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Ya, the UI/UX is pretty poor. 

You have to click a tile and then click the drill tower button. I suppose now that you mention it, it isn't super obvious that it's a button and not just a text box. It used to just be "build drill" and then I crammed some rules text into it.

Pressing space is unintentional. I was using it for development and then never removed it. A side effect is that the drill button makes the cannon button appear and pressing space does not so if you never click the button, you can never make cannons.

Game is really cool. That last sequence is quite the challenge, but I got through it eventually. I finally got the rhythm down of waiting til you're falling and then drawing below you.

You win when you kill the boss.

Ya, you gotta play on full screen. Thanks! I'm reasonably happy with how the sprites came out. Glad to see it's not just me that sees some potential in this concept.

Great concept for some puzzles. They are hard and it took me a while, but I got all of them.

You made running over the little guys really fun so kudos for that.

In my first run, I didn't see a lot of them and then just died after splatting a few lone guys. On my second run, I came into a room and saw 3 and it was like "wow, I didn't know I could find 3 at time!"  which felt great to be able to think about herding them or the movement to be able to get all 3 without them getting away. So I think the game is at its best when you have a bunch of little guys on screen and you're trying to figure out what path to take to get most of them in a bunch or splat most of them in one dash rather than having a few little guys and having to search for them and hunt them down.

I did it this way because I wanted you to have some choice in where your towers go. If you could only place on bombs, there's only one solution. Then the strategy would be in which order you place towers and which towers you placed where. Which is an interesting proposition, but I decided to explore being more free in where to place towers. In my head, I thought that you would have more freedom, but when I got it implemented, it doesn't give you very much more freedom so it's mostly negligible. I also thought the way a minesweeper game unfolds is you get a large contiguous region of blank tiles where there are no mines and the whole map is usually connected. I thought that would be antithetical to the Isolation theme. Not that my version really does much better, but this is what I thought early on when I decided what route to take. I thought with a system with no set bombs, you could safely click anywhere to open up a new section to build around. But I didn't get that to work so you don't see that phenomenon in game.

I do have a couple ideas of how I could preserve the early game - mostly just things I realized I designed wrong. It is kind of weird how the game can feel so different in the early game than even the mid game. Just the lack of choices in placement early makes a big difference in the game feel.

Some things I've already learned about the director is you need multiple enemy types to make it works. Spawning enemies in a different pattern like I did is a poor substitute. And that the idea of having multiple directors running in parallel is probably the right way to go. I noticed that the line spawns almost feel like a separate director because the enemies take so long to get to you so they start to overlap with other spawns and arrive at the same time. Multiple groups of enemies arriving at overlapping times is quite compelling.

The swarm towers were the last that I got working so they had less testing and balancing. I also vastly underestimated all the different moving parts that goes into difficulty and balance with a tower defense game. So if things are even the least bit balanced, I'm happy. I wonder why the FPS gets so low. Is it just natural from having a ton of things on screen or did I goof up something like stuff isn't getting deleted properly? Might have to look into that. I'm still learning Bevy, but it's been fun so far.

I don't think the tunnel vision issue is something to fix. It was just something I noticed was happening with me, but wasn't caused by the colour of the bullets or anything. I was just thinking so much about lining up jumps that I was ignoring the bullets. That's also partially because I knew when I was jumping, I was over top of them and when I landed, bullets were destroyed so in either case, they weren't really affecting me so I could ignore them. So it's not something to fix, just a weird emergent property of the game I thought was neat. It's just something you need to think about a bit more as the game gets harder. And I think most ways to try 'fix' this issue that I don't really think is much of an issue would make the game less fun.

For the movement, when you move right, your movement vector will be Vector2(1, 0). When you move up, it will be (0, 1). The length or vector2.magnitude() will be 1. But of you're moving up and right at the same time, it will be (1, 1). The length of this is 1.4. Use Pythagorean theorem or vector2.magnitude() to check. Then this number gets multiplied by move speed and that's why you move faster. What vector2.normalize() does is cap your vector's magnitude at 1. So after you normalize, it will look like (0.747, 0.747) which has a length of 1. And your right vector (0, 1) will be unchanged because it already has a length of 1.

