itch.io

I swear I wasn't making adjustments on level 1, but I probably was. And the camera wasn't too bad, I just got too crafty for my own good. Though where I ended up was fun, despite having to revert it.

I'll have to show my Rhythm Heaven enjoying friend the game, I was a DDR / Parappa kid but they played all the DS music games!

For many submissions for both Springs I've contributed, I have desired having a 4th likert scale for Technical Merit.

Many submissions involved a ton of work "behind the scenes." Either custom languages, engines, theories, algorithms, data structures, or compilation pipelines -- often done during the jam -- that I believe deserve their own dedicated 25% of the score. It would also mean folks who spend the 10 days on more difficult foundations still get celebrated as highly ranked in the fourth category.

However, I could see how this could be against the spirit of the jam, and totally understand if it would divert the focus from the core intentions. Just thought I'd share since it's a repeat thought for two years now.

Very good point, I updated what my partner wrote. Hopefully the manual makes the gameplay a little clearer.

thank you, that means a lot coming from you

Yet another project where I wish there was a technical rating likert scale to give you 6 out of 5 stars. Thanks for explaining! Incredibly impressive!

I demystifyed some things in my reply to technomancy. Apologies that the walkthrough tutorial levels and hints in the bottom right we're not sufficient for an enjoyable playthrough. Definitely something I'll work on for next time.

The only way to "lose" the puzzle is: 

1. End up with 2 status effects (center left) of the same parity (across from each other), soft locking you from any other status transitions.

2. Running out of little guys to interact with, and having 0 cards in your hand (top left), with a status effect, leaving you incurable.

You acquire a card in your hand when you attempt to interact with a guy who is directly weaker than your status effect. Acquiring cards in your hand is neutral. You can use cards:

1. from the top with Y, effectively storing and reusing an interaction with said little fellow.

2. from the bottom by acquiring 4 cards, bumping you back down to the limit of 3, while using the discarded card similarly to #1

#2 is supposed to be a punishment while #1 is admittedly less restricted than we would have liked. Many puzzles can be solved in shorter solution paths than designed by using multiple cards with Y at the right time. Unfortunately, we struggled to restrict #1 in a way that wasn't too frustrating, confusing, or rendered puzzles impossible.

In retrospect: I have an unhealthy aversion to text in my games. A bit more verbosity over the hints in the bottom right for the first few tutorial levels would've went a long way.

Very apt feedback, thank you!

That's awesome! what a cool framework :D

I'll have to take another look tomorrow, appreciate the explanation.

Took me a while to get guix to build, but the game ran flawlessly once I did. I really enjoyed the puzzle at the end. Some more platforming would've been nice, but the first stage had a really nice art style and vibe to it! Danke, drachi! 

Really happy to see such an ambitious idea attempted for this jam. Don't give up! 10 days is so short, and interest compounds exponentially if you stay consistent and forge ahead!

My one recommendation, have you considered using a term rewriting system to break down your procedural generation explorations into smaller, more tractable projects, that will run and can be visualized every step of the way?

It's a pretty nerdy thing to use, but there's a great video on defining games in it's Domain Specific Language.

At the very least, you may find it interesting to check out for another project.

I had to modify the requirements.txt to use hy 1.0.0 instead of 1.1.0. Also, the makefile could really use a clean directive... a couple commands failed and I had to figure out what dependency was missing instead of remaking. Other than that it ran fine on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on a 2012 Macbook Pro.

The macro command is so cool!!! I really enjoyed trying combinations and the puzzle platformer feel of the game.

I did find a couple bugs, mostly involving spamming buttons during the macro playback (hard crash on the values list), as well as using macros to no-clip out of most of the levels. Though honestly going hacker mode with the macros was more of a feature than a bug, as it doubled my replay value and enjoyment.

The concept is really creative and I really hope you continue to work on this game! :)

Any chance you're willing to livestream your emacs setup and talk through your KRF on the Lispy Gopher show tomorrow? I read the markdown, but I have never used emacs eev, and figuring out a linear path through the markdown code snippets to interact with your KRF seems a bit daunting.

edit: wow i suck at UTC... that was 2 hours ago :c

I'll see if I can get the code to run, this is really cool and I want to experience it

The compiled bin ran fine on win10 without issue. I only watched playthroughs of the old KotR RPGs, and I don't remember these minigames... but this... now this is pod racing.

