itch.io

"The commander IS the order" is a beautiful piece of design. No selection box, no unit groups, your positioning IS the tactic. Advance to attack, retreat to bait, go around to flank. For a genre that normally demands ten keyboard shortcuts, reducing everything to where you're standing is a smart simplification rather than a dumb one, and it's the only RTS I've seen in this jam.

The title screen is also one of the most beautiful here. A cloaked viking chief seen from behind on a hilltop at sunset, torn banner beside him, the army's spears coming up out of the fog below. That looks like commercial box art.

And the presentation around it holds up: DEPLOY, MULTIPLAYER, WAR RECORDS, SETTINGS, QUIT, with "War Records" as the name for the scoreboard being exactly the right vocabulary. The muster screen lets you pick a commander with listed stat modifiers and a difficulty before marching out, and in-match you've got gold, timer, an Ours vs Enemy score, a circular minimap, a recruitment panel with unit cards, a tech button and an 8 step tutorial with a skip option. That's big-game structure.

The blocker: I COULDN'T MOVE THE COMMANDER. The tutorial says plainly "click on the battlefield, your army follows the commander". I clicked all over the field. I also clicked the commander himself first, which DID register (his HP appeared at the top), so clicks are definitely reaching the game, and then clicked a destination. He never moved, and the tutorial stayed frozen on step 1 of 8. With the commander stuck the timer barely advances either, so the whole game seems to be waiting on that tutorial step to unlock.

Three smaller things. The play area only occupies part of the top left of the window with a big brown band around it, and the UI panels sit over the field squeezing the useful space further. In the main menu, WAR RECORDS and SETTINGS overlap each other. And your itch description was pasted as raw Markdown, so it literally shows "# Hersir: Glory Chasers" and asterisks on screen. The text is good and deserves to be formatted, and that's a one minute fix.

Ambition and presentation to spare. If the move click works, this jumps straight onto the list of entries worth playing. Fully playable offline with web and downloadable builds is a strong end of life answer too.

Your itch page is exemplary and I want to lead with that, because it's the most transparent documentation I've seen in this jam. You wrote a Bugs section listing your own defects (some enemy movement is framerate dependent, boss weapons break if you load a save mid-fight), credited every sprite, sound and music artist with a link, and left an emergency key that clears all enemies if something goes wrong. That's more honesty than plenty of commercial games manage.

Having SAVE and LOAD in a jam shmup is a rare treat, and in a jam about preservation, letting the player keep and resume their run is a gesture well aligned with the theme. The pixel art space background (purple nebula with coloured stars at different sizes) is genuinely pretty and gives real depth. It also drops you straight in with no menu and no loading, which suits score chasing. And there are well considered details in there: you can shoot down enemy torpedoes for points, and when you run out of lives the game starts slowly regenerating health instead of just ending.

Where I struggled. I couldn't get the score to move. The game starts with 130 points already on the board (I never worked out where that number comes from) and after a long time shooting it was still 130. My shots left the ship and crossed the screen, but enemies didn't die. Either my aim was wrong or damage wasn't being applied.

The pace is also very slow. Enemies cross the screen almost stationary and there are long gaps between them. In a score chaser the opposite helps: more enemies, faster, with the number always climbing.

Two smaller ones: there's no title screen, game name or in-game instruction, you just land in dark space with a ship, so anyone who doesn't read the itch page won't know save, cheat or the emergency key exist. And the window is bigger than the screen, so the vertical red health bar is pinned to the right edge and partly cut off.

The page is a model of how to document a jam game. The game itself mainly needs pace and a title screen.

The title pun is good, PvP that's actually Player vs Predator, and a frog against an eel in the sewers is a fun idea. The brick wall scenery with green vines and the cyan water pipe running down it has a likeable old MSX/Amiga look, the little green frog sprite is cute, and the double jump responds well.

But as far as I can tell THERE IS NO LEVEL YET. I pressed PLAY, the frog became controllable and the scenery started scrolling, but in over 30 seconds of running there was no eel, no obstacle, no collectible and no score. Just brick wall going past. The only thing that changes is the blue sign with the game title, which cracks as you run and then disappears, and I assumed that was leading somewhere but it doesn't.

There's also no HUD at all. No counter, no timer, no lives. And your description promises "at the end you get your score", but I never saw a score of any kind. There's no menu, no game over and no way to restart without reloading the page.

Honestly this reads like a submission uploaded before it was assembled. The foundation is working, though, and that's worth saying: you have a character, physics, scenery and scrolling, which is the part a lot of people never get to. What's missing is the game on top of it.

If you come back to this after the jam you're already halfway there. Add the eel, add a score counter and a game over, and you'd have the thing your page describes. On the end of life question, "releasing the game on Newgrounds" is a distribution plan rather than a preservation one, so a downloadable build would be worth adding too.

The premise is the most honest joke in the jam: a rushed jam game, about making a rushed jam game, submitted to that same jam. Self-aware in the right way without being cynical about it.

The hand drawn Paint art is great, the character asleep sideways on the brown sofa, the close up on the bearded face with glasses. It's ugly on purpose and it works. And there's VOICE ACTING, which for a two day game with an animated cutscene is much more work than it looks.

Your asset credits deserve calling out specifically. You list every Pixabay sound with its creator, the Wikimedia gif with its CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence, and best of all you note that the first frame of the final cutscene was traced from a specific comic panel, with issue, page, panel, artist and writer. Nobody made you do that. In a jam about preserving and respecting other people's work, that's real coherence, and I'd encourage other participants to read your credits page.

The STEP 1 - PROGRAM YOUR GAME!!!! structure with code windows popping up to click, a "C-c-c-combo" counter and a bonus timer is a good joke about programming in a hurry.

Two real problems. THE BUILD IS FIXED AT 1920x1080 AND DOESN'T ADAPT. In a 1280px window I lost the entire right side of the screen, and that's exactly where the combo counter and bonus bar live. So the two indicators telling you how you're doing in the minigame are off screen for anyone not on a big monitor. I only saw them after forcing the window to 1960px.

And the first minigame stalled for me: I clicked the code windows and the white square, the bonus bar emptied and the Score stayed at 00 with nothing else happening. I couldn't tell whether I'd lost, finished, or frozen, because no message appears. Related, "click on whatever looks clickable" is a charming instruction but in a timed minigame it becomes guesswork, and a flashing outline on the first target would fix it.

The heart of this is lovely. It mainly needs a responsive canvas.

The start screen is a masterclass in onboarding. In one panel you pick between three ships, each with speed and acceleration shown as actual numbers, and right below there's a quick controls block listing everything: Space/Enter to start, A/D to change lane, Q/E or click to program turns at corners, S to brake. After a lot of entries in this jam with not one line of instruction, that care really stands out.

