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Huh, I thought for a while there was some timing thing, but the more I played the more I thought it was just a timer when you were outside.

Wow this was great, I love the art style and snow and things, and I had a lot of fun with the platforming. I don't think I made the connection with the whistle (the wizard had a whistle, and you could hear it in the background?), but that didn't really affect much. Lots of fun.

It's great to see all the feedback here! 🙈sorry about the performance drops, classic case of "it worked ok on my machine" and maybe some wishful thinking against a deadline 😅

Wow the animations here are really well done, love the art overall. I think I almost never held the gear during the regular game, I basically played the whole thing on freeze. And the last level had quite a bit of trial-and-error until I understood what the image really was (I often tried to line up two pieces, and found something else stuck instead). I wanted a reference image, but I see how that would maybe take too much away.

In any case, very well-done!

Thanks for the video!It was great to watch you play and hear the feedback.

The conditions for the game jam were that it had to involve freezing and there had to be a whistle😂 that's really the only reason the whistle is there (I think the freezing pushed the game in an interesting direction, though). Originally the whistle was a way to call and direct the scouts, but I had a couple people who try it who never bought the scouts, so I made it more general.

Regular ants used to also have much shorter distance and the distance upgrades *only* affected the scouts, so they were much more important to gameplay, but if you didn't buy the upgrade it was easy to just get stuck with no food. I kinda ran out of time to balance things, but I do plan on releasing some improvements once the jam judging period is over!

Great take, I don't think I've played a Where's Waldo-like before 😂and I liked the ways the levels got tougher. I found the yellow haired guy *much* easier than the rest fwiw (like, sub-2-3 seconds every time), maybe more hair colors would help.

I thought it was well-put-together. I didn't love the viruses -- instead of feeling like an enjoyable challenge, it just sort of felt like a chore, eventually a "click on another tab and hit a snooze button" chore. I don't think I needed more than 1 or 2 levels of the virus thing, I don't think I ever used more than two charges before one came back.

I like the idea of a market and timing it, but in this case I'm not sure it added much -- given how slowly the market moved, and how often upgrades would give you big increases, it seemed like the best move was just "sell regardless".

Glad you liked it! Yeah I think the ending is too dry, I ran out of time to balance 😭. For a while it was too hard.

The whistle is finicky, it distracts ants from anything but taking home food. Then it wears off, so ants might turn around if there’s a pheromone trail or something.

Had you already burned through your first stack? It shouldn't let you add a card to the shop that's already in there unless it's out -- if it is, that's a bug.

Or are you just saying that overall, having more than 5 of a card is too strong (depending on the card)? I was thinking rarities would mostly take care of that, and the occasional OP run seems fine, but maybe it's too much.

Yeah I agree it's a bit too hard right now. I'm working on making a better starting deck.

I wanted the starting deck to not be that good so that you were improving it a lot early on, but I think it could be a little better to give more of a flavor of how the game works. The green card, for instance, is intentionally quite bad.

Yeah. I added a +1 gold to it to make it equivalent to a stack, but it's still not great until the end-game. Maybe I should just give it a + buy instead. I was worried that'd make it too strong (it means you can make a deck whose only job is to play 5 or 6 haggles plus some gold), but that might not be terrible. I'm also thinking about adding a card limit (like, the shop "runs out" of a card after maybe 5 copies), so that would let me focus the cards more on the case where you just have a few of them.

I see what you mean. I've tried to keep + buy clumsy/rare b/c I wanted to enable some of the more creative forms of payload (using Reconsider or Deconstruct, for instance, or the Haggle thing), but those are harder to set up, so the difficulty does end up pretty RNG-dependent. I don't want every run to just be "get a bunch of gold and +buy", though. I'll think about what I can do.

Somebody else suggested preventing duplicates in the prep stage, which I'm  going to add, so that should make finding different cards easier.

