itch.io

This game gave me a good chuckle. Creative take on the theme, and good job on the implementation. I like how the player character is just kinda fricking around doing dumb stuff, it speaks to the gamer in me on an emotional level.

Good work, and good luck!

Really good job on the art style! I'm a sucker for good character design, and I really like  what you did with the heros and the raid boss character designs. I also appreciate that you did your own music for the jam, so good job on the atmosphere building!

Not to overanalyze a game jam project (as I, unfortunately, am apt to do), but I think that the initial concept offers some unique, and quite difficult challenges from a gameplay and balancing perspective. In a general a boss in a bossfight has the advantage of health pool and damage output, but the players have the advantage of action economy. In my opinion, it's more fun to play with the action economy because it lends naturally to more interesting gameplay choices - you have more turns per turn so to speak. So, inverting this dynamic and playing as the person who traditionally has very limited choices can lead to uninteresting gameplay if not balanced properly on that knifes' edge.

As a potential solution to this problem, I suggest you break away from traditional RPG mechanics to create unique ways to combine your own abilities together. I'm not entirely sure how this should best be designed, but the end goal should be that one turn for the boss should involve numerous interesting decisions for the player to make. One idea I had would be the ability to set traps for the adventurers where if they make specific actions you can counter them (kind of like trap cards in Yugioh) but there are a billion other ways to achieve this goal.

Good work, and good luck!

I like the art style and I enjoyed playing your submission. Creating algorithms based on tile sliding led to a simple and fun gameplay loop. The only thing I didn't understand while playing is how the heat mechanics work, so I think a tutorial would be great for helping players understand the goals of the game. Good work and good luck!

Definitely fits the theme. As you noted on the game page, the gameplay is a bit cut short due to time constraints. For future expansions, may I suggest having a small pool of workers you control? It'd be just like an RTS game except you're unmaking the map (although I suspect this might have been your original idea). I could see this working as a super chill game about moving units around to make the map beautiful again, like some weird mix of the gameplay loop in Powerwashing Sim, the mechanics of Civilization, and the timescale of Tenet.

Hmm, never thought I'd fly through space by controlling the planets, but here we are.

Creative concept, great execution. Balancing putting planets close to the "player" to get better control while not smashing into the planets leads to surprisingly naturally balanced gameplay. Game is fast enough to be challenging and fun without being so fast that it feels unfair or stressful.

I generally try to give a point of constructive criticism when critiquing games, but I genuinely don't have anything to say except well done, and good luck!

Going for a 3d game in the jam was quite ambitious, but you pulled it off well. This game has great atmosphere, I'm a fan of the art style. Gameplay was smooth and controls were responsive. My only complaint is that I think that the game needs a bit of balance work. For example, in my first playthrough I played it as a stealth game and was very confused when I got to the end and suddenly all heck broke loose (also the game pseudo-softlocked as the monster pummeled me to death in a corner, lol). I think a few playtests would really help if you want to pursue this project further post jam.

I think that this project is a really creative idea, and I really see a lot of potential for it to be really fun. However, the buggy level editor and the somewhat incompetent AI really does hurt a lot of that potential. While I'm not an AI-whisperer, I would guess that many of the issues with the AI could probably be solved by simplifying the movement abilities. For example, reducing the jump height so that the AI only has to consider jumping 1 block gaps. Or maybe only let the AI move right. This does somewhat go against the idea of the real-time AI platforming concept, but it might help to simplify the amount of computation the AI needs to perform in order to path-find to the end of the level.

If you end up submitting an AI-patched version of this to either the post jam or just in general after the submission period, please let me know as I unironically want to play that.

(P.S, fantastic name. My dad would approve)

I'm a fan of the art style you cooked up here, and I think the attention to detail in this game is quite impressive. I especially a fan of the small touches, such as the little dude in the health bar absolutely loosing it as I'm approaching death (which gave me a good chuckle). I also like the random powerups adding replayability to the game, although I would prefer that they have more impact on the game loop besides merely "bigger number go brrrrr" (but tbh there's only so much you can fit into 48 hours, right?) Overall, good polish, good work, and good luck!

