The ability to move a module after placing it. Unless I just couldn't figure out how?

This made me want to learn crochet, which I have never attempted before.

From the entire Last Slice team, thank you all so much for taking time to play and rate our game. We are overjoyed by the results!

We have scoured your feedback, completed our jam postmortem among the team members, and I am happy to say that development of The Last Slice will continue! We will initially focus on fixing bugs and making quality of life improvements for which we will heavily rely on the feedback you all have provided. 

After that initial round of updates we intend to expand the game in both content and scope, so stay tuned for more adventures!

Fun game! It was over too soon. I would play more!

I really liked how all the moves acquired and practiced throughout the course of the game came together in the end to defeat the boss. I should preface that with the fact that I did not actually defeat the boss :( I was unclear what to do after it became red and my stomps were no longer effective. I would've really liked to beat the game because I was having a fun time with it. Thank you for your submission! 

Thank your for your kind words about our submission. We worked hard, but had a lot of fun building it. 
The narrative behind your game blew me away. Thank you for making it.

This was a fun game of pattern matching. I wish I could view the suspect description without having to zoom in on a single face.

This game manages to simultaneously be the most and least cozy game I have played this jam, and I think it's a masterful accomplishment. Every line of dialogue felt deliberate in growing the world into something mysterious; just as a child's world, on their first lone outing, grows big and scary.

The minigames were simple but worked. I liked that listening to the NPCs was rewarded. The leaf raking was a creative use of a physics engine. I liked that you had to move along roads in the minimap.

Thank you! This is one of my favorites in the jam.

I had fun! The lockbox explosions, especially when many occurred in a row, were always satisfying. I thought I was stumped at a certain part, but then I realized I simply didn't notice that one of the lock boxes in crowd of level 9s was in fact an 8. Maybe there is a more readable way for lock level to be shown? I enjoyed the scribbles on the notes.

Thank you for the game!

Thanks for playing, and thank you so much for your feedback! I was wondering if you could elaborate on the jumps being "slidey"? 

Thanks for playing, and I appreciate your insightful feedback. Considering there is no mouse input, I see your point about using the numpad or HJKL. That's a great idea and I wouldn't have thought of it. 

I have not been able to replicate exactly this behavior myself, but keep in mind you do have to press the movement analog stick in the direction of the wall that you want to cling to. If you happen to try the game again, and I hope you do, we would appreciate a video of the behavior. 

Thank you so much for playing, and I am sorry you got stuck.

Thank you for the feedback! We're glad you enjoyed it, and that you found a way through the more difficult parts so you could still reach the end. I much enjoyed Chai and the Missing Pupmkin too, and found all the dialogue and characters to be very cute and cozy.

I enjoyed the art and carefully uncovering the story of what happened. Nice game!

This was great! A very cozy experience. Far more cozy than typical space travel. I learned a lesson in the end, cause here I was stressing about figuring out which planet was the Autumn planet.

When you land and leave a planet you never know which direction you'll wind up facing which made it  difficult to know where you've been and where you're going.

Thank you for featuring a poly throuple as the main characters! I love to see it. :)

I love to hear that! You can count on me to give it a second try at some point :)

I think I found 4, but could not reach the one on the roof. The wall jumping worked, but would benefit from more animation. I wish I could play on a controller.

I enjoyed hanging out with these characters and the dialogue was always pleasant. It's nice to see the detective mechanic employed in a game story to such great effect.

Not cozy and the music knows it, but at the same time you don't get the picnic without the ants, and picnics are as cozy as they come. I wish the difficulty had not plateaued ahead of its time. I enjoyed playing it! 

I enjoyed the colorful cast of characters this game features. 

The collision with environment features behaved a little strange, and anywhere I went I found I had to feel may way through the environment. In fac,  I managed to hard lock myself by getting stuck between colliders.

There were some esoteric jokes that I did not get, but I still enjoyed discovering them. I was a little spooked that the time on the clock tree matched the time on my computer clock when I saw it, but I never confirmed whether it updated if I stayed longer.

All and all I had a cozy and fascinating journey through this game. Thank you so much for making it!

Pleasant soundtrack that got me into a cozy mood. The audio balancing was a little weird, but I did like how you could use positional sound to find your way home if you got lost. I think the effect just needs to be a little less intense. Like continue to play some sound in the left earphone, but more in the right when the house is to your right. Sorry, I'm not sure what you call that.

