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I kinda had a similar issue when I play tested it the first time and I wish I got the chance to do some sound design for it to maybe help clue you in. The way it's SUPPOSED to work is whenever you click the right pedestal in the right order, it stays active. If you pick the wrong one, it immediately empties. Definitely feel some more clear feedback would have helped with this 

Thanks for playing though! Glad you had fun

I was using a PS4 controller

Thanks for playing and glad to hear you had fun overall! We definitely went for slightly wonky controls to match the sheer impracticality of a crane car lol.

The barrels are meant to be explosive. We never got to a point of coding it in a way that made that clear and we ended up not having a practical use for them, so they're really just confusing set dressing lol. 

I also had some trouble playing this one. It might be worth having some tutorial/directions screen or something before gameplay starts, though the game page here on itch definitely helped. I kept running into the issue where I would try to pick up the die to reroll but the reroll button wouldn't work and then I'd end up softlocked and seemingly unable to take any kind of action or end my turn.

The aesthetic is peak. The graphics, the setting, the scrambling through the dumpster, and the sleazy laid-back music track. All of that hits strong and makes me want to get the game to work. I also think the video game version of some random parlor game with a weird aesthetic is very idiosyncratic to the types of games that came out in the early days of PSX, like the Mahjong games that came out in Japan. Good work overall!

I don't know if I was doing something wrong or if my controller wasn't working for some reason, but I could never shoot in this game. I tried to see how far I could get without shooting anything, but it's hard to go back for a second refill when the slimes keep coming. Best I could do was try to corral them to combine so I only had to deal with one at a time.

Seems like a really fun concept and I enjoyed the art and the music. But without shooting working for me, it was hard to give a fair shake.

Really cool concept! The effort that went into the lore and the presentation of the lost media is really present, and it matches the era and theme so well. Only disappointment was finding out there wasn't an actual game for it lol. Great work!

This had a cool concept written all over it. Love the perspective and the archaic take on the open world framework. I really enjoyed the driving music, and am curious if the idea spawned from trying to make an engine sound and hearing a beat out of it, or if the intention was always to play on the concept of an engine starting up.

Unfortunately, I struggled to figure out what to do in this game. I seemingly got locked in the first conversation because I wasn't able to select the dialogue choice. Assuming the random floating objects are collectibles, none of them were showing up in the pause menu. I wasn't sure if there was more to do beside drive around, grab random objects, and avoid the cops. I DID end up stumbling upon a graffiti zone right before I stopped playing, but while tagging I ended up trapped inside of the building that I was spraying.

While the final product may have been a bit unfinished, the mascot and visual premise makes me want to see more from this game, and it's clear a cool idea was hatched here. It also just feels so appropriate for the time period and the hardware, so great job there!

Love the literal use of SICKNESS in this entry. Overall, a great little package. I didn't play enough to get in the Top 5 of scores or know exactly how far it goes, but I'm assuming it continues in waves rotating through the three organs. Good use of the bosses, and I liked the switch-up with the final one! Visuals are strong, the transitions and the bonus make the gameplay loop feel addicting, and just overall very tight game design and presentation. Another Scrumbo classic!

Really dig the art style used here, and the framing hits strong.

Really fun entry! The package feels complete for how simple and one-tracked it is. Found myself wanting to keep trying to do just a little bit better. I finally managed to beat ASS on the scoreboard so that felt like a good exit.

Visuals are crisp. The sound effects spliced in with the really fun music was a nice treat. This sort of gave me Pepsiman vibes and I wonder if that was at all intentional.

One small gripe is that it felt like the hitbox window was just a tad unforgiving. I found my way around it, but it sometimes felt like I should have avoided hitting a trashcan when I still manage to nick it. But it did also motivate me to see if I could get past that little intricacy.

Great work, y'all! Very S.I.C.K.

Sick cover, really makes me want to play this game

Sprout lets you shoot a projectile that opens doors and activate the lilypad the same way you can with fertilize. It also activates dead plants(inactive mushrooms and vine hook points for example). I know we had an issue where getting Sprout without fertilize didn't let it work as it's supposed to or something like that, and I don't think we were able to update it before the 24 hour extension. Regardless, if you have the time to restart and get Fertilize first, it should absolve any issues, but you should be able to fix the issue with whatever save you're at.  Let us know if you need any tips/hints!

