itch.io

A nice showcase and implementation of the strategy course! Having different classes and a healing action are nice additions.

In its current state, it feels like the best way to play through the level is to abuse the game mechanics. For example, there's no punishment if you take several turns to heal up to full in-between groups of enemies. Another is moving far enough out of an enemy's range that their default behaviour is to move back and forth toward a specific GridPosition. Playing the game 'properly' by not using those methods made it feel impossible to reach the end.

Very nice! I'm guessing that I rode the crocodile to school!

Hi, you requested some feedback in the discord server so I took a look! I didn't see this one during the original review portion of the jam so I can't compare the current version to the original.

I see previous comments have touched on the controls and I would agree with them, for me it feels like being able to select a square by clicking the mouse makes a lot more sense than using the arrow keys. Speaking of the arrow keys, if you mash in one direction while the cube is moving it will end up switching the selected square even if shift is held down.

I don't really know a lot about Rubik's Cubes, I'm guessing that you can't move the middle column in a physical version, which is something I kept wanting to do while playing this.

I appreciate the ability to change the backgrounds and the music and the leaderboard is a great idea if you can get it working.

I hope that helps!

Thank you very much for playing! :D And for getting all the way through the game, that's the main accomplishment no matter how long it may have taken.

I haven't played any of the Alone in the Dark games but I have heard good things about them, so I'll definitely take the comparison as a compliment. :)

This is great! I wish I'd been aware of it during the review period. It's super impressive how much you got done in such a limited time, you even put in a sensitivity slider which I failed to do.

One way to avoid the "WebGL camera weirdness" for Firefox is to set your Embed Options to 'Click to launch in fullscreen' or at least that worked for me. It may not be ideal but it's a quick fix.

Congratulations on making the push to get your game onto Steam! 🎊

Actually pretty fun! I'm sorry you weren't able to get this working during the review period. But I'm glad it works now and that I was able to play it!. :)

A score at the end of a run would be really appreciated. I feel like I got very large on my first try but I have no proof since it instantly resets to the title screen.

Thank you for sharing your picks! Some of these games I haven't even heard of so links to their pages would have been nice, but it's alright I'll use the search bar and I look forward to trying them out. :)

I did it! Now that the review period is over I can go back to games I'd already played and this was the first on my list. I managed to get to 595.85 metres on my second try, somehow, and after a few regressions I saw the ending legitimately for the first time! :D

The message at the end is more poignant now than ever. My gamedev journey is not complete and surely yours is not either. :)

You should get an email at the address you've signed up to Itch with. How soon I can't say, on the livestream "tonight" was said.

[Edit] Tim gave us an update on the discord server: "FYI it will now go live tomorrow. Support was asleep for the night and I'd rather it go live when they're up to help fulfil peoples courses"

I played just over 200 games from the jam in the past week and it's crazy to consider I didn't get to experience even one quarter of the total submissions. I wanted to share some that really stood out in my mind when I was thinking what could win in each category.

[HUGE UNNECESSARY DISCLAIMER!] These are the games which popped into my mind and I will definitely think about this later and say to myself "Oh! I should have mentioned this one..." Also there are a ton of great games that I played, I don't want to make a huge list so I'm limiting myself to one game per category, please don't feel bad I haven't listed yours, I almost definitely also liked it a lot!

Theme

Attack of the Second Dimension - https://joebuttkin.itch.io/attack-of-the-second-dimension

Theme was the hardest category for me to evaluate when I was reviewing games, if often felt like a Yes or No question of 'Do I see how they implemented the theme?' There are some games where I didn't see it at all and that could have been a failing on my part. In the case of this game, the theme is used quite uniquely in my experience, with the enemies all inhabiting just two dimensions compared to the player's 3D view. This gives a great twist to an otherwise simple FPS.

Fun

Pizza Boi - https://lanyard.itch.io/pizzaboi

I could have spent a lot more time playing this one than I did and I kept playing it long after I had finished all the available content. I might have gone even longer if the gamepad controls hadn't caused the squealing breaks sound to go off all the time, it still plays very well on a keyboard, too!

Aesthetics

Welding - https://tinysquidstudios.itch.io/welding

A very unique look and experience of seeing the world through sound vibrations. The visuals aren't fancy but they're very striking. I'd say more, but the game speaks for itself better than I can describe it.

Music

Frank 2: Justin Strikes Back - https://vitbull88.itch.io/frank-2

In the games I played, this is the one which incorporated its music most into the experience itself. And not only that, it even gave me the opportunity to add to it!

Sound

Pudge Bara Alchemy Adventure - https://nicholasmcrae.itch.io/pbaa

If I'm honest, I don't really like some of the sounds in this game. I'm not a fan of farty noises and after a while I got tired of hearing that I did it... wrong. But objectively speaking this one left the biggest impression on me when it comes to sound!