Felt cozy. Made me desire a warm cup of coffee. Nice foley work.

A cozy game about taking care of an adorable money pooping pumpkin. I enjoyed myself! I found the most optimal purchasing strategy fairly fast, but I could also easily see the mechanics expanded beyond that by offering more ways to care for your pupkin. I am still intensely curious what the pupkin's gift is. Look forward to a sequel!

This is nice! That third spider level really shot up in difficulty. I was not able to get past it, but would really like to see the ending.

Kuiper

Devtober Post Mortem

Out in the frigid Kuiper Belt, far from the warmth of our sun, water is the most vital resource there is.

To the few that brave this frontier water serves as sustenance, fuel, and defense.

Kuiper is my idea for a unique spin on the classic Asteroids shooter formula. The above gif is the prototype I started with for this Devtober. As you annihilate asteroids you also build a protective shell out of the water ice that makes them up. Throw in enemy combatants into the mix and that protective ice shell becomes vital to the player's survival.

Objectives

For my first Devtober I set rather lofty goals, and met half of them. The game as I imagine it requires some complex systems that I've never built before, and along the way I encountered both pleasantly surprising results and discouraging setbacks. If you want to skip to the Lessons Learned TLDR that's at the bottom, please feel free to!

Revamping Destructible Asteroids

This was by far the biggest undertaking this month. To get the new and improved asteroids to act and look how they do now took half of my Devtober. I knew this would be a big piece going in, which is why I tackled it first. This was also blocker for revamping the accreting ice shell, since it would be built on top of the same system.

I am the most proud of my work on the asteroid break-up. I think it came out looking far better than I could have hoped, and performs must faster than I expected, even while still being coded in GDScript. The next steps are to get it fully coded into C++, which should prevent the frame stutter seen in the demo gif.

This part of the project also had some pleasant surprises along the way. For instance, while playing around with different ways to color the vertices of asteroid, I learned that by using a cubic color interpolation along the ordering of vertices of the Delaunay tessellation, I was able to very easily give the asteroids a nice frosted edge look. There was no reason for this to work aside from sheer luck, and I had no reason to try it aside from sheer curiosity and boredom. This experience taught me that aimless tinkering in moderation in game dev can yield serendipity.

One more lesson I gleamed from the asteroid revamp. The Fruit Ninja-esque chopping mechanic seen in the above gif was never meant to be in the game. It was just some debugging tool I made to test break-up, but as sometimes happens with debugging tools, I realize it's quite fun! I don't know what the mechanic will look like in it's final form, but I now know I have to find some excuse to give the player a similar power in-game!

Adding Asteroid Hopping and Crawling Mechanics

Since asteroids had to be rebuilt from scratch, asteroid hopping and crawling wound up being the only true feature addition I had this month, and it's one I have yet to discuss the idea behind. When accreting ice shells are fully realized in Kuiper, it is possible for a player's ice shell to be chopped up/blown apart such that the player character is now unshelled and adrift in the cold void of the Kuiper Belt without any shielding, propulsion, or weapons. The player is now in E.S.A. mode (Extra Shellular Activity), a sort of "second chance" phase of gameplay, and must use their momentum and nearby asteroids to navigate to safety before they can start the process of rebuilding their protective ice shell.

I dived into work on this feature immediately after I finished asteroid break-up; when I was reinvigorated by a hard fought victory and eager to start something I anticipated to be much simpler to implement. What I mean to say is I may have gone into tackling this feature with a little too much confidence right at the start. I vastly underestimated the time it would take, and I just assumed that the asteroid-ESA code interface would somehow work out. It didn't, and the feature took some amount of recoding on the asteroid end of things.

I also learned from this experience that player controls are hard, and to get asteroid crawling in particular to feel good on both analog stick and WASD is going to take some more time outside of Devtober. I am still proud of where the mechanic wound up, and during its testing I got around to building something I never even put in my objectives, but badly needed all the same: a PlayerFollowCam script.

What Remains

Following the completion of asteroid hopping in the 3rd week of Devtober, and already knowing implementing AI and HTML5 might need to be held off until next month, I was onto the final feature: ice shell accretion. Up to this point I had been building everything in Godot's GDScript, which allows for very rapid prototyping, but is slow for expensive computation like a Poisson disk sampling algorithm or iterating through a 500 triangle tessellation in a single frame. In addition to being destructible like the asteroids, the ice shell must also be larger (more triangles to iterate over), and must accrete material (add triangles in response to water ice collisions), meaning the slowdown from doing this all in GDScript for the ice shell would be significant. I knew the destructible script would inevitably have to be recoded in C++, but it was a step I hoped I could put off until after Devtober. Now this significant task had to be done in much less than a week if I were to have any hope of then extending it with a material accretion mechanic and finishing the accreting ice shell before the end of the month.

