itch.io

I faced the same issue. I am on Firefox with an AZERTY layout (but I don’t think it would impact the tab key?). By trying some other key combinations I accidentally closed the browser too. So I gave up after that.

My two biggest complaints would be the slow movement speed (feels arbitrary low like BOTW quick speed exhaustion) and the music being very low compared to the SFX. The jump height is also pretty low (a bit like how BeardMage describes it). Other than that the SFX and music are nice, the art as well (just a tiny polishing left I’d say, but it doesn’t help that I started playing video games with the DS and Wii, which had quite high standards already, so my standards are high from what I am most familiar with. It is still very good by itself!), and it is overall very creative! The ending was quite funny as well.

I can’t see the connection to the theme though. Did I miss something? Is it because it is a very resistent animal?

Thanks ❤️! I was thinking making places inaccessible without figuring out the mechanic would be interesting, but the more feedback I get, the more it seem frustrating. Didn’t have much time for the sfx and art since it isn’t my speciality, but glad you still like it! Someone else also complained about using the same keys to rewind. If I spend some time post jam to polish, I’ll probably add keybinds customization, but yeah probably remap these as well. If you have any keybinds suggestion for that, I am open to them as well.

The first is more production/mixing/mastering oriented. With good explanation in addition to some touch of humour and auto-derision. The second one is more theory oriented like 8-bit Music Theory, but not specific to game or analysis, more on very focused tips. But you have to scroll back to old videos as he stopped making free content on YouTube for years now.

Yeah no urge of course. Because my other project is 3D and I aim for a quite similar style, and that I mostly only ever did SDF shaders in Shader Toy literally just one year ago, I am sure it would be super valuable to me. And I’d expect the principles to be the same in Unity and Godot, even if the nodes or UI are different. Especially if mesh generation is involved, this currently sounds like witchcraft to me (at least doing it through shaders instead of scripts), and my first vertex shader was literally moving the plants in this jam.

Thank you ❤️. I thought about having difficulty modulatino, but impossible to fit in a jam. I wish it would have been a bit easier though. I didn’t get enough play-testers pre-submission to really adjust that. Not sure that I would had the time to adjust though, it got super tight the last days.

As a non-artist (well musician only), it is extra rewarding that some people really enjoyed the look! I spent a lot of time fighting with colors in shaders + lights + canvas modulation so it really means a lot to me.

Thanks for the feedback ❤️!

Loved the sound tracks made/chosen for the game.

I made it, I have been writing music for years (and need to share more of it), so it was manageable for me to write my own. It is also just a 30 seconds loop, with instruments turned on and off, so from a musician perspective the workload was manageable (it was Tuesday when I started, so I didn’t have the choice anyway…). The trickiest was really the base piano loop and chord progression, and the guitar solo (not very good and rarely played it in the last years with university and personal issues). Once the foundation is in place, it is just building a drum loop from common patterns and working around the chord progression. It also does help that Ableton has very good acoustic instrument presets.

maybe slightly a little too floaty for my taste.

Really? Multiple complained that the fall was way too fast. Or are you talking about the jump?

The only portion of level design I didn’t enjoy too much was the “intrusive thought” portion. It was a bit frustrating constantly getting pushed, dying, resetting, but not being sure where to reset at. There are times where I would reset and still just instantly get pushed to the spikes. I can see the design metaphorically, but from a game design enjoyment perspective I think it’s a bit too harsh.

I agree with you, and you are not the only one to complain. I myself feel like it is much harder than the rest, looking back. The trick is to more or less take the wind areas in a specific order and bump around the blue plants, but the physics of it is too unpredictable, and the area very unforgiving. If I spend some time polishing the game after the jam (probably not immediately, I have other projects aside), that part needs a redesign. After making wind easier to figure out.

I’ll make a post later this week about how to make FX with no texturing talent, if people are interested !

Yes! The effects look so incredibly polished, I am curious of how it is all done!

A bit too intense to be honest But it helps that I already explored quite a few aspects of it all (writing a devlog on that as well). using modulation over a very small texture count and having a small recycled music loop (30s or something) also helped to gain some time). It also helps to be out of a job right now, it basically was a full-time job with some overtime on the last 5 days or so.

I don’t know if I’ll do it before the voting frame but I’ll try to give it a try. Otherwise Under Belly (You Suck At Producing), Hack Music Theory and 8 bit Music Theory are great learning sources.

