itch.io

Congrats to everyone who submitted!

Thanks for putting this jam together, and to the community for all the feedback and comments. This was my first game jam on Itch, and I had a lot of fun working on the theme and checking out everybody's awesome submissions!

I had fun hunting for the treasures! I enjoyed the artwork and levels. I didn't enjoy hunting for the exits as much. I think some of the hidden doors make sense, but nearly every passage to another location proved difficult to find.

I liked it! It has a very casual and cozy feel, and the music fits nicely. 

It could be improved with some text/icons to show objectives, things collected, tree level number, perhaps even x/y coordinates so I can plan my falls with precision.

I like the artwork and theme, it definitely has a fun style. The digging mechanic feels clunky and a bit slow. Since that's the primary objective, it could use some work to make it feel satisfying and responsive.

This is great! I ate the whole world and exploded. I have no regrets, I'd make the same choices all over again. Even a barebones settings page was a nice touch for a jam!

I like the theme and concept! The animation and effectiveness of the attack action seemed very inconsistent to me, so I couldn't really get into that mechanic. As such, I spent my time evading and dashing for the exit orb thing, which I found pretty fun as a mechanic on its own.

Cheers! thanks for playing!

Thanks for playing, glad you liked it!

Thanks for checking it out!

I really enjoyed this game! The artwork and level designs are great. I really enjoyed exploring and unlocking sections of the map. Acquiring resources gets a little grindy, but overall the upgrade path feels pretty solid.

I rather liked the simple and quirky characters. Some of the dialog seems like placeholder for the purpose of the jam, but I found it compelling all the same. The sound effects and music were good, though I didn't find the soundtrack a very good fit for this style of game -- it feels like it belongs in a minigame for a thriller mystery, where this quirky adventure could use something more upbeat and a bit less repetitive.

I played this for almost three hours straight on first my run! It's a little grindy, especially from fabulous->fabled stage, in particular because I think I hit a bug with the Business Bluebird: the requirements/rewards seem wrong, and I was never able to fulfill it. That made getting the legendary(?) ore far more grindy as there isn't much of it around the map [screenshot attached]

Sadly, I was on the final quest and working on resources for the last few upgrades, and when I tried the Bluebird one more time as I passed by, the game crashed. It was then that I learned there appears to be no saving of progress, so that was a bummer.

I think the point-and-click is perfect for this game. It would be great for playing on a phone or tablet when you have a few spare minutes throughout the day.

I'm quite impressed with the level of effort that went into this jam. With a bit of polish, this is gonna be great.
I would definitely revisit this game from time to time to spend a few hours.

Nice work, keep at it!

I dig the music, I've had the title track playing for several minutes in the background while I jot this down!

The level designs are fun and quirky. The artwork is great. I had a lot of fun floating around and exploring everything on my quest for the ship parts. 

It wasn't immediately apparent to me where the exits from inside buildings were. My brain registered the giant black doorway silhouette as background art, so I kept going back to the level start to look for the exit. It totally clicked once I figured it out, but maybe there's an opportunity to call out the exits visually a bit more.

I really like the artwork and game concept on this one. The music and sound effects are also great. The world you've created is intriguing and a little creepy. 

I like having to experiment with things until I figure out how the world reacts to my choices.

The game feels a little too difficult to me. The Chromites are really aggressive, and the player is incredibly outmatched most of the time. I haven't been able to finish it yet, but I keep revisiting it to try to advance a bit more.

This is amazing! I really enjoyed playing through the entire thing. The artwork, music, sound effects, and theme are fantastically done and show a lot of polish. The story text in the intro could use a smidge of editing/cleanup, but the substance is great. 

One aspect that could use a slight adjustment: Allow the player to continue scanning if they haven't dismissed a previous scan's message. It took me a bit to realize I was skipping past scannable targets because I hadn't dismissed the old message yet.

Right on, thanks for playing!

Thanks for checking it out and including us in your video! There's definitely room for improvement on the camera, thanks for sharing your feedback. In particular, I think it might zoom back in too quickly, which can make it difficult to get your bearings again after colliding with walls and other obstacles. That's something for us to look at in future versions. Cheers!

I liked the government bailout you implemented to help me keep my head above water, that was quirky and fun, and worked well as an alarm that I need to recalibrate quickly. The disable tool you describe would definitely empower the player to start rethinking their choices over a longer recovery term. I like it.