There are a couple of other + buy cards (there's a 2 gold + buy that only costs one mana, the other one costs two). And then there are also a couple cards that can destroy and gain, so you can try and line up a bunch of purses or chests and use them to fuel the rites, or you can try and play Haggles to get the price down and use the cards that can gain at 4 or 6. Twincast or Multicast can help.

Almost all of those need a deck that can draw a significant chunk of itself, and to generate a ton of mana b/c none of those methods are cheap.

Viewing the current deck should be out soon! Every rite you buy also adds a Mental Scar, so maybe it's one of those?

I'm glad you enjoyed it! 100% agree on the undo button -- I took a stab at it, and it was buggy af (lots of edge cases), but I think it's more-or-less necessary.

I like encouraging deck tracking, but I think I'll give players visibility into like, their total deck contents. That still keeps the tactical edge of tracking where your good cards are, but it makes it a bit more accessible I think.

I definitely want to add duration cards or something like it! Probably something to unlock after the first run.

Great to hear! My plan is to have a map of the Dreamlands w/ branching paths, and between rounds you'd get to pick a connecting gate and go there. Different paths would have different themes and cards that are available (for instance, one route might have lots of cards that gain weak stuff, plus lots of destroy synergies. Another might not have rites that do damage at all, but there are cards that do damage, or maybe special rules like "do 1 damage for every card discarded").

Consume is def pretty busted. I'm adding a rarity system, but I sort of like having broken cards. My ideal is that a player can get one or two really strong cards per run, and they build their deck around that. My nominee for most broken is multicast, if you can get a mana engine going 😂.

Thanks! I'm working on a card selection update now, then I'll take a look at the performance. And the gallery is coming! Along with some card unlocks.

Good point on turns remaining -- I had the other language for a while, and that also confused some people ("The game says I get 8 turns, but the initial message says '7 remaining'"). I'll figure something out 😅.

And I'll take a look at the tutorial bug, I saw in another comment it wasn't fixed! One of those "it works on my machine" things T_T.

Just the run structure (each round has a higher and higher total to hit, and you've got a limited number of turns to do it in).

Hmm, I'll take a look. Any chance you remember what happened? Like, was the card discarded? Or did it just go into play but didn't do anything?

Nice job! Do you mean like, on your winning run you spent more time staying in early rounds not winning so you can buy more cards or something?

Oh shoot, thanks for the info. What browser?

Good call on the tutorial, fixed that! And I made the turn reward a bit more forgiving.

The next thing I'm working on is some better deck visibility -- checking the deck, also maybe some summaries like total mana cost of the deck, gold gained, size, etc. Maybe tooltips for some of the terms on the cards.

Thanks for playing! Did you feel like at that stage you normally had pretty good "deck control" (like, you could reliably play most of your deck) and just had trouble affording all the rites (you need 5 at that point), or was the issue more managing all the junk? I've been trying to stop spirals where some good deck control early on trivializes the later stages, but I might be more concerned about that than I need to be.

Wow this is great, I love the mood and the mechanics. I don't think I've ever played game that emphasizes the mechanics of actually driving like this before.

Nice, that beats mine! I didn't have time to add an endless mode but I thought it would be fun.

Agreed on the tutorial -- a lot of the times I get feedback that I under-tutorialize so I wanted to make the concepts more clear, but ideally the UI does all the work.

Glad you liked it, and congrats on making it through! I might have tuned it to be too hard, it's hard to tell with exponential growth 😅 and I also probably got too good at knowing the right thing to do.

I had a lot of fun with this one, loved the puzzles and stacking everything together!

Love the idea here, slingshotting was so fun! The range on the gravity meant that I almost never died out of bounds, I just died from hitting too much stuff. 1479

The physics on the skateboard is a lot of fun. I didn't end up getting everything b/c I got a little too frustrated trying to get to the upper levels over and over, but I loved all the nooks and places where power cells were.

Cool concept! I eventually got stuck in a room where I kept getting to the door and restarting, and I wasn't quite sure what to do. Waiting times after dying were also a bit long, for a game where that's an essential mechanic.

I was intrigued by the first few rooms, but then the game froze :/ was playing on Arc.