itch.io

thank you! Yeah the movement was really hard to tune. Fun fact: tunnels and ropes are almost the same thing under the hood. The only difference is that tunnels are "entered" automatically while ropes make you press the up arrow.

I think I'll try to make my next foray into tilemaps less headache inducing. Thats a good goal.

Hi, I started doing game jams this summer. But I have 5 years experience in Godot working on teams of various sizes, as well as more.. enterprise programming experience (web crap and c++). Im open to learning custom tools but godot is definitely my comfort zone.

Why would I look for another programmer? Well, i usually think just a tad out of scope for game jams on the technical side. Having some help and sharing ideas has really helped on another team I'm working with at the moment. Im also a competent Blender user, and I can do simple sound stuff. Let me know if you would be interested in working with me.

yay!!  cereal gang!

I originally planned on "lizards" (men on all fours with spoons), but I ran out of time. Monk playthrough :))

I don't think they would have worked that well because the existing code was already pretty jank and that would have been amplified by navigation and player character/enemy interactions. It's really frustrating because the world does come off as dry with nothing else in it, and I just don't get dry cereal.

Thank you for playing!

Everything about this game works. I played this game for 15 minutes. I played the cereal pouring game for 15 minutes. I got invested in the tech related to manipulating the box using the corner of the table. And for my efforts, I was given that final cutscene with- genuinely -and adaptive music track fading in over the existing background track. Incredible.

Actually unhinged that you commented on my rating page telling me to come here. Based. 10/10.

I'm playing all the cereal based games as a joke, but some of them are actually pretty interesting. 

I wasn't able to beat it in the end, the placing ui and the controls were a little too much for me, but the visual theming and adherence to the prompt were good. The race was just challenging enough that I wanted to come back to it when I ran out of time during the exploration sections.

front loops are food. You are grain. The cereal graveyard is the dregs of the grain farm in the background- i think. How do you think respawning works?

I will play all the cereal games!

This one was actually really good. I think I progressed too fast and broke it because I had 4 stars at the end, but that's just the kind of thing you want from this sort of game.

The premise doesn't overstay its welcome, this is one of the better paced submissions I've played so far. Thank you for making this!

I really thought of doing an idle game/incremental game for the jam at first. But I couldn't think of a way to make it interesting. My assumption is that other people would just make a game in the same vein more interesting than mine. I think that holds true here. There's definitely some decision making involved in progressing. I didn't get completely hooked but it had me clicking for a while.

The animations are nice. Is there supposed to be sound?

Horrendous. 10/10

I WILL play ALL the cereal games for obvious reasons.

I lost a piece of myself when, in the year of our lord 2025, the text "heckin chonker" appeared on screen. But, if you think about it, I needed that hole to become cereal, which is everyone's ultimate goal.

Ok so all jokes aside, the rainbow loops giving more points, but falling off if you have too much on your plate, encouraged me to really play the game how I imagine must be the correct way to play, which is by throwing as much food at the cat as possible. Kinda based design. Surprisingly engaged.

I've been completely outclassed in cereal gaming. 100 out of 10

I actually really liked most of the puzzles. For a game jam, I feel like I'm not really looking for mechanics that are too complicated or in depth. I don't want to spend a whole afternoon on one submission.

That being said, I didn't finish this game. I got apparently softlocked in room 10 when I opened the door.

The art and sound is great. I played a lot of UFO 50 a few months back and the [secret stuff spoiler] part of that game plays very similarly, if you know you know. 

You were very self-deprecating on the game page. But if you think about it, this game hits all the categories for the jam pretty well, and since I did in fact have fun with it, it's a pretty strong entry despite the bugs.

Impressive that you made this in such a short time span. There are some subtle challenges to it, like I found diamonds on the left harder to hit. The comboing mechanic is also really rewarding.

The menu is also nice. It would have been very easy to totally shelf that but you didn't.

GOOD CEREAL

Very solid tower defense game!

I played a lot of the early BTD games on flash websites when little, this brought me right back. Particularly, the way every part of the ui is on screen and updated in real time, including cheekily placed volume settings, really reminded me of that whole era. The number keys for selecting towers is also a nice touch.

The wave design is pretty aggressive, it took me multiple tries to get to the boss, and the boss music felt pretty fitting for getting there.

I really enjoyed this. At first I was frustrated that I couldn't figure out what the ui meant, but getting different items that interacted with them helped me sort things out and felt pretty organic.

I got to the point where I was intentionally backtracking to farm shops and different resources. It seems like this was the intended skill ceiling, unless I'm missing something. 

I finished by testing if a chest that costs one health would kill me. It did. Which is awesome, btw.

This was all driven by wanting to see what was next. I wasn't expecting more than one enemy type, and the animations of the wall coming up and the day/night cycle are very pleasant and well communicated.

Only big issue I ran into was that the controller support did not in fact work for me. The attack button wasn't being picked up. I was using a Xbox S controller, if that helps. And on keyboard, I was only able to attack directly up. On a smaller note, it was very hard to tell when an enemy was attacking me, or when I was landing a hit. Most of the time I died because I didn't realize I was losing health in the first place. Otherwise very fun, though.

