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That's good to hear!

The lack of precision controls for the tasks on the boat is something we planned from the start. For the steering it's intended to be something you hop on and off as you go, adjusting to the situation in the moment. For the cannon aiming the indicator does a lot of heavy lifting, it's a case of learning how much to lead your shots!

Imagine how much less piratey it'd feel if the boat controlled like a go-kart and the cannons were hitscan, bleh!

I'm glad the swashbuckling vibe came across, we were hoping the game would feel like a frantic battle to keep the ship alive :D
 

Thank you so much! I'm glad everything fit together for you!

Thanks! It's always a great feeling when you line up shots to hit with the first tier of cannon. Makes you feel like a real pro ;D

Thank you! 

The first cannon level is somewhat unweildy, but can be upgraded with the resources that drop. By the time you get to the third upgrade the fire speed and aiming is much easier!

I love the vibes for this entry! The audio and the art work really well together, I enjoyed picking up the phone a good 8 or so times before realising I should probably be doing something else :D

The way the ground blends into the background in particular is a good effect. Not sure why that in particular stands out to me so much, but I was focusing on it the whole time I walked back and forth.

This is some great praise! Thank you for the detailed feedback!

When we were brainstorming at the start of the jam we wanted to hit a sorta busy overcooked styled frantic feeling, which it sounds like we managed to do, very happy to hear that :D

For the steering & healing camera interactions I quite like the increased tension with the forced low-visibility camera. If a player is confident they are safe they can bunker down and heal a lot. Otherwise, it's a game of switching in and out of the mode to check for any needed readjustments. If a player had full control over the camera that tension would evaporate.

The ship steering bits are totally fair. We needed to put in some indicator of what heading the ship will end up at. It's doable to pick up a feel for that without one but it's not something that should be expected of players, especially in a jam setting!

The cultist population is a funny topic. We have some rudimentary AI in place so they avoid (mostly) smashing into the rocks while away from the player, but nothing in place to make them aware of other cultists. This leads to a kind of self-regulating population where the more boats are around, the more collisions will occur. We judged it felt good enough for the rapidly approaching deadline, unfortunately how these things go.

We did get into last years video as a bit of b-roll so if we could upgrade to an honourable mention that'd be amazing! The team really put their all into it this year!

This is so cute! It reminds me of a game I released in the past involving automating monkeys to do tasks :3

The meeblets must be protected as they wash over the continent with their ever consuming hunger for more raw resources!

My only issue is that I couldn't tell why some tasks wouldn't repeat consistently. Sometimes stockpiles of items would have a meeblet go back and forth for a bit, but then they'd stop at some point and I'd not notice. I then couldn't left click the item again as it already had a meeblet doing it, but nobody would show up till I cancelled and re-submitted the order.

Had a great time with the game either way, love me some automation gameplay!

Thank you!

We had some issues with the camera for longer range shots. Ended up in what I hope is a fine enough place, but your view still gets obstructed if you go for super long range. It takes some real skill to sink shots across the whirlpool ;D

Thank you so much!

We have a downloadable version that will run (and look) better as it has a lot more optimization flags enabled. It unfortuantely took too long to build a more optimized web version, even with the extension.

We tried to get as polished as we can in the time we had so that's a great compliment!

You know it ;D

One of my favourite games!

That's fair. It was our first time trying a web build too! Thankfully for us it seemed the main difference was shadow distance was hugely reduced compared to the download.

Thank you! Glad you had a good time.

Thank you! We had plans for a couple extra features like a research bench you had to interact with similar to the sails to get the cannon upgrades, but had to cut them for time. Glad there was still enough in there to keep it interesting!

Thank you! Yeah the boat has been a common feedback point, you're totally right. I'm happy you still had a good time with the game otherwise!

We threw together the thumbnail a little last minute. It turned out great, but as you say the text can be hard to read.

Sea of Thieves is an interesting comparison. We didn't have it in mind when brainstorming, but in hindsight I totally see how it's similar.

Thank you so much!

I wasn't able to beat the pheonix but all the fights up till that point were super satisfying to figure out.

Oh no, that's such a shame. Such is the way with this sort of thing, can get a bit risky with last minute changes.

We added some audio to the end mode and accidentially broke it to play every time you started the game. Had to patch it up super fast before submission.

Good luck with the post jam update!

This is great! Took me two tries to get the laces to stick, once I figured out the pins that made things much easier. Also realising the finger pinch was a toggle... The controls made a strange amount of sense once I was done with my vague half-plat half-coil knot :D

Great concept, great execution!

I was drawn in by the icon style and the game did not disappoint! I love the vibe you built up.

The car felt a bit too out of control for my tastes, but I got used to it after a fair bit of serving around the city.

I think a version with the car shown on the minimap to help with navigating around the map would make delivering robbers a little easier as I got lost very easily with the static map alone.

Either way, great submission!

Art style is cute and the swinging mechanics scratch the difficult-to-control platformer itch.

I feel like there was a bit of a difficulty spike with the level going to the left and then all the way around back to the right. Even figuring out I could fly infinitely without a surface with some precise tongue grabbing wasn't enough to get a win.

