itch.io

Thank you for such detailed feedback. Really appreciate the time you've taken to play and share your experience.

The bookshelf is indeed a flat surface, however it has both a baked normal and height map, which is a parallax effect (rather than tesselation created geometry). Below is a screenshot of the material channel for that asset if you're interested:

I'm really pleased to hear that it had the intended effect for you, it took quite alot of effort to put some of these together and it's nice to hear it paid off.

There is no real tie in between the two phases - other than being able to explore the world in relative safety (and with more light!) which should in theory make navigation easier when you go down. The player can choose to break through at any time and it has no impact on how the second phase plays out. There is just the one ending, it was a very late addition on the last day. We hadn't really worked out the lore in truth either, and this entire project was hugely overscoped. The broad idea is that the first phase is a simulation to keep the player placated. The player then breaks out into the 'real' world, but then we thought it might be interesting if you were the monster all along!? Honestly, we didn't get much further in the plot than that, so you have my apologies.

I completely understand regarding the enemy attack animations. He was quite experimental and uses an inverse kinematic rig rather than a conventional keyed animation. As such we had to animate him exclusively by moving targets for his various bones to point at. As such some of the animations are quite thrown together.

Thank you again for taking the time to write such detailed feedback, and thank you for playing :).

You're not the first person to mention the overload right at the start, we were actually working on a subtitle system today as it happens. But it's all a bit late.

I would say this game a case of, you have to go slow to go fast. If I may offer a couple of small pieces of advice:

You want to take battles slowly at the start, and focus on getting upgrades (on the right of the screen) as well as finding healing stations. As you get some gear and click the upgrades for gear, weapons and maschochism on the right hand side, everything gets alot easier and you'll have more comfort in exploring. The '!' markers are different colours depending on danger, blue is safest, then yellow, then red.

There is one healing station to the room on the right when you start, and two are in the open room directly infront of you from when you start (towards the rocket). Then they start to reset and you can use them over and over.

After this, it all becomes much easier and it'll be pretty much impossible for you to die, it's just the first couple of fights that can be a bit scary to start.

Hope you get on a bit better this time, I would hate for you to have such a horrible time and not get to see anything.

EDIT: I've drawn a small map - just incase it helps to you get you up and running.

This is a lovely little crawler, and I say 'little' in terms of game, not filesize -1gb is absolutely criminal! I'm sure this is a learning experience and hopefully you can get that down to something more manageable in the future.

I  think the combat system is really well implemented and well tuned. It's simple by very engaging. Like CryptRat mentioned, it does incentivise pooling resources between fights, but I personally didn't mind it too much.

The movement controller is decent, I think some others have touched on potential improvements, but it's an excellent attempt for a first crawlers. The perspective is great as it is.

The art is perfect as it is, the hand drawn aesthetic worked perfectly. This was a fun game, which didn't outstay its welcome. Thanks!

This is such a cool entry.

I'll admit, I assumed going in this was going to be another UE5 asset flip type deal, as it often the case UE games with enormous binaries - but it just isn't. This is a legit great entry, and I am somewhat saddened that there will be a potion of people that wont touch me because it's a ~1gb game.

With that out of the way. The mecha is awesome; I have to conclude that it was made for this as it's too specific to the jam? The grabber and elemental cannon are just so charming.

The combat is decently fun, I didn't love having to kite around enemies so much and sort of stutter step back and forth to avoid projectiles. The knifes were probably a little fast, and the glowing orb projectiles possibly a little slow. But all in all the combat was extremely engaging.

The little puzzles, breakable walls, and general dungeon layout was really strong, as you were able to give each each a strong identity while using a limited set of tiles.

All in all this is a really strong entry, and I had alot of fun, thanks!

I can really only echo what the other commenters have already said. Graphically everything is solid, and the SFX adds to the atmosphere. The implementation of the theme is excellent and really interesting. But I think it goes almost without saying at this point that a blind player is missing a substantial amount of information to really get anywhere without it being frustrating.

Finding the right processors is an absolute ballache, they need to be labelled on the map or physicaly - or the location given needs to be a grid reference.

