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Thank you, Kuboid studio! I didn't get to check out your entry during the jam, but I was able to do so this morning—good stuff as well! Congrats on submitting and making it into the top 20% yourself!

I didn't get to play before the jam was up, but I had a chance to do so this morning. I think you've got a great, simple game loop and I really liked your animations here. I noticed there wasn't much cover in the level, and I think adding more of that would really help make for a more varied game—in my runs I found that circling the red building kept me going the longest. Where would you take the game from here?

I did not get a chance to rate y'alls game before the rating period ended, and boy am I disappointed with myself for that. I loved the art and animations here and I'd have loved to see where you folks took this one had there been more time to flesh out a few more levels and further tune the mechanics. I think you've got a great move set for the player controller, but I didn't feel like I got to use much of it in the prototype level. Moving faster and faster was fun, but I suspect a smoother acceleration curve between the different movement speeds while on the ground would make it feel a little more natural. Thanks for making and sharing your game!

I liked the visuals and the gameplay loop here, but using LMB for the attack also had me thinking incorrectly that I'd also aim my attack—many bombs of mine were mistakenly thrown out of the way rather than at the enemies. I'd be curious to see how your game would play with mouse aim -or- if it didn't use the mouse at all. Solid execution all around otherwise though!

Cool little platformer—I made it all the way to end. I definitely recommend listing the controls you used for the player as I got stumped when I reached the part where I needed to roll through the boxes. Luckily I was able to find the right key after some strategic key mashing. One other thing to consider is the camera—it made the jumps (especially from your bounce pads) extra hard because I couldn't see the floor to properly line up the landing. Thanks for making and sharing your game!

Cool little platformer! I made it all the way to the boss a few times, but I couldn't finish them. Nevertheless, I never gave in to hatred or bitterness. Visual and/or audible feedback when either the player or an enemy was hit would really take it up a notch—I didn't think my attacks did any damage at first until I (much later) realized that it takes two attacks to clear an enemy. Thanks for making and sharing your game!

I love the movement and camera mechanics you went with—everything feels so smooth. Your animations are great, too, but I feel like the shader effects were a bit heavy handed here and obscured your visuals too much. Needing to switch between offense and defense (e.g. running up to hit the boss and then needing to come back down to take care of the baddies assaulting my well) was pretty fun, and I can several paths forward for extending your game loop into a rich game!

Cool visuals and gameplay here! That said, the difficulty is straight up brutal and after dying it seemed like I had to refresh the page to restart the game each time—did I miss something or maybe I ran into a soft lock? I think one thing that could help visually would be if all of the bullets kept to a similar color scheme that was different from other elements in the game. For example, it took me a few to realize that I could pick up the power ups left behind from destroying the earlier crafts as the power ups shared a similar color to the bullets I'd just dodged. Thanks for making and sharing your game—I'd be curious to play it again should you decide to tone down the difficulty or make it more accessible in other ways.

This was fun and I think you've got a great aesthetic going here, but it looks like there is a viewport scaling issue because the screen shader and UI was locked up in the upper left corner for me when I played. Here's what it looked like for me when I played:

The gameplay is simple but works really well here! I did notice that there were a number of occasions where the cats would move to spots on top of each other—I'd be curious to see how your game would play differently if there was a little more logic to control their placement so that they still had their random placements but stayed further away from each other to avoid overlapping and obfuscating each other. The art and sound were solid too. Thanks for submitting your game!

Nice job! It'd be great to see where you take the game from here—there's plenty of other things to take your game to the next level by adding audio, multiple levels, etc.

Such chaos! I was only able to hang on for a few minutes in all of my runs, but I think you've got a good foundation to build on top of. I didn't find the shooting mechanics to be too enjoyable, but the dashing mechanics were spot on. As someone else pointed out, the camera shake is too distracting/disruptive and is worth scaling back to keep the gameplay running smoothly.

Great puzzles! I had fun working my way though all of your levels—it felt like you really nailed the difficulty ramp here. The artwork is great, too, but I'd have loved to see your game lean even harder into the pixel art aesthetic by using only nearest filtering instead of the mix of nearest/linear filtering that the game has today. Thanks for making and sharing your game! 

Yeah! I mean I think it was clear how to get more bombs when you already had them, but then if you didn't knock out enough enemies to get more and you ran out... well the game didn't end but you couldn't make any progress either. Another approach here could be to game over the player when they run out of zero bombs and don't succeed in producing more bombs on their last throw.