Really cool demo, I am in awe at anyone who gets 3d working for a jam as short as this, especially in a lisp dialect. I just wish the track wasn't so short (I went in reverse for a minute or two so I could enjoy the snappy controls for a bit longer).

Hope to see more of this if you plan on updating it.

I had no idea love2d could be compiled for the playdate, that's awesome! All the art is super cute, and the Moby music used fits the vibe perfectly. The mouse wheel sensitivity was a bit low, so i had to button mash to speed up. Could only find one NPC besides the rabbit with the bubble over their head to interact with. I really hope I didn't miss anyone obviously needing help to get to their train ;~;

Probably my Top Aesthetic game for the jam so far!

shader and engine looks amazing, took me a second to realize my mouse position was what moved me, and while i was frustrated by the slow movement-- it also created such unease and tension that can only be described as "that golden ratio of gameplay"

game was hard until i realized that the blobs AI liked corners, and as long as i made my way to the edges of the map unharmed, i could eat up a bunch of little guys, grow exponentially, and become unstoppable... really disrupting the glob industry haha

my only complaint is the windows executable did not close gracefully on my win10 machine, always just stopped responding and had to force quit

other than that, super enjoyable, simple and expertly executed idea!

worked great on mGBA, i really liked the enemy art and the font used

really curious what your development pipeline looks like, what language did you write in and how on earth did that compile to a GBA game? really cool stuff!

for the life of me i could not win a single battle, always game-over-ed, but it was fun to explore and see all the monsters ^^

Was really enjoying my playthrough and learning how to repair vehicles, unfortunately this happened. I tried to get into a boat that needed fuel with 2 sheet metal and 10x fuel on my person.

Needless to say, this project is ambitious, yet somehow executed near impeccably in such a short amount of time. Bugs aside, the hex grid, the art, the music, the resource systems, even the modified A*, all come together for a game that feels like someone puts months into it, not just a week and a half.

Similar to Gnomic Vengeance, I look forward to playing the updated version. :)

yeaahhh i made the mistake of not testing love.js until the very end... and i had to make a call for:

1. pixel perfect CRT shader at 15fps for lower end hardware

2. reduce the render resolutions such that the shader was going to miss some details in the texel offsets

Honestly, in retrospect, i shouldve chosen a secret 3rd option--- unrealistic crt shading where the phospor details may be lost but the source pixel details will be preserved--- which wouldve just meant keeping the offset higher than the output resolution

All puzzle level logic credit goes to my Partner-- she was delightfully devilish over this weekend coming up with puzzles that had me stuck for an hour at one point.

Appreciate the feedback! :)

hmm, quells any security concerns but now piques my curiosity in regards to bending WASMs strict module rules... i wonder if something like that could allow for dynamic wasm module instantiation

if you happen to have any reading material handy, id love to take a look. but i also dont mean to take up too much of your time

thanks for the reply!

Thanks for the video, it clarified exactly what check-steps was doing, and why I didn't get position info when the map was hidden. I realize that would've spoiled half the fun of guessing the shapes I'm traversing. I was able to use your approach for a 3x3 hidden map, and it was quite entertaining. Made me feel like I was my own Conflict Driven Clause Learning algorithm!

If you do make a v3, something between totally hidden and totally shown map deductions would be nice for folks less technically inclined. Maybe some sort of minesweeper-esque system of uncovering squares and placing potential flags for cell types?

Either way, very cool! 

Yeah I often do not grasp intuition as well as others. I'll watch the video and give the labyrinth another go! Thank you for taking the time to provide a longer tutorial :)

Thanks for the thorough explanation! I'll have to give it another go later. Maybe I can fix my broken sim and make it as cool as yours! :)

Helltaker meets the magic school bus... simply awesome.

So glad someone provided the one creative in the community posts with a home, that means a lot!

My only criticism is I really wanted to see the effects of my dialog choices. Other than that, I enjoyed every minute of the experience.