The neon vector look (cyan, magenta and gold on near-black) is cohesive and good looking, and the isometric buildings with light strips down their sides are nicely drawn. The HUD is built for score chasing from the start too: total score, race score, timer and a big yellow multiplier in the corner. Having a total separate from the race score suggests progression between runs. And "programming your turns at corners in advance" instead of steering in the moment is a genuinely different, more cerebral racing idea.

The problem: THE RACE NEVER STARTS. After clicking INICIAR CARRERA the screen goes to MODO RECONOCIMIENTO AEREO and sits there with a red band flashing "ESCANEANDO RUTA DE ESCAPE..." forever. The camera flies over the city nicely, the timer stays frozen at 0:00, and a ship never appears. I waited over 20 seconds and pressed Space and Enter several times, which is exactly what your controls screen tells you to do.

Two more. The game is very dark, even the scenery visible in that camera mode is at the limit of readable, dark grey buildings on a black background, which will be a problem in a high speed dodging game. And the window is bigger than the screen, so the right corner of the HUD is cut off.

I really wanted to play this. The presentation is among the most polished in the jam, which makes stopping at a loading screen that never finishes genuinely frustrating. Ping me if you patch it.

The sheer volume of systems here is absurd for a jam. The HOW TO PLAY screen lists double jump, wall jump, dash at Lv.3, projectile at Lv.6, a 300 damage special at Lv.7, a sword strike at Lv.10 and a Triforce Resonance at Lv.30. Then there's a COMBOS section: Attack + Dash for Spike Ball Dash, Attack + Shot for Spike Cannon, a Delayed Fuse that needs attack, attack, wait 0.25s and attack again to become a Cyclone, a Comet Buster where you fire and dash through your own shot, and a Shatter Step with an ice projectile. That's fighting game vocabulary, not one-week jam vocabulary.

The move names borrowed from Zelda and Metroidvania (Helm Splitter, Ascending Edge) show you know where the language you're using comes from. The opening starry sky screen with a polite "PRESS ANY KEY OR CLICK TO SKIP" is a small kindness. And the main menu is the most complete I've seen in the jam: NEW GAME, SAVE SLOTS, HOW TO PLAY, OPTIONS, SKINS, CREDITS, QUIT. Having SAVE SLOTS in a jam game, in a jam about preservation, deserves a note on its own.

It also works. I moved, attacked (the strike shows as a yellow blade beside the character) and killed the first enemy with no hitches. The HUD has level, a green health bar, an XP bar and a coin counter.

Now the honest part. The art is literally rectangles. The hero is a blue square, the enemies are red and purple squares, the attack is a yellow square. The background (green gradient hills, clouds, wooden platforms) is actually pleasant, but the characters are placeholders. There's a SKINS menu in a game where nobody has a sprite. It's the starkest contrast in this jam: systems to spare, presentation missing. Even three simple sprites would change how this entry is received more than any new combo would.

Two more. The touch buttons (arrows, ATK, JUMP) sit over the play area permanently on PC, taking up all four corners, and should hide when the player uses a keyboard. And the theme fit is the loosest I've rated so far: this is a 30 level progression platformer, not a score chaser. There's no scoreboard, there's level and XP. That's why my theme rating is low, and it's worth saying plainly rather than leaving you guessing.

Last practical note: your itch page has not one line of description, and the available "downloads" are the loose PWA files (icon-192.png, manifest.json, service-worker.js). Someone landing on the page has no idea what the game is. Three lines of description would change how many people click play more than anything else on this list.

Huge ambition. With sprites and a written page this would be one of the talked-about entries.

"Every wall is falling all the time" is a good arcade hook. The scenery becomes the enemy, so your score is literally how long you last. And the white pixel art logo tilted on the diagonal has a nice arcade energy to it.

Real credit for the honesty on your page, too: you flag prominently that the leaderboard does NOT work in the web version, explain why, and point people at the downloadable builds if they want to submit a score. Warning players instead of letting them discover it is the right call, and it's the sort of thing this jam should reward.

But I couldn't get past the title screen. The game loads (Godot 4.7), but the screen stays almost entirely black: just the HYPERFALL logo in the top left corner and a small grey box reading "WRIT" beside it, which looks like text cut off mid-word rather than an actual word. I waited over 20 seconds and nothing changed. I followed your page instructions exactly, clicked the canvas, pressed Space to play and A/D to navigate the menus. No reaction at all.

The diagnosis I'd suggest: all the content is squeezed into the top left corner even with the window at 1920x1080, which points at a viewport or stretch configuration problem in the web export rather than a lack of screen space. Also worth noting the browser tab says "Hyperfall (DEBUG)", so a debug build got published.

I couldn't evaluate the game itself, which is a shame, because from the comments on your page there are clearly people playing and enjoying it. It looks like the web build specifically is what's broken, and since the web build is what almost everyone in a jam will try, that's worth a re-export.

The death rule is excellent on paper. "You die if you are NOT touching the opposite colour" inverts everyone's instinct: normally you run from danger, here you have to keep grazing it constantly. That's permanent tension from a single rule, and it's one of the most original ideas I've read in this whole jam.

And the multiplier going UP when you die is the most generous reading of the theme I've come across. Instead of punishing failure, every failed attempt becomes fuel for the next run. That's practically the definition of a high score chaser, and it's a kinder design than most of the genre manages.

The title screen has real personality too, neon pink with a grid texture, the logo hand written slightly crooked with a little smiling face for the dot. Simple and memorable. And your description explains the death condition three different ways, including an example, which tells me you knew the rule was counter-intuitive and took the trouble to repeat it. Good instinct.

Here's my problem: I could not start it. The screen says PRESS [ENTER] and Enter did nothing at all. I clicked the canvas first (the yellow focus border did appear), pressed it repeatedly, tried the numpad Enter, and even dispatched the key event directly on the page to rule out something on my end. The game never left the title screen.

And because Enter is the ONLY way in, there's no plan B. There's no clickable button, no "click to start". Accepting Space or a mouse click as well would rescue anyone who hits this. Also, the title screen itself says "READ THE DESCRIPTION FOR THE CONTROLS PLEASE!" and since you already have a screen sitting there, it's cheaper to draw the controls on it than to send the player out of the game to read.

Genuinely gutted about this one, because "touch the opposite colour" deserves to be played. Ping me if you patch the input and I'll come back and rate it properly. Staying open source is a great end of life answer, by the way.

The visual read is beautifully clean. Field green, white line, white ball, jagged white spikes, a red Start band. You understand the entire scene without a word of text, which is rarer in this jam than it should be.