I didn't really get the mecahnics to be honest. I got to the part where you have to bounce of walls and it wasn't really doing anything for me or working how I expected it to. I was trapped there and got killed by the robot, then respawned at the previous checkpoint and was stuck in the ground and couldn't do anything to get out. I might come back to see if I can complete this, but between that and the platforms not letting you be stuck to them, the game felt a bit more tedious than enjoyable to try and push through. The art was a cool concept, though!

Ok I just finished, and yeah, this was great.  Like I said in the previous comment, really impressed with what you created here, and it definitely feels like a demo of something I would pay money for. Unique concept, unique atmosphere, and engaging exploration gameplay all around.  I ended up finishing with 89%(not sure where I had missed stuff, but I assume I got everything but a couple hearts, or an ability I forgot to buy somewhere), but may go back to explore what I missed.  Here are some loose thoughts/feedback as I was playing:

• Being frozen after being hit felt weird.  I didn't notice it after the first couple screens, but it felt strangely unresponsive.
• The music was immediately incredible.  I'd love to know what VSTs/samples you're using! I'm honestly jealous of the production of the quality.  I feel that's my biggest weakness as a composer. The vertical layering was also done so well!
• The atmosphere as a whole is incredible.  The animations were so crisp! Loved the character and enemy designs as well.  They all felt very distinct.

• Very clever and nicely guided level design. The mini platforming puzzles and such felt intuitive and engaging to do. The sense of gated progression was executed so well.  In the Scavenger King biome, it was so satisfying to see all the platforms I couldn't reach and knowing assuming I would get a double jump or something, so the wall jump upgrade hot the perfect spot for that!
• Not sure the spark collecting ability works as intended?  I'd have to reread it, but it seemed like it was supposed to collect sparks killed by my echo automatically, but it never seemed to work.
• The mechanics feel really good to play, especially on a controller 
• I did kinda wish the vertical hit box of the melee attack was a tad bigger, and maybe a bit more standard length.  But the verticality was messing with me with the standard bats. Though that may have been intended for unique challenge.
• Amazing implementation of the theme.  Not only making the dash(a Metroidvania staple) a core mechanic but also the fact of how well it utilized the echo effect.  It was just a tad less useful in combat then it was in puzzles/traversal, but wasn't really bothered by that.
• The final boss was such a great use of all the core abilities. Felt appropriately challenging while also thematically correct.  The Scavenger King was definitely the hardest boss of all of them though.

Yeah, this was incredible. Easily my favorite jam project so far and maybe the best jam project I've played in each one I've participated on? Either way, excellent work here and you should both be proud. I can't wait to see what either of you make next.

Holy crap. I just beat the Scavenger King and have to put this down for now, but I absolutely love this game so far. It would take an immediate drop off for me to not rate this game incredibly high. As is, I would pay for this experience.  Mechanics, gameplay, level design, atmosphere(both art and music, my god) are done so well.  I'll give more detailed comments once I complete the game, but felt I had to say how damn good you two did so far.  Incredible work.

Thanks for the words! I agree the menu UI SFX are jarring and I would like to change them for the post-jam update, so thanks for confirming that. I'm glad you found yourself enjoying the music even if it didn't immediately catch your attention, and I'm glad you liked the Treetops and Karsts themes the most! Those were my favorite for this jam.  Thanks for taking the time to comment on it.

For a beginner there's a lot to enjoy about the art!  Like I said, it had a charm to it that stood out to me. Keep it up!

