itch.io

This is my favorite.

Impressed how quickly you put together a really pretty sprite for the main character and like the intro sprites a lot too.

Found the mechanics both novel, interesting and fun

Tightly scoped yet consistently polished.

My one tip would be to carry over that same kind of polish and care into the screenshots/splash art to get more people to try it out. I'd recommend two things mainly :

- Make the playable character more noticeable in the thumbnail' composition.

Didn't notice the bat character on the splash art and only saw the bones. I'm surprised how often people try some of my games by searching for their favorite animal species, make sure you tagged it and more bat lovers will find it :)

- Higher contrast with the main character and its environment

When you're playing it's not a problem, you don't blend in the background while in motion and traps are easy to notice. But on static screenshots the character is lost in its environment. Could achieve it by making all background stones darker or swapping some of the palette around.

Good luck hope you win :)

I was mashing at everything at first but really enjoyed the last few guests I had to puzzle into leaving

The sound design and bite animation felt good :>

Thanks a lot! :)

Thanks a lot :3

Thumbnail got me immediately sold on the idea and level 3 and the ending was the payoff I was hoping for, good job :)

Got a hearty chuckle twice and a proper laugh at the end good job.

Love the art, presentation in general and the music.

Figured out some customers seemed more patient then others so I stopped serving entirely when I received an infinitely patient customer thinking I'd win the day easy but then the game over triggered despite having a positive overall score. Was left confused

Wish the recipes icons were bigger it was difficult to identify which kind of milk is which on the bar and they'd sometimes mostly overlap anyway.

I like it in a slow burn kind of way, will challenge a friend to beat my score. Wonder if 12 is good

Initially didnt like it until I practiced enough to figure out you mostly want to have your boots in the shadow rather than stand around it.

The dash ability is interesting but I ended up not using it outside of hail mary try for one more hit and know I'll definitely not get a second one in because I'd get too far from the ball.

Made me smile alone when I played it then laugh when I made a friend play it.

Didn't know how to code at all at your age and only started making games until 18.
Good luck and keep working hard, you'll keep getting faster and better!

I like the idea and presentation a lot but wish it had more juice.

Visual presentation is very clean. Strong color palette and consistent artstyle. Really like the reflection on the timer too + I appreciate you even had a start screen 

Initially it's interesting to toy with and panic, die rinse repeat, then you figure out which numbers you need to wait for and which are irrelevant/wait times. I do like that it speeds up if you stand in the ":" but didn't figure it out on first play until reading the description and trying again.

I like that the idea is epurated and novel, polished rather than throwing extra unneeded mechanics in.

Wishlist/Random improvement ideas as tribute: 

- You have a strong art style for vector graphics and an eye for color. Add some motions to your assets that respond to player input imho and you'll go far. Basically even without doing frame by frame animation, stretching and squashing sprites goes a long way for juicing up visual effects or character motions, especially the dash. You can achieve that by tilting or stretching sprites etc.

- For this jam it works but in the future strongly recommend adding half randomized pitch or duration to sound effects to limit fatigue of hearing the same sound effect frequently.

- I don't think you need a lives system here, being able to manually quick reset would be more fun.

- Initially dashed across the gap between the two digits set and thought I was to hold on to dear life by holding towards the wall until the digits rolled. This caused it to have no time acceleration so I'd have to wait a few minutes and gave up until trying a second time after reading the description.

- Loved the splash art but thought it said Inside Tide. Adding an indent would clear up the confusion without damaging your good graphic design too much

Thanks a lot, had fun making it :)

Thanks I noticed it once but thought I fixed it already, will try to figure it out and let you know when I fix it :) Of note in the meantime you can use R or Select to quick reset on or out of that screen!

Oh also jumping while falling is intentional, you can only do it if you fall without jumping off the ground.

Thanks for trying it out and taking time to give feedback :)

Thanks a lot it's encouraging to hear :)

Using jam as a learning tool and when it's not too hard I love to apply lessons learned to the project itself.

Thanks a lot we'll try to address your feedback in a postjam patch :)

Thanks we'll try to fix the pause bug and tweak how the chests throw items a bit!

