itch.io

This is such a cool idea for a puzzle game!  Easy to pick up and play, and I like that you added a playable tutorial to learn the mechanics.  I loved it, and I think this could make a really neat and addictive mobile game! 

I ran into a bug where I killed the last enemy on screen but also died at the same because I didn't have enough health, but then when I reset the game the exit was right next to me.  Was that supposed to happen? 

Also:

Is the game randomly generated and did I just get very unlucky with the amount of enemies on the screen? :D

Very interesting and great atmosphere!  I found it visually quite confusing where I was at times and got lost and turned around easily, but if anything that adds to the sense of claustrophobia!

Loved the sound design and the HUD looks great too.  This sort of thing would be a great entry for DungeonCrawlerJam! 

No idea what I just played but this is awesome.  Sound design and use of samples is great and very creative.  Lots of juice and an extremely polished entry! 

Thanks for the feedback :) 

I agree the ceiling collisions were bugging me from the start and I couldn't find a fix that wouldn't break something else, so I decided to avoid small corridors for the most part, but definitely something that can be fixed in any future updates.  

Thanks for playing! 

Fun and satisfying, and it runs nice and smooth with simple controls.  Very easy to pick up and play and I like that you provided so many difficulty levels to keep things interesting.  Great job! 

A unique take on the theme which I really liked, having to navigate your ship whilst also aiming at the same time - it gets quite tricky as the game progresses! 

I would have liked to see more power-ups, maybe something that upgrades or changes your engine trajectory, or a shield or something to add some variety.  

But overall a fun little game.  I liked that you added damage indicators for both the player and enemies, and very cool that you wrote it all in C too!  

Fun little boss-rush game!  Very challenging once the bananas start flying about all over the place but good fun trying to learn the monkey patterns and avoid them.  Plus I liked that you also have to avoid your own bananas if you miss.  I also like that you included the health bar as a giant banana in the background - clever!

I managed to get 'Banana Boss' rank - is that good? 

Also, I'd heard Holinza's funk collection before and love that stuff so it was awesome to hear it in your game :D

So cool that you made this in your own custom engine!  It's a smart idea and fits your chosen theme really well.  I liked that each level introduced a new mechanic which meant you had to think outside the box.  

The animation is good and readable which is impressive with such small sprites, though a bit of a shock when I accidentally squished the bunny :D 

This is really cool and a unique concept with lots of interactivity.  I like how it's just one guy tasked with docking and repairing all of these abandoned ships overrun by lil' monsters.  The gameplay is simple and engaging once you figure out what each of your tools do.  I love the 3D effect with the environments and the overall art style works really well.  

Great job and a perfect game for such a low resolution! 

Oh and the game page looks great, real clever that you fit the screen into the overall aesthetic of the game. 

Wow, thank you!  That's some really nice feedback :)

Really appreciate what you said about variety in each level and keeping things interesting.  I was worried with such simple mechanics it would get a bit repetitive, but I enjoyed thinking of ways to keep the gameplay engaging.  I wanted the last level to be a real test of the player's skills, so am glad to hear this was effective too! 

Thanks very much for playing :D 

Thank you so much! 

I wanted to give each creature its own theme and play around a bit with dynamic music that changes as you hop through the levels.  I'm glad you liked it and found it relaxing too! :)

Thanks for such positive feedback! Having now played some of the other entries I realise I'm quite lucky to have had the full two weeks to add as much as I did!  

Glad to hear the dynamic music paid off and that you enjoyed it all the way through :)

This is such a dumb game but I love it!  The characters are hilarious and I love how they bounce around when they get knocked off their little bikes.  More modes, maps and maybe a two-player mode would have been fun, but honestly the best thing about this is how simple it is.  Definitely a fun adaptation of the unconventional weapon theme! 

The 3D audio works really well too in understanding where the opponents are - a nice touch.  

Weird, unique and fun!  An interesting take on bowling!  I like the wacky and glitchy music.

