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On the one hand, one line in the jam description says "You can also ask questions about Firebase, Godot, life in general..." and the jam is being run by the creators of GodotFirebase. On the other hand, nothing else mentions Firebase at all. So... is the idea to build Godot games that use Firebase? Or to build Godot games and we don't have to use Firebase at all? :-)

This was a fun jam and set of mechanics to design a game for! I tried to write up a dev log for Borealis so that I could capture the stuff I found difficult (or not) and thoughts I had before I forgot it, and that was a useful thing to do in itself, I found. It took quite a while to actually write all the different events... :-)

Devlog written!

Thank you! I'm hoping to write up some of the thoughts that went into it in a devlog or two.

Yup, that does make sense! I was thinking about, say, Klondike Solitaire, where some games you might lose through bad choices but some were never possible to win in the first place.

The SRD says "it can be fun to make a game that is very difficult to win, but make sure that however unlikely or difficult it is, it is always possible". Does that mean that every single game has to be winnable? Or that the game in general needs to be potentially winnable but a particular game might not be if you got an unlucky deal?

Bizarre little game with quite an unusual concept. It seemed to want to be quite poignant, with two figures looking out at each other across a misty sea, but then suddenly you have to do quite complicated mental arithmetic problems in about two seconds in your head. These two things do not seem to fit together, but that's part of what makes this interesting! However, as everyone has noted, it is way too hard, especially since you're basically hoping that you not only get easy equations but short ones. Once you've solved two or three of them, getting a long equation then almost certainly means death, because solving 5-9+7×6-2×8 in two seconds is really difficult, plus the long equation is certain to hit your boat. I really like how the increase in difficulty isn't arbitrary, though; longer equations aren't just threatening because they're harder but because they're more likely to reach the boat and sink it! And you can always, if you want to, give up some of the progress you've made to start again. There are quite a few very clever game design features here, even though it seems like a simple game of hard maths, and I would like to see what the author does with a game with a bit more scope for creativity.

Very slickly animated and polished! I have no complaints here at all; a complete game, with an interesting mechanic, well-implemented and fun to play. This should score highly!

Seemed well put together (although I didn't at first realise there was a double jump, and was cursing how accurate the jumps needed to be on the first screen!) but then... I couldn't work out what to do next. Walls with circular holes in may be some sort of door, perhaps? But I couldn't open it if so; "interact" didn't do anything, and I don't understand what the hub was for. The game seems well implemented and the shooting sound effect is nice, so I suspect the fault here is with me, but it does suggest that maybe some more helpful design might be useful?

This was really fun! If this game had come on the actual 3310 I don't think people would have complained in the slightest. Excellently made, very clear, no complaints. What a good job! Now make, like, fifty more levels :)

A good version of a well-known concept here! It was fun to play and I liked the sound effects. I think that key repeat should be enabled on left/right keys, though -- otherwise you can't hold a left/right key to mean "go left as soon as I'm able to" to fit in "under" another piece, and moving quickly across the board is also harder than it need be. Holding down the "down" key does make it repeat, so I believe it's possible. But this would only improve what is already a pretty good implementation!

A good implementation of an interesting concept! I hadn't seen this navigate-in-the-dark sokoban-ish idea before, and it works really well! I did experience moving twice sometimes, but other than that this is impeccably implemented, even if simple, and well worth being a complete game.

Thank you for the feedback! You're right, static rooms are deliberately difficult...!

Thank you!

Static rooms are deliberately designed to be difficult, although there is always time to move if you're quick -- at the very least you can always move back to where you were before :-) But I agree with you on the difficulty! I'm glad you liked it...!

This is nicely done; lots of extraneous small points added to make the game feel nicer, such as the background clouds. I think it's just too easy, though, because there is an up control and there are no physics, which means that it's quite difficult to actually get it wrong! Something to make it more challenging would, I think, be a useful tweak to the game's setup. Good music, too.

The swinging ball feels really well done; the physics here are very natural and feel right, and that's great work! However, there are a few issues that it would be worth working on. The screen is very small -- it's the correct resolution, but it really ought to be zoomed-up by default. The ball knocks over buildings well, but that doesn't seem to be enough; I couldn't get off the first level! And I think it may require the mouse to get started? I couldn't work out how to move on from the start screen without clicking, although maybe that was just my mistake? Nonetheless, there's the core of a great idea here, especially if everything else can feel as expertly done as the swing physics, I think.

Uncomplicated concept, and not a new one, but this is very well implemented given the limitations of the jam! It was very clear what to do and how, and the levels are challenging enough; good work, and a complete game, music included!

This is really good; well-implemented, polished, a complete game (except for the sound). Only someone terribly ungrateful would complain that it's really quite hard :-) Excellent work here; no complaints at all!

Good job on getting something written and submitted; that's a big step! This is obviously only a proof of concept, but the core ideas are there. I quite liked the notion of you walking off of the start screen into the game -- that was nice! And the graphics are small but clear and easy to understand. Hopefully this gives you the confidence to make your next jam submission even better!

Ah, that's useful to hear; thank you again :-)

Neatly done! The real challenge here is to spot which character is correct given the extreme graphical limitations, of course :-) So this is simple, but nicely implemented from top to bottom. Good work!