And the title is a good bit of thinking: a golf game with no flag, meaning there's no end, only getting higher than last time. That's the jam's theme in two words. Once I understood the gesture the shot felt satisfying too, the white aim line coming off the ball as you drag, and the camera rising with you as you gain height.

The blocker: the shot power seems to be capped. I tested drags of 200px, 400px and one nearly the full height of the screen (710px), and the ball went up almost exactly the same distance all three times, always falling back to the start. I never got past the Start band. I'm not the only one, there's a comment on your page saying exactly this, that they can't progress and the force applied to the ball could probably be higher.

You also flag in the description that the game LOSES MOUSE INPUT if you drag outside the play area, and that it only works properly in fullscreen. I can confirm: when my drag ended outside the canvas, the aim line froze on screen and the shot never fired. Since the game's core gesture is dragging a long way, that happens constantly. Capturing the pointer while the mouse is held down would fix it.

Two smaller ones. The gesture isn't explained anywhere in the game. People in your comments assumed you had to drag FROM the ball (I did too) when actually you can drag from anywhere and only the direction matters. A three second animated arrow on the first screen would solve that for everyone at once. And the title on the start screen is partly hidden behind the grass texture, I could only read "N. Fl.ag ...ole?".

The core is good and it looks nice. More power and locking the mouse to the window would fix almost everything.

The opening text on your itch page is genuinely good. "You look down at your hands and see claws" is the kind of opening that makes someone want to play. And the idea of killing in order to not die fits a score game neatly: survival IS the score. The name Bloodscore is a smart welding of the theme to the premise too.

Unfortunately I couldn't get out of the menu. The game loads (Unity), the title screen appears with BLOODSCORE in red and the two buttons, Start Game in lime green and Controls in white, but NEITHER responds. I single clicked, double clicked, focused the canvas first, tried Enter, tried the fullscreen button in the footer. Nothing.

A diagnosis that might help: the entire menu is bunched into the top left corner of the canvas with about two thirds of the screen empty on the right. That's almost always a sign of UI anchored to fixed coordinates, and it tends to be the same root cause as buttons not receiving clicks, because the clickable areas end up somewhere other than where they're drawn. Re-exporting with a responsive canvas and testing in a small browser window would likely fix both at once.

One more thing: your itch page doesn't list the controls, so even if the game had opened I'd have gone in blind. Adding those is two minutes of work.

I couldn't evaluate any of the gameplay, and the premise was one I most wanted to see working. Worth a re-export.

That title screen is one of the most beautiful in the jam. Detailed pixel art of a red haired ninja with a high ponytail, black mask and huge Wolverine style claws, the title in letters that each have their own colour, and her silhouette repeating as a background pattern. It looks like a Mega Drive box. The character sprite is excellent.

And the name is the thesis. DOPEAMINOYD with the combo as a survival mechanic is a joke about addictive game design itself: you don't hold the combo to score, you hold it to NOT DIE. The dopamine loop became a life requirement. That's a smart bit of framing and the rainbow combo counter under the white SCORE, each digit a different colour, is tacky in exactly the right way. It says "this is the number that gives you pleasure" without a word.

The HUD is clean too, health in red, SCORE, the coloured combo, level in cyan, the ability icon on the side and a discreet "Z - help" in the corner. The dark grey pixel art cave with hanging green vines is well made and the character stands out against it. Controller support with the triggers documented on the page is a nice extra.

Three notes. I walked a fair distance and didn't find a single enemy in the first stretch, so my score stayed at 0. In a game built entirely around holding a combo, opening with nothing to attack empties out the first impression, which is the one most jam voters will get. It also wasn't clear which key attacks, I tried X and saw no animation, and only noticed the "Z - help" afterwards. And the cave is dark and monotonous, the grey platforms against the grey background blur together a bit.

The art and the concept are above average here. It mainly needs to drop the player into the action faster.

The core mechanic is great: the scoreboard is your financial life. Using the emergency ability (Q, OVERDRAFT PULSE, cost 100) spends 100 points, so every time you save yourself you move further from the record. That's the perfect dilemma for this theme, and calling the ability an overdraft is a lovely piece of naming.

The whole vocabulary is financial and consistent: audit, balance, debt, Collectors, overdraft. The end screen showing FINAL BALANCE and FINAL SCORE as separate numbers is well thought out, because it means balance and score really are different things.

The controls being written into the CORNERS OF THE ARENA during play (SPACE - DASH bottom left, Q - OVERDRAFT PULSE / COST: 100 bottom right) is a great solution. Always visible, never in the way. And the visuals are clean and readable: black background, thick red frame marking the arena, your glowing blue orb, the Collectors as red and orange squares. Zero confusion about who is who, which is the exact opposite of the problem a lot of entries here have.

The blocker: I started with HEALTH: 1 / 3. A third of my health gone in the first second of my first run. Either I took instant damage on spawn or something is wrong with the initial state, but either way I died in about 15 seconds with a balance of 0. With a 2 minute timer and health starting at 1/3, I never got to experience the debt mechanic at all, which is the whole point of the game. The movement also carries a lot of inertia and the Collectors come straight at you, so escaping without the dash is hard.

If that 1/3 start is a bug, fixing it changes this entry completely. The "spend your score to survive" idea deserves to be played properly. Also, the Preservation Pledge on your page (no servers, no login, no DRM, no remote shutdown dependency) is exactly the answer this jam is asking for.

The login screen is a parodied Windows XP and the detail is perfect. The system is called "Modern OS" with a hand scrawled colourful logo, and the classic instruction "to begin, click your user name". Except the USER NAME is literally "Good Workers, Stay Productive", with a photo of roses as the avatar. You don't have a name, you ARE the slogan. That's an excellent visual joke and it tells you everything about the game in one screen.

The desktop is deliberately melancholy: a real sunset photo, purple and pink, pixelated and dithered, seen through a window with tree branches in silhouette. It's beautiful and sad, the view you won't enjoy because you'll be working until 21:00. The hand drawn icons finish it off.

And the taskbar clock IS the game clock: "Day 1 | Up next: Work until 21:00". Every action consumes hours. I clicked once and the clock jumped from 9:87 to 11:49, then to 13:33. Same as Employee of Forever, the resource you spend is your lifetime, and it's interesting that two independent entries in this jam arrived at the same metaphor. The task window is cruelly banal too: "Write 29 words in the Document 0/29", repeated three times, and you have to actually type them. Tedium as a mechanic, and it works.

Three notes. I didn't find the leaderboard, which is the premise of your description, in the first few minutes, so I assume it appears after a few days. The hand drawn icons are charming but don't say what they do, so I clicked everything to find out. And the clock reads "9:87", which isn't a time, so either it's a deliberate joke about distorted corporate time or a formatting bug, and I honestly couldn't tell which.