This is really cool. Very satisfying once you get used to it and can start looking to hit multiple enemies with one jump. The slight cooldown after jumping incentivizes this strategy. And it's good design when you the optimal strategy is the fun strategy.

You have a slight 'bug' with your movement. When moving at a diagonal, you move faster. If you want to fix it, do .normalize() on your input vector. Although I kinda got used to it so I knew I could move slightly faster and optimize my movement if I used diagonals. So if you were to fix this, you might have to boost the move speed to keep the feel of the extra speed the diagonals give you.

How you mixed the rolling with the ground pounding really helped the flow of your game. I've seen some other games have a long roll animation so you have to wait for the animation to finish before you can make plans based on what was rolled. So to coopt the rolling and the attack animation where you are invulnerable really makes the most of the rolling downtime. And when you land, you've killed the nearby enemies and know your next range so you can get to lining up your jump.

The enemy spawn indicators is a good idea in general, but this game pulls double duty with them. Because your attack takes some time for you to fly across the screen, you can try to time your landing with the enemy spawning which feels great when it works out. It also partially alleviates the problems of a ground pound as an attack - the enemies might move while you're in the air. So it's handy to know where they will be in a sec when they spawn. It's noticeably harder to hit the enemies that you didn't spawn-camp. The ! vs !! is a neat touch to give the player a bit of info about what enemies are spawning so you might prioritize an enemy spawning farther away if it might be a scarier enemy.

A weird thing I noticed was that I got very tunnel-visioned on lining up my jumps that I basically ignored/didn't notice enemy attacks. So I wasn't really dodging stuff, just getting lucky and being airborne most of the time. Not that there's anything wrong with the attacks visibility-wise, just an odd observation I had.

You can hover your mouse over the little coloured squares on the right side of the screen and some of them kinda explain how they work. Then you can drag the dice from the left side of the screen onto them. You have to be fairly precise, but then the die should stick to the buff slot. If you weren't close enough, it won't get sucked in to the center of the slot. The buff slots should've been bigger so you don't have to be so precise so sorry about that.

You have a nice day too :D

I knew I wanted to do a top-down shooter. My thought process was dice have 6 sides and a revolver has 6 bullets. So, from there, I figured I'd use the die to select the gun based on the amount of ammo it held (except the launcher which has 2 ammo. I just thought a 5 on a dice looked like an explosion). Sorry if I sold you on the game based on potato cowboy and then underdelivered. That was my last-minute way of justifying the default Unity capsule as the player. I coloured it the same colour as the hat and thought it looked like a potato.

I hadn't really thought of pausing interrupting the flow. I wanted the forced pause to force people to engage with the system and so you can't just roll all 6s once and be good for the rest of the game. That's also why the damage buff decays and it would have been a stronger theme with more buffs that decay over time. I used the Megaman Battle Network system of you have to survive x seconds, but then you have the option of when you want to rebuff. You have to survive a minimum of 10s and are forced at 30s. So I figured the player would have enough agency of when they wanted to rebuff. But that isn't explained anywhere so I could definitely see some confusion from the forced pause like "I don't think I pressed space? Did I?"

The enemies upgrade from 1s to 2s, etc. every 10 kills, increasing their health and damage, and then they spawn the big boss dice with 6 health bars. So I should have had these bosses drop some sort of bonus like the extra dice, but I just opted to have every enemy have a chance to drop extra dice.  So the only form of tension you get is having to go close to enemies to pick up what they dropped.

True. I was thinking of this menu as an overlay and not another menu so I think a solid background (while a solution) would have a different feel, but I probably could have put the dice in a tray with a background to separate it. Or maybe blur out the gameplay so there's higher contrast. 

Ya, the pause thing should be more clear. Saying 'pause' doesn't tell you that it opens up the upgrade menu. I should go make that more clear in the description. The big dice are the sort of 'boss' enemy so they have 6 health bars. Them rolling is them moving to the next health bar. I wanted to make the pips on the dice disappear as they lost health, but didn't get around to it.