A fun entry! There was a moment at the end which was almost game-breakingly frustrating, but I managed to get past it and finish the game. So we can end on a positive note, I'll start with my critiques:

• The Menu Map isn't really intuitive since you travel through doors. it doesn't lend to a consistent sense of understanding location-wise.
• On that note, being able to exit the map and menu without clicking would have been nice.
• I wish there was a bit more to the echolocation ability. Drawing a rectangle in the area where it could be made it seem pretty easy where I just had to walk/jump around the rectangle until the E prompt came up.  Maybe a hot/cold effect would be more engaging?
• Similarly, I think it would have been cool if you had to piece together the solution yourself or if the echoes of the past had more of a mechanical connection to the theme. But I think with more time and polish to make each Echo be a cutscene moment or something, that could make up for that. 
• I don't know if something was wrong on my end with my machine or what, but the final Echo glitched out on me.  Hovering over the images wouldn't do what it was supposed to, and I couldn't close it because it would make the cursor disappear. But then when I pressed E, it would prompt the dialogue for the evidence I had moused over previously, and lather rinse repeat. But for a while I was frantically scrubbing my mouse and pressing all the key commands to try to get the game to do SOMETHING. Also this was in Room G and for some reason it wasn't showing up on the map? I had a moment where I was running around trying to figure out where the hell the last echo was.

And now the fun part, the GOOD:

• Vibes start well. A tone is immediately set and sucks you in. They may have all been external assets, but they were used effectively.
• The game plays really good! The mechanics felt clean and enjoyable to play. The lack of combat made it a lot easier to play on a keyboard than some of the other entries. The height of the jump feels really satisfying, and the level design complements it as well.
• Despite my complaints about the map, I did find the level design fairly memorable enough to know where I needed to go most of the time, which is particularly impressive with most of the rooms being built by the same assets. Only issue I ever had was the aforementioned final Echo pile.
• The switches not always activating something in the same room and instead corresponding to a symbol that could be anywhere on the map was a cool concept.
• Making the ability to drop through floors and upgrade is novel and fun. It's something that most gamers expect from these types of games and the fact it became something to attain later was incredibly satisfying when I did.
• For as short as this was, you made great use of the backtracking/gated progression aspect of the game to give it that trademark Metroidvania feel.  I think the most important part of a successful jam project is understanding your scope and capabilities to make it feel complete in some sense, whether that's 5 minutes of gameplay or 60. And you pulled that off greatly.

You have a lot of capability and ability for coding and level design from what I can tell from this game. I hope you get the chance to work on something bigger and with original assets to make your stuff really pop, because your foundations are strong and made a really fun MVM project!

Great entry! There were some buggy aspects and some small things that made the playtime a bit frustrating. I'll start with those before I get into what I loved about the game.

(Also, for what it matters, I played the web build)

• The map was really cool from a style perspective, but it was kinda hard to actually use it for navigation. Your attention is drawn to the collision objects rather than the pathways between.
• It was small but a little annoying that saving also changed my weapon, but this really only affected me to any significant degree once.
• Something happened during the first big chasm you have to use the grappling hook for where I managed to pull myself inside of the grapple blocks and I was stuck there.
• This is probably a Me issue, but keyboard and mouse controls for these kinds of games are always a bit unwieldy for me, at least on my laptop, and it made that same grappling hook challenge a bit harder than probably intended. Also was hard to keep track of where my mouse was during boss fights.
• Mechanics seemed to get really wonky during the bosses.  Hit boxes and collisions got weird, the controls were getting less responsive, the slow time ability was activating and staying activated when I wasn't clicking.  I mostly ran into this issue with the first boss, though the second one was doing it a bit. It seemed like going out of full screen and clicking on the page before clicking back into the game fixed the responsiveness of my attacks, though.
• Something weird happened with the NPC dialogue in the Future/3rd world, where the dialogue disappears before you can fully read it and seemed like it was reformatting itself.  Getting it to show long enough to read and without the reformatting would be great.
• Some proper backtracking through the different timelines would have been kind of nice, as well as an optional area or two, but that also comes with my own Metroidvania expectations.  If there were any, I didn't find them(didn't find any of the purple doors that were mentioned?).  I also understand this probably had a lot to do with time considering you were a solo dev.
• The first boss felt like a massive difficulty spike for me and took me a long time to defeat.  The 2nd and third boss were much easier in comparison and took only like 2 deaths each.

