itch.io

NEAT. I actively avoid puzzle games most of the time, but I thought 'ahhh what the hell' and gave it a go. It's way more fun than I was expecting, probably because they are puzzles that I can actually solve. I love the interpretation of the theme. It reminded me to Portal puzzles because frankly I have so little experience with this type of game, I can't even think of an analogous 2D game.

I know that it's soooo unfair to say, but I wish it was like 2-3x longer! This has absolutely no bearing on my rating, but there just wasn't enough, I wasn't ready for it to end. It's so rare that my smooth brain can actually solve puzzles, that it was activating neurons long thought to be dead.

I would have liked a little more UI juice or SFX, this is just wishful polish, I thought the gameplay was very solid.

Like another commenter mentioned, I managed to bypass a wheel on the final puzzle. But it was a happy little accident:

This was much more fun than I expected. No reflection on you, just my own aversion to using my noggin. Wish it was longer, but I don't think that's too bad of a critique. Thank you.

This is not at all what I was expecting. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't this!

I'm mightily pleased that I managed to finish this because I quickly got the impression that it's a tricky game. I managed to one-shot the first two levels and the third took three attempts. This doesn't sound or feel too unreasonable, but it definitely felt tough.

My strategy in the end was to more or less treat the two tentacles as a single entity, move them close to one another slightly offset and then just repeat the same movements for both hands. I think realistically that's the way for most people to get their head around it, as the mental dexterity to control both independently isn't too common naturally without training it. I didn't engage with the dive mechanic at all as I was a bit overloaded.

I think with the power of hindsight, I might have preferred the main game to just have had a single tentacle and perhaps you could have had an 'insane' mode or something with the double in there? Not too sure. Regardless I managed to finish it, so the tuning is alright for me :D.

I like the graphics and audio, it all felt nicely cohesive and nothing felt out of place. I really like menu system; sure there's the small menu bug, but that's hardly an issue. The tutorial was great for me; I know lots of people hate written tutorials, and while something within the game itself is usually better, I felt you laid everything out with clarity and brevity. The little niceties like the volume sliders and even alternative music is a lovely touch.

The gameplay loop itself is really engaging, like face hugging the monitor engaged. It's stressful and difficult but that's kinda the point. It held my attention and felt great when I cleared a level. I note some other commenters had problems with creating whirlpools, but I had no issues, so I guess mileage varies on that one.

I think the game is the perfect length, and it doesn't overstay its welcome at all and ramps up in difficulty nicely without spreading itself too thin.

I think truly the only weakness is the ambidexterity requirement. It's something that people either have or they don't. And in the context of the jam, it might not be something people can pick up fast enough. As such I imagine there's a portion of players who've picked this up and just bounced right off. It's no real fault of you, just a difference in one's brain I think. I myself made my game way too hard and largely impossible without instructions, so I definitely feel the pain of making something that no everyone is able to play and complete.

However, I enjoyed this, and found it very satisfying to complete. It's an underrated gem for people that enjoy these sort of chaotic hand-eye game. Thank you.

This is fun! A really interesting take on the theme, and I enjoyed the revolver mechanic itself. It probably took about 30 seconds of messing around smashing buttons and tabbing out to the description for it to click, but I would say it was intuitive enough for most people. 

I was really happy to see that you integrated the reloading mechanic with a boss fight who has more health than can be removed with a 6 rounds. I would have liked a melee attack, I don't think it would disrupt or change the gameplay too much, but it was probably the only thing that I felt was truly missing. I was sort of expecting to be able to crouch behind the sandbags / barriers to reload safely from the ranged enemies. However the levels are designed such that I didn't actually need to reload under fire until the very end.

The art is nice and consistent, and the billboarding works for me, and I felt that the music and sfx fit into the whole vibe well. 

I thought the level was designed well too, I was able to navigate fine as I just hugged the right hand wall all the way around the level to ensure I didn't miss anything, however some additional clutter wouldn't have been a miss to help players remember where they were if navigating a little more aimlessly.

Overall, a really fun entry, I think the difficulty is about right for a jam game, as is the length; not to long but just enough to cut my teeth on. Thank you!

Where oh where do I begin with this? Awesome, awesome, awesome. I have a true soft spot for games that don't take themselves too seriously and I love this pastiche on Stanley Parable (and others in the genre).