Thank you ❤️

Thanks ❤️! Yeah multiple people complained with the wind. It goes with the fact that there is no speed cap so momentum accumulates. The area with a bunch of wind is also quite unfair on insight.

Very fun, the last few puzzles were pretty challenging (in a good way!). Got a few glitches like arms or bits of the body getting stuck in walls, but nothing game breaking (it is fun in itself as well). It was hard to throw axes and cut the string at the first axe level (I was wondering if it was the right way to do it?). Maybe I’d show all options as well when switching arms, for a moment I thought it forgot my unlocks. But yeah it is all a bit of polishing needed, same for art and music, the basis is great! The expression and goofiness makes it really fun! This one goes in my favorites as well.

Also very cool that it was the overlay of the stream, I didn’t make the connection immediately!

Thanks ❤️! The theme immediately rang with life struggles, so the messaging came quite naturally, especially after playing Celeste some weeks ago. Glad the gameplay felt nice, it is still rough on the edges but spent a few days just on that, trying to get the best feeling in that time-frame. If I had more time I’d had added difficulty tiers, but I doubt it would have been doable within 2 weeks with all the rest.

I tried making dynamic music for the first time in a university project, it was really fun, now I want to put that in all my projects! Especially as it doesn’t take more time, and on the dev side it is not so hard to implement (just smoothstep on volumes based on parameters, here the ratio of completion). But I agree the sound effects are hardly noticeable. Music was done on Tuesday, audio effects on Monday, and Wednesday was focused on fixing an atrocious music desynchronisation. So I lacked time for proper mix balance (not sure if it’d be better with stress, thinking about it). But some of them should probably evolve as well, since they are pretty calm compared to the music being a bit more intense in the end.

Thanks ❤️! That’s part of why those messages are around, I feel like they are much needed these days. They were at least needed for me. The difficulty slope is maybe too abrupt, but hard to make it different within a jam. I draw a lot of inspiration from Celeste in this aspect, where game difficulty is supposed to be a representation of life challenges, and to encourage facing difficult situations instead of fleeing them, within a safe space. Not as well executed though, Celeste is a monument to me. The fact that I played many platformers (including Celeste recently) and got very few play-testers pre-submission didn’t help to balance it all either. But I’m glad some people still had a good time despite the (almost) unforgiving level design.

Thanks ❤️

Thanks! Yes, the web version isn’t well optimized, and I noticed the stuttering too late to mitigate. You are not the only one complaining about using W to jump. I might fix that post jam. Glad you still enjoyed it though! And for the last question, it isn’t, to counter balance the rest of the narrative which is a bit too much “do it all on your own”. Especially as it is still very stigmatized by many people.

Thank you very much ❤️. I am alone on this project so this means a lot!

Yeah the web version doesn’t run well. There is a playthrough in the YouTube video at the bottom of the page with non stuttering audio. I didn’t have the time to fix it, as I incorporated audio on Tuesday night.

Thank you ❤️. I am not an artist so I couldn’t do more sophisticated than that! Besides adding more variation in tiles using Material Maker.

Thanks! Would you mind to elaborate on what was the confusion? I added a fix to prevent instant rewind while moving during my own testing, but wasn’t sure if separate key-binds was a good idea. So I’m genuinely curious to hear your arguments. Is it that you go right on rewind when you expected to go left for instance? Or unrelated?

It is a bit of a stretch, but you could still argue that the “ball” can’t die, while most golf games make you lose one shot if for instance you land in water.

But yeah it’s a nice game. It reminds me a bit the Super Stickman Golf series. Unlimited use is better though at least with how hard some levels would otherwise be.

I felt like the difficulty curve was OK (maybe I am a noob at such games too!). But I agree that the gameplay lacks something more engaging.

Did a bit more than 5000, but I closed before reading the description 😬. Maybe 5080 but not sure at all.

Otherwise, I would say that the game as-is is a bit bland and would benefit from a twist, like gestures constraints with the mouse for instance, Idk. Maybe I am not the target audience though.

Edit: also the itch.io page font is not super readable even though it matches well the style.

Really nice game. My only complaint would be that it is not that evident if you need to time your moves with the music, like it can be the case for instance in Geometry Dash. For the bomb level it lead me to care more about tracking visually than paying attention to the beat. But the visual style, music and SFX are great!

Thanks a lot ❤️

Thank you ❤️. It comforts me that choosing small but polished scope was the right decision. I'm amazed by the amount of gameplay from some other entries though they are in teams, but still you got to sync with each other.

