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Thank you so much for the constructive criticism! I think having more lives would have been the best solutions because when playtesting I had the timer longer and the players said the game felt too boring so getting the balance was tough, especially when I didn't have the food level done until about 5 hours before submission. I do agree that making the player restart feels way too harsh and should've been less likely to happen.

I really appreciate your feedback and I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the design and art!

Thank you for the review! Glad you enjoyed.

Nice game with some interesting puzzles! I did have a few issues with the background flickering sometimes and there being a transparent line between the body of the snake and the head, but I didn't put this against the game as I'm pretty sure this is an issue with my browser. I sadly can't give that high of a creativity score as I've seen a lot of Ouroboros related games but this one is still unique and a nice twist on the idea. I also loved the song, it was a bop for my entire playthrough.  Finally, the idea of a level editor is really great for replayability and I'm pretty amazed you were able to do that as well as all the content for the game in the jam time.

Nice game, I love these kinds of puzzle platformers! I personally felt that Cu's movement was a little too slippery for a puzzle game which led to some annoying situations where I solved the puzzle but had to spend a lot of time getting the exact movement to get to the finish (I have made the same mistake multiple times before so I understand lol). I feel like the sound effects sometimes hurt my ears a little especially Cu's movement sound. I did liked the music a lot and the outline for the art really made the game look cohesive. Great job on this stylish puzzle game!

Oh that's my bad, I thought I had a moment where it felt like there wasn't coyote time but I must've really late then 😅.

Such a creative bullet hell idea. Idk how many bullet hell/platformers I've seen, we need more! I love the design of how you have to go towards the rewards above the notes that shoot bullets, it was an interesting push and pull. I do wish there were platformer polish bits like coyote time (being able to jump a bit after you fall) and jump buffering (if you press jump a short time before hitting a platform you still jump) but those are only a bit of polish. I was also confused when I started as to what each upgrade did, so it would have been nice to have a pause menu where you could read the instructions instead of only being able to read right at the start. Overall I had a hard time coming up with critical feedback so this was a really polished game, great job!

Love the idea, but unfortunately I am horrible at these types of words games :(, still managed to get it after way too long. I think having to deal with multiple parts at the same time was too difficult but that could just be my issue. Overall the game is polished with good music and could definitely be extended after the jam is over, great job!

Super cool and creative game. I think you should've made the level have multiple checkpoints along the level to make sure that the player fully loops through the level as on the last level I tried this:

and to win the player just goes up and down at the start which is seen as a loop. Another thing that could've made the game feel more polished would be background music to just take it over the top. Other than that really great game, good job!

Thanks for the review!

Thanks for the feedback, we tried to have the goal in the how to section but I know not everybody goes there and it's not the most clear. I definitely could've added something like level 1/3 or something to give people more of a goal, seems like something I would've found if I playtested more. Anyways I appreciate the critique!

Thanks for commenting, I'm glad you enjoyed. (btw I've been loving your fonts <3 keep it up!)

Overall: Wow this game is right up my alley, you had me hooked from the "sub one minute times are perfectly possible" haha and I love leaderboards . Here were my thoughts when rating each category.

Creativity: I love the idea of using pool floats to race in a pool, very unique, although the gameplay mechanics are nothing groundbreaking. For creativity around the theme I do like how this has multiple interpretations for both the looping with the grapple and around the level. 

Enjoyment: I played for over an hour and had a lot of fun with the polished movement but there were still some issues. The main thing I felt was off was that my intuition was that you would press space to grapple the lines and then release space to stop the grapple. I feel like with how quickly you need to press the buttons for most of the times you grapple this would've made more sense, although it might be harder to teach? Maybe it could've been an option somewhere. The other issue I had is that restarting the game felt waaaay too long. Sometimes I would crash on the first 5-10 seconds of the level and then want to restart only for it to take as long as I had played in the previous run . This also impacted my gameplay where I wouldn't want to go for risky lines because restarting would take me out of the game for so long. But those are definitely not the worst issues as the overall gameplay feeling so good and the leaderboard existing made up for it. 