Wow! 

The narrative and mechanics work really well together. You can really feel the desperation of the main character, even though the npcs seem just fine with standing around. It was a bold choice to make the base character and car movement so slow, which forced me to weigh my options when getting out of the car to gather materials. The number of materials and their uses added to that. Seriously very engaging.

Also, the sound and visuals are good. The beasts really are quite large, and sound large too. The way the time meter is always there at the top of the screen and turns red when they get closer gives them a lot of presence, even when not looking at them directly.

I want to play and rate a lot of games, so I wasn't able to beat this right away. I got crushed instantly by a leg that was out of my field of vision. An indicator of when a leg is nearby would be nice. The game was also absolutely frying my computer. I might try again later, though.

The last puzzle is really neat. I like how the puzzle goal shifts from something straightforward to something more intuitive. 

The rabbit and gate models, and the look really nice, but I think the game would have looked better overall if some of the effort put into them was moved towards the terrain and texturing.

im stuck on the first level i keep dying. think i just need to up my dosage..

"I could implement the same functions in a separate windows.c file and link my game with it to seamlessly replace the JavaScript host." That is so cool. I will definitely not make my next game in C. As much as I want to.

Multiplayer is one of the abilities you unlock later in. I didn't even know applications warned people before accessing the network until the day before submission. Sorry if that freaked you out. 

Background music appreciators rise up! 

Yeah, I'm going to have to tone down the movement. Much like me in real life, the main character has V1 Ultrakill running around in his frontal lobe at all times.

It doesn't seem that I can open any of the doors. I was still able to get to the "prison room", but got stuck after the O2 room. I stopped after I got softlocked because the ladder down from Middle Room 1 cannot be escaped.

The vague notion of a "casual room" that just has reverse gravity was really funny to me. There's also a bug in that room where you can jump infinitely from time to time but that was also mostly just fun. The character design is also pretty amusing. There's some good ideas here.

I recommend that you keep making small games to get more familiarity with Unity 6. It's clear this game was made at a very introductory level. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily, but it also seems like the team wanted to do more and do better. Thank you for making this!

Thanks for the feedback! It was temple music indeed. The last week or so of rating has been an... illuminating lesson in player communication and balance. Haven't heard about the ladders, you really should be able to latch onto them with a contextual prompt dark souls style. 

In the first level, there is a double door in the ceiling that I assume is supposed to be operable. But when I press the two switches, nothing happens. I thought this was the way forward, because I felt that I scoured the level for other exits and found nothing. Not necessarily "game breaking," I might be missing something but it was enough to deter me, lol.

Thanks for making this game! Bug tracker? So fancy! I wish your team the best of luck working on this. More run variety could be cool. My roommate recently finished Blue Prince, which tackles the similar issue of shifting levels with specific story/progression points very well. Even without their ridiculous room variety, you're using the rooms differently every time. Instead of "go from one side to the other" it's "this room gives me a thing I can cash in at another room, but taking it also means you don't have enough steps to get to this other place". The usual "relic" roguelite trope is turned on it's head as the rooms themselves become the major deciding factor in what the player can and cannot do each run. 

I was not expecting the disposable robot to have such groovement. Part of that is the impressive level design. The procedural levels play well with the movement mechanics. You're never softlocked because you can exit to your ship easily.

Starting with one health was a little harsh for me but I respect the design choice. It was genuinely funny to close a door on myself and just explode instantly. I took up all of my tries stepping into a room while telling myself not to hit the button that rains laser on your bucket-head, just to do the same thing moments later.

This game also looks and sounds fantastic. 

I wasn't able to finish it though, it is buggy. That's ok. My game is a mess too and also had many 12+ hour days put into it. As stated on the game page, this is a prototype.

So, sticking to design feedback. I feel this game will be too punishing for most players without some kind of permanent progression within levels. I don't think this failure mechanic should be removed entirely, but there are too many ways to die in the first level that the player needs to adapt to. Doors, laser traps, different enemy types, and different configurations of the three have all had painstaking effort put into them, but it is hard to experiment with them knowing that any upgrades awarded for your efforts will likely go down the drain. I found myself avoiding gears just because I didn't like the feeling of being full.

What if there were fewer lives, but failing a mission simply rescrambled the map instead of generating on each drop? Just, anything different from a complete reset I would prefer.

You didn't do anything wrong. I'm going to stop helping people in comments. It feels like cheating. Chalk it up to poor level design ig.

The web build does suffer severe stutter. I baked lightmaps for everything! There's a solid 80 megs of lightmap data in there. I tried to calm it down with occlusion, but I shouldn't have gone for it in the first place. 

Super level design. Took me 3 or 4 sessions to beat the game. The upgrades feel so organic and useful! I'm not sure if I was solving puzzles correctly or if I was brute forcing them or cheating. I got confused at a lot of points but that was mostly part of the experience.

The main criticism I have is the sound. The jump sound clips every time. At least in the web build. And the music loop wore thin pretty fast. Having the music come in and out, or only play in certain areas, would have been nicer. But everything else felt good. 

I would also like to highlight that I would never have beaten this game if it didn't save progress. It's not a rare feature but thanks for including that anyway.

