itch.io

The arms race continues! Cool puzzle game! There was a lot of unique situations and it was nice to see all those different approaches. One big improvement was if there was a way to “mark” a meeple, like a safe square in minesweeper, so you don’t go insane tracking everything at once.

Also, I really liked these cute little illustration more then the main game art. Make of that what you will:

Creatures are mostly drawn from references of medieval mythologies, at least as far as I could find in terms of sources.

Wow, I thought they were mostly Youkai-inspired, I gotta hit the books on engravings again.

Great job, lost of cute pictures and animations. The reference image being in the corner and dimmed kind of made it difficult though. Might be better if it was in a symmetrical spot at the same color.

Ahhh, one of the few games that actually answered the theme and it controls really well. There’s a lot of very cool touches like the enemies actually jump over obstacles which made me notice that was possible and the FACES are an excellent detail.

I feel like you offered me a gimmick platformer, and did a bait-and-switch giving me a fantastic one with tight controls and just-right levels.

I noticed it looks like you’re suffering from particle load lag when they first pop up on screen. This wasn’t solved AFAIK for web build in 4.0, but two solutions were provided by a dev here: https://forum.godotengine.org/t/handling-particle-shader-compilation-lag-in-godot-4-web-compatibility-renderer/36170/2

Okay, fess up, you saw Balatro’s perspective shader on it’s cards and couldn’t help yourself right? 🤨

Jokes aside, it an interesting build system thinking about what ‘core’ items to grab and how those are placed. Seems like “abberiated” items hurt you here because you run into the situation were someone misplaces a core item turn 1, like I did with the casino and it’s a huge feel bad. Also, small touch I liked was how the basic enemy “sprays” instead of shooting dead-on predictably.

Some UX stuff:

• Some ‘not enough cash’ messages should be minimally short. the longer delay you have, the more frustration there is.
• I’d a box around the “Star” signs and just make them always show up as zones in the box so that info is always visible to the player, maybe have an item “shine” if it’s conditions are met.
• This might help you illustrated some better-looking items: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1pXyO0MKFg

Bunch of ux problems:

• If your too close, it’s hard to see the repair bar
• When you drag an oxygen tank to an empty space, it doesn’t “snap” you have to actually press F again(and I think it glitched for me and just ran out even though I put in oxygen)
• The camera for the docking is kind of confusing
• The game never tells you you can use the scroll bar to switch items
• You can’t hold-click the wrench, you have to tap it multiple times.

All that being said, fun game for the most part. I liked how you can open a shortcut to the oxygen tanks. Could also use a map which is harder then the other UX impv. I talked about, but still probably worth it.

Love the aesthetics and the film slide interludes. They probably could’ve been bit stronger with a slide sfx.

I stopped using the scanner entirely after the first creatures showed up, except when I could use it and jump off a cliff to get one over on the creatures.

plot twist was good.

Neato. I would’ve preferred some tooltips for the orb buying as well as something like stacking orbs like an auto-chess shop to increases effects.

Having to restart from the beginning when your health bar is hard-to-see is also kind of rough.

Movement Bomber lol.

Would be nice if the wheel chair had some momentum to it so there was more tech to pull off.

I think I landed right into the sweet spot where I just played the midi keyboard so long that he said “oh yea, I can see you now” and I was like “Shut Up! I’m making music!”

The translation made it a bit confusing on figuring out who was and wasn’t infected and the rules disappearing means it couldn’t be checked on later days.

Screw my boss though man, guy just wanted to keep all the cake to himself.

I think I broke it by stacking too many status effects:

___________________________________________
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of  Step Event0
for object Game_Ctl:

index out of bounds request 0 maximum size is 0############################################################################################
gml_Script_pick_arr (line 45)
gml_Script_update@anon@11534@GS_Battle_scr_battle (line 476)
gml_Script_update_game_state (line 97)
gml_Object_Game_Ctl_Step_0 (line 3)

Very impressive you got it this start of maturity! I mainly took to enemy avoidance, but the overworld movement made dodging around kind of fun.

Fantastic and really interesting concept to be the guy spawning the monsters, really brings me back to playing Dungeonland. I figured out the exploit pretty quickly on my second run to just spawn the biters right next to the player. This concept still has legs, just seems like you’ll have to experiment a lot with KABOOM’s AI and the player spawning resource. Really makes me want to see a full release.

It’d help alot if there was some obvious indication as to what attacks worked at what stance, like a gun/knife icon.

Really nice. I like games with simple loops like this.

• It’s hard to figure out that you have to ‘buy’ items that you grab. Something like disabling the grab button/adding a tooltip, cash register sfx would all help
• These composite conditions don’t appear consistent. It seems like it’s OR not AND.

Note that the menu being off screen is intended, you can move the camera with right click. Ah man I didn’t realize that at all! Zooming to the location def. sounds useful 👍

One of the guys became fearless at the end. Not sure if that was intentional.

The platforming and presentation is honestly amazing for the time limit. I kind of got burnt out on RPS quickly though.

I’m gonna kill the parts of my ego that bare the way to the gates. Great job!

I feel like I’ve hit a bug or missed something because the first wave seems to last like fifteen minutes? Not sure if anyone else runs into that but I stopped after I got about 150 carrots and didn’t even see the shop.

Animations are cute though.

Tracking the player’s health like a clock on their character is a nice touch. Really wish this had a lot more juice though.

It’s neat how you can tell where you’ve been with the snow deformation.

Ah, can’t resist the good ole’ RPG Maker “Cut audio track, character walks in room, notices something missing, freaks out moment”. The game has a lot of character, Great job!