Thanks man! :D

Thanks, only other thing I can think of is whether the program is the 64-bit or 32-bit build.
Also, if you want to see more specific information, from the settings go to System -> About and you should see a bunch of system information, including the "System type" which would probably be the most relevant.

That seems somewhat strange. If you can provide any information about your system (your operating system, processor, RAM, etc) and the version of the game that you downloaded then that would be greatly appreciated. I can pass along this information to the Love2D team and see if they know anything about what's going on.

This game made me very confused. I don't think the recipes for canceling out disasters are super intuitive. Ex, why is an earthquake combined with a flood good? Isn't that a tsunami? Maybe it would help if there were a cosmic reference manual that you could flip through on the side?

A fun twist on the TD formula. I quite enjoyed this game, and it's well executed.

I do think there are some small things that could be improved from a user experience perspective, for example reloading towers that aren't out of ammo, or how you can reload a tower then pick it up while it's reloading, but you can't reload a tower you've picked up. Also, you can get stuck between enemies and buildings and be unable to pick up your tower. However, I think that this concept has a lot of potential to grow beyond a simple game jam experience.

Also, bomb towers are useless, imho. Maybe buff their range?

Nice game! I especially like the artwork. As others have said, it's a nice retro-aesthetic.

I think my biggest complaint is that the enemies don't feel fair, especially the small walking enemies. The reason is that their movement seems to be completely random and unpredictable, which given the short range of the sword meant I lost several dozen HP to the enemy turning around randomly when I was trying to hit it. This is especially frustrating since the combination of large player hitbox and small range of attack meant that the reaction time to save myself from damage is basically none.

I think adding a bit of telegraphing to some of the more random enemies would go a long way (such as the shooting plants and the small minions). As a good example of an enemy that really fit this game, I really liked the enemy design of the bats since predicting their movement and parrying just before they were in range was super rewarding as a player.

I look forward to it!

Did the bluescreen look like this? 

If so, this wouldn't be a computer crash, this would mean that the game crashed with some error info. Obviously this shouldn't be happening, but I wouldn't consider it to be a "blue screen" that would crash your computer which looks like this:

Also, there is no in-game pause menu because we ran out of time, if you need to pause you can die and then exit to main menu.

Good game, fun, but I ended up soft locking since the call to action post doesn't refresh the possible posts list (also ended up with negative populations due to what I believe is the same bug).

Concept, gameplay, and artwork is good. I do think the tutorial is a bit confusing, but once you understand what's going on it's fairly intuitive.

I think it would be cool if instead of getting sent back to the beginning after each failure, only the present stage resets and the player can choose to step back a level. Like, imagine you get to a certain point where you just can't make forward progress because, for example, your yellow circle can't survive all the deadly lasers in phase 3, so you have to step back and replay a couple levels to adjust the timing of those lasers so that it's survivable in the future. I think this idea would improve the gameplay, and it also would fit with the rewinding time aspect of the game.

I like the graphics and audio, and can appreciate how they are made from scratch, however I think this game suffers a lot from something I'll call "developer-is-the-only-player-itis", which can especially be problematic for game jam games. There are a lot of mechanics that were designed to make the game more difficult for its only player (the developer), but as a player it feels like I'm usually just circling enemies waiting for my gun to reload or my knife to recharge (which isn't that fun).

Here's some suggestions for things I think could make the game better (probably implementing all of them would be bad, but maybe adding a few could be good):
- Guns have infinite ammo and increased fire rate. The ammo counter seems like a waste (especially since you can reload after running out), and the fact I'm stuck waiting to chamber the next round for so long feels wrong. This doesn't necessarily need to be a buff either, if you weaken the individual bullets but increase the fire rate it will feel a lot more fun, even if the raw damage output is the same.
- Ability to shoot in all directions. While technically being able to shoot in one dimension is unique, what I've found is that it really hinders the gameplay because it forces a relatively simple loop. 1) move to side of screen. 2) shoot a bullet or two. 3) use the fact you move faster diagonally to kite around outside of screen to get to other side. 4) Repeat.
- Enemies get momentarily stunned when hit by bullets and will stop charging you. Would help with the faster enemies, and also adds depth to gameplay. Yeah you COULD shoot a weaker enemy off the map, but maybe it's better to stun the big dude to buy some time.
- Cover and smarter enemies. Adding cover blocks to hide behind could go well with shooting in multiple directions. Since this is a unity game, you can use unity's built-in pathfinding to keep enemies from running directly into walls. Some enemies should also flank the player and stuff like that to keep them from forming a giant blob in the center of the screen.
- Enemies that shoot. This may already be in the game, as I only got up to two enemy types, but introducing these enemies sooner could help spice up the gameplay and dodging, especially if the player is significantly faster than all but the charging enemies.