Burnout atmosphere built really well. Releasing the source under GPL-3.0 with documentation is also one of the strongest end of life answers in the jam.

The 90s operating system interface is the best part. Several little grey windows with title bars and the three buttons, over a cyan desktop background, all inside a CRT monitor frame with a yellow bezel. Along with Delete Everything, you're one of two entries in this jam that really nailed that aesthetic.

Organising it as separate windows genuinely suits the genre: one window purely for stats (customers, score, HighScore, quota, employees, money), another with department tabs (sales, marketing, management, finance), another with just hire and fire, plus a toolbar with coloured icons. You build your own dashboard, which is a smart fit. And having a QUOTA with a HighScore separate from the score creates the right "hit the target or fold" pressure.

It worked, too. I hired 2 employees, money dropped from 1000 to 785 and the score went up to 800.

Three things. The start button only responded to a double click. There's no explanation anywhere: four departments, a quota, an employee cap, and no indication of what any of it does, so I hired completely blind. And the windows overlap in a way that hides information, the stats window sits partly behind the departments one from the very start and I had to guess at what was written.

The retro OS packaging is good. It just needs to explain the game inside it. Even one small "readme.txt" window on the desktop would fit the theme perfectly and solve it.

The 3D casino scene is really well put together. First person in front of a machine, more machines down the sides, chequered carpet, dark grid ceiling and an empty armchair beside you. It genuinely feels like an empty casino at 4am, slightly depressing, which is exactly the right mood for what this game is about.

The background posters are the joke and they land. One says "CHANCE ZERO." and the other, huge, just says "LOSE!". After I lost, it changed to "LOSE! TRY AGAIN?". That's good satire: the entire environment is telling you the truth and you pull the lever anyway. The machine itself is nicely modelled too, gold top reading BIG $100.000 WIN, the grapes and banana and BAR and 7, the !JACKPOT! 777 panel.

And the giant red arrow pointing at the lever on your first play is a zero cost visual tutorial that works perfectly. The HUD is direct as well, money with a combo multiplier and a spins counter, and using consecutive wins as the multiplier is the right mechanic for this theme.

Where I struggled. Starting with only 3 spins and $0 is harsh, I lost a third of my resources on the first pull and was immediately negative. It also never became clear how I earn spins back or what I actually do with the debt. Your description mentions a deep upgrade tree and I couldn't find how to reach it, which is a shame because the debt-as-tactic idea is the interesting part. And the lever only responded to a click exactly on it.

Great atmosphere, and the poster gag is worth the visit by itself.

The title screen is a wall of parody game covers, all hand drawn, and it's the best thing here. PAYWOMAN, ROAD TRAFFIC ACCIDENT, "the last one remaster", "ball game this year" sitting right next to "ball game NEXT year" (which is the annual release joke in two words). It's a chaotic, funny collage and every cover is a small jab at the industry. "the last one REMASTER" got me.

Choosing Ren'Py to build a shop simulator is an unexpected call and the result has a handmade quality I liked. The boss character, a giant smiling pink head in a purple suit greeting you with "welcome my dear empleoyee", is crude but has charisma.

And your description is disarmingly honest: "if the game doesn't break, post your stats in the comments so I can see how unbalanced it is" and "I might fix the game, or maybe not, I'm tired". That's pure jam spirit and it genuinely made me like the entry more.

Things to fix if you do come back to it. The title screen has a clear rendering artifact, the covers appear mirrored and duplicated in the middle of the screen with the text reversed, which looks like a transition effect that got stuck. There are several typos ("empleoyee"). And the side menu (Start/Load/Preferences/About/Help) hides behind the covers and is nearly unreadable, which is a problem since it's the only way into the game.

Messy, and you know it, but that wall of parody covers is worth the visit on its own.

This worked perfectly with zero friction, which after a lot of this jam is worth saying out loud. I clicked, chose, rolled, scored. Being plain HTML text instead of a canvas turns out to be a real advantage here.

The presentation is elegant: near-black background, spaced serif font, thin bordered buttons. It reads like a well edited gamebook, restrained and classy. And the choices say everything about the theme: "Draw people's OCs and suggestions" as the safe option, "Start trolling and ragebaiting", "Start a fight online", with icons signalling risk and reward without explaining themselves.

The dice system is transparent and satisfying. It shows Target Needed: 10 or higher, then Your Roll: 58, then SUCCESS, you gained 58 viewers. You see exactly why you won. A lot of luck-based games hide that and are worse for it. And the theme reading is sharp and current, chasing a number until it destroys you, with the ban as game over. Crediting the template you used is a good honest touch too.

Three notes. Being pure text makes it the opposite of everything else in the jam, which isn't a flaw, but a single header illustration would give it a lot more identity in a list of 300 entries. "Target Needed: 10" against a roll of 58 suggests the early difficulty is close to zero, and a tighter scale would create actual tension. And it's short.

If someone wants to play something from this jam with no risk of getting stuck in a menu, this one is a safe bet.

The title is a good joke. "Start Killing Slop" playing off "Stop Killing Games" flips the campaign's name and turns it into a comment on disposable games at the same time. Anyone who knows the jam smiles at that. And saying openly that it's your first jam and you made everything yourself is the right way to show up.

The red brick floor has decent texture and contrasts readably with the green enemies. The HUD is lean and in the right place, HighScore and Score top left, ammo at the bottom, nothing in the way. Controls are on the page and are exactly what you'd expect.

The main thing to fix, and it's a big one: the player is a FLOATING GUN WITH NO BODY. It took me a while to work out where I even was on screen. I assumed all the green shapes were enemies and that I was somehow off camera, and I only realised when I fired and the gun rotated. Drawing a body under the gun, even just a circle, fixes that completely and would change the whole first minute for every player.

Second: the enemies are irregular green blobs with no face and no facing direction, so you can't tell where they're heading or whether they're about to hit you. Even a single eye or a pointed front would help.

Third: I fired and the score stayed at 0. I don't know whether I missed or whether enemies take several hits, because there's no hit feedback at all, no flash, no sound, no number. Adding any one of those three would make shooting feel real. Also the first click on the canvas only takes focus rather than firing.

For a first jam the fundamentals are there, you move, you shoot, there's ammo and a score. The priority is simple: show the player, and confirm the hit. One note on the end of life criterion, since it's scored here: "the game will stay on itch" leaves it entirely dependent on the platform. A downloadable build would cost you nothing and fits the jam.

Honest heads up: the game never opened for me, so this rating reflects that rather than what you built, and I'd genuinely like to redo it if you get the loading sorted.

