itch.io

Love the VO work, and the overall premise is clear and explained very well. Started out feeling easy, then after several levels like that it felt like the difficulty ramped up very suddenly, so it might be a pacing/tutorializing thing.

Congrats on completing a solid entry in the short time you had for it!

The theme, the visuals, the premise and the audio are all great. The artwork in particular is cute and cohesive.

The gameplay was a mixed bag for me. The gameplay premise and the readability were good, and the controls were pretty good. I didn't quite understand how the stamina system worked, and generally didn't like having it alongside the movement. My main issue was that insta-death happened suddenly with very little warning at times, and that felt like a total mismatch with the chill vibe of the game. The game went from relaxing to extremely demanding and back at a seemingly random pace (I tried 3 times), without any telegraphing. I think the game can add challenge without being frustrating, e.g. you can miss out on big bonuses instead of being forced to replay, and after a couple of tries the slow parts just get annoying because you can't relax and you're just waiting a long time for the next challenge.

Finally, the map progress was too prominent on the screen imo, though not a big deal either.

Congrats for completing such a beautiful project!

Loved the comedy, music and history. The map/maze is a good idea, though maybe felt like it overstayed its welcome at the end. A bit rough around the edges but to be expected with a jam, congrats and great work!

Thank you very much! Sorry for the bugs :D

Haha, I've played a LOT of games. :D

Also, could it be that you have framerate-dependent logic? I.e. if you have higher FPS, the game or perhaps just the enemies might be faster for you.  My current monitor is 60hz, I used to have a 144hz one and have seen this issue before in jam projects.

Btw I added a note in the description of the game for a workaround, it's a bug that happens depending on how fast you buy and place the first "tower". If you do that quickly, the enemy spawning works as intended.

I'm happy you enjoyed it, thanks for playing and for the nice comment! I'm thinking about expanding on the theme and ideas! :)

Heh, from the perspective of playing it, there was no reason for me to expect (while thinking I had solved the case) that it would be about how I call. It wasn't even on my mind, I just cared about whether I guessed the correct suspect or not, and the game was telling me that's what it was about. I think it also goes against something that has been in most point-n-click adventure games since the 2000s, which is that usually you can't get to a dead end through bad choices, you will always eventually make it if you try everything. It's either that or your choices matter all along and you learn that early. In your project, up until the phone call, your game followed this unwritten rule as well, so it feels arbitrary to throw that in there at the end for that reason as well.

Anyway, not a big deal either. :) Congrats again on a great project!

I won't rate since I also got stuck unfortunately and couldn't get too far. I think maybe your capsule is exactly the needed height, which means some people might get stuck if the floating numbers are just slightly off. It's good to always leave a bit of extra space in tunnels for this reason. In any case, congrats on submitting!

Thank you so much, I'm really glad you enjoyed it!

Really great project, well done! My main complaint is how my "ending" happened... I think found all the clues and had 3 reds on one person. I get that I could have been wrong on 1+ of those things, but the way the ending is, it's pretty demotivating... no info, just "case ruined" and "gg". I'm guessing I mis-attributed something as suss or not, but that kind of feels like a guessing game. Some items/clue are a bit obtuse, some are confusing/misleading, though I feel like that's kind of par for the course for this type of game (point/click adventure with inventory system). Other than that, I really liked exploring this world and trying to find all the clues, and really liked the art and style. Congrats!

Pretty nice ideas, generally played well. I think I would have preferred keyboard movement, and also maybe the first part (when the machines are nice) can potentially have some mini-puzzles so the player has more control/agency. Other than that just polish and balance and it's a real game! :) Well done and congrats on the entry!

Very cool and impressive! Amazing that you made s mini-scratch like this for the jam, well done!

Agree that it's a bit too slow. I didn't mind the distance thing. I played until the level where there's 2 robots and one of them can't be programmed and the other needs to go through.  After many tries I got the top robot through the first door, then I realized that level is totally broken since I couldn't even walk to the other door due to the shadow blocking the player on the corridor heh. Totally normal for a jam though. :) Anyway, great work!

Ah that's odd, sorry about that! I think both buying and placing need to be quick after the page loads for the workaround to work (ideally within 1-2 seconds), but you probably already tried that. In any case, thanks so much for trying and good luck with the jam!

I managed to find a direct link to the music as I used it: https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/19493430/cellular-dist2/assets/music.mp3

Cheers!

Very good job, with a bit more polish this could be a great game. Controls got in the way sometimes, default walk speed felt too slow for traveling, and the NPCs were a bit confusing to me in terms of behavior. In the end the game seems to have bugged out, I couldn't attack any more, I was close to both winning and losing at the time heh.