The effects, sound, and art are all in my post-jam notes as something I dropped the ball on and should've done better. I did them all in the last few hours, got them to just good enough and then gave up. But I could have utilized the art in a better way. Like having the player be just the hat and have just the gun move up and down to aim and just flip the art when you aim left/right (which I've even done in a different game). Instead of the 3D capsule player.

Thanks for the feedback.

That's a pretty tricky puzzle game. I feel like I had to think on each one (which I mean as a compliment for a puzzle game). Like for each level, it looked easy enough, but I never got it on the first try. So I'd try something, and whoops! that doesn't work and have to try something else. Which is all you can really ask for in a puzzle game. Lots of good aha! moments. I liked how some of the maps got more narrow and had a bunch of sharp corners so it was just easier and neater to place my waypoints at sharp 90 degree corners, but then you needed to remember that you could travel at angles to solve the puzzle. Just kinda neat how the level layout tricked me there.

The UI and stuff was easy enough to understand what was going on. The paths your planes were going to take was clear. My biggest issue was figuring out the undo. The font makes 2 and Z the same and even when you tried to clarify, I read it as 2EE and tried double-tapping E. (For anyone else wondering, undo is Z like is standard everywhere). A small pain point was the later levels, you'd fail and the map would reset and you'd have to redo all your paths, but I understand it's a game jam and features like that take a bunch of time so it's not a big issue with me. Still, once I figured out the button for undo, it was very helpful to have.

I like the sound of crashing into stuff. It felt like I was just ramming the tornados out of my way.

https://solrun.itch.io/grid-overload

The lines are showing you the area of influence of the rule. Some rules are still in effect even when you break the chain. Some rules (like the do not pass blue spheres) disappear completely when broken. Others just stop following what they were attached to and some get smaller once they're broken (but are still active).

This is pretty sweet.

It's so cool how the drones as health interacts with everything in the game. Like you want to get more drones because it means more health and firepower, but then the enemy attacks become more devastating. The laser beam can take out half your drones if you're not careful because you just have so many drones to get out of the line of fire. And with the bullet hell circle guys, it's pretty hard to weave between their shots when you get too big. The shotgun mode it kinda handy, but it was still pretty tricky to use to dodge stuff. More often than not, I just ended up swinging my 'wings' into danger more than safety. I found rapidly spinning the mouse around in circles grouped up all of my drones in a small ball, but was pretty annoying with how much the screen moved around so I didn't do it much.

For an entity composed of a bunch of tiny drones, you don't feel especially maneuverable. I think I would have liked it if the player had a bit more momentum when moving and maybe a bit of gravity. But on the other hand, maybe the drones wouldn't really keep up with you as well as they do. And it is nice to see them in a tidy grid. Maybe I'm just equating it too much to Luftrausers which emphasizes zooming around and momentum so much. Maybe it wouldn't fit as well with the drone swarm.

The colour scheme was great. Pretty to look at and easy to read. The enemy shapes were interesting. and told you what you needed to know about them. You just know immediately the arrow-shaped planes are trying to ram straight into you. The laser beam charge up scared you every time it happened. It always elicited an 'oh shit, I had better be somewhere else' reaction. The art is pretty simple (I mean that in a good way), but adding them all together creates a lot of polish. Like the little trails behind your drones to really sell their movement, and how they puff up slightly when they shoot, and enemies flashing white and having smoke particles so you can tell when you hit them. I could probably go on and on about each little detail.

Man, I wish I made this game. The level of polish on everything is just crazy.

Oh wow. Everything about this is so well done. 

I finally managed to beat it at around 65-35. Even after Wendell stole all my points. I think it was the end? He just repeats the same stuff about how he's not playing. I was fully expecting him to rage quit and close the game when I beat him though. Beating him by 30 was actually quite a challenge. I guess that means your AI is better at this game than I am. Being able to get points when both of us died was pretty handy. 