What happened: the screen sits on a pulsing dark red and never moves on. I waited, reloaded the page and waited again, same result both times.

I did see your note on the page: "IMPORTANT: sometimes the game doesn't open after the splash screen, if that happens reload and open again". So you already know about it. In my case the reload didn't help, which is worth knowing, because right now that bug blocks 100% of the players it happens to, and in a jam where people give each entry two minutes before moving on, that's votes you never get to earn. The build is also titled SKGJAM26'PROTOTYPE internally, so I appreciate this may be a very early stage.

What I can praise: flagging the problem yourself instead of letting players discover it is the right instinct, and "sanity as fuel" is an interesting hook. LAST HUMAN / SURVIVE / SANITY FUELING reads well as a premise and I was looking forward to it.

If you find the cause, reply here and I'll come back and re-rate properly. Also, "it'll stay playable for the rest of the world's life, and if itch dies I'll find other platforms" is a nice answer to the end of life question.

The theme reading is fun and literal: the highest score ever taken is a pile of stolen money and you are literally chasing it down a motorway. That fits "high score chaser" neatly and the pun actually works.

The title screen explains the objective in one line ("Hit the heist truck to make them drop money from their big score") and shows the truck and the police car on the road, so you get instant context. And the briefing screen is one of the most complete in the jam: it lists all three of the truck's attacks (gunfire, dynamite and caltrop bags), explains that you can shoot the caltrops so they don't puncture your tyres, and gives the controls and the goal. Nobody goes in blind, which I appreciated a lot after playing a stack of entries that explain nothing.

Health as STARS in the top left is a pretty and readable choice, and the masked robber portrait with the rifle next to it is a nice touch. The multi-lane pixel art motorway with trees at the sides and the lines rushing past gives a good sense of speed.

Three notes. The briefing is a wall of text, five paragraphs at once, layered over the game already running behind it. The information is good but it arrives all in one go. Splitting it across two screens, or better, showing each threat the first time it actually appears, would land much more comfortably.

I also lost a health star in the first few seconds without seeing where the damage came from. And the truck pulls away off the top of the screen very quickly, with no distance indicator or arrow pointing at it, so I ended up alone on the road with Score 0, not knowing whether I should be accelerating or hanging back.

Likeable premise and a generous briefing. It mostly needs the information paced out.

The atmosphere is pretty and calm. Light blue sky with clouds, a dark grid platform stretching to the horizon, and dozens of translucent balloons drifting up in blue, white and pink. It has a genuinely contemplative mood, which is unusual in a jam full of neon and noise. The character is a round, chubby low poly creature in a helmet, half ridiculous and half cute, and it works. The 10 / 10 ammo counter in the corner is big and clear too.

But I couldn't actually play it. PLAY only responded to a double click, and once I was in, I couldn't shoot at all. I clicked on plenty of balloons and the ammo stayed at 10/10 with nothing popping.

The bigger bug: the counter reads "Score :" with no number after the colon. It looks like the variable isn't being written to the screen, and in a high score game that's the worst possible place for a bug, because the score is the entire point.

Two smaller things. There's a solid white square in the bottom left corner with nothing in it, which looks like a missing texture or a minimap placeholder. And the browser tab says "Projects_Template", the default Unity project name. That last one is 30 seconds of work and it changes the first impression a lot.

The scene is genuinely nice to look at. Get the shooting and the score display working and there's something here worth voting on properly. One thought on the end of life answer as well, since that's a scored criterion here: "it will stay as a WebGL build on itch.io" leaves the game entirely dependent on itch staying up. A downloadable build would cover you.

The palette is beautiful and calm. Petrol blue sky with huge flat lilac clouds, brown earth islands with grass on top. That purple and turquoise contrast is unlike anything else in this jam, which was dominated by neon and black. This one makes you want to stay a while.

The hints appear at the right moment, inside the game: walk near a field and "Plant something on a field with P." shows up, then disappears when you move away. Along with a couple of other entries here, it's one of the few that teaches without a wall of text. The inventory bar at the top, with items drawn inside wooden frames and quantities beside them, is pretty and clear. And having trading NPCs in a seven day jam is brave scope.

Real credit for thinking about non US keyboards, too. Your page says arrows, WASD and ZQSD all work, and ZQSD being the French layout is an accessibility detail almost nobody remembers.

Three notes. The game only responded to the keyboard after I forced focus onto the canvas, on my first attempts the arrows did nothing, which is probably the classic "first click gets swallowed" case. It's also hard to see where the next jump is, because the lilac clouds are as solid as the earth platforms, so you can't tell what's ground and what's background. Making the clouds more transparent would fix that immediately.

And an honest one on the jam theme rather than the game: I couldn't work out the high score connection. The number at the top stayed at 0 and the whole thing feels more like calm progression than score chasing. That's not a flaw in what you built, it's genuinely pleasant, it just sits a bit outside the brief. Of the relaxed games in this jam, this was the nicest to look at.

The philosophy of this game is lovely. The title screen says it outright: play whatever you want, what matters is keeping time, and if you want extra points try to stay in key, every song is in C major / A minor so just avoid the sharps. Just vibe man. A rhythm game that gives you freedom instead of punishing you is a beautiful design choice, and it's the opposite of what the genre usually does.

The drawn keyboard map on the title screen, with each key labelled with its note, is the best possible way to explain that. I understood the instrument in about five seconds.

The band scene is great: red theatre curtain, Bassa in a red dress with the bass, a trumpeter in a blue suit and sunglasses, a guy in a hat on bongos, and an actual audience of five people drawn in front of the stage. It gives the gig real life. The HUD is clean too, Score, Combo, and a constant reminder of the key so you don't wander off the scale. Three tracks with names that suggest progression is a good structure.

Caveat on my score: the problem here is on my end. A rhythm game depends on hitting keys at the exact moment and my inputs come out delayed, so I finished on 0. That says nothing about your game, and you'll do infinitely better than I did.

What I can fairly comment on: the blue note bars scrolling across are thin and close in colour to the purple background, so reading the rhythm visually is hard. Much higher contrast (yellow, white) would help a lot. And there's no countdown before the song starts, so you're already behind on the first beat.

Also, posting the full Godot project as a zip alongside the game is exactly the right answer for this jam.

That menu screen is breathtaking. A huge pale sun going down behind the dunes, sky gradient from purple to red, mountains cut against the horizon. It looks like a 70s sci-fi paperback painting and it's one of the most beautiful images in the entire jam.

Video options in a jam game, too. Render downscale, Pixelation and CRT as checkboxes, plus separate Master, SFX and Music volumes. Letting the player tune the visual filter is a level of finish almost nobody bothers with. The car HUD is detailed as well, km/h, RPM and gear all updating, so there's actual simulation under it rather than just "go forward". And the tyre marks left in the sand are gorgeous, I drove in circles just to watch the trail. The low poly cat portrait with the grumpy face in the bottom left corner is a lovely bit of character too.

