Sorry I'm late replying to this comment, but most of those things you pointed out were plain laziness on my part.

The sprites are all mostly just circles downscaled in realtime by Unity's pixel perfect camera, and I wasn't bothered making actual UI sprites so I just played around with a few more circles. I would have actually sprited them if I had time to have a pixels per unit consistent with the rest of game, but sadly Unity's pixel perfect camera doesn't work for UI, so if I was to perfectly adjust each pixelized UI element to be consistent with the rest of the game it could just be screwed over by playing at a different aspect ratio than 16:9.

I've pointed out in other comments that the small window was just a dumb mistake on my part - I spent most of the jam playing the game in a tiny window and only realized later how incredibly stupid it felt in fullscreen.

As for enemy variety - this game ironically has the most enemy variety I've ever put in any of my games - fast blue enemies appear from round 6 onwards and slow projectile-shooting enemies from round 11 onwards. But naturally my difficulty-obsessed self makes it borderline impossible to reach those rounds (I haven't got to round 11 myself yet :-$) Sorry you had a bad time with my game!

The lag when shooting enemies is freeze frames, and is intentionally added to make hits feel more impactful. As for the infinite respawning, how did you manage that? Any steps I can take to try and replicate that glitch?

Thanks for the positive feedback! Yeah, I see where you're coming from with the camera proximity,I didn't actually play the game in fullscreen until later in development, which was a mistake :-( I was actually intending on adding comboes if i had more time,, in particular one that encourage the use of killing enemies through mirrors, but I ran short on time.

Sorry, how exactly are you having trouble with the game? I can't exactly tell from this comment. (If it's that you're having trouble getting past round 2, try slowly baiting enemies to where the rest of the enemies are, then shoot them all.)

Uh, I haven't collaborated with the channel in any way, I just found it on Youtube lol

I meant to create a combo system that would boost your points immensely for killing enemies through mirrors, but since the laser's hitbox was made of box colliders the enemies could hit multiple at once, so I eventually scrapped the idea. Also the enemies were meant to not see you through walls, I copied code from one of my old jams for that, but it didn't work and I just never bothered fixing it :-/

Thanks for the feedback! I'm not the best at composing music, and while it is one of my better tracks I too found the melody drilling into my head after a while ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The UI was kind of rushed, and I would have pixelated it with more time (Unity's pixel perfect camera irritatingly can't pixelate UI, so I'd have to do it manually :-( )

Same, horror games are too scary for me too :-(

It just kind of felt that way with the simple graphics and slightly unsettling music (sorry if that wasn't intentional), as if there was going to be some imminent danger or drama just around the corner...

Nice game! The gameplay is nice and simple and works well, although the stamina can be a little annoying at times, but I got used to it. Also I do think requiring the player to get through 9 levels in a row is a bit excessive for a game jam game. I only managed to get through 6, and that took quite a few tries...

I'm aware you used asset packs in this game, but there isn't exactly any consistency to the graphics. The protagonist has an anime style, the ground is a flat plane with a ground texture, the props have a textureless low-poly style, the enemies and projectiles are simple shapes, and the UI is very non-diagetic and generic. There's no clear art direction to this project. I've attached a video that goes through how to make your game's art look more consistent with asset packs that you might find useful!

While dying over and over again seems to be a common idea, I really like the way you disguised it as a seemingly innocent RPG! The idea of pressing "new game" in the main menu as a game mechanic is pretty cool, and the game slowly advancing in time and colour is interesting. It makes the player think of what will happen when the protagonist's parents come home and find them dying over and over... I feel like this would have potential as a short horror game, despite not really being into horror games myself. I would love to see what you could do with this project with a little more time!

Very visually appealing game! You used Unity's 2D lighting very well, and the pixel art is good. I would usually advise to keep the pixels per unit consistent across sprites, but it honestly doesn't look too bad here as there isn't that much of a difference between the most and least detailed sprites. My only critique of the art is that the spikes don't exactly look like spikes, they sort of look like awkward 45° slopes... try making them pointier!

The game mechanics and platforming are kind of annoying though. There's no way to do high or low jumps except with the flight mechanic, which isn't exactly well executed. It takes forever for the flight power to recharge, and the flight power should regenerate while you die, not be wiped (although it occasionally does regenerate?!). If you want to jump high you have to perform insanely fast double-clicks of spacebar since it simply reduces the player's gravity - maybe perhaps try capping the player's fall speed to a glide while spacebar is held? It would also be nice if it didn't require a second press of spacebar, and you could simply hold to do a long glide-jump. Also, please add checkpoints of some description next time (not sure how it would have fit in with the whole random lever thing in this game though...). I acknowledge that this seems to be your first platformer (at least on itch.io) though, so these are just some tips for the future!