Over the final week of Devtober I worked tirelessly toward this end, and the results so far are very promising! The Poisson disk sampling saw a factor of 35x increase in speed, if I can get similar or better increases out of the remaining C++ recode, then the game should run great on most any modern machine (keep in mind I intentionally do not develop on my gaming rig so that I know I'm developing something even low-end machines can handle).

In this final week of Devtober, my focus shifted from rapidly prototyping flashy features that make nice demo gifs towards making sure the implementation of those features are scalable and adaptable enough for what comes next. It was the work that I wanted to do later, but realized I absolutely needed to do now, and while it did not produce any new pretty demo gifs to post, it is building my confidence to see Kuiper through to the end.

Conclusion

Kuiper is a game about being resourceful with what little you are given. Which is why I could stand to learn from it. At the beginning of the month I made a list of tasks that would get me to a vertical slice of the game, but I never took a moment to allocate time for each one. If I had, I am sure I would have removed some non-essential tasks from the list, and had a better idea of what to expect this month. There still would have been unexpected delays along the way, but with a scheduled list I would have stayed more focused on the task at hand rather than dreading what's to come or wondering what to do next.

You will notice my submission for Devtober is actually just an older version of the prototype that I started with at the beginning of the month. At this time I do not have a cohesive version of the game ready where everything works together quite in the way I would like it, so for the time being I am going to hold off on publishing a new version, but plan to have something playable soon. Hopefully within this month, so stay tuned!

I am extremely proud of the work I accomplished on the project this month. This is undoubtedly the most devleopment I have been able to squeeze into a game project within single month, and it's taught me a lot along the way.

Lessons Learned TLDR

1. Do the hard thing first

I'm glad asteroid break-up was the first thing I worked on, and it invigorated me to tackle what came next. Furthermore, if a problem winds up being too hard to tackle, it's better to learn early on in the project and rescope then.

2. Tinker!

Good things can happen when you toy with the systems of your game, even if you do it without a defined purpose. 

3. "Follow the Fun"

4. Give ample time to controls

This always seems to pop into my head everytime I work on a control system. For any game the feel of the controls can make it or break it. Give ample time to both designing and iterating on controls. If you do not have ample time to commit to controls then write a prototype that at least works, and plan to improve the feel of it later on. Simple and readable code is always important, but realize that control systems that feel good to the player rarely take the form of simple. If your code for controls becomes monstorous, that might honestly be okay. Function > Form.

5. List and schedule objectives

In contrast to #2, when you aren't toying with your project in moderation, it's good to work on a planned schedule. If you aren't the type to plan things the month out, like me, then at the very least try and do this: At the end of a day's work make a note. It could be a sticky note, an uncompileable sentence in your code, or a git commit comment; just write it somewhere you'll notice the next morning. Write what you were doing when you finished work, then write what you plan to do when you resume work. I'm not as consistent about it as I should be, but every time I do it I find the overhead of staritng up the next day to be far smaller.

Thanks!

Thank you so much for reading this far! 😁 I will continue to work on Kuiper at the same pace until it I get the vertical slice I'm after. If you're curious about the project and want to follow along, please follow me on Twitter and check out my blog where I'll occasional post longer form updates, including a duplicate of this Post Mortem.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/StarryNiteGames

Blog: http://astrostucky.com/wp/

Itch.io Project: https://starrynitegames.itch.io/kuiper

See you all next year!

I like the concept. Great work! The ability to move the camera around would be a nice addition.

Super cool gravity idea. Really enjoyed it!

I honestly had a ton of fun playing this game because I'm a huge nerd for task management challenges. Time intervals were well balanced for difficulty too! Nicely done!

I did encounter an error, and to be honest it was so thematically appropriate (because it happened immediately when I tried to interact with the kitchen fire) that I honestly thought it was part of the game for a few seconds and things were about to get all Doki Doki Literature club. Here's a screenshot of the error message. Happy bug hunting!

This is like the Dark Souls of top-down shooters. I enjoy it! Thanks for submitting! 👌

This made me smile and taught me snek platformer pro-strats. Thank you so much!