Where I got lost, literally: I drove for nearly 30 seconds and never found a single enemy, so my score stayed at 0. The desert is big and empty and there's no compass, minimap or arrow pointing anywhere, so I was just circling with no objective. The terrain is all one orange with little variation, which makes it easy to lose track of direction and of where you've already been.

New Game also only worked on a double click. The art direction and the car feel are excellent, I just needed something telling me where to go. Also worth saying: listing every asset as CC0 or CC-BY and shipping both web and Windows as downloadable zips is a properly solid answer to the end of life question.

The no menus concept is great and executed with confidence. I typed "play" and the game started. Making the entire interface the game's own verb is an elegant idea.

The look is clean and pleasant, light beige background with coloured letters (purple, blue, orange, green) with little white shadows and dashes under each letter marking the positions. It reads like nice teaching material. The HUD is minimal and clear, score in a green square on the left and a circular red timer counting down on the right. The end screen showing the word that beat you ("Failed with: savvy") plus what you actually typed is direct, useful feedback. And unlocking new words by beating records is a good way to give it legs.

Important caveat: my result here isn't worth much. Because of how I play, the game registered every one of my letters duplicated, so "savvy" came out as "avvvvvvvyyy" and I finished on 0. That's a limitation on my side, not a bug in your game, and anyone playing with actual hands will be fine.

What I can fairly comment on: the 2 second timer on the first word is short for someone who has just understood the rule, so three or four looser opening words would make a better warm up. And since it's a 100% keyboard game, it's worth saying on the title screen what to type ("type PLAY to start"). I only knew because I'd read your itch page, and I guessed at "play" on luck.

Strong idea and clean presentation. This is one to play with your own hands.

The art direction is beautiful and consistent from start to finish. Everything looks pencil drawn in a notebook: the menu is a sheet with crooked edges and a shadow, the scenery has paper texture, the clouds and sun are scribbles, even the studio screen ("ABProjects, drawn into existence") stays in character. One of the prettiest and most coherent entries in the jam.

And the enemies are ERASERS. The counter in the corner says "ERASERS 5" and you die by being rubbed out. In a jam about games being erased, making the eraser the enemy is the most elegant metaphor anyone here managed, and the lose screen doesn't say Game Over, it says ERASED. That's the whole jam in one word.

The end of run report is fully themed too: Wave, time, Score, Erasers defeated, INK COLLECTED, Ammunition crafted, Health restored. Even the currency joined the metaphor, ink instead of money. And having a CREATIVE MODE in a jam entry is pure generosity.

Three notes. The game pauses itself every time the window loses focus. That's correct behaviour in general, but it happened to me constantly and really broke the rhythm, so maybe pause only when the tab is actually hidden rather than on every focus loss. I survived 30 seconds without defeating a single eraser, they come fast and the aiming asked for more precision than I had, though that's partly on me. And it wasn't visually clear how much health I had, since the HP in the top left is small and crowded in with other numbers.

This is my favourite art direction in the jam alongside Zariel's Lair, and yours has the advantage that the art actually serves the theme.

The theme reading is the most literal in the jam and that works in your favour: the enemies are literally deletion bots that erase data, and the goal is to survive deletion. In a jam about games being deleted, making deletion the monster is straight to the point.

Having a TUTORIAL button before Play on the title screen is worth praising too, it was rare here. And the controls are written clearly on the page (A/D to dodge, Space and W to jump on the bots).

Three things, and the third is the blocker. The background hurts a lot: it's a repeating pattern of blue and grey letters and shapes across the whole screen, with high contrast and heavy texture, and the character disappears into it. A much darker, flatter background would fix that instantly and make the game look twice as good. The character sprite is also a rectangle of green, yellow, purple and red blocks with no recognisable shape, so I couldn't tell what it's meant to be.

And the main one: I couldn't move. I clicked Play, the game opened with "coins: 10", but A, D, W and Space did nothing. The character stood still in the centre of the screen the whole time, and I never saw a single deletion bot appear.

The concept is right for the theme. What it needs is the basics: get the input working and change that background.

The cover art is excellent. The character in white and blood red silhouette holding the chainsaw, cut against a blurred blue city. Three colours, very high contrast, extremely stylish. It looks like a B movie poster.

The pixel art city is beautiful too, layered blue buildings with lit windows, thick white clouds, real depth of field. One of the best backgrounds I've seen in this jam. And the control table on your itch page lists PC and mobile side by side with the symbols for each, which shows you thought about people playing on a phone. Pause, home and restart buttons always visible in the top right corner during play is also a good call. Scoring by distance with one decimal (3.1, 3.4) gives you that "a bit further next time" pull.

The main issue is the tutorial text. "Move around with arrow keys or WASD / Attack enemies to gain extra points / Try to get as far as you can!" stays fixed in the MIDDLE of the screen for the entire game, over the scenery. Because it occupies the central band, it covers exactly where the action happens, and between that and the character being low down I could barely see my own character while playing. It should disappear after the first input or after a few seconds.

Two more. The game paused itself whenever the window lost focus and it wasn't obvious how to unpause (I ended up clicking the screen). And I only got from 3.1 to 3.4 distance across several attempts, so either the character is very slow or I wasn't managing to keep it moving.

Visually one of the prettiest here. Getting that text off the middle of the screen would change the whole experience. Also, "I have copies of all the games I make on USB sticks, sometimes I sell them like in the good old times" is a great answer to the end of life question.

The online leaderboard is real and it has two factions, which is the best version of this I've seen in the jam. Two columns side by side, NETRUNNER in blue and CORPO in red, with actual players in them. For a high score chaser jam that's exactly right, and having the factions compete against each other is better still.

The main menu is polished, a synthwave landscape with a red grid and a NETRUNNER STATS panel showing best infiltration, total runs and your faction. It treats you as a persistent character rather than a loose session, and being greeted with "SYS_ADMIN, WELCOME BACK" is a small thing that lands. The micro challenges are varied and on theme, each with the rule written on screen: "RULE: CONNECT TO PORT 8080", "RULE: CLICK IN ASCENDING ORDER", "RULE: INJECT PAYLOAD IN SAFE ZONE". Each takes seconds and all of them fit the hacker fantasy. The TRACE bar filling in green while you work is a great source of tension, and the red skull in the corner says the rest.