The variety in the ways he breaks the rules is crazy. It was exciting every time I saw him cheat in a new way. I especially liked the ways where he broke the rules, but you could still win. Like when he fires a millions shots, but you can still win. It felt great to have him cheat, but then still kill him. Wasn't as big of a fan of the times when you couldn't win (like when you couldn't shoot or he killed you before the 3 seconds were up). A small tweak to remedy that could be to have a time limit to all the game so when he cheats and you can't win, you can still win by surviving. But at the same time, it does make sense for him to have some cheats that guarantee he wins, just that it can be a bit frustrating for the player. A delicate balance, to be sure. 

I can tell a lot of polish went into this. Like the bullets hitting the walls and moving them, all the walls bouncing when someone died, Wendell's faces and the text box were all superb. Some of them are pretty small effects, but they give the game so much life.

I'm pretty sure everything I could nitpick about this are just things that were probably already on your list to change, but you ran out of time.

Sound is a good idea. The text coming in over time (like one letter at a time type of effect) could also help you notice it better.

Shoot the golems with the fists, shoot the chains in the middle of the circles to break the rules (something will happen. They might disappear entirely or just stop following whatever they were attached to).

Not really. He's just misunderstood. Is he spawning minions to hurt you? Kinda. But mostly it's the evil wand's fault.

If you do shoot him, he'll need to take a break to recuperate. He's nice enough to let you join him at his campfire though. 

Basically the theme of the jam was "breaking the rules" so taking a "break" kinda fits that. And having an enemy that you're not really supposed to shoot also breaks some of your expectations.

The text narrator probably needs some adjustments to be more usable. There are a could times where text shows up when there are enemies to fight so you're too busy to read. I shouldn't have done that.

When you get to the end, there's a ladder and if you touch it, the game ends.

There are some checks in place so you don't go through walls quite so often, but it doesn't fix it 100% of the time. The game is a little buggier than I usually make my games. You kinda have to close your eyes and pretend things are working. (Like you can go through walls, but please don't. And the blue force field thing you can probably push through it if you try hard enough and sometimes you can just walk around it).

Press G to reset is there if you get stuck or fall out of the world. It just spawns you back in the last room you cleared.

Ya, I probably should have some UI to show how many bullets you have too. 

The clicking sound is probably just enough to clue the player in, but it's just good enough, not a great experience.

I wasn't sure on the pacing. It should be a bit longer to explore the different mechanics and how they interact with one another (like the no shoot rules combined with the rangers that may or may not work correctly), but I would need a bit more variation in the level to make it not drag on. And then it just kind of ends pretty abruptly. Oh well, I'm just hoping I cut it off before it gets boring.

As for the art, I'm just happy I gave everything a hat so it's not just cubes.

At the end, it fades to black. If it didn't or the AI got stuck and you couldn't make it there, sorry.

I agree, it should have worked that way. I think I made it good enough and then just never thought about it again. And I've made a game that does the camera like you said so it just slipped my mind. It would have helped you be able to see more of the arena which is a small issue at the moment.

I actually never thought about trying to keep up a quota to keep from getting fired... That could've been sweet.

Everything else was exactly what I was going for. The sense of humour and just the bliss of crashing into a big ol' pile o' beans.

This game is sweet.

The pixel art and the animations are all great. Especially the game page. Very nice. The sun animation is very cute. I don't like the dithering in the grass. None of the other sprites use dithering so it stands out (but I just hate dithering in general so maybe it's just me). I would have preferred little patches of tall grass to differentiate the dark and light grass areas. I think texturing the grass slightly would have looked great (google "pixel art grass" and that's what I mean by texture). Or some extras like tiny 1-4 pixel wild flowers; tiny so they aren't confused with the flowers you grow. Something subtle so you don't lose the worms or your plants in the background.

Enemies are simple, but having them spawn in bursts is a great way to do it. If they just spawned 1 every ~2 seconds, it would be much too easy to keep them under control by killing them one at a time. The burst ups the intensity of the game for a bit and you have to figure out which worms to hit first. The scythe stunning them was key to the strategy of killing them. And the scythe doing a bit of area damage meant you always wanted to try to hit as many worms as you could which added a lot of fun second-to-second decisions trying to perfectly aim your clicks. The slight cooldown on the attack means you can multitask a little early on. You need to attack some worms far away, then while the cd is resetting, multitask by spending that time filling up with water. Then going and finishing off the worms when the cd is ready.