Now that you mention your motivation for not adding a bulldoze, I like that too. It's probably just decades of playing other city builders that my brain automatically expects or even wants that ability. Could be an opportunity for some lore or flavor text to highlight that constraint as a feature.

I really like the theme and visual presentation, and I think this could be quite fun to play with a few tweaks.

I'm having a really hard time collecting the yellow and red "+" symbol buffs. The hitboxes could be bigger to make those easier to grab. They seem to spawn on a particular grid/offset that my player blip isn't constrained to, so I spend a lot of time missing them, driving in mad circles around them, and generally just being frustrated by that mechanic.

I like the artwork for the various buildings and structures. The game play was straightforward and I found it relaxing to chill out to for about 15 minutes or so. The audio and sound effects go nicely with the theme.

I think the only thing I'm left wanting, is a bulldoze feature so I can get out from under my financial burden of building too many schools, or maybe just to rework my town some.

I dig the artwork and audio, especially the sound effects.  The animations are also well done. Nice work! I'm not very good at this sort of game, so I couldn't get the parry timing down on normal mode. I failed about 10 runs then switched to the easier mode so I could finish it.

Thanks for playing and leaving feedback! Share your best lap time when you get that practice in! I think the best I can do is around 22-23 seconds myself.

Thanks for playing and for the feedback! I totally agree some collectibles or buffs would be nice additions to spice up the game play and give the player a bit more to do. We had a few ideas along those lines,  just didn't have time to explore them. Possibly down the road!

Thanks for checking it out, and for the kind words and feedback!

I really dig the artwork, theme, and overall look of the game, it plays really well. The atmosphere and music are great, though the audio level seems a little low even at max slider settings. I think it's pretty good in its current form, but I look forward to you taking this to the next level with more variety in encounters, discoveries, and a bit more story depth.

Great job on this jam, I had fun playing through this one!

Good job with the art and polished game play! You've captured that small world theme nicely. The music and effects sound great. I really like the layout and timing of the onscreen hints/tutorial, those work really nicely and have visual appeal without interrupting game play.

You've created a good mechanic with the urgency of keeping the filter going, but the art and sounds really make me want to relax and collect resources at a more casual pace. That o2 meter depletes pretty fast, and I feel at odds with the relaxing atmosphere by having to hustle to keep up.

I like the straightforward game play, the control of the ICBM feels great. The music doesn't quite fit the theme, but it's an excellent groove, so I can get really into the zone as the scroll speed increases further into the level. This feels like a nice slice to build on and to continue iterating into a larger game. I can picture multiple levels, different missile types, more obstacles to overcome. Nice work!

I like the artwork, sounds, and theme. They all fit together nicely and feel polished. 

I find it a bit difficult. Possibly I was unlucky with the rng, but in several plays I couldn't grow enough to match the pace of worms that knocked my size back down. A future improvement could include a difficulty setting to change the rate of good/bad spawns, growth rate, etc.

I haven't figured out what the left bar "Attention" means for game play, is that good or bad to have more of that? 

I find it pretty hard to jump up on things after infecting them early on since they are much bigger than me.  

Overall, I enjoy the casual game play, and even though I didn't complete the main objective, I had a good time!

Cool idea, and nice selection of assets so far. I like the core game play element of dragging stuff to the screen to build out the world and help my villagers. Keep iterating on that to see what feels fun and engaging. I seem to be quite adept at getting all of my villagers eaten by the bear in about 20s lol, that in itself was entertaining :D.  A little bit of audio -- even just placeholder stuff-- can make it feel a little more engaging and polished. It's a great start for your first game, keep at it!

The popping animations are really satisfying! I like the endless mode for just relaxing and not having to worry about the health bar.

The intro tutorial is cool, maybe you could put that you need 3 matches to pop the bubbles in there. I didn't notice it in the description right away, so I was confused as to why my color matches weren't popping when I only had 2.

Cool artwork and theme,  combined with cheery music, gives it a nice optimistic vibe. The particles and animations look great. Nice work!

I maxxed out my defenses pretty early, so didn't have much to spend gold on in the later waves. Maybe making structures a bit weaker and then having a repair function would give me somewhere to spend those funds.

Fun and challenging dungeon crawler! Music drives home the creepy mysterious vibe. The mobs are challenging and keep me on my toes. Exudes real cool retro crpg/rogue vibes.