Oh and btw, small feedback: I think your youtube video could be better... it has too much stuff unrelated to the great music you made, I think you should just focus mainly on playing the music in a video like this, so that game devs can quickly discover if the music fits their idea. I actually skipped listening to your music at first because many other albums let you listen to the full album directly on the youtube and for your music i have to download files and figure out the naming convention to even consider it.

Again though, the music is amazing. I think more people should find it, and I wish you the best and thank you! :)

Great music, thank you! I used your track Bold in my game jam project The King and his Spleen. 3 different people mentioned loving the music. I only just realized that I accidentally slowed down the song significantly somehow during my conversion process. This happened late at night, and when I put the music in the game the next day I didn't even realize it, I only realized it just now when I went to find the original song to tell you the name 😂

Anyway, wanted to let you know, and now you can consider offering this song mixed the way I did it too! :)

I really liked this one, very close to excellent. Main issue is the lack of feedback about the objective and progress within it. I moved a couple of pallets, one from a shelf and one from the floor, into trucks. Inside the trucks the color changed to yellow on one and red on the other. I tried the 2 other trucks but they also turned red. I wasn't sure what I was doing wrong, if anything. Other issues that got in the way were just the bugs really, sometimes it would go backward when I press w. Then if i let go of w and press it again, it goes forward. And the other main bug was the lights would turn off from certain angles (even though I could see just fine).

I think with a bit of polish, and a more thought out game loop, this could be a fun game! Congrats and well done!

I finished it (had to reload once), was a fun little experience. I enjoyed clicking around before the reload, and had almost solved it the first time so I got through fast the second time. I can see this being very difficult at the same time, if I hadn't thought to click... where the important things are.

Anyway, wasn't expecting a rhythm thing after, hah! Got through it on my first try (is there a loss condition? not sure, I did make some mistakes but mostly did okay).

Nice work on the project!

I appreciate it! I'm guessing I'm going past some allocation limit. I'll try to reduce the texture using in a future version!

I really liked the story, the writing and the art (silly as they are). I don't mind the sound. Dubious educational value. :)

I don't mind the big challenge. The controls make the challenge a bit bad (the controls were way too weird around dashing into enemies imo), but what made me stop playing is that pressing R to retry makes you go through all the dialogue again. That might be okay on earlier levels, but when there's lots of spikes and insta death, it just becomes annoying. Also WASD would have been nice.

Thanks for the nice comment and feedback! Yeah I feel the same, it's very close to an okay experience, I caused the spawning bug in the last hour, and I wanted to make the unlock system clearer visually in the game. I did have a bunch of thematic text in mind too but I decided to try text-less for some reason. But yeah I think there's good potential in the whole concept!

Also, I will say that at least 2 people have said that they looked up what the spleen does after seeing the game :P

Sorry about that! Thanks for trying, wish I knew what to suggest, it sounds like a bug. I'll try to debug and fix this in the future. I might be using up too much VRAM, there are only a few textures but they're on the large side due to how I'm (pre)rendering the space.

Sorry for the trouble with Firefox, and thanks for playing and for the nice comment!

Thank you so much! Yeah I took on quite a lot to get the visuals as they are -- the background is pre-rendered (you can easily hide it with css) but then lit/shadowed dynamically as though it's part of the world (I'm enjoying threejs's TSL). So that involved also pre-rendering normals and depth images, as well as an image to uniquely identify the cells, to be able to place towers, and then all the code to hook that up and iteration on failure due to color space and other conversion problems. I also export the blood vessel curve's tangent and normals everywhere, to pre-calculate what the velocity should be on a grid ahead of time, that way I can apply that to thousands of these particles every frame. I'm definitely happy I released something functional considering the scope I made for myself, but yeah I also need to be better at sizing such things haha. Just a couple more hours of polish and this could have turned out way better I think. I'll probably release a small update after the jam is over. I appreciate the comment!

I like the overall game idea, execution is hit or miss.

Very confusing at the start. Why do you let the player "Start Journey", which sounds like "Start Game", when they don't have any cards? Just prevent that if you know it doesn't work! Almost feels like you're trying to trick new players.

The main gameplay loop is great, and I like the concept and general incremental design around it.

I like the visuals in general, though definitely could use some basic animations to help tell the player what is happening. e.g. show damage amount temporarily, not just resulting hp. showing that the player healed. showing your stats change when you change cards. when the enemy changes (especially if it's the same type of enemy) and other things like that.

Battle Results screen is obnoxiously slow (would be fine if skippable).

Progression is really really slow, i would have preferred it a lot faster. also related is stronger enemies don't give more, which feels bad. Feels too grindy in general. I don't mind some amount of that, but the time between meaningful decisions was too long most of the time.