Nice small text-based game! Reminds me of when I used to make terrible pure-RNG text-based games in Python. It felt a little short, I would have liked to see a little more content, but I appreciate that these games require a ridiculous amount of if statements that take a long time to make. Deaths felt kind of cheap - you weren't given any warning about a certain option being risky, and having to start the game 5 times over was a little annoying - perhaps giving the player a screen where they can choose to play again with the same introductory options or not could be useful. Also, for my first few playthroughs I selected a mace, but then that option was completely ignored for the rest of the game - the narrative mentioning a sword - overall the narrative needs to be more non-linear...

The content you have so far in this game is great, good job!

Nice visual novel! I came across this game when listening to the Ace of Rope soundtrack on YouTube when this game's soundtrack came up, and I thought I'd check it out. I was initially going to try and get through the French version with my terrible French and Google Translate, but the English translation was available when I got around to playing (which seems to read perfectly most of the time, although I was kind of confused what you meant by "males and princesses" ("mâles et princesses") in the introduction). 

This game has a great way of making every decision feel like it has a consequence, or an eventual consequence at least - I was getting rather wary of foraging for food from the humans, but thankfully the winter ended soon after. I managed to not engage in any wars and survive the winter peacefully.

I did encounter two bugs. I'm sorry I can't point you in the right direction, as I haven't used Twine before, but I'll attach screenshots here:

The artworks looked quite nice mostly, apart from looking (in my opinion) unnecessarily grainy in parts dithering wasn't really required, but I can't say much as I am infinitely worse at high-res pixel art. There could have been more artworks, though, they really helped illustrate the world of Fourmidable more!

I'm not sure whether Twine allows you to add backgrounds of any sort, but they would certainly be a nice addition if it's possible to do such a thing. Maybe something diagetic, like the dirt of the anthill, or tall blades of grass reaching to the sky - it just feels a little bland with a completely white background.

Overall, I quite enjoyed this game, and I can't wait to see more of it!

Yeah, I noticed the UI covering some of the gameplay while gathering footage for gifs post-jam, I should have probably made it fade out when you near it or something...

Visually stunning entry! My only complaints are with the gameplay:

- Both the player and the zombies are too fast. There were often times I lost track of where the player was because they scurried almost out of the camera frame, plus it was hard to stop exactly on top of the corpses to pick them up. The zombies should be a good bit slower than the player too.

- Maybe it's just because any Unreal game runs at like 5 frames a second on my computer, but I could barely ever land a shot unless I stood still. This lead to the game becoming a constant unenjoyable cycle of running away from the zombies while failing to shoot them, failing to pick up the corpses, wasting ammo, only spending money on ammo, wasting that again, never getting above 5 gold the entire game, and dying.

Other than me being bad at the game and not enjoying it, great game!

Nice work! It took me a second to realize that it actually was an RTS, and when I did, I kind of just spammed healers and two-handed swordsmen until I won - I only upgraded them once near the end. If troops had a certain cost to deploy (like sun in PvZ for example) it would have made the game feel more tactical and rewarding. Perhaps if the arena was wider, and you could reposition the printers to areas of the map in need it would make the game more about strategising than spamming. Good game, just it's a bit too simple for something of this genre right now.

I checked out your game, it's quite good, but please don't spam people's comment sections for rates...

Sorry, I meant the Lactose Particle Accelerator mechanic you added in the last two rooms - I just wrote "LPA" because that was what was on their sprites...

But yeah, they could be sped up a little as they felt a little sluggish, and it would be handy if when you rammed into a wall with them you instantly entered the wall cling state.

Amazing visuals! I mean, it ran at like 5 frames a second, but so does any Unreal game on my laptop :') I unlocked terminal 1, but couldn't manage to find terminals 2 or 3 anywhere, let alone the hints to open them. I ended up looking at the safety instructions on the wall, but gave up as it didn't sound remotely related to a spaceship. Maybe some direction of where to go after terminal 1 would be nice, but otherwise, great job!

This game was really fun! I got really lucky on my first run, barely got any events and kept it fairly contained, but on my second run I only seemed able to save the measly amount of tiles on the other side of the river. I love how quickly this game can spiral out of control! I think the game kind of fell down on audio, with a boring background track, and only a few sound effects, but I'm bad at audio too so I can't say much...

A very replayable jam game that deserves way more ratings than it has!