Great atmosphere and excellent sound design.  The pixel art and animation is top-notch too, and I like what you did with the parallax and foregrounds.  Also, it works well having the player sprite so small as it keeps you on your toes wondering what's lurking nearby..!  The multiple endings are a nice touch too. 

Cool concept and a unique idea for the jam!  Very stressful when the timer gets close to the end.  I like that you can pick which puzzle you want to do for practice, though I wasn't able to solve all of them in one go under 60 seconds.  

Art is nice and clear, easy to understand what to do once you start clicking around, and I like the colour palette too.

I was playing Dark Souls earlier and think I've had enough of poison swamps for one day! :D 

Loved the art style, especially the big gator checkpoints, love what you've done with such a limited colour palette.  The characters you can talk to throughout the swamp were awesome and creepy too. 

Really cool, solid little platformer!  I love the art and animation, the colour palette is really nice and colourful too, and it all works really well for a low resolution game.   Also loved the music on the second level, cool that it was all taking place on a moving train!  

I would have liked to see more enemy variety in the later levels, but the amount of personality crammed into those tiny sprites is very impressive,  especially the crow design!

Loved this!  A perfect game for the jam - nice and compact with great art, animation and really good level design utilising all the mechanics.  Loved the simple story, though kind of sad... but the music works really well and the intro was well put together.  Impressed with how much you managed to do in the time frame.  

Unique little game, fun to play but difficult to master. 

I like how the grandpa's facial expression changes depending on the balance.  The shadow of the see-saw is a nice touch too! 

Hey Werxzy,

Thanks for playing and for all your positive feedback, I really appreciate it!  I'd love to expand this one a bit more and am thinking it might make a fun little mobile game. 

I've uploaded a web version now too :) 

Hey BoiDude, thanks for playing! And awesome to see such a high score!

You know I'd love to come back to this game one day. I had a lot of fun making it and still have loads of ideas for extra features (and to fix that annoying camera for sure)! 

Nice to see people are still playing it though. 

Impressive scope for a game jam game!  I liked the inventory system, picking up items and moving them between inventory slots was responsive and easy to manage.   Environments were well designed, lots of variety to the decor and I liked the spark effects and attention to detail.   Sound design was great too and really well implemented, it added a lot to the sense of being alone in an abanonded space station. 

I would have liked an in game tutorial, especially as the enemies didn't seem to stop coming at me when the game was paused while I was checking the controls.  I also managed to soft-lock myself at the start of the game, where I accidentally dropped the yellow key card and it fell through the floor, preventing me from entering the next area. 

Combat wasn't very engaging for me.  It was interesting that you added a level up system with stat progression and some RPG elements, but I wonder if more could have been done to enhance the combat and make it more exciting. 

Interested to see where this could go!   

Thanks very much!  I stuck with the NES colour palette for the sprites/textures which gave it a retro feel.  I even decided to limit to three colours per enemy, as if they were made on original hardware (albeit without any limitations on 3D!).

Hey impmja, thanks so much for all your feedback and compliments - I really appreciate you giving my game a go! 

I really enjoyed working on the music, great to hear you liked it.  It was stuck in my head for days during development, so I had to put it on mute towards the end to avoid going insane..! 

The phonetic typing sounds were good fun to implement too, although on reflection probably not the best use of time for a game jam!  I had planned on adding secret words you can spell out too, or even bleeping out attempts at swearwords just for fun, but this didn't go anywhere in the end. 

The combat is a bit slow, the flow of the text is fixed to a set timer and not skippable unfortunately.  I appreciate you playing the game on VirtualBox, not sure if this also had any affect on the game speed however as I only tested it running on Windows.  I would love to test the game on Linux myself as I have no idea if the game has any issues running on a Linux system. 

The intention with the spellingtons was for them to throw out random words that the player would have to spell quickly in order to defend against them, but sadly I didn't have time to implement this mechanic in the end.  