Mechanics

Piping Out - https://sami822.itch.io/piping-out

Mechanics are a bit of a nebulous area and I wasn't too sure what to pick for this. There are many games which chose to do something with the theme in very similar ways of shifting dimensions and none of those stood out as a result. This one was more unique than most by letting the player shift between five points of view fairly seamlessly. There was one point in the last level where I'd gotten so accustomed to the controls of the view changes that I was able to round a double right turn by shifting perspectives without having to take my finger off the forward button. That's the sort of moment which sticks with me after I've finished playing a game.

Story

The Babu - https://aquietknight.itch.io/the-babu

A gentle, heartwarming story told in a gentle, heartwarming way. It starts off a little too 'childhood angst' and I wasn't expecting much from it. By the end of the story it had won me over, even if I still don't really know what a Babu is.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be accusatory or put words in your mouth. :(

I was trying to clarify my own thoughts on how I rated things but I did a poor job of it.

Thank you for playing! I'll give Catlike Coding a look, I think I saw a tutorial there on particle effects some time ago.

Thank you for playing! The camera definitely needs more work, sorry about that! I had to play around with the sensitivity to balance it between mouse and gamepad and could have done a better job on it.

Thank you for playing! I'm sorry for the camera, it needs a lot of work!

Thank you for playing, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

You're definitely right that the cracks in the wall need to be made more obvious, I think a lot of them could be made much wider and the smaller ones can be saved for secret areas.

I also really love the guard sounds. 😄

There are some games in the jam that I feel could be released with little to no change, they aren't triple A titles but they're extremely well done. I didn't go back and change anyone else's score as a result of this, but I also didn't lower the score of those games if they had a larger team or appeared to have more experience than most submitters. :) But even in those cases they didn't necessarily get the highest score in all categories, I did my best to judge those individually regardless of my overall impressions of the game.

You're very welcome!

It may be as simple as adding the source image of the tiles to a sprite atlas, if you haven't tried that. :)

Thank you for playing and for your indepth feedback! The way through second level is definitely more difficult to find than I realized, it needs a hefty overhaul.

I did try playing your game, but as a solo player I wasn't good enough to handle two screens at once and so I couldn't give you a proper review. :(

Thank you very much for playing! :)

Thank you for playing, I'm glad it got you to laugh! :D

Thank you for playing! I'm glad to hear you enjoyed it. :D

Hello, congratulations on your submission! :)

The fox is very cute and the dream world levels are eclectic in a nice way. The nightmare realm is properly spooky, even though the spider enemies are less dangerous than the spitting frogs they replace (even the really big spider, which was defeated in a single hit.)

In the third nightmare world I ran along what looked like the correct path to the glowy plant exit the same as I'd done in the other sections but it appeared to warp me right back to the part of the dream world I'd entered from. I ran around off the path (and found that big spider) but couldn't find any other places to go. By that point, I'm sorry to say that I'd started to feel a bit too nauseous and felt I should stop playing. :(

Really brilliant design! It took me a while to get the hang of things and not accidentally jump into the void, since sometimes W was up and sometimes it was jump. I did get to the point of being able to move and switch perspectives at the same time, rounding corners like a proper citizen of three dimensional environments.

The look is great, the mechanics are phenomenal. The main character is a little too chatty. The ending was fabulous; after the pipes I, too, was ready to surrender myself to the embrace of the labyrinth.

Different music for different levels would have been nice, but as you made it yourself I can't complain about the variety.

Thank you for playing it!

I really should have looked into making Mac and Linux builds for it, but without a way to test them I worried I'd be putting out more bugs that I can't fix. Something to figure out for next year. :)

Lots of people have submitted games where you travel from the third dimension into a 2D world but the opposite is rare!

The inclusion of achievements (or an achievement) was an unexpected bonus!

Poor Leo, after his sad mushroom picking I went back into the 3D world and jumped very high... and then I went off the edge of the world and fell forever. He was excited to discover 'Up' but probably didn't enjoy 'Down' quite as much.

It doesn't show in the screenshots, but for me playing in the browser there were noticeable gaps between the tiles so everthying appeared to have green gridlines.

It looks very, very nice and it's fun to slice up the enemies!

The exact mechanics elude me, it wasn't clear how much health I had or when I should revive my other self. Deflecting projectiles is neat, but there are so many enemies firing so many things that I found it was simpler to charge at everything swinging my sword wildly. :D

Thank you for playing! I think you're the first person to say something positive about the camera. 😅 I appreciate it!