Good game! Also, really neat voice acting for a jam game! I could tell there was some really deep lore / backstory but I didn't really get it and it could have been explained a little more. I know this has already been said, but it's really hard to see what's going on in the artworks. I couldn't tell whether it was meant to be pixel art, or traditional art uploaded at a low resolution - but either way, it had too much anti-alias for me. At the end, the prompt to "poop" honestly scared me more than jumpscare lol - I wanted to go and handle those 100-or-so party guests that were waiting, not go to the toilet...

Anyway, great game!

Very interesting concept! I love the idea of beating up fellow customers to purchase more items! I just think less emphasis should have been placed on the collecting side of the game and more on the fighting side. The keybinds are kind of unintuitive (I wouldn't have found them were it not for the game page). Also, it would have been nice to have more than one attack (although, having spent the vast majority of the time on my game adding too many attack types, I can appreciate that it would be a pain to implement). And without the enemy fighting back at all, the game was a pushover.

Still though, great game!

Nice platformer! Vesuvius kind of looks like Core from Celeste, and Deiry kind of looks like Ori, and I like it! I appreciate that you took the time to make a tight-to-control character too - a lot of jam games don't put enough time into it. Just a few things...

- Very small gripe, but Pompeii's citizens don't have the same pixels per unit as everything else (Everything else is fine though)

- The background felt incredibly bland during the tutorial compared to the rest of the game...

- Cheese string felt incredibly unresponsive compared to everything else - the string itself should probably extend faster, and you should probably be able to cancel it with a jump as soon as it reaches the wall.

- It was kind of annoying having to cheese string after every LPA. (By the way, you should have used them more - they would be so cool if they were a little faster)

- Before I realized you could reset the scene with R, I got softlocked out of the tutorial for double-jumping too much :-/

- THOSE CYCLES ARE SOOOO TIGHT! Especially this room below, which took me forever. (I've made a stupidly hard platforming game for a jam too, I understand the feeling of wanting to make things just a little tighter... but you could have nerfed that second lava rise in that room by half a second or so...)

Overall, a really enjoyable entry that I had a lot of fun with!

Yeah, about the sounds... I kind of just copied them from my other games (Drillshift and Assasin of the Night) because I was running out of time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also would have loved to test my garbage composing skills but time constraints happened...

Sorry, because some of that unresponsiveness was slightly intentional :-/

Both the pogo and final horizontal slash had a commit time of an eighth of a second, which I hoped would make the attacks feel weightier and souls-like, but it definitely didn't work for the pogo.

I was also so disappointed that I only got one enemy type done, I actually had plans for 5, but I had to cut it down to one boring cannon fodder enemy due to time constraints. Thanks though!

Thanks for the positive feedback! Yeah, I do agree that there wasn't enough encouragement for flipping gravity, I almost had to force myself to do it when gathering footage for the gifs :') 

Yeah actually, good idea with the kill counter / score! (I mean, in its current state there's a set amount of enemies each time so you'd always end up with the same score, unless each attack gave different score or something...)

By the way, I really didn't make it clear as I kind of just rushed it in in the last half an hour, but you end the game by attacking the "corruption source" (big blobby thing) on the right that becomes accessible after killing all enemies. Thanks!

Nice game! Interesting combat system, although it's essentially pure RNG. However, the flickering dice sprites give the illusion that maybe it might be possible to rig the rolls, like in the King Dice bossfight in Cuphead. I did try my best to do this, and often failed, but when I actually tried, I did feel like I was getting higher rolls more consistently at least. Maybe if you slowed the flickering down slightly, so it's more obvious there's a small element of skill to it? (If there is one, I could have been all wrong lol)

The vector art is absolutely amazing. The alien designs are so unique and the game uses such a clever and vibrant colour palette which is so attention-grabbing. This is a really cool game, which deserves a lot more attention!

This is a very cool idea! At first I couldn't figure out how to shoot - in fact I didn't know you could at all, but once I did (space to shoot if anyone reading this is unsure), it became a delightful grid-based bullet-hell, which in itself is a very interesting concept, but the different firetypes for different face values made gameplay very interesting. I felt I didn't have a terrible amount of control over the firing pattern. Perhaps showing what face value would come up if you rolled in each direction would help? Like a sort of half opacity clone in front of each of the player's cardinal directions which showed the value?

While the game isn't terribly polished (except for the dice rolling animation which was way more satisfying than it should have been), this is a really fun game!

Thanks! Yeah, I should definitely lower the left ceiling...

- Thanks for pointing out the gaping hole in the tutorial. As soon as I came up with the tutorial room idea, I was so excited. All you had to do was hold J and D and it would literally play itself all while showing the player how to drill. Teaching the player downward-drilling was the intention of the room pictured here. Was that where you got stuck, or was there another way through or something? Could I have taught that part of the mechanic better?