Health card seemed to do nothing? i gave it to one of my creatures or used it, the card disappeared and the creature didn't gain hp, and neither did i

Music is nice, sound is mostly good, though battle sounds are pretty weak, and should be varied (based on enemy, and based on death or not)

I kept playing partially because i wanted to see what would happen when i combined two level 3 cards. instead of a nice big reward, you are very heavily punished as the player, by losing some of your best cards... without warning. oof.

Sorry for the long list, I did like it overall, and congrats on the project!

So strange, sorry about that! I definitely have code to handle window resizing and didn't run into any issues with that, though of course maybe there's a bug with my code that I didn't catch. Note that only the first sphere on the left (the red sphere that has a visibly blinking light, above the number 10) can be purchased at the start. At the start of the game, clicking the other spheres does nothing even when everything is working correctly. If you feel like trying again, I can only suggest trying another browser if you have one already or feel like downloading one. Someone who had issues mentioned that OperaGX worked for them, of all browsers. No worries if you don't feel like it 😅

Woo, glad it worked and that you enjoyed it!! Very random indeed that OperaGX works of all browsers, I haven't even tested it there hah! Thanks for playing and for the nice comment! :)

I don't mind the silly idea.

Visuals and sound are pretty decent for a jam.

The map seems quite big, but it's unclear where to go, and I think I reached a dead end, there was a pit with a single worm in it. I tried for a whole minute to either get out or kill the worm, and I couldn't get out and the worm seemed invincible. Eventually I died and that was it.

IMO focusing on a single screen + enemy and making that good and fun by itself would help with this type of game,, more so than a huge level with enemy variety.

Cool gameplay idea (a bit like dome keeper), but pretty confusing to play. The dialogue thing others have mentioned is definitely really annoying, and upgrades are mentioned but I couldn't find them anywhere, i tried clicking around too (why is there a cursor in this game while platforming??) and pressing random buttons but didn't find any upgrade screen. Sending stuff home just increased numbers but didn't do anything. The first robots says it's sending me a list, but it doesn't tell me what's needed, just shows 0 for all at first, and I increase them (both mine and the city's numbers) and nothing happens. Aside from confusion, I think the main thing I would suggest improving is making the movement more interesting, at least having acceleration and velocity, but also you can do things like bounce the player when they dig, or add gravity and jumping, etc. Movement is the main thing is player does to achieve their objectives.

Anyway, congrats on the entry, it's tough to build complex things like this!

Thanks! Yeah combining TD with light puzzle/mystery elements maybe wasn't the best idea. :D I thought people would enjoy figuring things out, but I guess not! Also, things are definitely more vague than originally intended (e.g. I wanted the yellow towers, that slow enemies and slightly damage them, to have a simple visual effect). I had hoped to have a little polish time at the end but I didn't. I just updated the game's page with an explicit explanation of it all, for people who are stuck or curious.

Sorry for the trouble. I just updated the game's page settings (the itchio "Edit Game" page), and I resized the game which should help on lower resolution screens and lower power computers, but also potentially the shop was off-screen for some folks? I also added a very detailed explanation in the game description for how everything works (see "NOTE 2"). I hope that works out, otherwise sorry again. I did test an old intel Mac computer and it was fine as well as my PC with Chrome / Edge, so not sure why it may not work for you. Thank you for trying!

Ah, sorry it didn't work. I tested Firefox after reading this, and it worked correctly.

That said, I just updated the game's page settings (the itchio "Edit Game" page), and I resized the game which should help on lower resolution screens and lower power computers. I also added a very detailed explanation in the game description for how everything works (see "NOTE 2"). I hope that works out, otherwise sorry again. I did test an old intel Mac computer and it was fine as well, so not sure why it may not work.

Ah darn, sorry about that, perhaps it's an incompatible thing in the project (I did use a couple of large textures).

I liked the mini intro, and the level design progression is really good. Nice retro art too. Pretty fun movement/attack overall, but also inconsistent at times due to the speed and sometimes the level design. Overall, it's a great project, well done!

Thanks so much! Yeah I'm often too ambitious (for my abilities) with my projects and ideas! :D Thanks for playing and for the kind words!

Yeah, I wanted to add 2 floating dots above the red tower, and fill them when purchased which unlocks the yellow tower, and shows the 2 floating dots above them now. Yeah also hiding the later ones at the start would have been a good way to help as well! I wanted to show the player what they can unlock so they look forward to more, but I agree the whole thing in general is too vague right now.

You need to buy 2 red to unlock yellow, 2 yellow to unlock cyan, 2 cyan to unlock purple. I wanted to add 2 dots above each to indicate the progress of that but didn't get to it in time.

Not sure why tower got stuck, sorry about that and for the bugs in general, and thanks for playing!

Yeah visual or other feedback would have definitely helped there, thanks for playing and for the nice comment!