I played through twice because I wanted to see both endings, and while we've already spoken a bit on Discord I'll write everything out here.

First things first. We need to discuss some completely ILLEGAL activities in this game that I am here to haul you to The Hague for crimes against humanity:

• VSync - You have gone to all this effort to optimise your game to within an inch of its life, only for my GPU to spin up to a million RPM and sound like it's about to fly out my window. Needs to be enabled by default or at least an option somewhere.
• Spinny Hat - Why could I not spin this? Unacceptable!
• The Menu - If you have a valve on the menu, and I've been spinning valves all game long. I fully expect to be able to spin that valve at some point! Illegal!

Okay with that out of the way. This is a top game for me this jam; there is so much I liked and enjoyed. The narrative is excellent, solid writing, very funny, and a love letter to the games that inspired it. The levels are excellent and ramp up in interesting ways. As I was playing through I was thinking what I might do as a dev in this situation; one idea I had was for the player to have to spin themselves, and then it turns out you had thought of it! But then you took me by complete surprise.

Sure, there are a couple of assets missing textures, the light leaks at distance. But I think any of the games small issues are so superficial I didn't care in the slightest.

I think there are two things I would change, or at least changes that I would prefer: 

• The dark room seems to have confused most players; I would potentially have wanted a 'return to menu' button which may have more clearly indicated to the player that there was more, this could be augmented with an additional voice line if the player re-enters that scene.
• I wish this game had a web build! I feel like so many people might pass this by due to the binary size and purely not being web.

All in all, I really enjoyed this greatly. I hope you come back to it, and I look forward to playing it if you do choose to update it. Thank you very much.

Thank you for playing and seeing it through to the end!

Yes it's very unbalanced. There is a set of instructions in the game description that makes it much easier, but there are so many systems interacting with one another, that I just didn't get the time at the end to fully balance it properly.

That being said, I'm glad you managed to win eventually and see it all the way, I really appreciate the time you took out of your day for this, thank you!

From browsing your profile, I understand this is your first game? In which case, firstly a big congratulations for completing a game and a jam; it's not a small achievement. Secondly I would like to congratulate you for making a fun game, I played through several times and I think my last run was 23 spins or so.

Okay so the good: I really like how you've approached this. Dividing the game up into little mini-games was really clever on your part. Firstly I imagine it broke the game up into more bite-sized chunks and was easier for you to approach as a developer. As a player this was also great, it added variety and meant I was only spending 20 or so seconds before moving onto something else. This kept my attention for far longer than if the game had been just one of the mini-games with more polish.

I like the art-style you've gone for and I also love that you've drawn most assets yourself instead of just grabbing them from packs. 

I did find it that it became harder on the eyes over time, and after around 30 minutes I was starting to feel some eye strain. I think there are probably two things that might have help me here:

• The first is perhaps not having the colours be absolute black and white, but a very dark shade of grey and a slightly off white. I think that might have taken a bit of the edge off. There may also be all sorts of colour theory out there about 'black' and 'white' shades that are best for this sort of thing!
• The second was the aliasing. Because it's so low resolution and there's a lot of very fast movement, the lines can become really jagged at times, One thing you could look into in the future is dithering, which would have smoothed out some of those lines and jaggies. This is just a suggestion and there are many ways to directly tackle aliasing

I found the mini-games to be engaging and well scoped. You kept them small and tightly controlled which helped enormously. I have very little to critique here because I genuinely enjoyed them, they were simple but good fun.

I think the Snake controls could perhaps be improved. I found that the snake didn't always move when I expected, or that I had to be quite accurate when I pressed the key to turn. From my recollection of my ancient Nokia, Snake had input buffering; which meant that it would save the last input and then try to execute it on the next turn. I think if you implemented an input buffer like this, it would feel much better (for my own tastes at least). You could even buffer 2 inputs and it will feel more natural for the player to made sharp 180 degree turns with WASD.

I found all of the other mini-games to be intuitive either by design or familiarity of the game that inspired it. The sounds effect use was great and the music fit really well.

I wasn't entirely sure whether the game had an ending or whether I was supposed to try and keep going for as long as possible. This maybe could have been communicated better, but I did figure it out in the end anyway!

