Glad to hear it! I can't spoiler tag here, but if you're on the playdate squad discord channel there's an explanation for the way that mechanic works in the dedicated Lexgrid thread.
I'll double check that spelling as well, thank you.
Thanks for purchasing the game! A rebalance is definitely in the cards (no pun intended) in the future, but I don't have any definitive plans at the moment. Honestly, Lux is a hard game to balance, because "hard"can very quickly morph into "frustrating". I ended up making the game much easier than the jam version to at least keep the experience on the "fun" end of the spectrum, but I might have gone too far. Still, I hope you enjoyed the experience, and I'll definitely look into a possible rebalance sometime in the future.
It's always impressive seeing something 3D made in a short time for the playdate. The way this game renders graphics is pretty smart, and the minimalist vector look works... most of the time. I had a really hard time on track 5, because after the ramp you can't see where you are at all while you wait to fall back to the track on the floor. With a completely black background in front of me, there's no way to tell if I'm even facing the right direction coming out of that ramp and turn. The powerup system is interesting, but it feels like RNG definitely impacts how easy or hard a race ends up being. Still, I love the look of the game and had fun racing the first 4 tracks!
I felt a little lost with this one. I got the broken part unscrewed and brought the new part over, but I wasn't sure what to do from that point. I tried putting the screws back but couldn't get them in the right spot and grabbing them was really hard with such a small hitbox. The game has a lot of different controls, and honestly it's a bit unintuitive to use. I did actually like the accelerometer, which isn't something I often like in a playdate game due to how the screen works, it felt very fluid. It was mainly the d-pad and button combinations that threw me for a loop. That being said, there was something compelling about the process of fixing the... computer? Not sure what it was. Either way, despite the controls I love the concept of this game and wish I had the patience to figure out what to do next.
Love the 3d look, and a good use of the crank! I did find it a bit disorienting having the camera spin around when doing tricks, but cranking as fast as I could after hitting a meteor was very fun and satisfying. I want more tricks though! Maybe bound to the d-pad? Either way, for 72 hours this is an impressive result.
A pretty fun platformer. I'm not a huge fan of having zero air control, but I realize that's a personal preference. It did make the game feel pretty rigid though, and climbing up one-block cliffs was a bit annoying since you stop if you so much as brush your toe against the side of the block. I did encounter a few weird things with movement- most noticeably that hitting your head cancelled all your horizontal momentum, but the game controlled well enough that these are more just minor gripes with the physics.
My only other gripe was with the post level menu, and I think I said the same thing about it in Negative Reinforcement- It's a bit unintuitive, and I often found myself restarting a difficult level by mistake instead of moving on, since I had been conditioned to press up when seeing that menu. To be honest, in both games, I have never wanted to restart and play the level again, especially as there's no flag to let me move on without beating the level again.
Despite it all, I still enjoyed my time with this game- the art is fantastic as always, the music is good, and the premise is fun. A well rounded jam entry for sure!
Felt a bit like wario ware! Very fun, and I enjoyed the variety of minigames. I didn't really understand what to do in the "collect 10 spaceships" minigame, mainly because I couldn't tell what was causing space ships to appear.
Using tiles like pixels definitely gives the game a distinctive look, although the super-large characters do make it a bit hard to tell what's going on sometimes. Still, maybe that adds to the "head in the clouds" feeling you were going for.
A very peaceful and compelling entry! Designing a little garden was fun and relaxing. If this game saved when closed and had offline progress, I could see myself coming back to it daily to check up on my plants. I'd love a post jam version with more stuff to play with (not that the available content isn't a ton already!)
I was a bit confused what the goal was while playing this. Obviously I can tell you lose at some point (so I guess "don't lose" is the goal?) but it didn't really feel difficult to keep placing buildings and shooting monsters, so I basically only lost because I got bored of playing.
Maybe I wasn't understanding something though! That could definitely be the case- my first run I missed the fact that you could move the cursor with the d-pad (all the other controls were listed at the start of the game, so I assumed that was all I could do!)
Still, cranking around to spin the moon was viscerally satisfying, and because the bullets travel in screen space rather than around the moon it was fun to spin a wall of bullet death around the moon repeatedly and rack up kills.
I appreciate the feedback! The bar was meant to represent the number of cards left in the deck, and I was split 50-50 on whether I should end the floor when you get all the cards out of your deck or when you play the last card. I ended up going with playing all cards and adding the "storing" system as a compromise. I'm working on a post-jam version, and I'll definitely try ending the floor after all cards are removed from the deck. I do think that could solve some of the issues of being stuck with all "take damage" cards when at low health.
Lower levels do actually have unique misfortune cards, but they still have a chance of being rerolled as misfortunes from lower floors. Plus, you keep those lower floor misfortunes in your deck, which dilutes it more. I'll definitely look into making each level feel more unique! Your suggestion about different sounds for each level is a good one, and something I definitely would have done if this wasn't a jam game. The post jam version will definitely do this.
Sorry to hear that. There's no instructions in english, but I can give a brief summary to hopefully help you enjoy the game more. You can draw a line on the grid by pressing A and using the d-pad. The line can only connect to tiles of the same type, and can turn, but can't loop over itself. Press A again to remove the line of tiles. If you're targeting an animal tile, that animal takes 1 damage for each tile removed, minus one. Removing tiles also causes the animals to attack, and you take one damage. Empty tiles don't deal any damage, but can be removed if they're in your way. Each animal has 6 HP, and dealing enough damage to kill it gives you a point, turns all its remaining tiles to empty tiles, and heals you two HP. It's then replaced by a new animal at full HP. The goal is to survive as long as possible.
