.

The feedback systems seem to be missing. One example would be that my food would be bad, but my people very happy. I would buy some food, and that would switch to good food but the people would be very angry. Another example would be the combat. I was never able to conquer another nation even though I sent a lot of troops. I didn't know if it was because I failed (or why) or if the game just didn't implement it.

I really liked the idea and wanted to see if there were any plans to keep working on it in the future. With some polish, playtesting, and balancing, I could see this being a lot of fun.

Also, not sure, but it looks like someone else re-uploaded your .exe to itch. It doesn't work, as you still need the .pck file, but I thought I'd let you know.

Really like the idea and the execution was great!

For the HTML5, I had a couple issues with the grappling hook detaching on mouse release. Lack of detach + the reel-in mechanic means I slam into whatever I'm hooked into.

I'm not sure, but I had several crashes pretty quickly. I was playing the Windows version.

Other than that, it looks pretty fun! The art style is good and I like the variety of the tasks. Speedrunning it would be nice with saving times so you could see how well you did.

Thank you for playing the game!

Thanks for playing my game!

I could see how that would cause problems. When I pick this game up again, I'll make sure to space the collectors so that starting a new week, they won't rebel until at least the third collects. 

Thanks for the play!

I know! I wasn't planning on joining this jam, but I saw the theme and couldn't resist. There have been some really fun games!

Thanks for playing my game!

Many thanks for the detailed response! My background is almost entirely programming, so the feedback on the art presentation is very welcome. I played around with theming for the Font, button, UI, etc. but didn't figure it out enough to really push the idea I had in my head. And the crosshair is my shame! I had it on my list to do a second pass on the visual style for that, but alas, time was not on my side.

I'll have to play around with the rendering tiny and then scaling up. I hadn't thought of that approach before. I know, for the roads, I had planned on tiling a texture across them, but I think there may be a bug in the Line2D with the vertices because it went all sorts of weird when I tried.

Sorry for the freeze! I didn't have time to stamp out the bugs on the HTML5 version, as I developed it testing on the Windows.

I agree with the lack of tactical gameplay. I had just planning the routes, but realized that the player would be super bored during the week, so I started adding abilities to give the player something to engage with. Do you have anything specific in mind in terms of adding tactical gameplay?

Thanks for the comment! I had planned on getting more levels, but ran out of time. It seems like the bugs come out of the woodwork in the last 3 hours :D

Thanks for the feedback! Which version did you play, the HTML5 or the windows version? I couldn't track down all the bugs for the HTML5 version, and I tested almost exclusively on Windows, so I'm pretty sure the crashes wouldn't happen in the Win version.

Haha yeah, that one was my favorite ability too! 

I hadn't had time to tweak spawning and road walking for the collector, because there were several edge cases where the collector would just get wrecked without the player being able to do anything about it.

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the feedback! I didn't have time to really tune the player info, so it's good to point out increasing the visual difference. If I could change it, I would probably make the tax collectors a different color so you can parse them better while the scene gets busy.

Haha, my second game jam game had a procedural music generator and it ate up time like nothing else! I'm glad I did it, but think that I would need to build a system several times, or have one pre-built that I could use as a stepping stone.

Have some more time for thoughts.

I like the PS1 style graphics. They seem to be making a comeback as a good compromise between high fidelity of today and the pixel art that was the norm in the birth of gaming.

I thought the UI was a little hard to read, as I only saw it when I was moving from building to building. Because of that, I think it was hard to understand what was going on.

Excellent game! I  loved the atmosphere of the game. The story was a good one as well, had me hooked immediately.

Like others, I found the wall jump to be a little clunky. With some polish though, it could be an excellent stealth game.

I did find an issue where I died after getting the grappling hook and it took me back to the beginning, but didn't respawn the hook, or let me use it. I had to restart the game to get it back.

This game is really interesting! I like the idea, but it was pretty hard for my brain to map the notes to the keyboard. I if this would work better with a gamepad or some other dedicated device.

I love any kind of procedurally generated media, so this is really cool to see.

I really liked this game! I can see a solid concept with plenty of room to grow. You could either turn this into a puzzle game by making the levels not random, or push it to more of a sim game by keeping it random and adding more systems to interact.

I wasn't sure how the hero was going to react, so some indication of what he's thinking would be nice. Maybe he has moods that means he's looking for certain things. A mood emote could pop up that basically says "Hey, I wanna kill a monster" or "I'm hurt, looking for health!"

Thanks for the feedback! Was there anything specific about the mob management that you think could have been improved?

Thanks for the feedback! I was definitely practicing with my UX on this one, so I'm happy that you called it out.

I had a tutorial planned, but the deadline snuck up on me. If I come back to this game, making one as the entry levels is definitely on my list!

When I made the game, I targeted mobile platforms, so it's good that you thought that it would be better on their. I planned on adding buttons on the keyboard for the abilities, but ran out of time.