All in all I think this is an excellent first jam game, with only very superficial critique warranted. I was kept engaged throughout. Thank you and well done.

Incredibly polished and juicy for something you threw together in seven hours; quite mad really.

I get highly motivated by any sort of global leaderboard; so I enjoyed rogue-like aspects and coming up with a strat that would get a decent score. And that part was really fun for me.

The sfx is nice, where do you get it from / how to do you make it? This is something I am so very poor at.

It is entirely RnG as you say, which is a kiss / curse in my opinion. When my plan came together and I hit an absolute god run on the strat I had been cooking up, it activated neurons deep in the recesses of my brain that I didn't know still worked. But hitting a bunch of multipliers over and over to bust out with not enough score, not so much. I think the complete RnG systems work well for sweaty degenerates who don't mind playing 50 times. But for a casual player it might just feel unfair and I could see someone dropping off in the first couple of minutes if they get a bad first run.

There were a couple of smaller UI/UX issues I noticed. I hope you don't mind me saying this is quite a casual 'second monitor' game, but as I was playing it on my second screen, I was clicking to grab focus it would also start the bar to spin the wheel. It took me by surprise the first time it happened and I had to be careful from then onwards. I don't know how other players would feel, but I might have liked the first click that grabs focus to not start the spin. The second issue, like another commenter mentioned, was the UI at the edge of the screen, I didn't notice the tickets in the top right and the upgrades in the bottom left until perhaps my 5th run.

I had tonnes of fun with this, and presumably you can see how many times I actually played on your analytics lol. Thank you very much.

Congratulations on making your first game, that's a real achievement and it's a complete experience in that you have a tutorial, main loop, ending, animations, sound effects, music and it all tied in well together.

I play very few platformers so take frankly everything I have to say with a pinch of salt. I liked the way the tutorial was presented, I did however find they some bits of information maybe came after the fact. For example, there was a gap which I double jumped across / up to, before the double jump tutorial was visible. I'm not sure if it was possible with a single jump, but I would have maybe liked that to have been shown a little earlier.

I liked the spinning / wall riding mechanic greatly. I think it thematically makes sense that as we are spinning or rolling there's quite a lot of inertia, but I did slide into spikes quite often, maybe that's completely intended haha. The camera had a little kinda vibration for me, it wasn't a problem for the the length of game here, but I can imagine for a longer game it might strain my eyes a bit.

I thought the game was an excellent length and I liked the difficulty, nothing ever felt too easy nor difficult and it didn't outstay its welcome. 

Thank you, and very well done for completing your first game and jam!

Thank you for playing and your feedback.

I suspect your lack of experience with management games is only a small reason, the majority of it is one me! Sorry about that. I'm pleased you didn't mind the programmer art; I hope it get some old-school flash game nostalgia!

Thanks again. 

Thank you for playing. Glad you enjoyed the dialogue!

It is tuned quite hard. The money comes from buying more oil refineries and the accompanying ships will earn money when they complete a trip. However they cannot sell if their parent refinery is damaged, and if the ships are sunk they have to dispatch a new one and restart. So it becomes really important to prioritise air-defence early to build some economy. I would imagine your ships were just getting sunk over and over and that was thrashing your economy. 

It's tuned very all or nothing in that regard, and I've added some instructions to the description as I was unable to tune all of the interconnected systems well enough on the last day.

Thanks for your feedback.

This has so much polish, it's amazing how many little details you got in. Even just the animations / tweens and transitions in the intro. You must have over 100 sprites, the painting tech for the puke; there's just so much going on and it's really really neatly tied together.

I enjoyed the game a lot, and it ended just at the right time as the mechanics were juuuust starting to feel samey. This is my run:

The power-up mechanics were nice in idea and I enjoyed choosing, but I didn't notice them personally. Perhaps would have liked their effects to be much stronger and dramatically change the gameplay. I, like many others I think, ran over as much of the office furniture first before puking to finish off the score, with the health reduction, it felt like I was punished more for using the main mechanic of the game over just running into stuff. But as you've mentioned in another comment, it's just a tuning thing, which is totally expected and frankly we've all struggled with it I think!