It's a very ambitious entry with some really style to it and a creative approach, but it is quite frustrating as a player when you more or less have to resort to trial and error.

Well, that was fantastic. This game has pretty much everything, and it's all polished too.

It is a monster of a game, and i'll get that upfront that I think it's too much for a jam. "Oh no, my steak is too juicy and my lobster is too buttery!", it is very much a good problem to have, but there is a trend this year of massive games, and in order give all the entries a fair crack, it is an enormous time commitment.

With that out of the way. This is just wonderful. Movement and perspective is excellent. Lots and lots of subtle or not so subtle nods to staples in the genre. Even a chicken because that's so very meta. It's a game that's clearly had a huge amount of effort and thought put into it, and it shows in spades.

The themes integrate really well, and don't feel tacked on.  The art is consistent and if your artist has managed to produce all of that over the week, its a huge achievement.

Fanstatic effort to you all, thank you. I'd be surpised if this isn't winning a prize.

Sorry to hear you're having trouble!

Yes it's an autobattler so you don't need to do anything for combat. At the start, just stay in that little section you're in and take one fight at a time, there is one fight directly to the left of you and there's a healing lamp to the front-right.

As you get a little bit of gear, the fights get alot easier, if you're willing to have another go or two, I promise it gets much much easier. Additionally the clicker mechanic gives you upgrades that makes you stronger in the autobattler portion. 

I hope things get easier for you if you're willing to give it another go.

This game has such charm, a really lovely playing experience. I got a great deal of enjoyment playing this one, as it's bit more of a relaxed, feet up and go at your own pace sort of adventure.

At first I was playing like Candy Crush or those sorts of games, in that I was only trying to swap adjacent orbs. But then I realised I could swap any orbs across the board. I'm not sure if that's normal or expected but I certainly was able to get bigger combos and chains that way. I may well have missed or glazed over some explanation though!

The art is perfect for this type of game. The music and SFX are equally fitting. I had a great time with this one, thanks. 

The puzzles are great in this one! Granted I only solved most of the light puzzles by smashing my head against the wall and trying every combination I could, but I enjoyed doing so.

It took me so much longer than I'm willing to admit before I realised that I needed to switch defence depending on enemy type, I was just brute forcing for ages and spending most of the time hunting for potions, oops!

All in all it's a really nice game. The perspective is great, and while the tiles are pretty small, it worked well. I had a lot of fun, thank you.

A fascinating (and fun) interpretation of the themes. 

The mechanic is a breathe of fresh air if you'll pardon the pun. I've ended up playing a string of deck builders and this has been a lovely change of pace. The firefighting mechanic is well implemented and intuitive to use. The game was also a great length in my opinion.

Visually everything was nice and consistent, and I liked the post-processing which worked well here. I think the perspective was a little narrow for me - but as I write this, it does occur to me that your view is narrowed in a respirator, so perhaps it's all intentional!

Anyway, I had fun and thought it was a highly creative way to tackle the jam. Thank you.

I think I have to start by saying that the technical achievement is great. I love a homebrew engine and I did a 'sort-of' one last year, but it was just writing to a framebuffer on the CPU rather than a full rasterizer, so i'm finding this extremely impressive. I do wish that the view was pulled back a little bit, but aside from that, it's got some really incredible fundamentals to move forward with.

The art is obviously great, and despite coming from a few different places, all intregrates nicely together for a cohesive experience. As does the sound, UI and all that. Everything works together nicely.

For some reason there are dozens and dozens of card battlers in the jam this year, and your implementation of the is one of the best i've played across probably over a dozen with card systems. Sure there were some balancing issues, but i'd rather be able to cheese through a game in a reasonable time considering the amount to be played and rated.

On that note. I would say in the current position of the game, it's probably too long already for the content. I felt like I had seen almost everything after the second ship and by the time I killed the boss it was getting a little stale for me. This is almost certainly a symptom of it being a jam and not having the time to expand the systems / enemies etc for more variety, but in that case I would say there's no harm in a game being shorter and taking 20-30 minutes. I think my playthrough took just over an hour and that was without stopping to shop at all (perhaps I missed something really interesting there).