Honest caveat on my results: I did 5 runs and finished all of them on 0. The TRACE bar fills very fast for me and I'd hit 100% before completing a challenge. A good chunk of that is on my end rather than yours, so take the difficulty note with salt. Still, the suggestion stands: the first two or three challenges could have a slower trace so there's time to READ the rule. My first run was lost purely to reading "CONNECT TO PORT 8080" and looking for which one it was.

Two small ones. Retry on the end screen only worked with a double click. And the nickname warning says you can't change it later, which is good, but it's worth also saying that it goes onto a shared public leaderboard. I only knew that for sure once I saw the board.

Of the games I failed to score in, this is the one I blame least. Good structure, and the faction board is a great idea.

You said on the page that you're a beginner and asked for feedback, so here's an honest one.

The title screen tells you the controls ("USE W/S TO CONTROL THE NET") before the Play button. That's more than half the entries in this jam managed, and it's a genuinely good instinct. The theme is likeable and carries a small environmental message without being preachy. The blue pixel art water with the lighter ripples and the sand strip at the bottom is clean and pleasant, and for a first project the palette is well chosen. The scope is also tight and realistic for a jam, which is the right call. A simple game that works beats an ambitious broken one every time.

The problem: I couldn't start. The PLAY button didn't respond to a single or double click, and W, S, Space and Enter did nothing either. I was stuck on the title screen.

Almost certainly this is the cause: the game window is wider than the browser view (there's a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom), so the button's clickable area ends up somewhere other than where it's drawn.

The practical fix, since you asked: in Unity's Player Settings, tick the resizable canvas option and test in a small window. That single change would open your game up to everyone. The rest of what you did is on the right track, so it's worth doing.

Splitting a unit to take territory, the cells and bubbles idea, applied to clouds versus lava is creative, and the visuals carry it well. Cyan spreading from one side, orange and red from the other, over a grey isometric board. You read the conflict instantly.

The title screen is good too, the scene split on the diagonal with clouds above and lava explosions below and a red Start in the middle. You understand the fight before reading anything.

And there is a TUTORIAL button highlighted inside the game, with a little yellow NPC and a blinking "Tutorial (click)". After playing a lot of entries with no explanation at all, that deserves real credit. The HUD is informative as well, cloud counter 1/5, resources, and a yellow panel with lava's status (4 fire, +1/3 per second, 0/3), so you can follow the contest.

Three notes. Start only worked on a double click. The window is wider than the screen and the Tutorial button sits right on the right edge, half clipped ("Tutoria..."). And the HUD numbers are small and unlabelled, so it took me a while to work out which was which.

Good concept, and rare in this jam for actually having a tutorial. It just needs to fit inside the window.

The framing is the best idea here: the whole screen is a newspaper page, with NEWS in huge letters at the top and article text below, and the playable area is the photo in the story. I hadn't seen that before and it stuck with me. The vertical side tabs, UPGRADE on the left and CONTRACT on the right, integrate the menu into the scenery without cluttering it.

The layered desert in orange, salmon and dark red is a good readable palette, and the rifle barrel in the foreground gives it depth. Shooting works well, I clicked targets and they disappeared.

Also, you wrote on your page that the game will keep running after you stop developing it. Simple, direct and exactly the spirit of this jam.

Four things. The Kills / Score meter in the top left sits behind a grey circle (the scope? a gear?) and the text is unreadable, so I never knew my score at any point. The targets are floating heads with no bodies, hanging in the air over the mountains, which looks odd next to how careful the rest is, and a body or even a platform would fix it. There's no hit feedback at all, no sound, no +1, no animation, the target just vanishes. And I couldn't open the UPGRADE or CONTRACT tabs by clicking them.

The newspaper framing is too good an idea to stop there.

The premise is great and your page sells it perfectly: "A high score chaser. A nice guy. But you are not a nice guy and you are not a high score chaser. You are red and you are the villain. You are the Final Boss." Flipping the point of view on the theme is a smart move, and it's one of the most creative inversions in the jam.

I also liked that it's several minigames rather than one. I started in a Space Invaders style level as the giant red mothership shooting down at the little green player, then it became a top down race with a red car and a checkered finish line. That variety keeps the "I'm the boss of every game" joke alive. The neon red on black pixel art in the space level looks good, especially the red glow of the ship against the player's green.

Where I struggled. The game window is much bigger than the screen, so in the space level I lost the entire left status bar (I could only read "...S BAR") and the control list on the right was clipped, which means I never found out what the 1, 2 and 3 keys did. Since each minigame has different rules and nothing explains the transition, I was also lost when the screen switched from ship to car.

One design thought: there's no visible score for "how much did I slow the chaser down", which feels like the natural metric for this concept. Right now the thing the game is about isn't on screen.

Fix the layout and give me that counter and this is one of the standout ideas here.

The idea is excellent. A scoring game built on orbital mechanics, with real altitude and velocity, is far more interesting than another shooter. The preview image shows the HUD reading "SCRAP: 1 / SCORE: 0 / ALTITUDE: 27.0024 / SPEED: 6.0989", and an altitude number with four decimal places promises actual simulation.

The composition is lovely too: the planet in the centre, the dashed orbit around it, the little ship with its thruster lit, orange asteroids and grey debris scattered through the star field. Lives as hearts at the top, and all of it readable within PICO-8's 128x128. And using PICO-8 means the cart file itself carries the full source, which is about the best end of life answer available.

Here's the serious problem: the cart doesn't run for me. I can see the preview image perfectly, but the moment I click to start, the screen goes black and never comes back. I tried reloading the page, waiting 15 seconds, pressing Z, X and the arrow keys. Black the whole time.

So the only thing I was able to evaluate was the cover art, which is a real shame, because of all the ideas I've read in this jam this is one of the ones I most wanted to play. Worth testing the PICO-8 web export on another browser or machine, because as it stands nobody can get in. Ping me if you get it running and I'll come back and rate it properly.

The pixel art space background is genuinely pretty. Dark blue nebula with purple veins and cross shaped stars scattered through it, and it has real depth. The player ship is well drawn with a nice detail on the blue engine.

The captain's portrait in the dialogue is the standout, an old guy with a white beard, sunglasses and a blue beret with a red band. He looks like an actual character rather than a placeholder. And the first line is a good setup joke: "It looks like another beautiful and peaceful day in our galaxy." We all know it isn't going to be. Having a Controls button in the main menu next to Start is a good call too.

Three problems, all layout. Start only worked on a double click. The dialogue box is clipped on the right, so the captain's line disappears mid sentence ("another beautiful and peacefu..."), and your own itch page warns people to play in fullscreen so the layout doesn't break. The fact you already know about it is good, but depending on fullscreen just to read the text is risky in a jam where most people play in the embedded window and move on. And the dialogue appears over the play area without making it clear how to advance it.

Good art and a good character. The layout just needs to fit inside the window.