I did have a small issue on the tutorial; as I was wheeling about and getting used to the controls, I was running everything over. Just as I started to puke, I noticed there was some text about the fire extinguisher which I missed as it transitioned out of the tutorial, so I had to reload. It's a very small thing, but it was accidentality skippable at perhaps less predictable time.

I couldn't quite work out how you've done the 'painting' with the puke. I presume it's layered sprites and then modulating the furniture sprites affected? I really felt that the lean on Jimmy's sprite is really nice, it's tiny, but made the movement controller feel great.

This is highly enjoyable and doesn't outstay its welcome, and I think it's probably the entry with the highest quality polish on it that I've played so far. Thank you.

I'm really happy to hear that landed ok! It's an absolutely minefield (pardon the pun) and I knew I was treading a pretty extreme tightrope on the humour, so i'm very grateful to know everything is ok!

Thank you for playing and your feedback.

Thank you for your comment. It is all a terrible coincidence really, what are the chances!

I'm really pleased to hear that you found everything intuitive, some people have struggled so it's nice to hear that some stuff has clicked and made sense every now and then. Yeah the management / sim / whatever genre was a bit of a curse in the end, but I'm still glad I gave it a crack.

Thanks for playing! 

I have been writing long, detailed responses to every game I have played. But I'm not going to do it now because I have so little to say.

This game came from a recommendation. Sometimes I need to remember that you don't need much to make someone feel. And when I caught myself trying to win back all the money I lost, I really had a moment.

Thanks mate, this is good.

Oh I totally understand, it's the reality of a jam, but I think an update and a balance pass is a wonderful idea, there's a really great base here!

This has the bones of an excellent platformer and just needs a couple of small tweaks. 

Firstly, where's the win screen! It took be quite a few attempts to win and it was a bit anticlimactic to right back to the menu (unless it was a bug). The boss is pretty tough, near impossible to dodge or play around, but I had a run with a sniper and explosive bullet and they absolutely shredded him.

The audio & art is fantastic and there are a lot of animations here which I guess can go unnoticed sometimes, but I imagine that took an insane amount of work. I enjoyed the 'deckbuildery' bullet mechanic too, but I'm not sure I worked out what the cookie cutter strat was.

I had a great deal of fun with this, even if i nearly loaded the wrong game initially!

Thank you for playing and your feedback.

I too wanted to put more audio in, but I didn't have time to work it around the architecture sadly. As it currently stands, everything is simulating across all the systems and screens simultaneously. I wanted rocket, drone and explosion noises on the straight seen, but maybe some other SFX on the production pages and perhaps a humming noise for the centrifuges. I ran out of time to firstly source those sounds, but also split them across various buses and then fade them in and out as the player moved around the UI. There's also the issue of the rocket and drone entities being freed and re-instantiated from memory rather than pooled, which would destruct an audio player possibly while in use. Basically I didn't make anywhere near enough time for that headache and ran out :(.

I'm sorry to hear you had some trouble initially, but glad to hear you got through it in the end. Thank you for your time and feedback. I'm looking forward to playing your game.

This is an extremely serious game. 

We have some important action items to address, and really I would like to do a deep dive before EOD. There's some low-hanging fruit, and I believe we can move the needle given enough mental bandwidth. If you need to circle back on any points, we can take this offline, or we can look to put a deck together for review. /uj

Ok, enough jerking. This is extremely fun, and kinda relatable actually. The game under the surface is super simple; go from point A to B and perhaps C and repeat 5 times until you win. But it's dressed up enough that it feels more exciting. There's some nice environmental storytelling which I loved - the guy running into the toilet, the party button and the *spoiler* on the last level.

I can appreciate how much you've made yourself and that's extremely admirable. The assets all looks nice, the music is good too, but the sfx and voice acting really shines in my opinion. I like that everything is a physics object and there was some nice extra juice in there such as the filing cabinet exploding papers, I imagine there's more that I didn't stumble across. The movement controller feels nice and smooth, and the inertia of spinning is well managed, sometimes these things can be a bit much.

I think if I had to find some critique; I would have enjoyed a bit more to the gameplay loop and less homemade assets. But equally I completely understand and actually appreciate that fact you have done so much yourself. I think the game was a perfect length, and if it was longer it might start to overstay its welcome or become repetitive. There was a little smeary-ness graphically, I'm assuming that's TAA and I would have loved for an option to disable anti-aliasing or to change to something else. But these are pretty minor points for the sake of having to give feedback on.