We ended up having to simplify controls in the postjam patch sadly we won't be able to bite our hands anymore but I'm really happy you found it funny, I did too  lol

Impressive, everything was so consistent I thought you were a team for a while now :)

Thank you for the feedback! Good points :)
After the jam we'll simplify controls and add a picture that explains control mappings. Maybe also have the dragon tell you to throw things in there.

If/when you need playtesting I'm down :)

Thanks!

I wish we had time to implement ways in which it was more strongly reflected in the mechanics but very happy people find it charming :)

Thanks for the feedback!

Yes that's definitely a bug! Right now I think all dialog triggers all at once without checking the intended progress condition(!) We fixed that and some more bugs we'll patch in for sure :)

Me and noxid are working on bugfixing, maybe tweaking the balance and map right after jam ends, will let you know when it's out for comparison.

Not sure if we'll add entirely new areas/features yet but might revisit it at a later date or at least for sure reuse the characters/voice system maybe in another jam or hopefully full game some day. Sifa had been sitting around as a complete model with nothing but a walk cycle for a while, very happy we found a first home for her!

Found the concept interesting and novel, execution is good too

Wishlist:
- More levels and powerups
- Making it so dying doesn't reset the music so it feels less repetitive
- Making the birds bigger and have a thick outline, only noticed them after dying 2 or three times

Thanks :)

Interesting and thanks for the explanation gonna be useful for me to test in my own project knowing this now :)

Reminded me of my favorite phase of Spore in an efficient and charmingly unique package

- Love the visual assets and think they fit great together, except maybe the funny looking fish which looked very different in rendering/texture but he looks funny enough I don't mind at all.
- Love so much that you included difficulty options. After losing very hard in medium switched it to easy and had fun. 
- Really appreciate there was enough time in the jam to make a boss at all and was impressed he showed damage taken visually.

Wishlist/Random improvement ideas as tribute:
- The boss has a weird hitbox that confused me sometimes. Specifically I tried to stay behind him and bite his butt but sometimes just biting his ribcage seemed to damage me
- The boss movement looked erratic and very hard to predict/play around especially with its very long hitbox. It was funny and didn't overstay its welcome though. In a more complete context I think having it swoop left and right would've looked less jarring and felt more avoidably fair but tbh probably more boring and less memorable than the current version.

Good job :)

Immediately in love with the presentation

- Favorite song in the jam
- Favorite character design in the jam
- Love the intro screen and found it a clever way to set the picture without needing an entire dialog system
- Reminded me of old flash games I used to play in a good way (Dolphin Olympics 2 specifically)

Wishlist/Random improvement ideas as tribute:

- Took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out I needed to HOLD space not tap it in bursts to gain speed. Wish it was under Controls instead of Tips section of the page, I thought Tips was spoilery but it was essential knowledge.
- Wish going to 0 calorie didn't double whammy you so hard. Not being able to boost anymore is already punishment enough in my opinion or at least it shouldn't break your speed as fast and completely as it does. It might make more sense if the idle animation played a tail wag that got slowed when you hit 0, but losing momentum speed from fatigue feels confusing and frustrating.
- Noticed hitting space right as I reach waves while going up would make me jump while at low speed. Tried holding space as soon as possible on reentry or going out at high speed but often just lost all speed instead of getting a boost. Didn't understand/notice if it was because I was at 0 calories each time or something else.

Very funny and interesting twist on Papers Please kind of game. Played it with the bf watching/giving advice over the shoulder and was a blast.

- Had interesting situations where we were really unsure or not if the person was going to get us punished for being sent to hell and started getting armchair philosophical about it
- Laughed out loud when we reached a point of the game where good and bad deeds can be shuffled and bf pointed out "THEY STARTED 2 FOREST FIRES!?"
- Also laughed when he'd read faster than me and I'd go "damn this guy's spotless" "Dictator."

Wishlist/Random improvement ideas as tribute:

- Wish the game had a communicated ending, we were very excited to see how else it would shake up the formula but found out the only thing that changed was the thresholds and quantity of souls to judge.