And now on to the GOOD:

• The art was excellent. The worlds felt distinct, the character was charming, and the enemies were all unique. I really thought the boss designs were sick. They stood out the most to me in an impressive way.
• Using Heal as a Parry attack was brilliant, and ended up being vital to the boss fights, especially the last one.  I feel like I could have done the first boss easier had I remembered the ability was there(not a fault of your own, my own for forgetting). 
• The level design was handled really well.  I think you did a good job of utilizing all of the abilities to a fairly even degree.  The final world had some challenges that felt like it was putting the dash, double jump, and run consecutively in an intuitive and satisfying way. Gave a strong feeling of, "Now put it all together before the end of the game!" The grappling hook became a bit less relevant by the time you have the double jump, but it was the most effective offensive attack until the Fireball due to its range, so that makes it not fully forgotten.
• Also, I didn't know I could kill the NPCs.  Felt legit guilt when I blew up the person who gave me the fireball lol.  Nice touch, though! Would have been even more impactful if they were permanently dead, but intentional or not, it just adds that much more subtle depth to the game.
• The final boss actually was a decent challenge, and until I realized I could infinitely double jump there(an exploit or intended?), I was having some trouble.  I also love the plot reveal at the end.  Made the game feel more personal and more to enjoy from an emotional perspective. I hope you felt satisfied with the outcome here, because you did good work.
• The music was awesome. I saw you credited it to an asset  pack - did it all come from there? It definitely fit the vibe and helped me want to keep playing.

Overall, the weaknesses were pretty small in comparison to the full package, and the vibes and gameplay were strong enough to make me perservere through the rough parts. Great work here!

Interesting about the collectible updates.  I think we ended up fixing that already for the post-jam version.  Not sure about the map updates.

The original plan for the seeds was getting all of them would unlock a secret final level, but it was too far out of our scope for the time frame.

Thanks for playing and the feedback!

Thanks a lot for playing!  I just worked on the sound, so I'm sure others could have more specific comments, but your feedback is greatly appreciated and will be put into consideration.  A lot of it came down to time(the level designer wanted more landmarks, but we couldn't get the art assets in time, and same with enemies).  Great point about the progression for the final upgrade by the way!

For my own sake, I'd love to know your thoughts on the music/SFX and whether anything stood out to you good or bad. 

I may give this another shot before the voting period ends, but I couldn't quite finish it. The menu really pulled me in, but the art was cool.  Felt simple yet charming and unique. Especially the player character. However, the controls and exploration was bland and somewhat frustrating. The enemies don't give great feedback for damage and you have no way of knowing you get hurt if you're not looking at your health constantly. The jump seems to only just barely clear the enemies so you have to be extra precise to get over the dinosaur-like enemies and it was frustrating when I was trying to get back to where I died and progress.  Checkpoints would have helped immensely and I would have saw it through to the end regardless.  I also think the game would have done better with melee or a projectile that actually shoots from the character with quicker response time.  Either that or the enemies bouncing back when you hit them, or a short moment of invincibility while the enemy is blinking.  As is, the  controls just seemed unwieldy and it was too easy to get punished.  After the menu, I would have loved to hear more music and sfx to make the game feel more interesting.  The lack of sound and interesting level design(from where I got to) and the unresponsive mechanics made it hard to want to finish. But the start had a lot of promise and with some more time and polish, I think this could have been a really good game.  I'm sorry this comes off so harsh, but I also know game jams can be tough as is, let alone as a solo dev.  Good job putting in the work that you did.

Thanks for checking it out and giving feedback! Let us know if you do end up coming back to complete the game and what you think.  I look forward to checking out your game soon, too!

Something to consider post-jam. Thank you for playing and giving feedback!

I don't think we were able to get the asset for a pogo animation last I had the chance to playtest it, but you hold down and melee for pogo. There's a decent amount of room before you make contact with the enemy to do it, similar to Hollow Knight.

Usually, a page for results will be posted, listing everyone's ranking in order along with their full scores.  The winner will likely be announced on the discord server as well.