Good luck with your future work on this game and your Canned Heat engine!

Live Dot Reaction: Alright another wave fighter, cool I'm a dog, awesome I can WAF, alright hit a bat... hmmm they didn't die but they bounced off t- THEY EXPLODE HELL YES

Music sounded like it was coming out of a Sega Genesis, but it was written by Toby Fox. The riff at the end was sick.

0 bugs encountered, gameplay was smooth, and I don't think I'll ever get tired of the explosions.

Y'all also seemed to work really well as a team, which I admire and aspire to.

Idk what constraints you decided to use when programming the physics from scratch--but they are good ones implemented well! Doing this in a single weekend is even more impressive!

No engine deals with solving perfectly, thanks to delta-time, and from what I've seen in GDC talks, the most graceful undesired behavior is objects under constant collision slowly pushing into each other... as opposed to source engine boxes going crazy, skyrims ragdolls shooting into space, or at worst, no-clipping out of bounds. The fact you're getting 0 no-clips at the framerate of my poor old computer in a web browser is amazing honestly.

Funny story, I wanted to make a pinball game. If you run our game, you can see a cartridge called "Balatzee" on the shelf in the top left. Similarly it will spawn balls that drop and only wall collisions are implemented. The frame rate issues with love.js and my own amateur coding of constraints with 0 research meant having the game function well in a week would be impossible. You got waaaaaay farther than I did in less time! Seriously awesome job!

yeah this is sort of my thing, but I think making that sort of gameplay satisfying either requires some very sophisticated procgen techniques, or a lot of worldbuilding work. Exploring is one of my favorite aspects of both open world games and metroidvanias, and I'd love to make a game centered around that sometime.

yeah even as I said that it sounded a bit unfair for 2 weekends... the game was just so engaging that I wanted to see out a docking bay window so badly... that plus the music I probably would've left that running on the side of my screen for a few hours, 10/10 atmosphere

I wanted to do more for both the music and graphics but I had a lot of life stuff going on during the jam's run and was only available for like half the time.

lemme clarify that was about SFX (ship thrusters etc), just to help me understand what my button presses were doing. knowing you did this music in half the time I assumed is, wow, talent

the INSERT key. seriously. it's 2025. Who has an insert key on their keyboard?

wow the im-sim (immersive simulator) of game engines... you really need a commodore 64 keyboard with the backspace, delete, and insert all lined up vertically with each other- hah! do not blame you for using (what looks to be) Logic Pro

I like TIC80 for these jams because it keeps us focused. We talked about doing this in Löve2D instead, but I'm not familiar with that yet, and I feel like the increased freedom would have helped us lose sight of trying to make an interesting _game_ in the short time we had.

precisely why i asked! while pico8 over-did the minimalism IMHO, love2d-- while minimal in terms of game engines/frameworks-- is maximalist compared to any fantasy console... and in their defense... i don't think anyone has managed to make a good neo-retro minimalist dev environment past the 80s era of the two fantasy consoles we're talking about... i just rabbit hole myself in love2d every time I use it and I end up writing a bunch of half baked libraries instead of creating art... definitely going to check tic80 out

the sfx editor is different, but as someone who is very experienced with synthesizer programming,  TIC's sfx system strikes me as offering a lot more possibilities. I could be wrong, and I'm sure someone intimately familiar with pico's system could do some amazing things with it. Would I have made TIC's sfx system differently? yes. Would I still like to embed it in a DAW plugin? yes.

I'm not a big fan of trackers; I sketched out all three tunes in a more sophisticated music-making program and then copied that over to the tracker

the wavetable thing they got going on looks cool and not too daunting, but ive also stared at bitwig / vital / serum before, so im not really the right audience to tell you if it's good for folks who've barely used a DAW before... and this essentially boils down to my previous point of... once you get past a certain level of complexity, the best you can do is give your users the ability to work outside the restrictions your console creates-- tic80 seems to do that much better than pico8

I have no experience with pico8 – the three game jams I've done with Phil are my first real game dev experiences since playing with Qbasic in high school in the early 90s.