Really pleasant incremental and lovely entry all around. The visuals! The audio! I don't normally play most jam games for as long as I did this one, but over an hour later I got the worm! If you're planning to continue working on this, I'd either bring in more mechanics or reduce some of the grind along the way—I had a lot of fun, but the grind got tiresome at points. Really well executed, y'all!

What fun and absurd concept here—I love cats and tacos so this worked for me. More visual or audible feedback would really help up the fun level while playing, and I noticed that after a while the tacos only seemed to come from a single location on the screen. This let me hang out in one spot and just eat up all the tacos. Thanks for making and sharing your game!

Horizontal scrolling games like this are typically fun, but I found myself wanting something more here—I didn't spot the theme asset used in the game during my run nor did I see much other than me bumping into traffic along the way. Cool visuals and decent audio though!

This was pretty intense! I loved how hardcore the music got after you found the boss room, but unfortunately I wasn't skilled enough to be able to beat them after a few tries. I think the movement mechanics are solid, but the balance between how much health I had and how much damage I dealt felt a little off. Thanks for making and sharing your game—I also love seeing other folks use Godot for their games, too!

Too much mashing for my taste, but cool that you used the jam to learn something new! What framework did you use and how was it working with it?

So glad you were able to submit! I think you've got some good bones to work with here, but I found the player controller to be difficult to use here—the player felt like they moved so slow unless I was bouncing off one of my explosions and whenever I'd try to use shift to reverse, it'd almost always get me in trouble. I bet twin-stick controls would really feel good with the gameplay you've designed so far. The visuals are punchy and I can imagine how cool this would have been had you more time to keep at it. Thanks for making and sharing your game!

Fun little arcade game—I agree that having some kind of mechanic that'd allow the player to refill their bombs after using them all up (maybe a timer that refills them slowly after the player runs out?) would have helped keep me going. Right now there's not much incentive to do anything other than throw yourself into an enemy after you run out of 'em since you can't refill 'em.

Really fun! The way that your physics work here is so satisfying. I also only made it to the second level, but I may come back here to play further after I've rated a few more games. The sound effects are great, but felt a little repetitive—are you using pitch shifting here to add any variation into them?

Thanks for playing and sharing your feedback! I'm typically working in Godot for my games—it seems like all of the platforms are pretty good these days!

Seriously so good. I struggled a little bit with the placement mechanics (I think I was expecting the bomb to snap to the middle of the tile rather than have free placement), but after I locked in I just kept going. Dropping a red bomb and then having to hightail it out of there right before getting blown to bits and pieces had me going every time. So much fun!

A little more feedback (like a little audio buzz or shake) when trying to place a bomb incorrectly would probably help. I think I was mistaking an inaccurate placement of my bomb for the game eating my input or something glitchy happening. A little feedback would help let me know I did something wrong!

Top tier!

A lot to see in here! I liked how you went back and used all of the different assets from past jams and the large amount of content you made for the game! That said, I'd be curious how your game would play differently if things were a little more streamlined and focused for each mode of play. For example, if I'm playing a game I tend to want to keep playing it by getting right back into the action as soon as possible.  The rating notifications that pop up each time at game over and needed to be dismissed before I could see the restart button really took me out of the action each time I reached that screen—especially as there's already a link in the UI. Another example is the level editor—I think that it's a great addition to the game, but if I'm playing the game I want everything (including what's being shown on the UI) to solely focus on that. The level editor is really cool, though I'd have kept that as a totally separate mode of play reachable from a main menu or somewhere else outside of the main game loop. Thanks for making and sharing your game!

Thanks for playing and sharing your feedback! I’ll look into that camera controller bug. Keeping the camera and player states synchronized was a constant source of bugs during dev, and I think I’ve got a path forward for eliminating that class of bugs entirely, but it’ll take a few to get that update out.

Oh no! Do you remember the sequence of events that led to the player being unable to throw any bombs? There were some similar bugs that I squashed along the way, but I'm sure I missed a few, too. Thanks for playing and leaving your feedback!

This was a ton of fun. You've made a great set of upgrades and the pacing felt just right. That said, by the time I'd reached level 8, there was so much happening that it was slowing down the game pretty badly in the browser. Not sure how you'd address it in pico-8, but it might be worth digging in to figure out how because I think you've got something really special here. It's another one of my favorites from the jam so far!