No strafe mode available at the moment.  It was tricky limiting the available controls as the entire qwerty keyboard was taken up by the spelling mechanics in the end.  However I ended up removing the ability to cast spells or type messages outside of combat/spell walls/riddles after all, so perhaps could have just used WASD/QE in the end!

Thanks for all your awesome feedback and nice to hear you enjoyed making little raps out of the audio, (I was definitely doing the same during development)!  Love the idea of a couch co-op mode with wizard rap battles!  That is an insane, but potentially very fitting idea to such a wacky game. 

Thanks so much for playing and for your feedback.  

I completely agree about the map and combat encounters,  I would have loved to add some variety to the spells and damage types to add a bit more variety, but I'm really glad you enjoyed it, especially considering you're not a fan of typing games! 

Thank you for all the appreciation of the graphics and sound design, these were definitely my favourite things to work on.  Animating the wizard portrait to mimic Doom-guy was definitely intentional, so I'm glad you picked up on that :D 

Thanks Slippers!

I have to admit, the audio was all done using text to speech as I didn't have time to record my own lines (as much as I'd have loved to).  I somehow managed to get the text to speech bot to make that squeal noise, so there was no way I couldn't include it in the game! 

Really appreciate the feedback, and so glad to hear you enjoyed it, especially the audio as I had a lot of fun putting the music and sound effects together.  

Thanks for playing!  Really apprecaite the feedback.  

I definitely agree about the combat being very slow, giving the player the ability to skip the combat text would have helped a lot.  

No problem that you didn't finish it, I appreciate the level design is reliant on being a maze with not much else to aid the player in their sense of direction.  The idea was that the red vines lead you to the tree roots which need to be destroyed to unblock the exit door, but agree this could have been fleshed out a bit.  

Thanks for your compliments on scope, it's such a hard thing to manage with game jams.  I was really impressed with how much you managed to cram into your entry, so thanks for taking the time to play mine too. 

Hi BeardedCynic, thank you so much for playing and for such valuable feedback!  Really awesome to hear you stuck it out until the end.

Thanks for your feedback on the prose, I made a mistake choosing to make everything rhyme, as towards the end it made it much harder to write in the riddles in particular, I'm glad it paid off however!

I completey agree with your feedback on variety, the combat is probably the weakest element of the game due to this, as the main gimmick with the typing only goes so far.  I would love to add spell variety,  with different damage types etc.  One of my original intentions was to have an enemy that can 'curse' you, which removes certain characters from your keyboard.  I also played around with having a 'mana' pool which limits the total characters allowed in a word until a recharge, but all of these ideas were scrapped due to time contraints at the end.  

I really appreciate your feedback, and will definitely give your game a try too! 

Thanks for your reply!

That's an expensive solution.  Probably not worth it for game jam games, but thanks a lot, really useful to understand the process.

You know what, this could really go somewhere!  It's nice to see something a bit different, even if it's unfinished and doesn't quite adhere to the rules. 

The first thing I did was fall into the water, and got caught by the Eternal Jailer.  Realising in my next playthrough one of those floating bodies was my previous guy who didn't make it, I like to imagine all the other bodies are the rest of us jam participants in some kind of asynchronous online multiplayer game.  

It's a cool concept, the kind of thing where it's just weird enough to start creating your own ideas of what the hell is going on and justifying why your boat has two massive machine guns attached to it.  

The low poly models fit the strange aesthetic perfectly.

Thanks for uploading, and I enjoyed reading the game page description too. 

I liked the dialogue - simple but interesting characters, and loved how the player (much like me) had no clue why they were there! 

Pro-gamer hint: the red crystals are checkpoints - make sure you press [F] to interact with them! 

I liked the retro graphics and simple art style, exploration was fun and the first trap got me good.  The death sound effect was pretty funny and restarting was quick which kept me playing until the end (once I figured out the red crystals were the checkpoints!).  