- Sorry for the jarring ambience. It was kinda thrown together at the last minute, and it's literally just noise fading in and out on a loop. It was meant to sound like relaxing wind or something, but I evidently failed at that :-(

- I definitely would have added rooms where the camera scrolls if I had more time (and if I had this jam's feedback) to hopefully counter the blind gameplay issue.

Thanks for the constructive feedback!

Yeah, you're right about drilling upwards being an incredibly dumb timing. The reason I didn't make it easier during the jam is I didn't want drilling up out of the ground to be more viable then actual jumping, but in retrospect I should have given the player some sort of velocity boost when upward drilling. I think I was thinking something similar with the dash timings - that I didn't want them to be cheesable by normal drilling with some y-velocity-shenanigans, but I honestly feel like it was just because I was grinding out a Geometry Dash level with dumb dash timings at the time, and I felt the itch for more and more dash timings ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(Sorry for taking so long to reply to this comment, I got a little distracted from this game jam)

I so should have done gamepad support. It would have literally taken five minutes, yet I didn't think of doing it :-(

Also, you're right - blind gameplay (especially in the industrial area) was something I didn't really consider was completely awful. I think my excuse in my head at the time was that it was "memory based" and the player would die there once or twice and then have it in their head what to do, but that probably wasn't the case for most people. It just added to the difficulty of an already incredibly unbalanced game.

This is a really solid entry. Honestly, probably one of the best I've played this jam! The art, especially the backgrounds at the start, are beautiful, and the character is responsive, although they feel a little sluggish. The cat-form upgrade is essentially a morph ball, but better. It has a speed boost, which actually makes it useful, and you had the sense to add anti-wallclip code, unlike most of this jam's games! Kinda annoyed I got bugged at that transition like everybody else, as I would have loved to try my hand at the bossfight! Good job!

Thanks! Now I come to think of it, the second room you mentioned is particularly confusing to newcomers...

I've attached both room's intended routes if you or someone else got stuck there! (Arrows are dashes)

Thanks for pointing out the secret route into playground! Had a load of fun trying out the grapple there! I do feel like the grapple should allow you to channel your current velocity a bit more, but maybe that's just me trying and failing to those random out of bounds blocks :-)

Nice small game! I love the nice, simple artstyle and the fog of war effect! Impressed you managed to fit everything in one screen too! I couldn't find the high-jump ability, so I used teleport to pretty easily wallclip and get acid-proof armour. After that I got rocket boots, and then just got yeeted up to the boss without any explanation. I personally could not figure out the boss's patterns at all, but a few attempts after I beat it, not exactly understanding how I did. A bit confusing, but great game overall!

Very interesting to see a movement shooter metroidvania! I like the pixel filter, and although the environments feel a little bland, I can't say much, as my 3d modelling skills are non-existent. Just a few things:

- Harvest, at least with the first gun, is literally useless, since the player can move so fast when moving anyway. All of the harvest-gated areas can be skipped with diagonal running (holding W and D or A at the same time), even straight from Grey to Blue without gaining any abilities, although the jump is considerably tighter.

- I struggled initially to tell what was the harvest bar and what was the health bar. Even a small heart image beside the health bar would help to distinguish them, along with a flash on the harvest bar when you hit enemies.

- The snowmen sinking into the ground is just annoying. It can be fixed by just entering and exiting the room, but why?

- LOADING DOESN'T WORK. I mean, I believe it might have worked on my first death, I can't remember exactly, but every other playthrough, I had to quit the game and start all over again, re-entering my settings too. Which lead to me skipping all the way to shotgun as mentioned earlier every playthrough. I once got to Blue's savepoint in just over 30 seconds, but there's plenty of room for optimisation.

- It's really hard to tell what the upgrades in the pause menu are. I never figured it out in the end, except for the blindingly obvious heart.

- It's kinda hard to tell if you take damage unless you're staring at the HP bar. Even a red screen flash would help.

- I can appreciate that it was the last weapon, but the sniper rifle has no harvest special.

- Uh, was there a way to switch weapons? Because if there was, I missed it.

- The game doesn't fit into the theme (except for the name pun).

- Finally, this is completely my fault, but at the ending I softlocked myself because I skipped slide. I couldn't access that cool-sounding playground :-/

This game definitely has a lot of potential! I can't wait to see more of it!

Just curious, but can you give any examples of rooms that were awkward to figure out for you? Rooms leading up to the first dash upgrade come to mind for me, but are there any others that you can think of?