Nice entry. I thought the game was well built, but I'd like to have seen more feedback when firing and more active hazards to give a bit more challenge when I'm working my way up to the boss. I thought the boss fight itself was great, though as someone else mentioned it was possible to cheese 'em by staying outside of the final area.  

Lots to like here—great visual style, fun gameplay, and music that really amped me up for my battle! Two things I noticed were that I found the SFX to be a little too repetitive after a few rounds, and I struggled to finish the final wave—by the time I got there both times I'd had too little health to stand much of a chance. Thanks for making and sharing your game!

Thanks for playing! I love to pour hours and hours into my games—they're just so much fun to make, and with each game I learn more ways to be a little faster for the next one so that I can spend time on the polish.

Such a solid entry. It took me a few to figure out how my first steps after loading the game, but after I got into it I was hooked for a few rounds. Great effects/juice throughout the game, and I really appreciate that you added toggles for the screen shader effects—they're such strong effects that they overpower the really awesome art you put together for the game. Thanks for making and sharing your game!

Your concept is strong and I really like the loading/shooting mechanic you built into the game. The different bomb types are great here as well, and I liked how easy each one was to identify based on the recolor. I'd be curious to see how your game would play differently if I was able to aim the cannon with the same keys I move the player character with—I think switching to Q/E for this was OK, but it slowed me down each time I went to load my cannon in a way that never really let me get into a groove when firing the cannon. Thanks for making and sharing your game! 

Great concept and solid execution here. The animations and art style are fantastic, and the mechanic is simple to understand yet hard to master. I love that you added gamepad support here, too, as it makes such a difference for so many games including yours. That said, I didn't realize that I could use the Start button to immediately start the next round from the upgrade screen until after I maxed out everything—it would have been great to see a hint for that on-screen. I'd been using my d-pad to shuffle the focus back over to play every time which really slowed down the pacing for me.

You've got a simple set of mechanics and a really great idea here. I loved how your tile-based raft was designed in a way that let the bombs poke holes in it without it losing its great visual identity. More "juice" like flashes, screen shakes, and audio cues would really go a long way towards taking this to the next level. 

I'd also be curious to see how your game would play differently if you had shadows representing where the bombs were falling to help telegraph to players where to head to next. With a little more heads up on where they need to go, I bet you could do all kinds of interesting things with how the bombs drop where you've got multiple bombs dropping at once or them dropping in tight, pre-defined patterns/sequences to really ramp up the urgency and give more variety to the gameplay.

Thanks for making and sharing—this is one of my favorites so far!

Really fun! The level design really stood out to me here in terms of helping me understand how the movement mechanics worked and then giving me incremental challenges that really helped me master it by the end.  I noticed that I was able to clip out of the playable area and get into an infinite fall after reaching the top though, so it might be worth looking into that or adding a respawn at the bottommost area of the level just in case it's something that's difficult to patch. Thanks for sharing your game with us!

OK, so I love this concept, but I wasn't able to get through the second section with the morse code—trying to decipher the starting/stopping point for each number was too difficult to effectively do under pressure without another visual or audible indicator. I agree with all of MOJArcade's points below, but I'd also add that having everything on-screen at once is a little overwhelming, too. I'd be curious to see how your game would play differently  if we only had one section presented to us at a time and then had the instructions for that section presented right alongside it—I think it'd make a huge difference in the accessibility of your game. It'd be great to revisit your game if you decide to make some of these tweaks.

I made it all the way to end! Level 3 gave me a little bit of trouble and I ended up waiting a little longer than I'd like before I was able to restart it—I'd be curious to see how your game would play differently if the rounds restarted sooner so that I didn't need to wait for the timer every time. Thanks for making and sharing your game.

I survived the mutant horde! Cool idea, though I didn't see the theme asset in the game? Maybe I missed it. I noticed that enemies stayed dormant when they were on the left and right edges of the screen which made it pretty simple to snipe them from afar. I'd be curious how your game would play differently if they were a little more aggressive and started chasing you when just off-screen instead of waiting until they were a bit closer. Thanks for sharing your game!

I'm so glad you got this submitted! I liked the gameplay and loved the visuals here, but I found the platforming more difficult than it should have been due to the delay in the jump. It seemed like the delay was due to the anticipation pose just before the jump, but in this case I'd have skipped it and had the player proceed right into the jump to make the controls feel more responsive. I'd definitely keep those anticipation poses in for any non-player characters though—they can really help telegraph the movement and give jumps a better feel. Thanks for making and sharing your game!