The movement controller felt great, and the 'choose your own journey' on the bridge was great, but I did wonder if it changed anything? As it seemed the ships all had broadly the same layout.

All in all this is really strong, from both a sytems, gameplay and technical standpoint, with strong art to back it up. My only critique would be the length, but I might be alone on that! Thank you.

7 seconds before the deadline!? Absolute madman!

Instantly recognisable art style, and UI. Very reminiscent previous entries, howeverI didn't find any easter eggs to your previous stuff like I did last year! Only the mousemat. The enemies are much improved this year, and this was elevated by the elemental RPS.

I did have a bug on my first run, whereby the sanctuary door didn't open from the library level. I assumed I had missed something but on the second try everthing worked, so not sure what happened there. I did also have some hitching when the flameflower particles were being instantiated. I couldn't quite work out if it was the transparency forcing a shader recompilation or something else.

Everything else was great though. I've always like your art style, the combat was great and the game was the perfect length for me. Thank you.

I share Damien's sentiment about the viewing angle. I nearly fell out of my chair initially, but it made total sense afterwards :D. Despite being short, I enjoyed the game.

The spitting sound effect got an actual belly laugh out of me, I just wasn't expecting that. I like your interpretation of the theme and your implementation of it. I'm also very grateful that you were generous with the save points and respawning not being punishing.

Sure, the game could have benefitted from some more variety, but I certainly would rather one mechanic well baked then several that are incomplete. In that sense the game is actually great for the time I spent playing. Thank you

Super creative interpretation of the theme. The movement controller feels excellent and the artstyle worked well.

I don't think I need to flog a dead horse on the music, but all in all this is very solid. I did have to come to the comments to ensure the white screen was the end, but time gets away from us all I think :D.

All in all its short, snappy, crunchy and a nice little experience. I had fun, thank you

This was a lovely game, and the perfect length for a jam game in my opinion.

I went for the water mage as I'm always drawn to leeching / healing mechanics and wasn't dissapointed. It was probably a bit overpowered if anything. Regardless, it was an enjoyable platstyle and meant I actually engaged from the start with the elemental RPS. Infact I actually backtracked to avoid the air stone initially as I was weak to it, so the manner in which everything was communicated was clear.

The visuals and sounds are all excellent, nicely consistent throughout. Really now that i'm thinking about it, I haven't really anything to critique. Perhaps some additional stats to choose between HP and MP might have created some build variety? But I think i'm grapsing here! 

The spinners were nicely implementated, gettting the feel right is a nightmare and you nailed them.

A very enjoyable game, thank you.

There's alot to like about this entry, and there's far more I like about it than dislike; such that I think you've been quite hard on yourself in the self-critique on the game page.

The game is a great length, if it was longer it might overstay its welcome. Perhaps that's a lack of content, frankly I don't care too much. There are some games that take ~2 hours to complete without providing anything new outside of the first 15 or so minutes; and thus I see a snappy game like this as inherently positive.

I really appreciate that you've authored your own meshes, and I recognised the gradient texturing; I absolutely love it as an approach to jams in 3D. This is a major plus in my books because it means that every single part of the visual aspect of your game has a recognisable internal consistency.

The computer interaction reminded me of the Cyperpunk 2077 breach protocol, I would have loved that as a mechanic but as always, time amiright? 

I think there is some nice low hanging fruit here that would be easy to look at for next year (if you plan on taking part again). The perspective would benefit from coming back a bit and not being completely nose-to-tile. The movement controller is not bad, I would like it to personally be a bit faster and be able to hold to move and turn while moving.

Sure it was a simple game, but it was engaging, didn't last too long and I have a deep appreciation for the hand-made assets over AI slop or flipping pre-mades, it's something I take a great deal of enjoyment in making and I wish more jammers gave it a go.

Thank you.

Lovely presentation; the art is excellent and I appreciated the numerous throwbacks and references to days gone past. The retrofuturism in your case is a portmanteau of the word than really the spirit of the sub-genre, but with that being said, many others have come up with their own intepretation so it's all ok. And yes, you have dragons :D.