Narrative: So great, I cried at the twist ending 10/10. (but yeah nothing here lol)

Artwork: Really simple and clean! I love that you added the character customizations options and the leaderboard art naming system is also smart, feels very arcade-y. All the random people floating in the pool looked great and I liked the random objects on the edge of the pool. The main issue I had with the visuals was the water was a little too plain. I shader would've been amazing but even a little particle effect or faint ground tiles would've helped the water not feel as bland.

Audio: Music was good and fit really well with the vibe of the game and all the sounds I would expect to be in were in and sounded good! 

Got the first sub minute time which felt pretty great, would definitely try out an extended version of this with some fixes (mainly the restart. if the restart was faster I'd be playing more rn) post-jam!

(I could've had a 52:xx if I didn't hit the last guy before the final checkpoint lmao)

Thanks for the review! I'm glad you noticed that way I showed the bouncy planets, I had like a aha moment when I thought of that. I also agree that the gravity could have been bigger, I did used to have a line showing where the player would jump to but I found out that made the game way too easy so I didn't have the time to rebalance that because I was to focused on making all the levels. Anyways, thanks for playing and I'm glad you enjoyed!

Glad you enjoyed! If the worst part of my game is the volume I'm very happy haha

Glad you liked it! I spent more time on the art than I normally do and I'm glad it worked out.

Fun: At first I was going to say the game felt a little simple but was still fun, but then you added the console which added more to the gameplay. Then I was going to say that players could make the levels boring for themselves by moving super slow, but then you added the oxygen mechanic. So now that I don't have any notes here I'll just say for a game jam it's probably better to have fewer levels before you introduce mechanics because a lot of times people will play only the first few levels and rate based on that and for me it felt like the levels were getting a little old before you added the console. The other thing I will say is that the character rotate made the movement a little hard to know which buttons to press to go in  but I don't really know how you'd fix that, maybe have the keys next to the player showing what buttons go in each direction? Anyways I had a great time with this on!

Presentation: This pixel art in this game was super impressive. I'm not much of an artist myself but I do have a few pieces of advice. One thing that I noticed was that the art felt a little flat and a bit more shading could've helped. I also have used a vignette around the screen to help and make the game look a little nicer. The main thing I felt this game was missing was some background music but the atmospheric noises do help with that a little. Loved the starry background particles as well.

Creativity: Not a crazy idea but an interesting take on the theme and the ways you were able to expand on it worked well! Good job here. 

Overall: Wow this game was really great! I kept getting surprised at how much you guys were able to add in and how polished it all felt. Keep it up.

Thanks for the review! I was definitely planning on adding a speedrun timer but decided to make a few more levels instead.

Thanks for the comment, I did have an aim line above the player at one point but I felt like it made it hard to design interesting levels. Looking back maybe I could’ve made it a shorter line that fades out or something like that. Anyways I’m glad you enjoyed!

Thanks for the review! I don’t know if you used it but when you’re holding jump and moving the rotation speed is much smaller.

I'll suggest https://tallbeard.itch.io/music-loop-bundle, https://xdeviruchi.itch.io/8-bit-fantasy-adventure-music-pack or https://not-jam.itch.io/not-jam-music-pack as some great free music here on itch that I've used before in my projects. You can also look at https://itch.io/game-assets/tag-music and https://itch.io/soundtracks if you want other options.

Glad you enjoyed! I always want to add tutorials to jams but it seems like I never have time but I’m glad you were able to figure it out eventually. You can definitely use the game in a video, that would be great.

Yeah that was definitely not intended, thanks for the review!

Really funny idea that was executed well! Here were my thoughts on each category:

Enjoyment: This thing is right up my alley, I could honestly see myself guessing how big an object would be based on another object irl (wait I should actually do that when I'm bored) and I found it really felt good when getting it correct. I had a few issues in my playthrough, one being on my first times I got spoons which made my second round kinda boring because I already had gone through it, another one was more of a bug which was you can press enter after you guess and it will enter the guess again so I was able to get a pretty good score lol (but honestly finding that was kinda enjoyable)

Creativity: Definitely really creative! I felt like I haven't seen any ideas similar to this and it was a cool interpretation of the theme.