I failed at making the game run smoothly on web which leads to the audio stuttering. In case you are curious, beside the binaries, there is a YouTube video at the bottom of the game page which showcase a play-through with non-stuttering music.

I incorporated music on Tuesday after spending the whole day in front of my DAW, realized late that audio was not syncing, fixed the sync issue Wednesday morning, then realized it was stuttering and frame-rate dependant. At that point I had to go to a job seeking event so I just let it be. A bit frustrating but that's part of game jam shenanigans. I wanted to start audio earlier, but I lost a lot of time understanding lighting and fighting color blending.

Thanks! Yeah, looking back I should have capped it. I realized it too late to have time to adjust the level as well unfortunately. But trying other platformers from the jam really made me realized that it falls way too fast and that the frame to jump on the circles is very unforgiving even as I increased the hit-box mid jam ( thought it was just making it more challenging but it quickly gets out of hand as you say. I had watched GameMaker's video on platformer physics and wanted to avoid the floaty feeling, but went too hard on the other side!

But I am happy that you enjoyed the look and feel, because I spent a few days just fighting the lighting system and trying to remember the GLSL lessons I got a year ago!

Thank you ❤️. Yeah unfortunately I didn't manage to get it run decently on the web, and the audio can stutter a lot. Besides the binaries, there is also a YouTube video of a play-through where the audio doesn't stutter, in case you are curious (especially as I knew I'd be against me). I think I'll upload the music at some point, but probably not within the span of the game jam. But glad you enjoyed it nonetheless!

Thanks! Yeah I may have put the bar a bit high there. I played quite a few platformers, so I am not a good play-tester for these myself (at least to evaluate the progress curve). The castle is also intentionally more puzzle oriented, and where you are left on your own the most. I wished I could get more balance feedback before the deadline though. That's why I uploaded a proof of completion, so that you can still have a glimpse of the rest of the game.

Still, making it past the directional wind hell is already a great milestone though! Even knowing myself the pitfalls, it takes some trial and error to go through. (Not the best designed part either, thinking about it.)

Good luck as well!

Thanks, it struck my mind by reading it again. Again, nice game! And I'd say, it is much better to have a very short but polished experience over many levels but with mechanics that didn't get enough love, imo.

Hey, is there anything after the yellow guy? Just to know if I should spend some time finding out some hidden that leads to the next part of the game. It's pretty fun between, really interesting game mechanics introduced progressively. I got hooked, and I'll be continuing it if there is something I missed!

Thanks for the honest feedback. As I stated, this is still an early prototype and a ton of work remains to be done. But I align with all you said. To be more precise:

> The game is definitely intended to run with a better FPS than what it manages (probably shadows, somehow)

I haven't started focusing on optimization yet given that I still rewrite code a lot and still am figuring out an architecture that I am satisfied with (basically no premature optimization). But that's something I have in mind in my design and architectural choices.

> the difficulties are shoehorned when the game is very clearly designed for challenging or crazy

I still don't know if I'll keep the two first, right now they serve more as a testing ground for different speeds. That being said I still want a very low barrier of entry. The current test track is just way too long for that speed.

> the track design is fine but unengaging, excepting the narrow section with the building which is just kind of bummy

This is a test track that will likely be scrapped. I am still figuring out the core mechanics and do not focus much on level design right now.

> the AI are suicidal but are fun to compete against

It is part of the things I want to rewrite not only for that reason but also because it doesn't allow for them taking shortcuts and is resource intensive as-is. The path itself isn't very precise as-is but it still needs an overhaul in all cases.

> barring the whole Win Game By Pressing E button thing.

Bots still can't use items, it goes within the rewrite above. I also plan many more items, but needed a simple one to setup the item system. By itself, having this one all the time while bots can't use it is indeed overkill and something I am aware of.

---

More generally, I shared the game to have somewhere to point to to follow the development in a more focused way, and to distribute alphas more easily. But the game is very far from being in a satisfying state, let alone a playable state. But I still appreciate the feedback, as it confirms my current intuitions and feelings.

Very ambitious to finish anything. It will look like an alpha if I complete anything but nowhere near a finished game. Not that I believed much into it in the first place though.

Hello,

I remember playing this game a while back and it was an amazing game! Unfortunately it is not on the Play Store anymore. Is there still a way to obtain it?