All in all I had a great deal of fun, I love the theme application. Thank you.

Thank you for playing! Yeah it does ramp substantially towards the end once you start buying centrifuges, perhaps a bit too much so!

I'm glad the theme made sense, I was a little concerned about that. Thanks again for stopping by.

What a brilliant take on theme, I'm also really impressed with this being a GameMaker game!? I feel like that's almost a slanderous statement against GM and I'm just ignorant to it as an engine (which I think is probably true in this case!)

On the theme, I do really think it's well applied; but it's abstract in that it relies really on someone knowing what Samsara is and making a connection with time. So I potentially might say that with the power of hindsight you could have tried to be a little bit more on the nose with the theme? Perhaps a clock face spinning back in time, just spitballing. Really this is only to allay any accusations that the theme has been applied spuriously.

The application of time travel is excellent, and the bootstrapping mechanic works excellently. I don't  play a great deal of puzzle games so it doesn't come too naturally to me, however I was able to bumble my way through. I totally understand you were up against it a little bit with regards to fleshing out the lore and getting it to work with rewinding, but there is enough there for the player to cut their teeth on.

I also thought I'd share one observation that I've had before which you might find interesting. I play a bunch of old-school grid based dungeon crawlers; and I have encountered games in the past whereby there is some sort of mechanic, timer or stat drain associated with the number of steps taken. For some reason this always makes me stressed and uncomfortable because it feels like a punishment for exploration. In this game that is not the case at all, but I still couldn't shake that feeling. It's a strange one, because I know it's all in my head, but I thought it would be interesting to share! And had minimal impact on my experience of the game.

This is a really nice entry, and I love the theme application and not just another wheel to spin. I had fun, thank you.

Thank you for making the time to play and share you feedback.

We've already had a good natter on Discord so I won't regurgitate what we've already spoken about. But thank you for playing and it's been really useful for me to start to understand how more detailed instructions are helping players and changing the experience for better or worse.

Thank you for playing and such detailed feedback. I really appreciate the time you've taken with this.

Yep, the centrifuges are a total trap, I did update the game description with a step by step on how I think the best way to navigate the early game is; however the fact that this is needed is a massive problem in the way I designed the game and you've hit onto those issues perfectly. I am really happy you managed to get the victory screen though, and very appreciative that you were willing to see it through.

A tooltip for the refineries is a great idea, it didn't occur to me at all, but that would make it far clearer. 

In regards to a lose condition and agency, I think you and some other commentators have all closed in on what probably should have been the solution; and that's a proper RTS with tiles and placeable buildings. That way everything can be built and destroyed and there's very clear win and lose conditions. This is all with the power of hindsight of course, and I have no idea if it's something that I could have done, but it's definitely useful to think about, and I’m building a strong picture in my head from all this great feedback.

I'm glad you like my awful programmer art! And I really love the comparison to Plague inc, that was definitely in my head when I was planning out what this might look like!

Thank you again, appreciate your time.

Thank you for giving it a go, sorry to hear you weren't too sure what was going on, it's not for everyone. But as long as you were doing it super seriously!

I'm glad to had a laugh, it's a tricky topic. Thanks for taking the time to check it out.

This game is an absolute vibe, it's super fun and definitely not for those of who are starting to slow down in our advancing years.

It's clear that the speed was the vision™ so I rolled with it. I did encounter a bug in the intro level whereby I dashed into the demo enemy and I got stuck between him and a doorway / wall part. But beyond that everything worked well. There was a point where the game captured my mouse and for some reason I found it quite a bit more tricky to control, not entirely sure who!

The art and sound is awesome, and the music really ties it together.  Great tongue in cheek fun all in all, thanks!

P.S. Your game is very Aladeen.

Thank you for your Aladeen feedback.

Thank you for playing, and gosh I actually feel terrible that you gave it five tries. The tuning is all over the place and it's extremely difficult if one doesn't understand all the systems; and as you've pointed on, the content / tutorialisatation is a balance I haven't gotten right with the amount I shoehorned in.

You essentially have to go full economic, and air defence investment and not touch anything else while you get that developed. Because when you start building other infrastructure including centrifuges, Yankistan thematically would be getting quite uncomfortable at that point and hits you with the full might of the military industrial complex. This is certainly a case where realism is not helpful for the player!