Loved the presentation

- Impressed by how simple but fun and rewarding the fishing minigame was. Love when idlers have ways like this to play them more actively or leave them in the background.

Wishlist/Random improvement ideas as tribute:

- I wish instead of being a separate purchase the first level of autoclick should unlock it. I think I accidentally bought autoclick speed upgrade before I bought the ability to Autoclick at all.

Love the idea and the nasty sounds the cat makes while eating. Reminded me of our cat even though he never ate cardboard lol

Wishlist/Random improvement ideas as tribute:

- Wish there was no Gecko mechanic, it got in the way without providing something interesting, just a disruptive button mash that got old quick. Would be funny as a one time/boss thing thrown in to spice things up, in that case I,d suggest keeping the button mash to Space too.
- Wish the next boxes was delivered automatically once I ate current one enough.

- Wish the way punching holes work was more immersive. It was too obvious they were being overlayed on top of everything instead of actually punching through the box specifically:
The cat bite indicator should be layered higher than the holes
The background shouldn't get punched through at the same time as the boxes

Probably prettiest game I played this jam, good job to all your artists :)

- Huge fan of the presentation, down to the texture of the sharp clean interactive UI distinguishable from its fuzzy pretty art
- Huge fan of how cohesive the theming is: You're made of wax, your health is wax, you heal by getting more of it
- Impressed with the variety of platforms especially considering I barely survived 87 seconds
- Really like how the back of the chandelier showcases upcoming platforms and keeps stuff not being immediately in sight from completely blindsiding you once the speed gets very high

Wishlist/Random improvement ideas as tribute:

- Wish there was something more stapled onto the core loop. Mario has fireball and it felt like the little guy needed something more novel/on theme than just doublejumping
- Wish the particles for the playable character were prettier or dropped. Think the clearly circular particles is the only thing that kind of clash with the rest of the aesthetic while the static platform fires looked pretty.

Love the idea and execution of an incremental eventually idle game that does not have a mashing click until I break my finger or mouse phase

- Love the idea of Breeding stats in this genre. Always been a fan of Chao Garden type stuff

Think I encountered a bug both times or didn't understand part of the UI:

- After buying a first extra lilypad a wooden block item in nursery gets replaced by a lilypad. Which seems intentional. I can then field another frog on that slot.
- After buying a second extra one though no extra lilypad sprites appear in the nursery (But an empty lilypad I cannot populate does appear in the play area so I think it's bugged?)

Probably my favorite frog game this jam

- Great environment work
- Funny sound effects
- Fun to boost around in the air once you get good at it

Wishlist/Random improvement ideas as tribute:

- Not sure if that's the case but thought levels were segmented in closed off sections you can't access without boosting when I couldn't nail a jump from a lilypad to the rock wall. This started making me anxious I forgot a chicken and didn't have a way to boost back into a previous level section. Turns out there was still one fly so I was ok.

Would suggest either:

- Blocking off level sections until the current one  is cleared (meh)
- Having clear ways to slowly but eventually navigate between sections without boosts (meh)
- Have a clear "This thing will spawn flies slowly but infinitely" in each section (Better theming, more fun because more boosting but might imbalance the game and might require a new asset)

Loved the gameplay, level and sound design :)

Wishlist/Random improvement ideas as tribute:
- I wish the short platform in the middle of the screen in that one wasp level was wider (Or that it came later in the game). It was a high difficulty spike that felt a lot harder than the rest of the game.
- I wish the bloom when opening a new area was less aggressive or stylized differently. It was very bright and blinding when the spider stood in it.

Overall intriguing but very hard.
- Really loved the ambiance nailed both visuals and sounds.
- Love the SCP exploration log kind of vibes I get from this.

Decided to move on to try other games after dying without understanding the cause when reaching the lighter blueish gray area (pretty sure I didn't touch a wall and died mid-air).

