I saw this at SIX! Very very cool!
NotExplosive
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Congrats on your first Jam! This is way better than my first game jam that's for sure.
Little nitpick: The little menu between levels doesn't serve a purpose. You're making me reach for the mouse to simply say "yes please, I'd like to play more of your game" I'm not sure why I would ever choose "title screen" just take me to the next level!
So clever right from the title screen! Pressing Q + P primes you with just the right expectations of "you're gonna need to do some weird button combos to play this game." It was so fun fumbling around on the keyboard and SO SATISFYING when I finally figured out how to launch missiles. I love that some tasks require you to be in a certain state (achieved by holding one key) before you can execute a command by pressing another.
Combine that with the charming framing of a guy on his first day on the job and the bureaucracy of being a Final Boss in a video game and you have a wonderful submission!
Minor nitpick: the text seemed to bleed off the right edge? I tended to miss the last word at the end of a line of dialogue.
Edit: Aha! It was because I was zoomed in to the itch webpage, apparently if you're at 150% zoom it causes the game to zoom in as well.
Congrats on actually finishing a thing!
Couple things I noticed:
- I wish it were clearer what object I was about to pick up and where I was about to drop what I was holding, I lost several runs due to dropping something one tile to the left or right of where I thought it was going to land.
- ESC to start is a very strange choice. Since the clock starts ticking right when the game starts I have to hit escape and then quickly move my hand over to WASD to start playing, maybe it should just be "Hit any key to start"
- The color choice of "light blue" for things that are "warm" (or at the very least un-cold) is an interesting choice. I would consider choosing a warm color (orange perhaps?) That would help me piece together what's going on on screen.
I was looking at my analytics and I've noticed a weird anomaly. Lately I've been getting pretty big spikes in download numbers for my games. Normally a given game gets one or two downloads per week but lately I've had days where I get 14, 16, and 22 downloads. The weird thing is: I see more downloads than views. That means (I think) that someone went to my game page and hit the download button multiple times? That would make sense if the difference were 1 or 2 but it's like a 3:1 difference. Here are some examples:
- 2022-8-18: Lay Down Your Roots got 8 views and 22 downloads.
- 2022-8-24: Lay Down Your Roots got 9 views and 14 downloads.
- 2022-9-10: Lay Down Your Roots got 3 views and 16 download.
- 2202-9-10: Function Conjunction got 2 view and 14 downloads.
What's going on here? Is someone going to my game pages and hitting the download button over and over?
Very fun and rewarding! I felt really clever with each puzzle I solved! The music, sound and visual flavor of the game was really fantastic as well. The fact that even the enemies have a special animation when they slide on the slippery surfaces was such a cool touch!
I think one the tiny bit of feedback I'd give is that I wish there was more attention drawn to the randomness of choosing which effect would happen next. I didn't realize it was random until about 12 levels in. Honestly I think the game would have been better without the randomness at all, but I guess we have a theme to conform to ;)
I'm on a quest to play every game with "Pip" in the title.
Really cool premise for a puzzle game, I had an idea a lot like this at the start of the jam but didn't go through with it because I wanted to keep my game 2D. There were a couple weird things mostly regarding the perspective/camera that hinder the execution but I still liked it!
I found this game because I wanted to see how many other submissions used the word "pip" in their title. Turns out our submissions are similar in more ways than one!
I love the gradual slow reveal of what the game is and what it's about, discovering the cups and what they did was very cool.
As my "factory" grew the sound got a bit grating on my ears (when I finally closed the tab I could feel this relief of pressure). But sound design for a game like this is very challenging so I don't blame you!
Made it to wave 21! Had to play the tutorial twice before I "got it" but after that I felt like I understood how to play.
I think with a bit better UI design this could be really fun! As it stands it takes 2 clicks to fire/heal/defend/etc and that typically involves moving the mouse all the way down to the bottom of the screen to all the way to the top (or close to it). That's a lot of precise movement that I'm being asked to do while also trying to rotate the ring to track my shots.
I also found that if I clicked on the Fire button while it was on cooldown, it de-selected my current die which meant I had to go back down and select the proper die, wasting valuable time.
Not to mention having to scroll! I barely used the "defend" command because it was so out of the way to reach it. I never used "Stun" for the same reason.
A possible remedy (I think) is to have the 4/6/8/10/12/20 buttons be built into the fire/heal/defend buttons and there should be a separate indicator for how much of that resource you have. That means firing is just one button.
Another remedy would be to bind hotkeys to all of the commands (both selecting dies and fire/heal/etc). That would make it much easier to engage strategically rather than keeping plates spinning.
Really cool idea, would love to see a post-jam build!
Very focused idea with a tight implementation. I made it 10 waves in before I was finally overrun. Really fantastic submission!
A minor nitpick: I wish that when I rerolled the "value" of a die that I could get some guarantee that it wouldn't be the exact same number again, it felt like a waste of a round.
For other people trying to rate this submission, the link is here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/sway
Very cool idea! Similar premise (but wildly different execution) from my submission, where you also play as a healer who has to keep the party alive.
(hope you don't mind me linking here: https://notexplosive.itch.io/ld50)
This is really cool! I want to use this but I'm worried it'll be really time consuming to convert all the assets in my game. Having a command line interface would be amazing where I could just do something like:
`scalenx.exe my-image.png 4`
Then I could automate on all the pngs in my assets folder rather than pulling them all in one-by-one.