This is a neat idea for puzzle setup, and not one I've personally seen before. This feels to me like a proof of concept for what could be a really interesting puzzle game if you decide to take it further! Nice work. (Also: yay Godot! Also also: it ignores the pixel grid when moving :-))

Thank you! I'm glad you liked it :)

Thank you! Agreed on working out what the room traps do being by design :-)

Well-polished and nice puzzle game! I found two things confusing: it's not very obvious where the electron is at any point (especially at the start), and it's not obvious what you have to do to win. (Go through the "hollow" point? Once it's been "opened"? I think that's it, but I never did actually work out the rule. I think that if you decide to come back to this then making these a little bit more obvious (which would be a lot easier in a version without such stringent graphical restrictions) and then of course adding a bunch more levels would make this a complete game; it's a really nice and elegant proof of concept!

Nice little set of puzzles! This is a neat concept. I did at one point manage to have the top ball fall down into the bottom half, which was a little weird. I also think that it would be much clearer if the two types of poles were more visually different; I never really did manage to grasp which type let which ball through, and I worked it out by trying and then hitting space if I couldn't proceed. Perhaps, if you don't want the poles to be solid black and solid white, they might be one mostly-white striped and one a regular pattern of dots or similar, so they're obviously different? The core gameplay is excellent; these are polish issues, but I think a little more attention there might take the game to the next level.

Being in only two colours has not made this any easier for me than the original, it seems :-) Nice work; no complaints at all. A very clean implementation!

An interesting concept! It still needs some fleshing out and some work, but the idea of using the light as a weapon against the monster is a good one, I think. I ran into a couple of issues -- it seems to be possible to walk right through some walls in the mansion and end up in blank space, and being caught by the monster doesn't seem to actually do anything -- but I think this is an interesting proof of concept! I should note that it doesn't stick to the 84x48 pixel screen restrictions, though; the main parts of the game are, but the flashlight's circle and beam are not, I don't think?

There's plenty of stuff going on here! It's a little weird that the dark enemies are invulnerable to being shot, but I got used to it pretty quickly. It's also interesting to see a side-scrolling shooter that's top-down and person-based, rather than R-Type-style spaceship-based! Good work :)

The core of a nicely put-together game here, I think! I enjoyed playing it. The music is a little bleepy and annoying after a while, and you can't mute it or it's harder to know about the minotaur, but the music's a lot less annoying than the music in my game so I can hardly complain :-) The screen shake was a nice effect; it felt very tactile, very visceral and really gave the Minotaur a sense of brutish heaviness. That was cool.

I can see the theory with the speed taking time to build, but I think it could be changed to take a lot less time to feel more fun. At first, I thought that I was pressing the wrong buttons. I'm also not very sure how to aim the gun; holding E and pressing W/A/S/D doesn't seem to change where bullets aim to, so I was battered the first time I ran into any enemies. There's the core of something good here, with stealth and dynamic lighting in a stark, minimally-drawn environment, but I think it needs more work before it's lots of fun to play. The "Spooks" image for the game is amazing, though; brilliantly drawn and compelling! If the game had only a little more resolution maybe it could all look like that.

Interesting idea, and quite well put together; the puzzles are complex, and require both thinking and coordination. It did seem a little strange that the jump isn't actually high enough to reach most of the platforms, but the squares do a sort of wall-jump off the edge of a platform to reach the top, but I got used to that soon enough!

Crikey, this is difficult. I think with a game where failure is expected to happen this often, it might be nice if things were to move a little faster? That might make it feel less frustrating :-) But that's kinda the point of it, of course! Good work on capturing my attention, certainly.

I think this doesn't quite adhere to the 84x48 pixel restriction? When it's zoomed up, lines don't seem to match that grid and seem a bit thinner than they should be, perhaps. It may be fine at 84x48, of course.

Thank you for the feedback! I'm not quite sure what you mean, there, though -- are you thinking that you're being rushed into making moves? That's mostly deliberate...

Thank you for the feedback! I'm using Firefox myself, so performance problems are a little surprising, but clearly I need to do some more testing :-) You are right about the music, though; I think maybe I should have gone with sound effects, which is my fault for not having thought that through at the beginning. Useful feedback, cheers!

Thank you! That's kind of you to say so. And yes, the feeling of moving to a new screen and realising you're in a static box rather than a lightning box is pretty scary :-)

This is well-implemented, with introductory screens, nice transitions, and the course look before each hole. Lots of polish, which is good to see! The gravity flip mechanic is fairly common in platformers but I've not seen it in this sort of game, which is a nice change. I took a couple of holes for me to grasp what it means (that you can do a simple soft hit and let the gravity change do most of the work, most of the time!), and "hit the ball a small distance" is frustratingly difficult because by definition the ball has to at least swap from ceiling to floor or vice versa on every hit. The later levels having the flag in its own little valley was helpful, though, and much welcomed!

A very minimal game graphically, but easy to understand. The game does tend to whip you around the field quite disorientingly sometimes -- I think this happens when I lose and am snapped back to the middle of the playfield, but it's hard to tell. Nonetheless I think there's the core of a good idea here! Jams are often a good place to put together proofs of concept of an idea to see whether they strike a chord with others, and that might be a helpful view here, I think.

Interesting concept here, I thought. The game doesn't start off with a handful of easy levels to teach you that concept, but instead throws you right in at the deep end with you needing to switch the light mid-jump at least twice to complete the first level. This is probably a good thing, on balance, but it feels a bit challenging at first! However, it's also made difficult by the collision detection being extremely unforgiving, which is frustrating; the slightest whisper of contact with spikes is instadeath which means a lot of adjusting before a jump, which isn't fun so much as frustrating. Nice idea, though, and I see you're already suggesting a future change to the hitboxes which I think would solve the issue and be most welcome!