I kinda had no idea what I was doing a lot of the time. Not that it made it any less fun. The game was easy enough to figure out what you had to do in a broad sense even if you didn't know the specifics. Like I knew I needed to water plants and slice worms. I  figured out that I could hover over the water at the bottom to refill my can without being told, because that's pretty clear. But I was unsure what watering plants did when they were in their final stage. I guess it keeps them alive, but I wasn't sure if I needed to fill up the blue bar to get to another stage. How does the chopping your own plants thing work? Sometimes it wouldn't work, sometimes I'd get 2-4 new plants. Does the plant need to be in the final stage to be able to be cut? I'm not really sure why I would want multiple plants. Do I get more points? They sort of act as lives. If I have multiple plants, the worms need to kill them all for me to lose, but they don't spread very far so the worms can kill nearby plants pretty easily. I didn't really know what the upgrades did. It seemed the upgraded scythe lowered the cooldown which was handy. I see now that the game page has the upgrade info.

All in all, the game is really fun to play. It has great flow between chill watering and stressful scythering. And this is your first game? What a great game to start with.

If you fell into the bean counter and didn't die, that means you're a bean now.

Man, there's a lot of stuff going on. The concept for this game is so cool. The game is pretty tough to get into, but you figure it out after a little while. The first time reading the tutorial didn't really help me, but I read it again after building like 3 things and it made a lot more sense. You mostly figure out the game as you go.

The art for everything was great. The dotted lines for the orbit were nice, the orange line was so helpful for finding where the outer planets currently were. Pixel art animal forms for each of the planets is a really neat idea that adds a lot of charm to the game. The art for the elements is sweet and pretty unique with their particles that trail behind them. I like how unique the 5 little wedges that make up the outline of them are. Same with the cool ring of the crafting areas for the planets. They could have just been simple circles, but you made them unique and it looks so much better for it. The colour palette for the different types of elements was pretty good. It was easy enough to tell what type every little orb was just from a glance without having to zoom in to read its name. The particles fading to a slightly different colour is subtle effect, but quite nice.

The text was a nice font and the gradient colours look great, but the font size was just too small for the requirements for the planets and the names of the molecules. The little trivia things for the planets is neat, but a lot of the text doesn't fit inside the boxes.

The springiness of the molecules is frustrating pretty much the whole time. Moving them takes so much longer than it really should. You have to click on it, then move your mouse to where it needs to go, then hold there for like 5 seconds until it stops bouncing around before you can let go and go grab another one. I think it's a really great effect and makes thematic sense with planets and gravity, etc., but I just think it's a little overdone. The planets repelling their building blocks makes it so hard to build the last 3-ish planets. It's doable with the first 6, but once you get 8-10 elements, it's difficult and tedious to build them. 

Everything about this game was so clean. The UI all looks great, the gameplay was simple enough - just smash the ingredients together to create everything, the music is just relaxing and doesn't get in the way and fits the game, etc.

All the planets are pretty cute, but Saturn mew-mouse was my favourite.

Very satisfying and chill to play. Moving around picking up boxes and placing them was more fun than I thought it was going to be. After the game ended, I just kept placing boxes because it was just pretty chill.

I would have liked a bit more direction. At first I thought the stars coming from the center were going to hurt me so I didn't want to head towards the center. With how simple the game is, I guess the player will probably just figure it out eventually. The game could also use something of a splash screen or a title in the game. Even if it just appeared at the start and faded out. It doesn't even need to be a menu with a play button.

Laughed the first time I heard the pshew noise. I seriously considered just making vroom noises for my game. Now I'm just sad that I didn't.

The twinkling stars in the distance and having them slowly rotate was nice and subtle. The music really fit the style of the game. Definitely felt like the theme song of vast and empty space.