Also, I think grenades are broken in this build, I was only able to use one of them during my run, even though the HUD said I had another.

Best of luck to you and your game. Let me know if you decide to make a post-jam version!

"Simple" game, but I like it. I laughed pretty hard when I first pressed the button in the main menu and the title card popped up, it's a great introduction/tutorial for the game!

My only complaint is that it's very unclear how the inventory works. It really feels like you should be able to click on items in the inventory. Also, the inventory UI element doesn't prevent you from clicking on items behind it, so I had a lot of frustrating experiences where I would click on something where I wanted to use an item (such as the fuse box) and then try to click on an item in my inventory to use on it only to be thrown back to my desk. In the same vein, clicking on the button to close your inventory opens your desk drawer, which probably should be fixed.

This game is fun and I enjoyed playing. Graphics and audio are excellent. Obviously, given more time having menus and a proper game over screen would be nice. I also think the difficulty curve could be adjusted as I think the difficulty ramps up extremely quickly after the first few levels.

I like the graphics and the audio, but I'm a bit mixed on gameplay. While taking two diametrically opposed genres and creating a mash up of the two can be interesting, it is very difficult to pull off well, especially when combining the quick reflexes of rhythm games with the slow paced nature of puzzle games. In this case, I feel the Rhythm aspect of this game really hurts the core gameplay. Maybe replacing the rhythm with a more traditional turn-based approach would be better? (See Snakebird or Baba is You).

Hey Brokovnik!

I'm having trouble replicating this issue. Can you provide any further information about this incident such as the version you downloaded and your operating system? Thanks in advance!

I like it! Cute and fun.
Also, https://osu.ppy.sh/beatmapsets/150945#osu/372245 >:)

I do think this game could use some more "juice". Was wondering about adding some particles, a touch of screenshake, and some rhythm-pulsing stuff (I really wanted to make stationary pieces jiggle in time with the music as if there was a giant subwoofer under the board). Maybe I'll spend some time working on a juicy update for when the voting period ends, we'll see.

Moving on beat in this game is, admittedly, a bit strange. So, technically you always move on beat, but I wanted to give players some grace to deal with various forms of input lag and make the game more accessible to newer players. I had experimented with a few control schemes, and the one in the game is the one I found to be most responsive. The king always moves on beat, but the inputs can be fudged quite a bit. That said, you'll find the controls to be the most crisp if you go with the beat since (to oversimplify a lot) your inputs are queued if you aren't close enough to the rhythm.

It would be interesting to play around with. It may be that this game is at its best when pieces just refuse to end the game.

Enjoyed the game! I like how you can turn getting hit into collecting items. Made for an interesting twist on the learn-to-fly sub-genre. I spent... longer than I'd like to admit upgrading my spaceship ;)

It's surprising how well this game builds atmosphere considering how simplistic it is. Good job.

This game is very chaotic. I enjoyed it, although it does seem a bit buggy at times.

Interesting concept. It could be interesting to add in the concepts of check and checkmate into this version of chess, although I'm not sure if that would help or hinder the game.

Controls seem a bit clunky for a keyboard game, might be better as a twin stick shooter.

Amazing and very unique game, I love it!

Thanks! The music was made by a friend of mine. I'm pushing him to post more of his stuff online because it's all really good. I'll let you know when he decides to get a Spotify, lol.

Heard there was someone else who made a chess inspired game, had to check it out and... Lol this is amazing.

Great concept, fantastic execution! This game is super fun and the graphics are on point. This could totally be made into a steam game. See you in the finalists!

A little bit buggy, but a lot of fun to play. Reminds me of those mobile games where you tear apart cities.

I really love the concept for this game, but I think that it could benefit from a bit better balance. As it is, there seem to be far too many enemies too quickly to deal with efficiently.