itch.io

Thanks for playing! Sorry about the re-start. It was in the pause menu, but that also caused issues on the web when playing in full-screen. Something I need to improve in the future.

It seems to always save my progress. Is there no way to start from the beginning? Or go back to old levels?

I didn't understand the mechanics at first (beat first level by pogoing) which lost all my time. I get the concept, but I'm super lost in actually navigating the levels. 

I always get two levels to work on, which I switch between with E? What about restarting, or jumping back to old levels? 'r' just sends me back to my current level. 

Escape brings up a Pause Menu with options like 'Restart' and 'Skip Level. Sadly, on the web, Escape first cancels full-screen... next time I will bind another key (TAB or something), and have an on-screen button you can press for bringing up the pause menu.

Thanks for playing!

Reminds me of some flash era "rage" games. This one was pretty mellow on the rage side of things though :)

Fun concept, and nice writing. As @pavlee said, there was something wrong with the button highlights. I also often got stuck inside of the 'check' info screen for >20 seconds, which made it very difficult! I ended up no longer pressing this button because it was too buggy. But sometimes I pressed it on accident because of the button highlights being unclear. 

I liked the bomb that had to drink water :)

It's a very cool premise, and a creative interpretation of the theme. Sadly I ran into some bugs, which largely prevented my ability to play the game:

• The game randomly went back to the start screen. Based on the description, I suppose it's because I survived enough turns to "win"? I would have loved to seen a win screen, if so. And a visible "countdown" to show how many turns I needed to survive.
• At one point, the enemies stopped moving/attacking.
• The solder char never got move cards, and the enemies got stuck, so I could never attack. 

It was really fun, nonetheless. Puzzle games are hard! I actually made my first one for this jam :)

Very interesting, and quite different from the other games in the jam. I guess I would say the connection to the theme is pretty weak -but that's ok!

A few nits:

• I would have liked to know WHEN events occured in relation to each other
• The initial information screen should close based on user input, not time. Different people read at different speeds. 
• In general, I wish there was more to discover. I often tried using a word in the report to learn more about the incident, but it always returned no results. e.g., ship (info) so I tried astroid (no info). 

Here is my report:

Ship got into a fight with two alien ships. They won by disabling the weapons.

They got hit with astroids, and the engines are broken.

An illness has broken out, with no known records, and patients are becoming aggresive.

It is unclear what the timeline of these events is.

Really nice! Beatiful art and sound design, good puzzles, and generally very polished. One tip: I would have loved full-screen. You can either do this in Godot (put a button somewhere that allows entering full screen mod), or check the box on Itch.io (they can add one for you, in the bottom right).

Do you have any hints for getting past the elavator section? It doesn't seem to go down or up enough to actually access any higher. I'm stuck here. 

Edit: I came back from writing this comment, and my blue mouse was randomly above the elevator. I don't even know how this was possible? 

Really interesting premise, but I also wasn't able to properly interact with the game. Not sure if my mic wasn't working, or if I was doing something wrong.

I would have loved to see a really obvious indicator when my mic was being picked up (like a waveform?) to help me diagnose the issue. 

The art is very cool! 

Sadly the gameplay was really tricky to understand. The angle of the arena made it hard to tell where I was, in relation to the enemies. I think also some enemies didn't have their origin at their feet, because the y-sorting was bugging out like crazy. I also felt like I got too many upgrades, and since reach upgrade had a lot of (overlapping) text, I felt like I spent more time reading than playing. 

I would have loved more refined gameplay, because the art and premise was really intruiging. 

Pretty fun! I got my butt kicked by the CPU haha. 

I've always wanted to do a co-op game for a jam, but it feels risky. Adding the CPU player was smart for solo testers. 

That was very fun! I loved how much depth you packed into the game.

Thank goodness for swords, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to beat it otherwise! 

It would have been cool if you could bait the boss into the walls to split off rocks quicker.

It's a really good start, but it's a bit difficult to understand. I was able to win some fights, but never really "got" it. 

It would be good to work on the information available to me, without needing to click each enemy. 