Style: Simplistic graphics that well for this game idea. I think it would've been nice to have at least some kind of texture in the background so it wasn't just blank (even just like a repeating brick image in the same art style would've added a lot). One big thing that made this area take a hit was no sounds but other than that that everything was cohesive and worked well!

Hey!! Feels like every time I do a jam you're also participating haha. I'm glad you enjoyed and I am also officially calling the "bug" a feature and it was actually intended (subconsciously). Crazy that we both did long arm based games, what are the chances of that lol.

Glad you enjoyed! It was impossible to hit it twice fast enough for 99% of the jam but last minute I made the hand faster to make it easier but I didn't double check that.

Thanks you for the review! Glad you enjoyed the presentation and gameplay.

Wow, thanks for the super positive review, these kinds of reviews are why I keep doing jams. I remember leaving similar reviews when I was newer at game jams so this feels like a full circle moment, and I'm sure you can do the same!

For the difficult coin we were hoping having 2 coins in that room would show it wasn't a necessary coin but I guess that didn't work. The way to get the coin is to do something like the hyperdash in Celeste as you go faster when you're swinging down in this game so you can release the jump while going down and jump to be able to save more speed.

Thanks again for the review!

Thanks for the review, we tried to make the game still accessible to those who don't like platformers as much as we do but I'm afraid we still made it too hard in some parts.

Thanks for the review, glad you enjoyed!

This was interesting! I found it impressive how you were able to think of so many topics and questions in such a short amount of time.

This was a really cool game idea I had some fun for the time I was able play it.

One thing I did try the game in fullscreen because I read the description but that actually made it so I wasn't able to see the sides of the screen so it worked better to play it in the small window but this still did make it a bit hard to play so I don't know if that made my playthrough harder than intended.

For the gameplay the most confusing thing was that there was no visual indicator that the clothes were being made by the machines so for a bit at the start I was a little confused about what was happening. After that I got into a bit of a groove. I ended up playing it twice because my first time I made a ton of clothes before it was done a tried to buy a machine so it said that I lost that day so I restarted to make sure that I won, and Ithink that is an interesting gameplay mechanic.

Glad you enjoyed the game, my idea was that there would be multiple types of checkpoints so you’re crossing a boarder and the guards are in checkpoints, the places where you check in with the other travelers are kinda checkpoints and I wanted to make checkpoints more of a game mechanic rather than just a thing you get so there’s more of a risk/reward because if you don’t get the checkpoint it’ll make you go back to the start if you mess up

That is what itch does, if you see how it says raw score and score the, raw score is the ratings from everyone and the real score is ratings after being penalized if under the median, but the formula isn’t public afaik

Yay I'm glad it reminded you of sts because that was my main inspiration

Glad you enjoyed! I don't think I'm gonna expand on this any time soon but when I get the itch to do a long term project this idea will definitely be on the list

This is a really cool game, gives me some nostalgic vibes of playing board games with friends. Its really impressive how much content you were able to add in such a short time span. One thing I wish you could've added was more animations which would've made it a lot more clear what was happening. I also wished the map overlay was more high res because it looked a bit out of place. Other than that the game was a really nice experience, nice job!

Cool stuff, crazy impressive for a first game! The game was pretty good for a bit until I found the strategy of going to one side waiting until the wave ends and going back to collect all the coins after the waves end and even after I tried to play it a bit more risky it still got a bit repetitive. One of the main reasons is that there wasn't enough variety of enemies but I get that its hard to do a lot of content in jams. One thing that I found a bit annoying was the foreground elements got in the way seeing the enemies so it could've been good to have them be a bit transparent. For the art, the game world looked really good. But I think its really important to have consistency even if it looks worse so it was a bit jarring to have some of the upgrades at high res and some pixel art. But overall this game was really impressive, good job!

I think turning this on is the way to fix it