Sorry for the crash! I don't know what happened, as I had programmed it to deselect a settlement if you clicked on it when it was already settled. Honestly, I didn't realize that I had to submit either an HTML5 or all 3 platforms, so that threw me. I had only tested on windows. I know HTML5 deploy better than linux or mac, so I went with that one, which had some of its own problems.

Thanks so much for the feedback!

Thanks for the comment! I bit off more than I could chew, but wrapped it up decently enough. Amazing how fast time goes by

This one probably needs an epilepsy warning for the title card. Anything rapidly changing like that can cause issues.

Love the atmosphere and the sound work.

I feel like the creatures don't give enough time to react, given the slower speeds of the characters.

Something else that I've not been able to see is if you can complete the game without a survivor. With the number of doors I've run into, I don't know if it's possible. Maybe make sure that the game can be completed with no doors (the doors make it easier, but not necessary) or fail the game when even one of the survivors dies.

I'm not sure if there is/was plans for something for the weapons, but right now they are misleading in the game as they seem to do nothing. Maybe you could replace them with abilities specific to the survivor?

I liked the art style of the game. I thought it worked really well for the gameplay. 

For gameplay, I felt like there was a story, but it didn't mesh well with the gameplay of eating the fish and avoiding the jellyfish. Maybe if you tied it in somehow, like make the player find so many fish before being rewarded with the next dialog or letter.

The story is an interesting subversion of the usual my parent's not my parent. I thought the reveal twisted it pretty dark, though, and the ending didn't leave enough breathing room for the player to process. This is probably because it's a jam game, but if the story were to be stretched out longer, the player would definitely need some time to anticipate, process, and decide whether they agree with the actions of Jo and the reaction of Tip.

My favorite part of the game would have to be jumping up out of the water. For some reason, I did that for quite a bit of time. Maybe you can "follow the fun" there and expand on that mechanic if you were to take it further.

Overall, I love to see a story-based game in a game jam! Most of the time you see a pretty standard prototype, light on art and story, focusing only on the core element. This game, however, has more story than most. That was pretty neat!

As soon as I saw this game, I knew it would be a contender! It has a simple yet challenging game loop, art that serves the game well, and a fantasy that's amazing! Great job!

If I were to add to this

I struggle to find things to add to this game. If I were to expand it, I would probably add conversations that you could listen to. I might also inject a substory, kind of like how Papers, Please tells a story without ever coming out and saying anything.

Game Design

I'm going to be using Jonas Tyroller's framework for fun for these reviews, so you can watch his video for more context around it. My day job is looking for ways to improve things, so just because I offer a lot of opinions on that, don't think that I didn't like the game. :D

Impact

There's a lot of good impact in this game. The small sound of plugging in the cables, the ring, and people talking all give weight to what you are doing. When a call completes, the bell is a pleasing sound that rewards the player. The post-game screen helps the player to decompress and examine how well they did.

Challenge

I thought the challenge curve was especially good in this one. The first two shifts are pretty easy going, but by the time you get to five or six, it's a frantic race to get them connected. I like how the names persist across the shifts, so that time spent memorizing the places in the earlier shifts pays off later.

Fantasy

I am jealous of the fantasy this game is able to conjure. From the game card on the itch.io page, I can see what the game is going to be. The title screen throws me into the era. The music is exactly what I would expect to listen to while I am waiting for callers. Everything in the game adds to the fantasy, and I think that even with the other strong points, this is the reason this game is so great!

This is a great concept that can easily play into the idea that different perspectives bring valuable info to the table. The puzzles in the game highlight different things to solve, which can be expanded upon in a larger game. Good job!

If I were to add to this

In the jumping portion, the black edges against the black area beneath made it hard for me to gauge when to jump. I would provide a little more contrast there. I would also be careful with making the puzzles based solely on color, as it can shut out people with forms of colorblindness.

Game Design

I'm going to be using Jonas Tyroller's framework for fun for these reviews, so you can watch his video for more context around it. My day job is looking for ways to improve things, so just because I offer a lot of opinions on that, don't think that I didn't like the game. :D

Impact

The actions in the game seemed to carry weight. I felt like the buttons were being pressed with the right amount of "thunk".

Challenge

This was a good mix between memory and hand/eye coordination. I was definitely satisfied when I was able to complete a puzzle, so good job there.

For the jumping puzzle, I wasn't quite sure the trigger that would cause the safe color to change. Maybe animating or drawing attention to the fact that it's changing would help explain that puzzle a little more.

Fantasy

I think there was a good basis for the fantasy of the game, but it could have been explored a little more. Maybe giving some testing flavor ala Portal would help with the fantasy.

Yeah, I think cameras are one of those things that are easy to have a basic implementation, but really hard to do very well. Thanks for the feedback!