I might just really like this game because I too made a game a few years ago where no one tells you what to do and you just push boxes around until something happens and it's probably my favourite game I've made.

I like it. The personality of the game really sells it. Adam's little run and especially his jump animations. It has the angular style of the dab combined with all the energy of a t-pose and then the cannonball backflip to really dunk on those elephants.

Movement felt pretty good. The lack of any aerial movement made it a little tricky to properly land on the elephants, but the stomp hitbox for them felt generous enough that it didn't really matter. Getting the extra boost after bouncing on them is a nice touch. You really have to hold to jump to your max on some of the platforms, but it was doable with a few tries. 

The spikes were kinda unfair. The first time I died to them was just a total surprise. And going back to the main menu was a little shocking. I didn't even see the spikes so I didn't know I had died. I thought the game had crashed or something. It would have been nice to see the spikes a little beforehand. Like have some spike pits that were on a timer so you know the game had spikes, then later on switch it up and have the spikes that trigger when you step on them like you do have. At least the spikes were consistent so once I knew that there were spikes inside the boxes, I could avoid them. I went straight at the start, I didn't go left so the first spikes I saw were on the floating platforms. I thought the box on them was just how all floating platforms was. If I had gone left first, I probably would have recognized it.

The animations for Adam were pretty smooth and well-made. I think you could have used the elephant explosion poof for when Adam died too. It would have made dying to spikes more clear. The sounds were really well done. The cheery music really fit the game. The elephant bonk sound made it feel good to stomp on them; I didn't feel bad at all bonking them out of existence!

When you fall into the void (the black area), the game is over so you're not really supposed to be still pushing beans at that point.

It's a very pretty game. The art all looks great. Everything had a great amount of detail. The tutorial images were stylized in a cool way and were pretty good at showing visually what to do. The sound effects on everything fit very well and added a lot to the game. Pressing the buttons felt great because of the way they moved making them feel very real. The music resetting was a little annoying, but oh well.

I was very confused on level 4 because I didn't realize you could just press launch again.

The level design was very good; each of the levels felt quite unique and interesting. The game is very complex so ideally, it would be nice to have more levels in between each of the levels you already have to teach players some of the mechanics a little bit better. But I know this is game jam game and making more levels takes a lot of time you don't have.

I think the only issues I really have with this game are only issues because of the limited time frame. Given more time, I think most of those issues would just naturally go away. I could nitpick every little thing, but at the end of the day, I think the good outweighs the bad. It's a great game and really impressive that it was made in a week.

Atmosphere was great between the sound design and the lighting. It was fairly easy to tell that the dark, barely-visible cubes were not enemies and the reddish, bright, animated pac-man planets were the enemies. The cutscenes were pretty cool too.

The boost felt great. Flying around the game was fun. The trail changing size gave you a great indicator of how fast you were going. The speeds felt just right. Unboosted, the enemies caught up to you and then boosting got you out of danger quickly. The cooldown was the perfect time; short enough that it was up when you needed it, but not too much so that it was trivial.

More clarity on the white orb thing to transition levels and the boundary of the level would have been nice. Something like a little arrow that floats around your spaceship and points towards the end. It seemed that the second exit spawned where you killed the last enemy which is good, but you might miss it if you killed that enemy off screen. For the border, maybe you could have like an asteroid belt of asteroids very close together.

I was a little confused about the wording when you went through the white portal. It said travel through it to kill the corrupted planets. I thought it meant you were going to have to find another white orb and travel through to kill the planets (like you touch the white orb and it kills everything on screen). It took me a bit to figure out it meant "travel through the portal to go to a location where you can kill the corrupted planets". Honestly, this is such a minor thing and I'm probably the only one who felt this way.

You should probably put the game controls on the game page somewhere.

Thanks for playing.

I do agree it's a bit frustrating to push the beans with any precision. That's why I made pushing beans off anywhere count and if you push them into the glowing jar, you just get bonus points. I could have made that more clear. I think it's just fun to plow into big piles of beans.

I had to fix some things to get more playable performance so I added a tracker to show your progress and next goal.