"You're a cat with a Glock, chasing your high score on the run" is the whole pitch and it's already funny.

This is pure jam energy and I mean that as a compliment. A white pixel cat holding a pistol with fire coming out of the barrel, pasted over a stock photo of a snowy mountain. It's rough and it's great. But the hand drawn Paint cutscenes are the best part: a scribbled arcade with an ARCADE sign, then the cat playing a machine labelled "Highscore Chaser" with "Highscore x69420" on the screen. I laughed properly. That communicates this jam's theme better than a lot of much more serious entries. And having a LEVEL SELECT going from 0 to 5+ suggests there's real content here rather than one room.

Four things to fix, all quick. The main menu literally says "UNTITLED GAME", the Unity template placeholder is still there. Swapping that for the game's name is 30 seconds of work and it changes the entire first impression. No button responded to a single click, only double clicks (START, the levels, the cutscene arrows). Level 0 wouldn't open at all, only level 1 worked. And in the cutscenes the text on the right is clipped ("I HA... SHA... MY...") because the game window is wider than the screen, so I lost half the joke.

Fix the title and the clicks and this becomes one of those daft games people actually talk about in the jam thread. The cutscenes deserve to be seen.

The title screen has a lot of charm. Wendy drawn in a red hat with a revolver, two silhouetted enemies (a huge brown one and a skinny blue one with red eyes) in front of a purple stone building, warm desert colours and a western font. Very cohesive. The in-game HUD is clean too, three hearts, an empty item slot outlined in blue, a reload bar, and big SCORE and TIME in bright blue at the top. The desert with stone fences, barrels, cacti and a cow skull has consistent art direction.

Real credit for being honest in the description, flagging up front that the build was rushed and that the high score and lives don't reset without reloading the page. I'd take that over discovering it myself any day.

The obvious priority: the START GAME button doesn't respond to clicks. I tried single, double, on the text and around it. It only worked when I pressed Space/Enter. Since the screen doesn't say "press space", anyone who only clicks will assume it's frozen. That one fix probably rescues a lot of votes.

The bug you flagged (score and lives not resetting) stings most in a high score game specifically, because the second run starts dirty. And the timer, which starts around 51 and drops fast, is running while you're still working out the map. I walked a fair bit and finished with SCORE 0 because I couldn't find an enemy near the spawn, and the map is big and empty at the edges with no indication of where to go.

The menu has EXPORT SAVE and IMPORT SAVE. In a Stop Killing Games jam, letting the player take their own save file away with them is the sharpest possible tribute to the theme. That isn't a detail, it's a position, and you're the only entry I've played that turned the jam's cause into a design decision rather than just narrative. Bravo.

The build screen is enviable. A Part Library with 40 draggable parts on the left, a Component Assembly Table in the middle with slots for Chassis, Mobility, Suspension, Power, Sensor, Utilities, Propellant and Vertical, and an Engineering Telemetry panel on the right updating live: Top Speed 58, Traction 61, Stability 63, Durability 59, total mass 15.8t and a "Course-fit estimate: 61/100". And the briefing BEFORE the build gives you the terrain data (Plain 41%, Sand 20%, Rock 39%, crater severity, max slope), so you're designing the rover FOR that specific course. That's real design, not decoration.

The race screen keeps the loop closed too: Battery / Boost Fuel / Grip / Rover Condition, checkpoints, mission time, and a WEAR REPORT showing each component degrading in real time. When the sensor warned me "SENSOR: ROCK HAZARD AHEAD", the part I picked in the workshop had a concrete function on the course. That's a beautiful bit of closure. The pause menu listing every control and the "Peace, love and engineering!" in the menu footer are lovely touches.

Three practical notes. I got stuck in a dip in the terrain at 0 km/h and couldn't get out even with boost. There is an "R - recover" key in the pause menu but I only found it afterwards, so showing "press R" on screen when the rover has been stationary for a few seconds would help. The pilot name is mandatory (minimum 2 characters) and Start Journey errors on an empty field even though the text below says your score will be saved as Guest, so those two messages contradict each other. And it's a lot of information at once, so a one click "recommended rover" preset would help people who only have three minutes.

Along with A Game About Driving Fast and Until The Last Mile, this is the most ambitious trio I've played here.

The diegetic menu is a great idea. PLAY / CREDITS / EXIT printed on the drawers of a 3D server rack with little lights next to each one, and the HIGHSCORE on the display at the top of the rack. The menu is part of the scenery rather than sitting on top of it. The 3D "Stack Server" logo with the letters stacked (beige over blue) reinforces the idea nicely, and pairing Tetris style polyominoes with a data centre theme is a combination I hadn't seen and one that makes visual sense, since racks literally are stacked blocks.

I couldn't start it, though. I clicked and double clicked PLAY several times and nothing happened.

Probable cause is the usual one in this jam: the game window is much wider than the browser view (there's a horizontal scrollbar), the rack is clipped on the right, and the buttons' clickable areas are almost certainly offset from where they're drawn. Making the canvas scale to the window would likely fix it in one go.

It's a particular shame here, because with a menu that creative and good looking, the menu is exactly where the player gets stuck. Also worth saying your end of life answer is one of the strongest I've read: completely offline, no servers, no DRM, download and play forever.

This is the most ambitious thing I've tested in the jam. A logistics tycoon with BUILD / ROAD / RAIL / SHIP / ERASE, a DEMANDS panel, pause, money, score and a meteor impact timer running down. That's Transport Tycoon compressed into seven minutes, which is an absurd scope for a jam.

The production chains are real, not decoration. The help panel lists Grain + Fresh Water = Provisions, Medicinal Plants + Fresh Water = Medical Supplies, Wood + Iron Ore = Construction Materials and so on, each with a tier and a value, with advanced goods worth more points. And having a help button always visible at the top that opens exactly the table you need to consult is an excellent design decision. The pixel art island map with proper names like VERDANT REACH and EMBER ISLE over the light blue sea is pretty and well organised. Putting a meteor timer on a normally calm genre is a clever way to fit "high score chaser" into a tycoon.

Where I struggled. It's too complex for the time it gives you. Seven minutes to learn production chains, transport types and an economy is very tight, and I spent half of mine just reading the help panel. I also couldn't build anything. I tried dragging a road between two buildings and nothing happened, and it wasn't clear whether I needed to click tile by tile, whether I lacked money, or whether the terrain was unsuitable. The buildings and labels on the map are also tiny at the window resolution, I couldn't read a single factory name.

A guided first 30 seconds ("click here, now here") would fix most of that, and with the help panel you already have it would be easy to add. If you keep working on this after the jam with a longer timer and a tutorial it becomes a real game. It's the one I most wanted to come back to.