Sliding up the walls and along the underside of platforms was very smoothly implemented. :)

There was noticeable delay between pushing the key to talk to someone and have it function, the first time I attempted it I pushed W several times and became 'Near Fatal' in stress when it finally kicked in.

... it has a downer of an ending.

I'll preface this by saying that everyone should rate the way that they feel is right. I'm not claiming that what follows is objectively correct, but I do think it's important to consider.

Games released to the public don't have their reviews weighted by the size of their teams but by the quality of their work. It's not necessarily helpful to give leniency to someone because they had a small team or are inexperienced. We've all entered the jam under the same set terms and none of us have the same personal conditions.

There's at least one entry into the jam this year which someone was forced to get done in less than a day. It's super impressive that they were able to make anything at all, but I can't give them a five star rating in all categories due to their unfortunate circumstances. In my opinion that's not fair to the individual in question and it's not fair to every other person who happened to have more time to work on their own games or who was able to work as one member of a larger team.

Quite stylish and fun to play! The combat is pretty simple, I found it much easier to dash away from enemies and shoot that at a distance than to try and dodge their attacks, but perhaps I would have gotten more trick points if I'd done it the other way.

The bosses are predictable in their actions but when they hit, they hit very hard. I don't think they regular enemies ever got a chance to hit me thanks to the dash.

I'm breathtaking!

In the final level, I often had an issue were merging caused the player to disappear entirely, or in one case the astral version didn't appear and then couldn't be re-merged. Other than that it worked great, I really loved being able to merge while in the air and getting pulled to a platform that neither the main character or their astral self would have landed on otherwise. :D

Nice and relaxing. I really enjoyed flipping between the two planetoids and you managed to make that work without causing any disorientation or motion sickness. :D

I accidentally pushed one of the blocks underground so I wasn't able to give the full compliment. However, the picture that came out of it is kind of nice too, I think.

A really fun idea and the setup to the 3D version of the game was neatly done.

I'm not sure how to survive in the main part of the game, I had a terrible time trying to avoid the enemy shots, generally I'd get to one health restore power up and not make it further than that. From what I could tell that was about one fourth of the way through the level.

A 'skip' ability once you've been immersed into the game already would be nice, since what you do on the 2D cabinet doesn't appear to affect anything in the 3D version. Making it have an effect and switching between the two modes is an idea, but in a game jam time frame I wouldn't have suggested going for it. :D

Good ideas in general, the platforming needs some work to make it fun. It's very hard to tell where you are in relation to the ground or a moving object, at one point near the end I was certain I was standing on air as I tried to inch my way onto an oncoming platform a tiny bit at a time.

The transition effect between dimensions is great, but gets distracting if you changed between them too quickly. I understand that the layout is such that the player doesn't need to switch often, but while learning the layout it can get too disorienting.

I was warned that this game would make me angry, but in this case it was incorrect. The only thing that really bothered me was that the 'blinking' effect of waking up meant too much downtime between attempts. It looked very good when it happened in the office to give the sense of being extremely tired and to transition between the two scenes, but after that it overstayed its welcome.

It would be nice to have health refills every so often, possibly even put them on more challenging detours for the risk/reward effect.

The furthest I managed to get was shortly after the line of three pictures in a row. 🐦🐻👫

I just needed the second player to go along with it! 😄

I agree with pretty much everything kindman said below (in the first comment, not the ChatGPT romance followup.)

Everything is simple which is not a bad thing and the meat of the game is the challenge of trying to navigate with unreliable platforms. The ending steps are too much for me, I couldn't find the right distance to even land on the first one without overshooting it. I've love to know if anyone completed the course!

I'm sorry it took so long for me to get to this one, I saw it advertised plenty of times in the discord server.

A very nice blend between a regular game and a meta aspect, the ability to sense the approach by watching the crab eyes was extremely useful! I did get grounded the first time by choosing to ignore them, but succeeded on the second attempt, even if there was no confetti waiting for me. 🎊

It's clear a lot of care went into the design of the bedroom, though I focused so much on the 2D game that I only looked it over once while waiting for mom to stop her patrol. The intro/tutorial was also fun to watch, a great immersive touch!

Spooky stuff! The concept is good, having to navigate the 2D maze while making sure that the monster doesn't sneak up on you can make for a very intense experience. The sound of the breathing very definitely heightened that intensity.

The implementation of distracting the monster by throwing objects did not seem to work for me, it was always interested in moving to where I was rather than the direction of a thrown object. Because of this I wasn't able to escape through the maze.

The only possible way to succeed that I could come up with was to make a tiny bit of progress between running loops around the starting area. That keeps the monster a few steps behind and buys only a couple of seconds to try and get somewhere in the maze. Heading to the lower area was more likely to end in being cornered.