The combat is great, took me a little bit of time to figure out how to correctly kite and CC Clippy, but i'm grateful for the regular respawn points to not make retrying unfairly abrasive.

I did encounter a freeze right at the end of the game when I was dousing a firewall. I wasn't able to dump any crash logs / nothing was printing in the console, and Firefox was screaming at me that the browser was slowing down, so I think I hit an infinte loop, but couldn't debug it anymore. Thankfully Local Minimum has shared his playthrough so I was able to see what missed.

This game was recommended to me and I wasn't dissapointed. The art, design, sound and nostalgia is all wonderful and I absolutely won't count the small technical snafu agaisnt you. Thank you, I had alot of fun.

Honestly, all this stuff is super small. Those improvements sounds great to me, but it really was great and I was just trying to grasp for anything remotely constructive!

Haven't defragged anything in a while! This was great.

At first I thought this might be a bit too easy, but I ever increasingly found myself getting boxed in by a virus as I exited the elevator to then get peppered by a fragment behind it. That being said, the tuning was spot on for me, and I was able to finish the game on my first attempt, which is ideal for my taste. The visuals are lovely, nicely consistent and the enemies are well designed. 

I did have to click the shoot button throughout; I think the input event was being consumed by movement actions and thus I wasn't able to shoot with the keyboard while strafing unless I clicked, but it's a pretty minor thing in reality.

The written guide was very useful, but I probably would have made it without as I think you communicated everything splendidly in level, enemy and UI design. I'm finding it hard to find too much constructive critique! Perhaps the jingle was a little repetitive?

Overall this is an extremely solid entry, I had alot of fun playing. Thank you

Visually this game has a lovely artstyle and atmosphere. 

The difficulty was a problem for me however. On the first 3 runs I was one-shot / crit by the first monster, and I just felt awfully unlucky. Eventually I survived that fight and then was one-shot by the next enemy around the corner and up the stairs. On the next run I went the other way, grabbed the sniper and that helped quite alot! But a short time later a crit took me down from full health.

This was a shame because I actually was really enjoying the way the card system was working, and wanted to explore more. Just insta-deaths can feel terrible for the player, it really felt like there wasn't much I could do in that situation to play around it. I tried to spec into HP one run, and defense another and I was still getting slapped around.

From what I was able to see, I really like your implementation of the cards combat. There have been quite a few I've played in this jam so far and I actually think yours is my favourite, it's nice and crunchy, not overly complex for the sake of it, and was intuitive from the start.

If you can give any advice on the best way to stay alive and progress I'd love to give this another go. Thank you.

A huge congratulations for making your first game, seeing it through to the end and getting some nice polish on it too!

You're movement controller is pretty good for a first go. I would prefer the actions to happen on key-down instead of key-up, but everything else was pretty good!

I like that you picked a simple mechanic and focused on implementing it well. It worked, it was fun and it ticked all the boxes it needed to for the jam. You should be very proud of what you've achieved. Yes it was short, but a fun game and I hope you come back next year.

I love getting beaten up by goth girls. Wait a minute....

Excellent battle system, like the  others have mentioned a little tough to use initially without tutorialisation. I ended up having the symbols up on my second monitor which worked out well, but probably isn't ideal or intended.

Visually it's all great, I enjoyed the both the artstyle and the music was a lovely touch. Movement was good too.

I found I had to be extremely accurate with blocking and there were occasions where (I think anyway) the shield was occluding the fist fully, but only just up to the edge, and the hit would come through anyway. Not sure if I missed anything on that mechanic or it's just a case of gamers thinking hitboxes are bigger than they really are.

All in all a really solid entry, thanks.

This is a very nicely focused game. Conceptually it's all strong, everything made sense to me, it's thematic and the perfect length.

Like others have said, the movement controller needs a little bit of love, I did find myself trying to move backwards and strafe quite often, and that's a tough habit to break. The perspective is very narrow, and while it's not 'traditional', it didn't matter in this game, not that a crawler about AI particularly traditional!

I enjoyed this alot, it was fun playing around with the various abilities and I think you made a very wise decision to err on the side of caution in regards to difficulty. It made for a really pleasant experience.