I'm glad you didn't mind my programmer art! It's not really my thing, but I decided to roll with it anyway lol. I'm also happy to hear your like the theme interpretation.

Thank you again for spending so much time with this, I really appreciate it and I'm genuinely apologetic (and unlike your apology to me, this one is justified!), the game is tuned far too hard for the level of understanding needed to complete it easily. There's a lot of lessons in here for me and I'm grateful for your time and wonderful feedback.

Firstly I want to say that you really have nothing to apologise for. Like you say, puzzle games are a tricky one and i'm certainly not a 'puzzler' so there's a very good chance that this is a me issue and not a you issue! 

The CRT thing is really minor, but just a thought I had as I have entered some more retro jams and it usually involves trying to recreate older systems, so I come across those shaders often! It's not a big deal and a super easy fix / addition if you use a similar effect in the future and feel it might affect readability or accessibility.

I was going for the right hand side of the board as that was I think the ending I wanted? But honestly don't sweat it if I'm an outlier on the difficulty, I wanted to give you an honest appraisal of my feelings, but I don't believe it's actually a negative part of your game.

I really do think you should be very proud, it's an excellent game, just not something I'm all that good at haha.

Awesome game, I'm a little torn on giving feedback because I'm 99% sure there's nothing I can say that you don't already know.

Conceptually it's great. The deck builder bullets and the revolver just tie together really neatly and create a tight game loop that's really satisfying. Balance is all over the shop, you already know that, and I can attest first hand about how badly I dropped the ball on that so no more needs be said.

The art is super stylish, music is a bop and the sfx brings it all together with a cherry on top. UI is decent but lacks some polish as you've also noted already, but really doesn't detract from the experience.

It's honestly really fun, and despite small flaws, there's really nothing glaring. I had a good amount of fun playing this, thanks!

Thank you for taking the time to play and share your excellent and overly generous feedback. I'm really pleased to hear that at least the thematic elements of the game have landed without offence, which is kind of a miracle.

 I think you've really hit on the crux of the problem with the whole tutorial and systems design; there probably needs to be more of it for the player to get a complete understanding, but no player actually wants more of it. I certainly left myself stuck between a rock and a hard place, and there's some real learnings here for future games that have more than one mechanic!

No the balance is absolute dogshit and you're most welcome to call it out. In general it is a nightmare to balance systems when they start to interact with one another, but that shouldn't be an excuse, because I made the decision to add that complexity. It does lead to a situation where you either get thrashed from the start, or roll over everything. But it always leads to some waiting around for the end which is never good.

I'm quite pleased that you didn't find my programmer art offensive to look at! I am no artisté, and usually stick to 3D games as that's where I'm most comfy, but I thought I'd screw around with some pixel art this time and here we are. I certainly wont be making a career change to drawing any time soon.

Thank you again for taking the time to play and collate your thoughts, you're much too kind in your feedback and it is appreciated. There's lots of food for thought.

This is an excellent take on the theme, there have been a number of entries using particle spin, but I think this has kept me engaged the longest.

For context, I pretty much never play puzzle games; but I really want to try and finish every game I play. However I could not for the life of me figure out the last level, to the point of a substantial amount of frustration such that I've had to put the game down. Ordinarily I don't think I'd care too much, however with there being a narrative element, it feels terrible! I'm not sure there's anything to be done with this piece of feedback, because making the game easier would hurt the people who are into puzzle games. I so suspect my frustration is primarily borne out of not being the target demographic.

Right, with that out of the way. The graphics are good and certainly fit into the terminal style you were going for. The audio also fit very well and create a nice atmosphere. I would have liked an option to turn off the CRT shader. I find them to be a bit like marmite and start to hurt my eyes after a while. Not a biggie for a jam game, but it is nice to always have the option when it's a disruptive screen-space effect like that.

The tutorialisation was excellent, and I particularly liked how you interwove it with the lore, so it really didn't feel like a tutorial to the player.

For your first game it's really great, you've nailed the theme and really come up with a creative idea and executed it brilliantly. I think you can be really proud of what you've put together here, and from what I can see from the puzzler fans, it's gone down a treat! Well done.