We'd love it if you checked out our submission! Have fun, and good luck with the channel!

https://negative11.itch.io/asw-circuit

I've made some optimizations to how the Grid & Sprite layers are rendered in the latest updated: https://negative11.itch.io/frem-sprite32/devlog/444743/making-some-optimizations.... This should result in some reduction of memory overhead and CPU load when not working with these layers. Other recent updates also provide more options for window resolutions and resizing that could also make a difference. 

Thanks for checking it out and for the feedback!

There are likely some opportunities to optimize the way I'm rendering the Grid, Pixel, and Sprite layers, especially when they are not in use. Under the hood there are a lot of objects on the canvas that are making that stuff work, which is probably increasing the cpu/gpu load. I'll do some more testing on mac this week and see if there are some things I can unload when not in use.

For capturing that text input away from the editor, check out chapter 15 in the manual. If you're already getting text input, you're pretty close, there's just one more line you'll need.

Cheers, and happy coding!

-- John

I definitely want to incorporate the concepts from other projects based on SAP architecture and 8080 Assembly into future development, e.g. https://github.com/johnsquibb/Go-SAP and https://negative11.itch.io/sap-1-emulator. I don't have any roadmap of what that looks like just yet, but it's definitely on the want-to-do list.

Thanks for checking it out! Exportable binaries is an interesting idea. Right now, FREMScript is tokenized, parsed, and evaluated on the fly using the underlying Godot game engine and its native GDScript language. So, in that sense, the machine code is really just a bunch of GDScript objects. I suppose if we think of the Sprite32! as a Virtual Machine for FREMScript, then to support exporting complete projects, there would need to be some low level "bytecode" representation, possibly serialized exports of the GDScript objects that could be deserialized and run by any Sprite32! system later. I like this approach, and early builds had the notion of ROM cartridges that could be loaded from files. Those early versions were just FREMScript saved to a file with .rom extension, and since this wasn't unique to other files saved with .frem extension, I ultimately simplified it down to just the latter file format.

Another approach, and possibly the one you may be thinking, would to be support complete executables that could be run standalone from the game itself, probably everything presented in the screen area. That approach is likely out of scope for this project, but I think it could be done by generating the equivalent GDScript code from a FREMScript program and putting that through the Godot build tools to generate a full executable.

A third idea comes to mind as I write this response and is a mix of the two previous ideas: a FREMScript runner VM application that is just the screen and input support, with all the extraneous game elements removed. Exported "bytecode" could be loaded into that virtual machine and run. The VM could open source/free and distributed with binaries that users of the Sprite32! write. I kind of like this idea, and thematically it fits into the FREM corporation's roadmap of releasing a consumer game console system based on a stripped down version of the Sprite32! I could definitely see them presenting that at COMDEX '87.

I'll definitely add a sticky to the dev board and noodle this some more for future versions of the project. Thanks for the feedback!

About a year ago, I put together a visual emulator based on the Simple-As-Possible architecture, tossed it on GitHub, and kind of forgot about it. While digging through some old projects, I came across it and decided to upload it here!

Download it here: https://negative11.itch.io/sap-1-emulator

What can you do with it?

• Enter Assembly instructions and manipulate memory values by entering instructions on the keypad interface. 
• Run simple programs to add, subtract, and display results. 
• Step through programs to watch how the registers behave at each step.
• Save/Load programs 1-4, externally edit source and RAM files in the src directory and run them in the game.

Hi!

Yesterday I released  a simulator/sandbox/programming/retro-computer-y thing I've been working on, called: FREM Sprite32! Right now, you can play around in sandbox mode and learn all about the language that powers the machine: FREMScript.

Get it here: https://negative11.itch.io/frem-sprite32

Current Features

• Write programs using the high-level FREMScript interpreted programming language
• Read the in-game manual to learn the language, discover system settings, and copy code examples to run in the editor.
• Display text and get keyboard input from the user as the program runs.
• Get feedback in the status window for current system state, including program errors and highlighting.
• Play with sprites, pixels, the color grid, and 3-channel waveform audio generation.
• Save and load files, even swap out the default boot program with your own!

Check out the Devlog for more about features, plans for the future, etc.

There is also a GitHub repository with numerous examples to get you started.  For instance, I've been working on a simple little single player pong-like game this morning:

Cheers!