ive been thinking a lot about love2d being a bit much, there not being a 90s+ fantasy console, visual programming, and the lost magic of visual basic a lot these days... time saving, creativity enabling, education supporting, software is my jam... there's something neat about fantasy consoles that reminds me of Racket's sub-languages for teaching programming a la their textbook

kinda why i built a lot of audio visual framing and a pseudo-tech-time-machine around our submission... this convo's given me a lot to think about

thank you again, both of you, for such thoughtful comments and donating the time it took to write it all out! as well as hosting this awesome jam again :)

Was really surprised at how balanced the later waves of enemies were-- as long as I tried to take out the weaker type (if I could remember the order of their appearance in the army)... I was able to gain enough XP to get pretty far! Dying being the good ending, winning because I was free from the curse, was unexpected and pretty cool. Not many rouge-likes think that hard about something as commonplace as dying.

Took me a second to realize I was moving until I held down the button, as well as realizing I needed to keep moving ever so slightly to deal attack damage. Other than that the gameplay was smooth. Sound effects would've kept me engaged for a few more playthroughs for sure.

Maybe as the name implies, there's some cool ideas here that make it more than just a Vampire Survivors clone. I hope you keep working on it after this jam! c:

A lot of the pictures you paint with words are honestly pretty spooky. I would've love to have seen some art of the creepy endings. The writing of the deepest path was so good I had to click through every option in the hopes I finding more.

Unfortunately I ran into a lot of "untimely demise" and "TODO" s along the branches. I almost would've been happier with a quarter of the options with one more interesting end. It was also frustrating to have to restart the game after every death, though maybe I missed the restart button somewhere.

The eyeball mouse cursor and book animations were splendid! Really great work. Would love to see this book completed!

A faithful rendition of snake, honestly plays very similar to my Nokia/Palm Pilot versions of the game. Macroquad looks really neat. Thanks for using something I haven't seen before!

My one issue with the game is the direction update seems to be done on the last keyboard input, digested at the same delta-time as the drawing. It give it that "activate button on mouse release" UI lag feel... plus if I put in a combination of presses, only the last one is recognized... which got pretty frustrating around the walls and when my snake got fairly long.

Also, kinda weird... your game requires scripts originating from the macroquad developer's github.io to be permitted in order to run. Any idea why that is?

Game runs and plays great. It gave me the same feelings as Crazy Taxi. Some sounds would've kept me more engaged, but I still enjoyed playing up to 1k in tips. 

Though... I cheated a little bit... you can reverse just as fast as you can go forwards, reversing stops on a dime, and colliding with walls at an angle allows you to slide. With all those together, I racked up essentially unlimited time to play both modes. 

I'm glad those mechanics were exploitable though, as my reaction time wasn't great with the zoom level of the game. If you continue to work on this after the jam, a GTA1/2 style zoom out with speed would be great!

Very fun game, dropped in and enjoyed it with 0 frustration-- very ufo50 levels of intuitive , thank you!

Had no issues in the latest firefox with a bunch of add-ons. Only bug was the login screen gets cut off at the default web player size.

No one was on but I planted a lambda of cabbages. Honestly really neat how far wasm stuff is coming along, despite the bugs others are reporting. Thanks for doing something so cutting edge!

The writing is honestly amazing, so much so I had to go read up on these guys https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cs%C3%B6rg%C5%91sapka

Game ran really smooth, I'll have to check out guile/hoot sometime. And I did thoroughly enjoy smiting all the squares. I didn't seem to take any damage though, and if I held 3 WASD buttons while pressing right shift, I would start gliding in a single direction. Maybe a secret sprint mechanic?

Either way, a great start to a top-down shmup with a great story. If you plan on doing jams in the future, consider continuing to bring this story to life, or possibly even do a text adventure.

thanks, means a lot coming from you!

Also, I was able to use your bleeding-edge love.js builder on codeberg as opposed to the usual gitlab template. I had some issues with luarocks, having to manually install the latest version and softlink the path, as well as modifying the build script to use some slightly renamed require paths / function names. Other than that it worked like a charm.