The survivors genre is a tried and tested format and you've clearly leant into that with the theme which I think is fine.

The game itself is fun, and the only complaint I would  have is that it's trivially easy. I have no problem with jam games being quite simple and they should ideally be completable by most players first time; but I stood still and just get clicking upgrades. By the time I hit level 200 I assumed there wasn't going to be any more or an ending. I think a little more tuning would have gone a really long way here, because the player doesn't really need to play the game and can just stand still.

The music and assets are nice, but I'm not too sure where they came from, if they were made by your team or they are from a pack. It would be nice if that was disclosed somewhere.

All in all it's a decent game, but I do find myself lacking basic bits of info which would have been great even in a short description. Thank you for the submission.

Such an addictive game! I have  completely lost track of time and have no idea how long I've been playing. At the end, I was desperate to see if I could knock out 6 rows of coworkers and eventually the text clipped off the screen!

I had such fun with this. There's loads of polish and juice and it's seriously addictive for those of us that like upgrade games, super duper serious. 

The art is great across the board, no notes. The gameplay is fantastic, and I especially enjoyed the variety of upgrades. I'm not sure I ever understood the pricing of the upgrades and why they changes / scaled up over time? I'm guessing it was because the money grows exponentially and everything would end up too cheap? But it did leave me a little confused.

I truly think the only thing this is really missing is a proper end screen and perhaps a little jingle music? But it's a very complete jam game and I was more than happy to sink a substantial amount of time into it. Thanks very much!

Oh my. Well I'm glad the game is more wholesome that it initially appears from the exterior! Clap Clap to Miss Albert for suggesting dress up.

It goes almost without saying that the visuals are excellent. I played on web and Firefox had an aneurysm trying to load the game, however everything worked flawlessly on Chrome. I really appreciate that you've made everything yourself and all aside from the goblin during the jam itself. The whole vibe, clothing and jingle stitch together nicely and keep it light hearted.

I couldn't quite workout if I missed anything and I needed to complete extra spins to see more? But I think I saw everything. My only critique is that I would want more! It is a simple and short game, of which I appreciate, because overly long jam games are often long for the sake of it. I do feel unfair in asking for more content for a jam of such a limited time, but I did want more :D.

Overall; it's a delightfully weird experience, that's probably one of the more unique takes on the them. Thanks!

This is wonderful for your first game and first jam, so a big congratulations for submitting something so polished.

I think that's the first thing I'd like to mention; I really like how you kept the scope nice and limited and focused on refining and making everything look and feel nice.

Your background in design really comes across here, and I adore the direction you've gone for visually. It's cozy and highly refined. The gameplay is very simple, but it works and I don't have any complaints. I respect that it's kept short and concise and my time is respected. 

Thank you.

I absolutely love this game, I've had a read through the comments and I have to say that it clicked for me right away. Thematically the red, green, blue / damage, heal, shield makes perfect sense and cuts through the corporate jargon. The cards and upgrades all made sense to me. The only point of confusion I had was regarding the rerolls; for some reason, I believed that they were in limited supply, so I held on to them through the whole game and only used them at the end when I was in dire straights. Not entirely sure how I reached the conclusion that they were finite, but there we are!

I enjoyed the upgrade system, in my run I simply went for the upgrades that increased the power of the skills rather than the cards that augmented them. I suspect the best strategy might be to mix and match? The art is lovely, very impressive how much you managed to create within the week. Lots and lots of polish and juice here too, it's a lovely entry.

I feel like this is more of a documentary than anything else. I have definitely worked with every single boss that I fought just now; ridiculous corpo babble included! 

It's also very well tuned and of a perfect length. I completed the game first time, but only just and it was fairly close towards the end. 5/5, loved this, thank you very much.

It took me somewhere in the region of 20 attempts to finish this, goshhhhh that was hard. There's absolutely no chance I can get anywhere near W0ffel's time, nor have I the intestinal fortitude to try:

So, this is a lovely game, with a tonne of polish. The tutorial is absolutely spot on and I have no notes. The whole vibe which encompasses the sound and art direction is perfect, sure there could be a little bit more juice here and there, but it's really nice as it is. I think the simplest thing to really elevate this graphically would be some glow. I can't imagine how amazing this would look with radiance cascades. I did mute the game for my victory run, but that was purely because I was trying to concentrate and remove all extra stimuli lol.

