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Ok -- I was seriously not expecting to get so hooked!! Such a direct approach to the theme, but you did it so well, amazing job! Really good combination of game mechanics, a surprising amount of strategy with the mocktail buffs, and the freeze system was just the icing on the cake. Personally I love games where you start out struggling, before eventually getting unfathomable amount of money and breaking the score counter of the game,  so naturally I got fully addicted -- you nailed the 'one more spin' feeling you were after. If this is a first or early time working in 3D, you've done really well! A bit more of a 'sense of place' might help, make it feel a little less liminal (windows, room being bigger than just what we see, etc.), and perhaps making the camera a little more diegetic (it felt a little low? i kinda felt more like a camera place on the counter top  than a person in-universe) -- but these are just small tips to improve minor aspects of the game, not a major knock at all.

Fantastic work, a real pleasure for me to play!

Guys -- sweet game! Art style is dope, great little touches on the SFX and attention to detail on the UI! I think the main thing that needs work is just the UX -- I wasn't really sure what the QTEs did, since they didn't always trigger the ability upgrade screen,  so I'm not sure what does (number of kills??); I'm still not sure what the meter is, even after reading your comment; and sometimes getting damaged felt a little unfair because I couldn't really tell what hit me, even if something totally fairly did, since there wasn't really any feedback. I'm sure you only need to make some small tweaks to help the player implicitly figure out how these things work, and then this is set to be a masterpiece! REALLY excited to check this out post-jam. Kudos!!

Hahah, excellent work! Very fun and cute game!

I really enjoyed the whole vibe of the game, and that you kept it nice and short and snappy. A small piece of feedback: I think it would be beneficial to have a more obvious visual indicator of the point around which you're meant to circle, or otherwise change how the spins are counted so that the cursor can go in circles anywhere? Without the guide, it seems like it's just a speed management game, but then you'll occasionally slip your mouse over a non-obvious point in the screen and it won't count as a spin. It is okay for it to be both a speed management and control precision game -- in fact I think that's a really cool game design choice, forcing the players to balance both -- but I think the requirement and visual feedback of the latter should to be communicated back to the player as excellently as you've done so for the former. Maybe an inner and outer ring that the mouse needs to stay within? Anyway. Sorry -- that was a really length paragraph for what is really a tiny gripe. It did not really both me that much!

On the whole, you've done great work here, awesome job!!

Awesome work! Remarkable amount of gameplay content for a jam game, super great sense of player choice and progression! 

From the credits, seemed like there was supposed to be music? May have been bugged for me, only heard the repetitive swinging sound, which would be my main gripe of the game. That is, if you guys up the visual and audio capability of your team, you will absolutely destroy any jam, I have no doubt.

Other than that, I can't really fault the game at all! Some people have said the swinging is a bit unintuitive to start -- I don't think that's such a bad thing! It gives the game a a Getting Over It kind of learning, a non-fake difficulty where the challenge is a real-life mechanical one, that you actually learn to get better at. It's not gonna be everyone's cup of tea, but I think it's a completely valid approach. Do I think the swinging mechanics could be polished up a touch more? Sure, but that would be more about elevating the feeling of doing it right, not taking away the learning challenge by making it trivial. 

Anyway, enough rambling from me. Fantastic stuff, please update post-jam! This has such genuine potential as a game.

WOW! Absolutely incredible work! A really fun and unique concept, super polished, AND balanced well gameplay-wise to give a solid amount of challenge, but still feel achievable?? This is an unbelievably strong entry -- and from a solo dev no less?! I'm blown away and utterly impressed. You smoked it!

Heheh, cute gayme! I see some others talking about there being a lack of 'gameplay' -- this is not inherently problematic, some things can just be simple experiences. But! If you did want a super quick tweak to give a little more meat, you could perhaps put more than two response options per visitor (maybe a -Bad -Neutral -Okay and -Good option?) and shuffle them around, so that the player has to think a little bit more about each characters situation and give good advice. Just an idea!

Anyway, great work! 

Aw, fills my heart to hear that you loved it so much!! And I'm so so glad the ending hit so hard, I think I was worried people might not really care too much about it, so your words mean a lot! It is just a little funny to hear the word polished when much of the background dialogue is basically me completely making it up as I go in character for 10 minutes straight, lolol ^-^'

WOW! I would really not worry about the length or simplicity of the game, the sheer level of polish and cohesion of the whole game easily made it one of the most entertaining I've played in the entire jam. The humour had me genuinely bellowing with laughter, seriously too good !! Fantastic work you two, full marks from me.