Appreciated btw, because my game really needed that performance increase from love 11.5 and lua 5.4 to run via wasm on my old 2012 macbook pro at 30fps. :>

glad it worked too! admittedly I spent way too much time on the side features, but I was exploring a concept beyond the jam a bit too much ^^

There is more to the game than just making money, but we didn’t get enough time to add enough hints to push you in the right direction. Hopefully that can be added after the jam.

I'll have to pick it up tomorrow and try to find it.

I also am not much of a fan of pico8, for a few different reasons, but the main one is that the font gives me a headache! The other big advantages of tic80 are that you can use an external editor, and that it supports Fennel instead of just Lua. The developer is also really accommodating and helpful to people who want to help contribute.

Ah I assumed there was a way to finagle pico8 to hook in fennel during the cart load, that would be unfortunate if tic80 didn't sound like a perfect alternative. Free is kinda insane in comparison but I'll take it.

Thanks for the detailed responses!

So fun that I nearly forgot about all my frustration as I played through it... and the easter egg at the end (I won't spoil) made me actually laugh out loud.

Your submissions are always impressive, but this one takes the cake. Took me until the end to realize what I was building.

My major gripe is the difficulty upon entry. I chose the wrong axis to move everything by, and it turned what was probably an easy level into one where all my timings were off by a lot. I was mad because I liked the cool beat I made, but then I had to ruin it to get within the proper timings. For some reason, the first level also forced me to get near 100% centered on all 4 dots before it would advance me forward. Also took me longer than I'd like to admit, that I needed to click then drag, instead of holding down the mouse button and immediately dragging.

However as soon as I adjusted my behavior into what the game expected, I was taken on a pleasant, well thought out journey, where I was delighted by what *I* made at the end. Masterfully designed and evoked a lot out of me for a work of art made in 10 days. The ending reminded me a lot of playing Parappa as a kid. Thank you!

Really snappy controls and nice graphics, though jeez, I am not a good gamer please give me a couple of health points!

Unfortunately, it took me 3 tries to run this game.

Idk why Windows 10 gave me so many issues, but I thought I'd let you know (and anyone else wanting to properly rate this game)... oh do I miss the days of Java Servlets...

1. Windows 10, latest consumer JRE from oracle, apparently out of date?

2. Windows 10, latest developer JDK, runs... but uh, the frame draws are flickering and some sprites just won't show.

3. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (can't upgrade for GPU reasons)-- runs just fine with the latest openjdk JRE from apt... which is funny because so many things are not up to date.

I recruited my 1300 chess.com (  not LiChess ;)  ) friend to help me with puzzles 10-12. She wishes there was a grid system, because "A takes B" was ambiguous at times.

I wished I didn't have to double click, until the last puzzle, where I was greeted with the first two white piece puzzle! That mechanic has so much promise, but I would probably tear my hair out trying to design a level with interesting ways of blocking myself from winning, moreso than I did playing the last few levels. 
The walls+knight and walls+diagonal-moves mechanics were really cool too!

I must say, a master-class in picking a simple idea, thinking it out before coding, and implementing the core mechanic, with ample time to polish the UX and puzzles before the deadline. I really need to get better at that. I'll keep your game in mind for the next jam.

A lot of subversive twists, though I would've liked to see one of my decisions impact the ending a bit more.

Really happy to see more content today! I checked out some of the submissions quickly yesterday after I finished and was delighted to see the apology replaced with some quality gags. Hope we get a sequel next jam.

Took me a while to figure out the controls and how to dock, despite the hints. Sold a bunch of porcelain back and forth between the close gray planets so I could upgrade everything. I wish there was more focus on exploration over trading goods, but that's just a preference.

The art style and music are awesome, and kept me engaged despite my frustration with learning how to fly. The gameplay is surprisingly complex yet cohesive for such a short jam.

My only gripe is the automatic zooming out to far away targets and lack of audio-visual changes. I gave up on manual flying when holding X felt much more responsive, even with the upgraded engine.

If you do have the time, I'd love to hear both of y'all's thoughts on tic80 vs pico8 for development. I've only used pico8 and wasn't much of a fan. tic80 seems like it could make progress for a short jam a more rewarding experience. Maybe something to try next time.