Maybe also the first fights could be really easy, to kind of show the game mechanics.

I really like the art style. The falling down mechanic is pretty nice as well -cool interpretation of the theme! The intro page is very polished. I just wish I didn't have to see it every time I died!

I played probably 50 times, but never really "got" it. Are you able to open the chests? My weapon felt too underpowered, and the melee enemies were so thick, I couldn't ever charge it up properly. Are you supposed to be able to clear all the enmies before the next floor?

I think maybe I'm missing a trick, or it's really just that hard. Is the "Perfect Dodge" a big part of it? 
Edit: A played more to try and figure it out:

• Using the laser also uses your health points. When you go down to 1, it WILL fire, regardless of whether you were aiming somewhere useful. Also when the floor breaks. So make sure to shoot before that.
• You *can* open chests, by spamming the interact button. This will heal you.
• The best strategy I found was charging up my laser to full power, and then lining up all enemies in the floor to fry them. Then go to the chests. This still left me with negative health per floor :(

Very cool! Feels very polished and nice to play. Reminds me a bit of old flash-era "puzzle" games (Robot and Kitty, etc). I got to the key-card, then over-extended and died :/

For a jam game, I would tend towards leniency for the player. Maybe let them respawn instead? I don't see the value in permadeath for a jam game (where you usually have less of the players attention). 

Will you also be giving feedback on the games in the form of comments? One of the most impactful portions of a jam game is receiving feedback. Due to relatively few submissions, and no community vote, most games only have a few comments, or none at all.

Once you've announced the winners, it would be amazing if the Jurors could go back through at least some of the games they played, and leave their feedback. 

PSA: For the ARD game jam in Germany, they used a community vote to determine the top 20. These 20 games were played by a Jury on Twitch, and then there was a live-stream for the winners. In that jam, my game had thousands of plays, compared to <10 for this jam.

That document was so inconsistant though. I found at least 4 occurences where it disagreed with the rules posted on the main itch page.

You can send them an email: https://itch.io/jam/coolmath-game-jam-2026/topic/6461118/late-submission-instruc...

https://itch.io/jam/coolmath-game-jam-2026/topic/6461118/late-submission-instruc...

Very cool! It's a nice twist on the Tower Defense genera. 

I struggled a bit with the controls in the beginning, so maybe this will help somebody: You have control over where the roots grow. When you select the starting base (or a root), you can click inside of the circle to direct where the root will grow. It takes a second to grow.

I'm sure it's out of scope, but it would have been really cool if the enemy was more dynamic. I think right now it doesn't get stronger over time (?) so once you've handled your defense, the game is technically already over. 

I see some ratings coming in on the Submissions tab. Are these from a Coolmath games Jury, or can we rate games as well? I don't see how.

Anyone know if a full-screen button is even allowed? 

The itch page states: 

> You can use assets not made by you so long as you have the proper license to use them and credit the source

The more detailed rules states:

> Submissions must be original work created by the entrant or the Team and must not contain content created by a third party, such as images or artwork, other than appropriately credited open-source software;

This feels entirely contrary to me. Please clarify.

You were asking for play-testers, so here goes.

Who am I? Game developer by profession and hobby. I don't usually play auto-battlers, but I do enjoy strategy games.

First impressions (store page and trailer):

Your presentation and trailer are very nice. I like that you jump directly into gameplay. My first impression is that it's a mobile game, or heavily inspired by the style of mobile games. Art, juice, SFX, and especially the UI give me this impression. Nits: You have two screenshots (side-bar) and two screenshots (main page), along with first frame of the trailer that are all showing very similar backgrounds (beige). I wonder how feasible it would be to create different environments for the battles to take place? For the close-up screenshots, it would already be enough to color-grade the ground differently (e.g., one with a more vibrant brown, or gray). Second nit: Word mark is a bit hard to read. 