Thank you!

The concept behind this is incredible, quite abstract and especially hard to grasp early on. I think there is the risk than in a jam context that it might get a bit lost.

The art is absolutely gorgeous, and the sounds / music all fit together very nicely. I found the combat extremely tough, such that ended up in a save / load loop where I just couldn't progress. Not entirely sure where I went wrong in that regard, but I was getting absolutely smashed and burning through all my resources in a couple of fights before being sent the the start screen for another go :D.

In that regards, I think a slightly more gentle introduction into the combat systems would have been great, even to just help the player understand the 'correct' way of doing things. I'm a bit gung-ho, full attack, so these issues were certainly self-inflicted, but even reverting to trying to stun and CC I still struggled.

I would very much have liked to have completed this, so if I'm able to better understand how things work i'll be sure to come back. But the 30 or so minutes that I did see, were absolutely fantastic. Thank you.

Ahh right yeah, it sadly won't run on integrated graphics. We did put a decent amount of work into optimisation for lower end systems but sadly it still needs a GPU or APU.

Thank you for trying nonetheless, and I think in future I should make sure to state the requirements on the jam page. Take care :)

Oh that's not good. Do you mind me asking what your system specs are? This should run on a GTX 9 series or above very comfortably. So anything within the last decade or so should be fine.

So this might be a more sinister driver issue that we'd like to get to the bottom of if at all possible! 

Ohh Branford you naughty naughty boy. Happily completed this and didn't realise how long I had been engrossed the game.

I was careful on the teleporters, so thankfully avoided any issues there. Music, SFX and art were all integrated nicely and nothing felt out of place. Great use of verticality too as always. I struggled with inventory management as I'm a self-confessed hoarder, throwing stuff on the ground hurt my soul. I actually made a little collection of ground loot in the village just incase I needed to come back for it. So perhaps a vendor or some mechanic to incentivise the player throwing out old stuff would have been good. It also just occured to me I didn't try to throw anything down the well. Perhaps I missed something...

Of the dozen or so entries I've played so far, this is my favourite by a country mile. It ticks so many boxes for me. The dialogue is excellent. I enjoyed the combat and there's some nice itemisation that gives meaningful choice but it's not over-complicated for the sake of being clever. The movement controller is nice, however it did find myself spamming attack in combat and then the queue being executed after the enemy died - this feels like a me issue though.

Anyway, this entry was absolutely outstanding. I really enjoyed it and i'm having to nitpick. This is a 5 star submission to me through and through. Thank you.

Thank you for playing. Really happy to hear you enjoyed some of the tonal switches and enjoyed the silliness :D

This is exactly what came to my mind when the "Cleaning up the hero's mess" theme was picked. It's a great implementation of it too.

The level design is spot on, and like some of the other commenters have mentioned, the spike traps were my nemesis but not unfairly so. 

Overall, a solid little entry with a strong sense of direction and pleasing loop, thank you :).

This is fantastic, the art is of course extremely charming. I'm not sure what the 'meta' is, but just stacking armour seemed to work pretty well until I accidently sold my full plate the vendor. That alone made this feel completely old school - 'Oh, you want to sell your best piece of gear you're currently wearing? Sure!' Haha. 

Jesting aside, I had a blast. I share the sentiments of the others that the bindings we're super intuitive, but aside from one whoopsie, I managed to find my way around.

Thanks very much, great game.

This game is super sharp. I really enjoyed that I had to make a choice on how to use the essence. On my first run I think I was trying to be too clever for my own good and was trying to hold onto essences for the correct enemy type, but eventually I fell over. Run two, just full send on upgrades and I completed the dungeon :D.

The art  & sounds design is great, everything feels very consistent and cohesive. Everything has a nice level of polish and it's a really satisfying experience. Thanks very much.

This is a fantastic interpretation of the theme, I got to level 4 and couldn't quite figure the right approach to not get surrounded and kite away the enemies sufficiently to tackle them safely.

You ticked alot of boxes for the themes in a manner that didn't feel forced - as we often have to try and shoehorn them in. But yours intpretation melded everything very nicely.