This was a fun Gradius clone. I wasn't able to finish the whole thing and due to getting my butt stomped for the first few tries, but managed to get to the second boss.  I enjoyed the opening cutscene and the art had charm despite being simple.  The music was awesome. Would have liked to see maybe a more unique spin on the transformation aspect, but this was really well made.  Good job!

I can attest that hole can be frustrating. Was one of the bits of QC we didn't get to touch before submission deadline. If we expand after, we definitely plan to be a bit more curated with the level design.

Thanks for the feedback!  We'll look into adding a map post-jam

What a fun entry! JRPG with some detective action definitely got me going. I can only imagine the work that went into making what felt like such a balanced system. Loved the music and the vibes, and the characters and dialogue were really charming. I actually think the game could have used a slightly higher encounter rate. I also think leaning into the detective/puzzle/mystery element of it could make this a strong game that stands out in the RPG genre. For what we had here, it was great work.

clicking to the grid tiles sounds like it would be  heaven for me, but maybe also messes with the  ability to sketch in specific halves of the tile.  But if you could make it work I think it's a movement I would definitely like.

I was thinking the variety of timer lengths could help. Adding the different difficulties and canvas sizes sounds like a great addition.

This is a really fun concept! I loved the music and the art style, and the way the faces are generated is clever, with there being certain templates that are slightly rearranged so you can't ever just memorize a face type. Maybe this was a failing on my part, but I couldn't get more than 2 sketches each round. Maybe it's my perfectionist brain and lack of pixel art skill, but I think being able to change the speed of the brush OR increasing the time limit would help a lot to make people feel like they have a little more control over how many sketches they can complete. As is, I didn't really feel like I was getting any better after the first two tries.

Great idea for both the theme and the jam limitations, great work!

Fun and simple concept. There was another game about planets that did something similar in this jam. It's surprising how enjoyable clicking can be when you have upgrade options that let you have more control over how you generate the power. Could make a surprisingly deep game with this concept if you added more ways to generate power, and maybe further "missions" where you have different amounts of power/different obstacles or something. I liked the ambience during play, and the plot was simple but effective.

This is a cute and fun concept! Loved the art design and the music was really chill. It's not quite laptop friendly as I couldn't pan the camera and therefore I had a limit to how far I could see even after zooming out(I probably had about 18 turns where I could feasibly make the move, and then I happened to die by then anyway). There's a surprising amount of depth with the possibility to turn Semi around and to use the obstacles to destroy each other. Excellent work!

Really enjoyed the art and the music here. Made for a cool atmosphere, and the different tracks were nice to hear. I don't know that it utilized the theme in the concept or gameplay. 

I think the hit box range for the short attack as just a bit too short and I would have liked a little bit more speed in the movement. I like the approach of "avoid filling the danger meter" as opposed to dying/taking damage, though I think it would have been cool if the game had a stealth element where you had ways to use the wall launch to find secret paths to sneak past the enemies or something like that.

Has a good foundation that I think a lot could be built upon to make a really charming game out of this. Good job!

yeah, that! I THINK that would be within the rules of the post-submission parameters, but I would definitely double check with someone before doing it lol

I ran out of time to be able to finish the whole thing, but this was a great concept! it's like taking mine sweeper and making a deeper game out of it. Took a minute to understand, but once you get the grasp, it's really enjoyable.  Love the concept of upgrading your ship each round which changes how you navigate the stages. The sound design was done well, too. Some music would have been nice, but maybe that would have taken away from the deep water atmosphere.  Awesome work!

Fun game with a cool concept and fun vibe. Something about the design of the player character's eyes had me giggling internally. I liked that each form had a purpose, even the human form having the faster recharge capability. Would have been cool to see a bit more implementation of how you can use the abilities in conjunction with each other. The music was fun, too.  Good work!

Fun game! I liked the mechanic concept and feel there is so much room for puzzle variety with it. The mini plot was fun and left some intrigue. There were definitely some awkward collision issues with the platforms where I couldn't crawl over a small hump that I probably should have been with the "creature." I also think using buttons to switch might have been a bit more natural then having to click the different characters you could take over, but it was pretty minimal. Decent sound design and ambience!  Good work!