The design of the levels is really good, but if you're planning on continuing this project I would recommend taking a step back to remake some of the mechanics. I found the game very buggy for a longer term project. I ignore my own advice all the time and always pay the price when I have an unstable foundation for a larger software project.

That being said, here are the things that do appear to work very well:

 - Navigation is no joke. Unreal has some good tools for it but it's still very impressive how you've integrated it with the companion and the enemies.

 - The ideas are great. The pet mechanics are really cool. I definitely sequence broke while I was exploring, and it was kind of tough to tell where to go (both arguably not that bad things for metroidvania). But getting lost would definitely be harder if there was just a little more environmental detail. 

 - Finding shortcuts and running into all the soulsy level tropes was always fun (kicking ladders, doors locked by contraptions). 

The best part of the game for me was when all 3 of these points combined to create that really cute moment where the pet can pathfind through the dilapidated hallway just like you, but has to take a different path due to not being able to jump.

The biggest bugs I encountered were:

 - I was able to skip the dark area by dying. The trigger to set the darkness doesn't cover the actual checkpoint, and dying gets rid of the darkness. So just dying to the enemy down there clears it up and lets me see just fine.

 - The glide ability is pretty glitchy. Because the pet is actually hanging on top of your head, if you stop gliding while close to a ceiling you can get them stuck in the ceiling. This can even be used to staple a trampoline to the top of a window frame, which allows for lots of unintended movement. When the glide ends, maybe return the pet to the player's exact position before enabling their physics. 

  - The ledge grab often does not pull you up properly or grabs onto ledges that it shouldn't, such as the walls with invisible walls above them. 

The main points of the design that could be improved:
   - The telekinesis isn't currently as compelling as the other abilities. It slows you down and doesn't have any interactions with the pet. Maybe if you could pick them up with it? 

  - Decoration and worldbuilding. Even with a bare prototype like this, the idea about the school "crumbling"  could have been more present beyond using debris as an obstacle. This is why the levels feel "empty". 

The main mechanic is implemented very well. I would have liked to see some utilization of its interactions with ceilings. Maybe if it was on a toggle instead of held and you had to set yourself to the right height for stuff? 

Anyways, this game feels very solid and rewarding. Each point of progress was slightly surprising without making me feel dumb for  running into them, which is a hard balance to get right. The controls are a little jittery but it never demanded so much from me that this became a problem.

Ok. It's up.

Like, if i rezip my local files, its fixed. But i cant fix it here bc i cant upload new files after the deadline. The game is bricked. I made a community post abt it.

So some games will give you an ability and be like "you now have the soul dash, you may now dash through metal grates by pressing the right trigger". This game takes a more organic tutorial approach: "space to dash". Those blocks over there? Well, there isn't a lot else going on, so might as well give it a shot.

Jokes aside, this game surprised me. It's starting presentation and jank controls didn't gear me for the effective pacing and boss design. Good work!

Cool!
My favorite part was how enemies didn't have passive hitboxes, only attacks telegraphed by awareness indicators. It felt relevant to the character that they can sneak around instead of confronting things directly. Not to mention how the beetles can run themselves into spike pits. I felt very stealthy! The movement is a little clunky, but that added to the tension of certain situations, especially navigating around those terrifying fish things.

My only complaints are the same as what Kaseling already mentioned about the map and that things like pogoing enemies, dashing into walls that are too nearby, and any more precise movement generally felt inconsistent. I also found the music a little repetitive and the visuals for the player sprite and the screen darkening for messages looked a little off, but the overall look remained very cohesive and I don't think the game loses much for these small things.

I didn't account for this possibility. Microsoft Windows 11 works in mysterious ways... I can't update the files now because the deadline has passed. Though I have the fixed zip file. Literally just rezipped the same files. In the same way. All I would need to do to fix this is to add them to my game page. 

Is there anything I can do? On the one hand, this seems like a dumb thing to lose my game over. On the other, there doesn't seem to be a protocol for handling late late submissions like that. I don't want to interfere with the structure of the jam.

https://roboticy3.itch.io/the-beacon

If I rezip the files, they work. Just rezip the same files. I'll probably have to badger someone to update the files since its well past the deadline now. I can't change the files here.

I can't believe that I built the game, tested the built, zipped it, shipped it, and now nothing works because I didn't test that the zip file would work. I've never seen that happen before.

There's definitely stuff you can do down there. It's a puzzle area! If you're stuck stuck like can't move at all, restart the game and you'll be placed safely at your ship, either to explore more or try again.

I swapped souls and scrap in the ui by accident, sorry. It's just visual, though.There is stuff you need in the temple area, but if you're ever stuck you can always quit and reload, your progress is saved.

During the 24hr extension, I introduced a new bug! I'm really angry that it's in the game, because I just got back from work and didn't realize until now. Souls and Parts/Scrap are swapped in the ui. This is really obvious and annoying. How did I not see this earlier? I'm sorry for not having mac support. The beacon (the red crystal you may have collected) will not work there. I can try to send you a mac build if you like but Godot told me that it wouldn't work because of some signing thing.