Nice inversion of the card battler format where your goal is to just run away. It seems like the acquired cards don’t show up in the deck? I was still able to win despite that however.

Cool idea.

• I had some slowdown on turns or it seemed like there was? The point changes froze on the screen
• Having a button, control to toggle animation speed would be immensely helpful
• Tooltips would be very nice for actions.

I got to then end!

• The empty input also crashes the game(just pressing enter at the prompt)
• If you’re going to make a text terminal your main features, please, tab completion.
• knowing to omit the backslashes for the dates is kind of correct, but also awkward, since in the worst-case you try 6 different options.
• I didn’t know you had to press ‘enter’ at the menu for a second, might want to prompt for that.

All that being said, I like haunted terminals and this had about the right level of stylization, so it was cool!

I liked the concept and the aesthetic, but I couldn’t figure out how to use the wacky new power granted to me by the Flemish(?) speaking meteor guy.

It would be nice if the game had a ‘fast restart’ option so failure doesn’t feel so frustrating. Have to wait quite a bit to get back into the game after a botched attempt.

Pretty cool! It was fun to figure out how to launch and fly, but I got bamboozled by “Maintain heading 340” after the takeoff because the flight instructions say “Maintain Runway heading” and I didn’t realize that’s only for TAKEOFF not in-flight.

The oddity was a bit underwhelming, but I see a lot of potential here!

If you gotta omit a tutorial, then I’d always make sure to include a text instruction manual in the pause menu.

Ahhh it’s so close. The concept is great and I love the idea, but it’s ergonomic death by a thousand cuts! Please forgive me for this list I have many thoughts:

• scale of things feels like half the size it should be. Makes it hard to accurately pickup/drop things(I even catch the feeder miss dropping some things in the heart!). I’d double the size of pickups and triple the size of drop-zones like turrets and the heart
• I did not realize the ‘sacrificial dagger’ is not the same as the dagger you start with and assumed it was useless to craft. I’d probably change that to something different then the ironic main sacrificial dagger to avoid confusion
• Having no way to heal the heart makes a challenge, but’s also very frustrating. For a jam game, I would’ve had it heal at the end of each day to full.
• One of things I’ve done in past jam games is just thrown up a quick-n-dirty graphic in the pause screen for instructions. If you find yourself in this situation, you can literally just put what you put on the itch page in the pause screen.
• Slowing down during building is nice, but I would completely STOP the game process after a set period so the player can scroll through the menus to access things
• Sometimes the menu appears out of bounds and I can’t see what I’m selecting
• If the craft menu had icons of what you’re about to craft, that’d help
• If the craft menu had q,e shortcuts to switch categories, that’d also help
• Some audio/visual queue that the heart was starving would be a good edition.

Hope any of this is useful, again, I wouldn’t have this many thoughts if there wasn’t something to this!

Very nice writeup.

For lightning, did you use Light2D nodes and just the flashlight to apply to all the canvas layers? Also, do you have any ideas for shadow casting, like with the desks or objects that aren’t world bound? I actually didn’t notice their absences until I thought to look for it when thinking about how you did you light.

Ahhhhh, grenade jumping/hit boosting is the besttttttt feeling. I never opened any of those level doors after I figured out how little HP you lose from doing it.

• It’d be a good idea to add some more playground elements to the level hub like maybe an infinite grenade dispenser and npcs that respawn which you can practice your timing on. Nightmare of Decay had a shooting gallery with inf. bullets at it’s start and that made all the limited ammo feel fair
• The delay for opening menus/restarting is kind of aggravating, especially if you’re aiming for the perfect run. A hot-key to restart on death is essential IMO. The Golden heart is a very cool concept though and I think was a pleasant surprise at the level end.
• I’d like if the enemies had some indication of whether or not they had a key or some way to figure that out without trial and error. People who go for score won’t care as much, but it feels really unfair to the first time player.

Most skillful game of the jam I’ve played so far. Have to stop myself from playing it lol.

It’s like you tributed sound to make a game that has both multiplayer and a cohesive visual style. Very impressive!

Three 2.5D games in this jam by my count so far. Neat transition! The neutral tone of voice laments pulls at some unwritten anxiety.

I was filtered by the mushroom check 🍄. There’s some old adage about not eating something you haven’t seen someone else eat, cause your brain won’t believe it and you’ll get sick anyway.

Nice little game. The pentagram power line ritual site was inspired.

It was neat. I like these small puzzle games.

• I gave up at the book counting section because I screwed up the count twice and the walk through section seems to be missing?
• The part where you’re labeling letters should probably have a check off of “correct” letters you’ve found.
• The keypads and locker stalls need number BAD. This is the fifth locker:

You made that system for cutscenes/dialogues, a unique movement system with random, a turn based battle system with 5 very different working spells and logs and a pause menu?

Thanks! The cheat I had with the cutscene is that I build the dialog with a dialog_finished callback, so anything can create a dialog and wait on it while it’s rolling. I copied the trick over from how the battle animations work where they’re mostly tweens that can be waited on.

Great minds think alike, cause I actually gave hexes a shot for Ludum Dare awhile ago: https://soulreviews.net/blog/Cave-Game-Dev-Log-1 It’s always amazing for isometric games, although in the first-person perspective I’m not sure it’ll work since people are kind of married to cardinal directions?🤔 Gonna have to try this out at some point, I feel like there’s a 5D Chess-like idea here…

this game absolutely oozes style I consider this high praise coming for you and your game, thank you very much! I plan on doing a lot more experimentation stylistically with 3D sprites, since currently the particles are still in screen space cause I was strapped for time. 🤣

as for this:

perhaps some way to combine orbs would be awesome,

soon™️