Oh my god, you're seriously too kind! I really appreciate the sentiment, truly. The capsule art is such a fussy particular thing for me to have cared about, lol, so I appreciate your ability to also appreciate the small things like that :)) 

Thanks heaps for playing, I'm so glad you liked it!

Excellent work, great job! Super moody atmosphere and very entertaining writing! Like others, I also had some performance issues that meant that, the video played back super laggily (leaving me not 100% on how the game worked), and that made the game itself not register my inputs even when I did time them correctly (leaving me even more confused about how it worked!). But I did the zoom-out trick that another commenter mentioned and managed to beat the game! Very cheeky final cutscene, hahah. Hats off to you!

Naw, thank you so much, you're too kind! I'm really chuffed to hear you think it has potential -- I was worried it might not land with people, being too weird for a visual novel but too railroaded to be called a puzzle game, so I'm glad you see the vision too!! :))

Incredible atmosphere,  fantastic stylisation, awesome sound design -- all round a super fantastic work.

I want to play to beat it but I'm having a hard time figuring out where I'm going wrong! Sometimes its felt like I've done all the tasks I can see but my heart rate is rising anyway. Some kind of post-game indication of what I failed at would be super helpful and make me want to grind at the game. 

The spinning felt a touch off for me too, though I might just be bad; I could also never quite figure out whether the valve wanted to be rotated clockwise or anticlockwise, haha. Maybe you could just take the absolute value of the Mouse X & Y Input axes and automatically translate it to the valve rotation -- I think if you were to multiply it down enough and bound the mouse to the window, spinning would be the optimal strat anyway (as just going in a single direction would have your mouse hit the windows bounds).

A real pleasure to play -- excellent work!

Really glad you enjoyed it, thank you so much for playing! Yes, the yellow puzzle is a circle -- I've posted the solution guide in a comment if you still wanna help our guy !

Nice work, and cute art! I agree with others that the camera controls should be adjusted -- I'd probably have the camera rotate only around the Y-axis, keeping the X-axis locked or at least damped? Not super often you need to be looking directly downwards, or perfectly parallel with the ground.

A simple adjustment to make the gameplay loop more solid might be to have the each weapon grow stronger for each time you span the wheel before getting it. These upgrade point could be 'banked' so that even if you get three bad spins in a row, you know that when you do land on a weapon, all those points will all get dumped into it, and that weapon is going to grow by 3 tiers at once ! Very satisfying. This way, you're encouraged spin the wheel so that your weapons scale to keep up with enemies, but you're also forced to learn the particular playstyle demanded by each weapon. Just an idea!

Good stuff!

Hahah all good. Skill issue on my part lolol.

Thanks for your kind words about the graphics! Though, it does say upfront that the game is very audio-heavy, I totally understand that it's really not ideal for non-native speakers at all -- I'll make an effort to include a subtitle option for my games in future! The clue for the puzzle could definitely be said to be a bit arcane, I'll probably adjust this in a future patch for the game outside the jam. 

Thanks so much for playing!!

Thrilled to hear your enjoyment for the audio and my, uh, cinematography(?). They're kinda more peripheral elements that can go unnoticed, so I really appreciate your noticing, that means a lot!

Getting 'stuck in the loop' is actually, sorta, intended, a bit of a meta-narrative point, and is when the game shifts into being less of a cutscene and more of a puzzle, though I'll be the first to confess that this maybe isn't signposted well enough, heh. If you are curious about how to beat the game and get the good ending, you can check my comment with a link to a quick explainer video ':)

Either way thanks for playing!

Thank you very dearly, you're too kind! I did wonder if anyone was gonna sit though all my super dumb dialogue, hahahah

Really great work, looks incredible! Gameplay-wise, I feel like the recoil that the spinner does after hitting an obstacle is really needlessly punishing, often the recoil from one hit will cause a chain reaction, and your single mistake will mean all of your lives lost, which feels really unfair, so some i-frames might be a good idea I think. That's really my only gripe! Your level design is really underrated, super nice progression of levels, and the level geometry itself is suuuper satisfying to navigate around when you do it just right. Awesome stuff!

Hahah, I wouldn't call it a disaster -- in all seriousness ( :O ) I'm so curious what the full initial plan was gonna be! Regardless, even with the time crunch, I feel if you'd put colliders on the desks and set up a weirdly long office, I feel like you could have had a interesting racing/speed game on your hands. Maybe spinning at different speeds would grant different abilities, no spinning might make you move faster, spinning a little fast might throw off movement a little bit but let you knock over obstacles, and spinning the fastest might make you start flying? Just riffin here.