I think the one thing I would change is the movement controller. I think the primary difficulty I had was orienting forward movement with my facing direction. I totally understand this was completely intentional, but I would say 90%+ of my failures were when I was spinning and losing my bearings regarding direction. I think it's interesting, because this style of movement is an important vector for how the game feels and its challenge. Equally it requires a huge amount of very specific spacial awareness, which to my understanding, is not something everyone has or can necessarily learn, so this might completely exclude some players who can't really get their head around it. I'm not sure if this is a problem or not, I'm leaning towards the conclusion that games can't always be for everyone. For my own taste I would like WASD to have moved globally irrespective of local rotation, this would make the game more accessible and much easier, so it's a bit of a kiss / curse. 

It goes without saying that it's really challenging. I found it really satisfying to break through level by level and develop some strats. I eventually settled on trying to save up as much ammunition on the final enemy and then spray and pray wildly at the start of the next round. I can imagine as it's a jam, many will drop the game far sooner. On that note, the entire spinning to collect bullets is a really novel, and interesting take on the theme; I really enjoyed this entire aspect and how it created some emergent gameplay in how I approached the levels.

P.S. I've just read in the description that this is your first game, wow. This is extremely impressive for a first game. I'm not going to delete everything I've just written and reframe it, but holy shit. It's a huge achievement. I had absolutely assumed you both had a considerable amount of experience; so I can only take my hat off to you both.

Thank you for the game, it's excellent and I had a great deal of fun trying to crack it! Amazing work.

Firstly, what a fantastic achievement for a first game, and under a month of rolling your face on the keyboard. This is a cracking game all things considered. So, first things first, my high score: 

I definitely enjoyed this, it's very simple, but addictive. I think it's the multiplier that really gamifies the scoring. I'm fairly certain that if it was just a linear +1 to the score for every jump, it wouldn't have held my interest for nearly as long.

I do agree with some of the others that it might not be obvious what to do without reading the description. I did, so thankfully there were no issues, but it's rarely a guarantee that a player will read it, so it's good to show the same information in-game. 

I thought the difficulty ramped up really nicely, I did try to find a safe spot to cheese the score, but I couldn't, so kudos there :D. It would have been lovely to perhaps have a small window showing the score for that run before it resets so that one can sit and bask in their successes when getting a high score. Perhaps even a high score label too! However, I'm well aware I'm asking a lot and expecting far too much of you for a first game and a first jam. What's here is excellent and perhaps these might be things to consider for the next one.

I think I only encountered a couple of bugs that were very very minor. The Modifier label occasionally displayed 'N/A' and if jumping while touching a wall and turning into it, the Flamingo sometimes stutters. These are super minor and I'm really only mentioning them for completeness and they certainly aren't something that affect my opinion or scoring. 

The art is lovely, I especially like the flapping animation; did you also draw these yourself?

All in all, this is an impressive first game. I hope you're proud of yourself, and I also hope my feedback doesn't come across as picking holes. 

Great job, I had a lot of fun

I played this for quite a while, and I think there's a really great game here with just a couple of bits holding it back. 

The first thing I want to note is that I think there's a small bug with the mining controls. As I understand it I can click or use S, however I noticed that if I hold S and spam click the drill, it goes about twice as fast. I'm not sure if this is a bug, or intended to reward those giving themselves carpal tunnel.

I love upgrade games, so I really enjoyed this aspect of the game. The upgrades are varied and interesting, much much better than just 'number goes up' type things. Because the shop opens immediately as the inventory gets full, I did often accidentality buy upgrades as I was clicking at the same time it popped up. I think I would also love a UI icon to show how much ore I have stockpiled, not just the haul from the current run. I didn't realise there was a stockpile for longer than I'm prepared to admit haha.

The art and sound is nice, nothing stood out to me there and everything integrates nicely which is great, so I have very little to say here.

I didn't actually suss out the prospectors until I saw the GIF in the description, so a little more tutorialisation might be nice, however the penny did drop eventually.

Overall I really quite enjoyed it once I started to understand all the mechanics. There is just a little learning gap at the start where it's not completely obvious how to progress, and some small UI blockers. Aside from these small points, I did have fun. Thank you!