The movement controller feels great. perhaps a slight mishmash of assets but it was honestly fine. I didn't mind the tutorialisation, as like the others have mentioned, the tone felt deliberate and on brand.

Thanks!

A lovely little experience that fits the theme really well. I did have some substantial performance issues so I downloaded the exe and I was still suffering from some pretty extreme lag.

I  hope you don't mind; but I was really surprised that I was having performance issues. When I took a frame capture the drawcalls jumped out at me, ~11,000 on one of the more demanding frames which is several orders of magnitude higher than it should be (I would expect 50-100 for this game). I'm guessing the levels are procgen? 

In which case the meshes and materials are not making use of instancing. Instead are treated as unique and given their own drawcall which explains the performance issues. I've run into this exact issue myself on a little project. I'm only on a 1660 so it was probably more apparent for me, anyone of a 20 series or above probably wont even notice.

Aside from that small hiccup,I had a good of fun. The movement controller is nice, the persepective is excellent and thematically you're on point. Thanks!

Cutesy, endearing game with a nice combat system. I did run into a couple of bugs as others have mentioned, but it's a very enjoyable game.

The tiles lighting up is a really great system; I was very incentivised to fully explore everything. I had fun, thanks!

Really happy to hear that you reached the second section, we weren't sure how many people actually would! Glad you enjoyed it, thank you for playing.

That's a satisfying screen if i've ever seen one.

This is definitely one to get the graph paper out for. Simple is sometimes good, and I got more enjoyment out of this than some other entries so far, it certainly kept me occupied for longer!

I don't have anything bad to say about it; because all your games, this being no exception, never pretend to be anything they are not. This is something I will always respect.

Thank you.

I always really look forward to playing your entries, and this was fantastic as always.

The movement & controls are excellent; being able to play pretty much entirely one handed was delightful as my wrists sound like a packet of crisps after this last week or so.

I thoroughly enjoyed the loot and combat system and that item choices are meaningful. I found myself re-gearing for the different elementals. The exploration felt rewarding too.

I was quick saving regularly, however I accidently fat fingered F5 right at the last quest. Quickload sadly wasn't working for me when the page refreshed. I'm not too upset, and I suspect i'll come back and play this one again, but I just thought I'd mention that.

Overall it's a really strong, classic, charming entry. Thank you.

The Big bad AI is dead and I found 7 out of 12 things.

This is really great. Like you mention on the game page, it's got the DNA of your entry last year, but has been built upon massively. The visuals, sound and gameplay are excellent. There was this (I assume deliberately placed) dead pixel on my screen that was driving me nuts, so thank you for that! :D

I am quite disappointed that there was no breakdancing in the game. There is only room for one Raygun in this solar system:

Pew pew. Feels like a very classic crawler experience with some modern comforts; the movement controller, UI, perspective was all excellent, as is the instant-step.

It's nicely paced and the perfect length. I felt like I was cheesing the game a bit by just strafing all the time with the gun upgrade, but perhaps that was intended.

Thanks!

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this post.

[0.1.2] - 2025-09-18

Added

• Add UI rotation gizmo to view and reset camera position
• Add lighting settings menu to change HDRI & Tonemapping
• Add new materials: 
  • Cracks Texture
  • Grunge Texture 
  • Voronoi Noise
  • Perlin Noise
  • White Noise
  • Stylised Wood Planks
  • Carbon Fibre 
  • Wood Grain 
  • Stylised Craggy Rock

Changed

• Improve Brick Wall Material to make mortar more realistic
• Improve Grass Lawn Material by adding seamless tiling
• Improve Hardwood Floor Material by adding tiling and UV offsets for the planks
• Remove experimental 2D Pixel Materials & refactor to support 2D base textures such as noise and patterns
• Add stricter memory qualifiers to shader storage
• Improve hashing functions for ~10% reduced frame time in heavy noise generation sections

Fixed

• Fix a memory leak due to compute shader RIDs not being freed
• Fix a bug resulting in DirectX normals not exporting correctly
• Fix kernel coordinate overflows:
  • Sobel filter across all 3D shaders
  • Slope blur in Brick Wall and Castle Wall shaders