Also, tell me why the sound design is like... weirdly good? For one, I've never heard such an accurate 'bumping in an office wall' sound before.

Anyway, congrats on submitting, and don't stress too much about misjudging scope, solo dev is hard and such is par for the course on early game jams, haha. The opening cutscene to my game just... became the whole game lol. Hope you'll keep at it and take on more jams in future!

That progress bar is evil though.

Wow! Thank you for the compliment; being compared to an A24 movie is like, stupidly high praise, so thank you so much. I posted a solution guide to the puzzle in a comment if you're interested ! :))

Wow! Seriously fun game. A little bit of a learning curve but the I got totally hooked. Others are mentioning difficulty -- I don't think it's too much of an issue. I think maybe there could be a kind of handicap situation where each death gives a nominal stat increase, just so that any amount of playtime slowly raises the skill floor, but I personally enjoyed the challenge and didn't mind the repeated attempts at all, since the controls became really intuitive. Perhaps you could make each death seem a little less menu-y and a bit more 'instant respawn' to keep the flow of the game going -- current death pop-up could be a temporary HUD pop-up as a new ship spawns in right away. 

Also -- holy programming. I think starting to even think about how to program it might induce a migraine. Watching the trajectory just... be correct... was crazy. Also, I'm not sure what, but I feel like you should do something when all settings of thrust will result in a crash -- it's a very particular kinda 'oh shit' feeling that I think you should play up, haha.

I found myself a little disappointed there wasn't more to play once I beat the final level! Remarkable entry, full marks from me, bravo.

I put a link to a solution guide in a comment if you're still interested!

Frankly, I'm pretty god-awful at shooters, but something about the atmosphere you all created here compelled me to really try and beat your game! I've played for a couple hours now but I can't get past the 5th stage! I'm probably gonna keep trying even after the jam is over haha.

In any case, really lovely work. I maybe had some slight performance issues? but that's totally on my end and not a major flaw. Great little UX feature with the letter dissolving animation playing exactly when you complete the mission -- no guessing 'was that a headshot?'. I personally would have cranked up the timeslow a little bit more per rotation (especially for noobs like me), and made it renew at the end of each new rotation, but I understand that there's a difficulty balance to be struck (i.e. the 3rd stage is more difficult precisely because after 720 and 1080, the time scale is far more back to normal.

In any case, these are minor grievances. Full marks from me! 

Heya, sorry to say, but I think the download is broken! I'm getting this error when I try to run the executable.

Had a fun time with this game! The basic mechanic actually handled really quite well IMO. I do think you needed to be more explicit about the wall jump and roll mechanics since I was such on the second screen for a while until I figured out you can just kinda click to chain wall jumps, though it also control relative well once I'd figured that out. The rolling was also a bit hazy to understand, but I did eventually figure out that you basically just needed to spin dash into the tile in front of the hole.

I will say -- you really have a knack for level design! Super inventive with fresh concepts on each screen.

Super solid concept and great basic implementation -- with some further refinement and UX  adjustment, I can absolutely see this becoming the next Jump King 📦🎂

Great styling! I'm not sure I super  understood how the combat worked, more of a tutorial might have been nice (unless I somehow missed it!)? The practice mode was good, but even just a few explanatory boxes during it would have been illuminating. I like how you have the many different characters to face off against, though it would be really great if they had really (more?) noticeably distinct play styles that forces you to adapt over the course of the game. The battles got a little bit grindy otherwise, though the story beats in kept the game refreshing. Overall, a sweet entry!

I think your directional movement code might be bugged! It's impossible to drive forward south while the car is facing south :P

From what I can tell, I think your current movement code could be reconstructed something like this:

angle =  (variance from facing north, ±180 degrees)

xAcceleration = angle * speed * upInput

yAcceleration  = (  upInput * speed * (180 - |angle|) )  +  ( downInput  * (|(angle - 45) % 180| - 90) )

...which has some odd quirks like the fastest way to go north being to face south west and press both the up and down keys, lol.

You probably want something more like:

xAcceleration = sin(angle) * speed * (upInput - downInput)

yAcceleration = cos(angle) * speed * (upInput - downInput)

Anyway. The game 'packaging' gave me a chuckle, that's for sure!