Wishlist/Random improvement ideas as tribute:
I wish the game didn't feel as punishing as it is. Mostly the problem comes from:

- Dying is very easy (Not necessarily a problem) Instead of being a one hit kill, the game could benefit from slow regenerating health while the player is in specific safe areas or hasn't been taking damage for a while or something thematically/mechanically fitting/interesting.
- (As far as I know) Lack of a checkpoint system (Is a problem when combined with the previous)
In most horror games nowadays failure means being set back but not an entire do over, which kills the pacing at which curiosity is being rewarded.

Love minimalist puzzle games and this one ramped the difficulty just in time to stay interesting.

- Love the pencil tool and copy paste ones most for their alternate uses
- Very satisfying sound design

Bucket tool seemed really powerful in ways that often trivialized some puzzles.
But at the same time it was most satisfying to use not sure if and how I'd improve on it. Maybe by making the game into a Reversi puzzler and replacing bucket tool by "Flip all in given area shape" tool, but these tend to be a lot harder once you start having to stack shapes back and forth, really appreciated the simplicity of this one and the execution as is :)

Really liked the weird vibes and funky assets
- Sound design is good
- Favorite part was the weird fish and artifacts to fish out, was very curious to see them all and wish there was a way to document if/when I had

Managed to craft the first item but didn't do anything so I got lazy when I couldn't find the last slug. Hope I didn't miss much more lol

I'm a sucker for both spooky themed but not jumpscary games and idlers in general so I really liked this one.
- Very solid presentation, both in sound design and visuals
- Loved how once you upgrade buildings enough they change visuals
- Appreciate the shortcuts being directly on screen, surprised how these are missing in some big release tycoon/city builder

Wishlist/Random improvement ideas as tribute:
- Wish that instead of repeat clicks you could turn on/off each feed button to autofire when ready
- Wish the game had a communicated end goal or end of content. Took me a while to realise oh wait I got as far as I could (Or I think I have)
- Wish there was more depth or reasons to mix buildings. At first I was excited to unlock new ones but then realized the base buildings seem more reliable as each upgrade netted an extra income of the primary reason you built it in the first place while hybrid buildings leveled up both resources but slower and you are more often than not held back only by Faith late game imho.
- I wish buildings comboed with eachother. Like placing a house near a place of worship generates more Faith per ticks etc.
- I wish there was narrative and mechanical payoff to progress Mother. The buildings changing color as you level them was interesting, I wish similarly the island got more gloomy and corrupt or unlocked entirely new phases as Mother grows stronger. I think tying the research unlocks to Mother's growth would give stronger motivation to feed it and resonate the theme a lot

Fun infinite runner idea and solid execution that left me wanting more

- Really like the presentation think it's cohesive and solid
- Can tell levels are generated in chunks but can't tell easily when they start and end, they are very well and seamlessly connected
- Clicked for the cat and loved the cat, funny cute dialog, good sound clips. Looks like a pettable creature

Wishlist/Random improvement ideas as tribute: 
The execution reminds me a bit of Dino Run and even more of an obscure Nintendo DS game it could steal notes from : The Chase- Felix meets Felicity
In it you outrun a level-obliterating void as you draw your own platforms using the stylus using a mana system. If I recall you can also grind down slopes to accumulate notable velocity).

Notable differences between this and The Chase:
- The Chase has a preset campaign made of handcrafted levels
- The deathwall goes at a fixed speed

I think, like Dino Run or The Chase, this would work better as a hand crafted or at least finite runner experience if you had had more time.

Currently you score based on how far you go, but that metric feels grinded for with time more than skills. You complete runs and get cool upgrades, but very quickly you master or trivialize all the platforming chunks (triple jumping over the garage area for example) and the only measure of how far you can go is how many upgrades you've accumulated rather than any test of skills. Then the high score chase loses a lot of meaning and left me with a bitter note despite the polished experience.

I think one of two ways could really improve this game if you chose to make it into a full title or similar jams in the future :

- Have a  finite and clearly communicated end distance for which the player is grinding for
- Have individual levels to beat

Then the metric of success/personal satisfaction could be : Time to beat the entire thing or Number of attempts before beating the entire thing. Cheers and thanks for the feedback on our game too :)