Tutorial:

The initial start-page was a bit overwhelming. There was a lot to read (home faction, enemy faction, hero, etc). And it triggered before the tutorial. I think maybe for the first play, you could try to guide the player through this page faster. It might be enough to have a flashing arrow pointing to the continue button or something similar. I spent time on this page that wasn't necessary, because directly afterwards the tutorial started. The rest of the tutorial was very good. I liked how you triggered tutorial pages as-needed (e.g., before the shop) instead of giving the player a ton to read up-front.

Gameplay impressions: 

The basic game concept was fun, and easy to understand. I was surprised that there wasn't anything similar to pass-through damage (I mean, if an enemy was in a row un-opposed, it just didn't do anything?). As a player, I felt motivated to make sure my people didn't die, but I didn't feel motivated to min-max my total damage. I would often ensure that my people were either in rows un-opposed (seems my total damage was always higher than theirs?), or ensure I had at least tied their damage in each row. In the play-through, I lost one unit in wave 9 due to a miscalculation.

In general the gameplay was a tiny bit shallower than I hoped. I would at least consider whether passthrough damage (e.g., Inscryption style) would fit into the game. 

Nits:

• You have some inconsistent  UX. For example the barracks and infirmary are without text (had to click them to know what they did), while the Continue button has text. 
• The large red numbers showing player/enemy summed attack seem hastily placed. Also maybe buggy: It didn't seem to correctly calculate enemy attacks (showing 0, when enemy had 2x3)
• "Can reposition twice" OK, but where is it indicated that I've already re-positioned once? 

That's awesome that you were able to survive on 1hp. Nice job!

Anger being the weakest was actually a bug :(

It was supposed to dash ~80% of the time, and only occasionally stop (giving the player a chance to do damage), but the numbers got mixed up so he only dashes ~20% of the time.

Great job! The art is very cute, and the animation for the first banana attack is awesome!

Maybe the game would feel more complete if you started with 1 attack, and then slowly unlocked the remaining attacks? That would also make it less overwhelming for the player to decide which attack to use.

Such a fun entry! I enjoyed hearing the rowdy playtests during development as well :)

What a cute game!

Impressive ammount of polish. I especially love the curtain animation, and how well you timed the music and spotlights. Very good juice.

Runs smooth as butter as well.

Really nice entry! I enjoyed playing through all of the levels. 

I would have enjoyed if there was a "fade to black" when you died. Sometimes it was dissorienting to be teleported so directly. 

The Web version also didn't work for me: mouse wasn't captured. I played the desktop version. 

Performance was also quite rough. Probably there were some simple optimizations you could have used (like instanced geometry) that would have solved that. I couldn't find source code though, so I couldn't snoop xD

So cute! I especially loved the level design. I never felt like I was seeing the same assets, or repeated sections of road. Making such a complete and interesting level with limited assets must have been quite a challenge.

Nice job! I love the theme interpretation.

I sadly ran into some duplicate-solution issues as well. I think it's probably very tough to eliminate them all. 

I could see this game being used in an educational setting, to show the basics of layers and filter. I kinda want to see a 3D version of this now with booleans and blender-style modifiers (e.g., array, twist).

Very nice job! The art and music are very pleasant, and fit the gameplay/theme perfectly. It's also quite cool that the game can be replayed (since the mask is randomized every time). Not many jam games have that!

Very cool entry! I love where you took the art style. The music, lightning, and models all fit together very well. 
I wish the gameplay was finished, so I could explore the world properly.

Pretty nice game! As others have said, some audio would have been really nice.

I really like that you took the time to add upgrade cards. It makes it feel like the start of a Roguelike.

Note: The game is easily broken by standing across two "planks" at once. This allows you to walk forever without gathering resources or building.

Also don't ask me to reply on your itch page. I'm happy replying here.

Very ambitious entry! The art was very cute and immersive.

The gameplay was perhaps a bit too hard though -I wasn't able to complete the game. Enemies hiding behind obstacles was very punishing! 

Nice entry! We considered doing something similar, before deciding it was a bit large in scope for a jam game. Nice job getting something playable. I scored 473. 

Feedback: Having different particles/SFX for different objects would have been cool.