A bit too short.  I would have loved to see more levels, perhaps with a way to use the traps against the zombies, but appreciate the time pressure.  I felt that [V] and [Y] were quite random keys to use for the lantern and medkits.  I also found a bug where my position kept resetting in the room at the end with all the zombies.  

Overall a fun little game! 

Really nice looking game, loved the pixel art and the amount of effort you put into the characters and level design.  The verticality and being able to climb stairs to access different levels added a lot of variety.  

The party system has a lot of depth to it too which is impressive, being able to swap inventory items, weapons and armour between characters is very cool.  

I didn't like pressing buttons and not knowing what they did, it made navigation a litte bit confusing at times, but maybe that's just me.  

A really solid game with a lot of polish - great job! 

Amazing atmosphere, art style and sound design.  This is the best looking entry I've played so far, insane level of detail and depth to the environments, they really reminded me of the first two Fallout games, but in 3D.  Loved the pixel art - if that was all hand drawn it would probably have taken me the majority of the jam period just to put those images together!  Sound design was pretty perfect, the distant monster sounds effects every now and then really makes you feel like you're not alone.  

Navigation was quite difficult at times, I got lost not realising there was a dark hallway I'd missed.  These would be great for hiding easily missable secrets, but a small light source or something to show there's a way through would help to keep the player moving forward.  

The inventory system was good too, and having to search the environment for text logs and items was a nice touch.

Awesome and really impressive for such a short development time! 

Wow, for your first ever game this is incredibly well made.  Nice to see a game with a focus on story and exploration over combat and the writing was pretty funny.  The ending was impressive - you clearly put a lot of effort into it and the visuals were stunning during the warp drive, I'd love to see where you go with this one! 

Loved the lockpicking mechanic (I've recently started playing Skyrim again... so it made me laugh to see a similar mechanic here), though I would have preferred using A/D or left/right to adjust the pick.  

Lighting and level design was great too, really reminds me of the original Half Life, and cool to see you added slopes to add a bit of variety to navigating the levels  Getting zapped and thrown backwards by the electricty was a cool and cinematic addition too, rather than being locked to the grid the whole time. 

Awesome game, and looking forward to seeing what you do with this! 

I managed to make it back to the void!  

Love the art style and the low-poly graphics, the pixel art textures and lighting were perfect.  I found the enemies quite hard to make out up close, but the effort you put into the level design and location outweighed any major complaints.  It's great that the exit door is located right in the centre of the map, and the church stands out so you always know which way to go to get back.  

Enemy variety was good too and the level up system worked well, I spent some time grinding the weaker enemies near the beginning to tackle those wolves in the forest, though it was only after I finished the game I saw your comment about the infinite health, but nevermind..!  Cool that you implemented looking up and down too, (even though it didn't serve any gameplay function other than admiring the awesome environments). 

I would have loved some more sound effects, especially when healing as I originally had no idea my HP went back up at those spinny triangles and just stood there spinning it endlessly thinking it would open a door somewhere or something.  The music doesn't seem to loop either.  

Overall, a fun little game, with impressive level design! 

Really liked this one!  The art style and sound design are great.  I really liked how the ghosts cast light in front of them so you can anticipate their next move and attempt to avoid them accordingly.  The atmosphere and sound effects were top notch and really complimented the spooky vibe.   This is the kind of game I that would have given me nightmares as a kid...

With only two inventory slots, being able to put items back on the pedestals was a nice addition too, and allowed me to quickly heal when in a tight spot.  I think the slow movement and PS1 aesthetics helped with the surival horror vibes, but movement was slightly too slow for me, and avoiding those ghosts was sometimes impossble.  My entry is guilty of this too, but I would have loved a map to avoid getting lost!  

But overall a really solid entry with awesome visuals, horror vibes and excellent sound design! 

Thanks for playing and for the feedback.

Much appreciated!

Ah awesome, thanks for the response.  That's good to know.