Hello everyone! If you're having trouble unlocking the Good Ending, I've made a quick video to help point the way (that doesn't contain any spoilers for the final cutscene)!

(breaking) cycles - bts & how to get the good ending (3m25s)

Even it's arguably a tiny bit obtuse to get there, I really hope you'll all play to see the ending because it's seriously cool, if I may say so myself!

Either way, thank you all for the love so far. I'll make a point to get to everybody's game who comments :))

Happy jam!

Thank you so much for playing, and thanks for bringing that issue to my attention!! I have patched ending  transition, so it'll work properly for you now 😅

I really like this concept, it's kind of like a detective game of your own life, really interesting! I think I may have had some bugs, moving between levels before collecting all of the clues and then having to loop back around, I couldn't really tell whether this was intentional? I also wish the flavour text wasn't timed, and instead that I could click once to inspect an object, and then a second time to dismiss the text? But in any case reaching the fun little end screen was very satisfying. Nice work!

Surreal and intriguing! I'm so curious what it all would build to, what it all would mean. Nice work!

Yeah so basically holy shit. I love the dithered graphics mixed with the manga printing techniques,  just sick. Seems like a visual style you've developed for yourself which I really gotta respect. What really got me was the writing though, oh my god, somehow genuinely triggering me for a situation I've never been in! Really sparked a primal terror in me, congratulations, haha. A true 10/10.

Wowowow, loved this a lot! The art style was really fresh and well done, and the story was definitely really intriguing, a super fun fake-out in the middle.

I have a few nitpicks for you, though these are so minor, they haven't had any bearing on my rating (if you know what i'm 5aying). 

I'm not sure of the capabilities of your engine, but I really really recommend changing the font -- your beautiful visuals deserve more than Verdana!! Nothing too kitsch, just something that understatedly matches the vibe of the game, (a brief look on Google Fonts, maybe something like 'Quicksand'?). It will really take your game from looking like somebody's pet project, into a bona fide, professional and artistic visual novel. Furthermore, using different fonts (if possible) for just the different character names can instantly help the reader more clearly and instinctually understand who is talking, esp for people with CVD or reading processing impairments.

Secondly, your writing is definitely solid, the characters are fun, but I'd love to see them pushed beyond just being 'the peppy one', or 'the moody one', or 'the arcane one'. Your visual character design is just so unique and original, but personality-wise, I feel like I've seen already these characters before, y'know? So just pushing, developing the characters further, making them kinda weirder, really, and trying to pull away from the cliches of character writing. Kind of hand-wavy feedback, but just a direction for to consider working on. 

Anyway, fussing about aside, I super loved this, you did absolutely fantastic.

Maybe it was supposed to spook me, but I had a big grin while playing, haha. Nice work!

Thanks so much for playing!

Yes, super valid critique. There's a delicate balance between punishing the player for being careless with where they finish their path and making the next targets be in impossibly difficult spots to get to. My plan was to make bonking into the carcasses nudge them slightly, and then if you rammed them 2/3 times, you could destroy them too. This way, a skillful player can try to play carefully, setting themself up nicely, weaving around the carcasses, and using as minimal dashes as possible, while if a novice player gets stuck, they always have an 'out' by kind of brute-forcing it. (Not how I would personally like the player to play the game, but if I can make the carcass destruction satisfying in its own right, then this could be fun in its own way.) But I just kind of ran out of time for that stuff, and focused on finishing the narrative component 😅

Maybe I'll polish stuff up and release it more properly at some point. This was my first time entering a game jam, and my first released game in 5 years, so thank you for the encouragement!

Hahah, funny twist, very cool. For 2 hours this definitely gave me a good laugh. Nice work!

I absolutely adore the styling of the game, super cool, you have a great eye. As another comment says, I had issues with the gun tracking my mouse correctly, I basically couldn't aim at all. Also, even once you die, you're still able to shoot, haha. All the same, I managed to destroy the copter thing, which was cool. I got a message in response, although it kind of seemed like it got cut off? Not sure.

Anyway, really cool vibe, great work.

I really quite like the concept of the game, the switching between the two characters is a really interesting mechanic, but I think I failed to follow along exactly how the two different levels interacted with one another, and I might have accidentally cheesed a section? I got to a point where Seal was in a room with four runes and a blocked door, and Mouse was at a point where he had to seemingly impossible jump. I tried different things but ultimately was stuck and unfortunately wasn't able to finish the game.

But I really think there's something interesting here! You've gone in a super unique direction from the theme for sure. The game is undeniably teeming with personality.