I hope that helps you enjoy Pahtkest!
This was a fun entry! I'm honestly not very good at normal sokoban, but this had a fun twist on that ruleset. I have only two main complaints that compounded on each other and led to me not finishing the game- first, is that it's really hard to compare snowball sizes. If I'm looking at two static snowballs it's fine, but I had a lot of trouble with things like "If I push this snowball three spaces, will it be bigger than this other snowball? Considering snowball size is such an important part of victory in this game, that really held me back from solving puzzles. The other big issue I had was the lack of an undo system- and I get it. It's kind of a daunting thing to add in a game jam game. But between being unable to tell the exact size of each snowball and having to restart after every mistake, I found it hard to play more than a handful of puzzles. Still I appreciated the twists I did see- the fire was a fun dual-purpose puzzle mechanic, and I think the puzzles were well designed. I think this game has a lot of potential once some of the quality of life issues are fixed!
A really charming entry! The cutscenes and characters were a huge plus for me, and I loved the writing. The gameplay was also interesting. I appreciated how nearly every level introduced some new mechanic or put a spin on an existing one- and there are a *lot* of levels. Maybe too many. Actually, almost certainly too many. That's my main criticism of the game actually- most of the levels feel like the first thing that came to mind- understandable in a game jam, but man, some of them are *really* tedious. The timed maze level where you find out you were supposed to grab the 1 in the maze, not the 3 dummy! Why would you get the 3! The level where you... very... slowly... go... through... spike... ball... hallway. Four times. And the level that finally made me quit, where you have to wait for sets of lasers as you slowly crawl up a long hallway- then back down again, which my frayed patience simply couldn't get through. I'll probably come back to the game when I'm feeling more up to it, but these a lot of these levels felt this way, which was sad, because a lot of the mechanics were super interesting- putting numbers in countdown timers, disjointed solution panels, and panels that modify your character's stats (like the level where you change your speed) were all super interesting concepts, and honestly I'd love to see it explored more. I feel like there's a ton you could do with the idea.
An interesting story focused game. Not usually my thing, but I enjoyed my brief time with it. The light-collecting aspect of the game was a good take on the theme, although it could really lead to a bit of a vicious cycle, especially in later levels, where because you couldn't see very far it was impossible to find more light. This was also the reason I didn't really use the time-stop ability; I felt my vision of the level was more valuable than making obstacles easier to avoid. Some of the later levels seemed to give you very little light to work with and many obstacles, and I'm not sure how I would even go about using the time stop effectively in those levels considering the lack of light pickups. Also, I know it's standard that pulp games require a press for each move but I would have liked the ability to hold a direction to keep moving. Still, I think the writing was pretty good and I enjoyed the story of the game. It's always fun to see what gets made in pulp, and even if this doesn't break the general pulp vibe like some games do it's a fun and unique experience in its own right.
A fun little arcade game! I'm not very good at it, only got a score of 300 after a few runs. The graphics are quite nice, although I feel like the fish don't quite match the rest of the visual style. Music is nice too, but... 8 MB?! Gotta compress that audio more! I appreciated the little minigames that popped up, but it was a bit frustrating that the two types of minigame had completely different control styles, and sometimes I'd fail the minigame before I even parsed what I was supposed to be doing (they look quite similar). Personally, I'd either remove/greatly extend the timer to fail (you're already incentivized to catch fish quickly due to the overall timer) or pick one type of minigame and stick to it. It was especially annoying to fail the cranking minigame and then have my claw go shooting up to the top of the screen since I'm still cranking.
Still, it's a fun arcade game and it's a good fit for the system!
Very fun puzzle platformer! Besides the lag between screens I didn't experience too many issues, although some of the level design felt a bit frustrating at times. It can feel a bit stiff at times too, since your horizontal speed (or vertical speed) is completely locked when magnet-ing. Definitely has some interesting movement that I'd love to see explored more. Particularly, I'd love to be able to point the magnet down and shoot myself into the air with b. The metroidvania-esque level design was also interesting, although I wasn't as much a fan of having to guess when a metal platform existed on the screen above me. Maybe some sort of indicator could be nice. I think if the movement was loosened up a bit and a few more mechanics were added it could be a really compelling game!
An interesting puzzle platformer! I'll admit that it's a bit janky, but I did appreciate that this game embraces its jank for the sake of puzzle design. That meant that some levels were *really* unintuitive to solve, but once I understood the mechanics of the ice blocks and how they worked things did click a bit. Some of that jank did bleed into making some puzzle solutions a little bit annoying to actually execute, but I was able to complete the whole game. I'd definitely be interested in seeing an expanded version of this game with more mechanics!
It's a pretty small experience, but I think it knows what it wants to be and does it well enough. I would have liked to maybe have the game get a bit harder as it went on- perhaps having the nut travel in more erratic patterns as the game goes on, because as it stands it's pretty easy to play indefinitely. I scored 142 before I got tired of cranking. The music can get a little grating after a long time playing, but I'm still glad it's there. Overall, a small game with a fun use of the crank. Why not!