I wish the best for my snake and its abnormally strong tongue grip!

I had a fun time ambling around and murdering everything I came across. I got lost almost immediately, but I feel like that was at least somewhat intended :D

There was a point where the game change to have a step limit at the top. I'm not sure how I triggered it, or what I was supposed to do when it showed up. I immediately ran down the steps and lost without being able to interact with anything.

If the dice for movement was rolled without needing to click through a popup I think the experience would be much nicer to play. The dice roll so fast I'm not sure there's any benefit to clicking them one at a time manually over using the 'stop all' buttons.

Interesting take on the concept. It took me a little while to realise that I had to drop people on the trolley itself and not on the lever off to the side.

Keeping timing with the trolley as it rotated was challenging and fun. I'd be interested in seeing a version of this with more mechanics around the type of object you drop and how it could impact the environment or the trolly.

I also had some problems with freezing as you say might happen in the description. Is this caused by spawning a lot of people up front into an object pool? Or some other problem?

I'm so sad that I couldn't find the kitty after wandering around and checking everywhere I thought it might be. I managed to get all three endings otherwise!

Had a good time with it overall. I think I'd have liked to see some more gimmicks like the infinite hallway for the other endings, but otherwise exploring was fun with all the internal thought text to read.

Uhm, I was playing on Windows 11 firefox in browser. I had just gone into the settings and disabled the timer and started a new run. Unsure what else I did specifically past that. Not a big deal though, a quick refresh and had no problems.

Good to hear you enjoyed it!

The multitasking was something we set our sights on really soon after we had the whirlpool idea, and I'm super happy with how it came out in the final game.

We'll have to nerf any future boat controllers we make as we may have tuned it a tensy bit too unweildy ;D

Nice execution on the blocking yourself time loop concept!

I wasn't expecting to go back to the same route as before, but that was a great idea as it led to giving way to myself in large zipper merge styled jams.

Great fun all around, and if you want to make life even harder for yourself I figured out you can hold W and left click to move even faster ;D

Once I went to the settings and disabled the timer the game was very chill and fun to play. It reminds me a lot of an old game I used to play that required drawing roads between buildings and meeting throughput requirements.

Were the drawn pathways supposed to not be allowed to cross? I'm not sure if something went wrong or what, but I was allowed to cross them all I wanted and could otherwise still progress to new circles. I played without taking advantage of it (for the most part).

I also hit an issue with the tutorial text getting stuck on the screen which made it difficult to see orbs in the top/center area.

I had a good time for a while, the loop of levelling up items while keeping an eye on the inventory for upgrades was quite satisfying.

I found it wasn't all that interesting to look at the loop after 20 or so rotations so missed what lead to my eventual death. Maybe adding stat bars near where the player will be most active (the inventory) would help track those things?

Fun game, the truck feels really good to control. I liked taking advantage of the change in physics with helium and navigating multiple trucks through the enclosed pipes at the same time.

I feel the main loop gimmick was a bit lackluster due to the unpredictability of when a replay would happen. Maybe it'd be better to sync and start every trip whenever any package is picked up? Would somewhat break the idea that this is a constant delivery stream though.

Could also use some arrows to guide the player to locations to pick up / drop off packages. I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to get the game to start because I didn't realise there were other packages that could be delivered...

Ah I see, that could be interesting. I did notice with the slipping on water and such that I had to be very careful.

It's difficult to fix the mistake with such a short time limit. I found myself messing up in the last 2 seconds or so and trying to fix it the next life but running out of time before meaningfully helping. Not sure how that could be helped without some way to extend the time loop itself. 

Maybe progressing in some other way would extend the loop a bit and allow you to go back and fix previous mistakes with the new breathing room?

Glad you liked it!

In hindsight we should have toned things down a bit before the cuttoff. I think our perspective on the difficulty was skewed by our familiarity after playing throughout development.

For example, it makes a big difference if you know the ship can be healed via interacting with the sails at the back. Something we'd have loved to tutorialise but ran out of time for unfortunately.

Very chill. I liked trying to guess what the shape would bee ahead of time. I wouldn't have minded something like a fr(b)ee draw mode where we could create a loop and put a pin somewhere to draw our own pictures.

I agree that the camera angle made it a touch difficult to judge distances, but I felt like that kept me on my toes.

This is quite the unique take on the previous-selves loop concept. I love how frantic it gets, especially on hard mode.

I love the cat, multiple runs were lost solely to thinking I could get a quick pet in before getting on with that life :D

My one complaint is that the playback doesn't seem to match too well sometimes. I'll pick up a barrel and quickly throw it, but when watching that ghost in the playback they'll miss the throw trigger and the barrel will not be extinguished.

I enjoyed the simpler mechanics a lot, it's nice to go back to pokemon ranger styled mechanics after so much time. I couldn't figure out how to win on the more complicated creatures however, even after trying a few different pearl upgrades.

The art is very cute, love the more chibby characters and the snake :3

Great concept and amazing art!

My ability to keep all the keys in mind long enough to beat the levels is lacking. Best of luck to those with better co-ordination than I.

I really like this concept, the moment I understood the concept I was so down for the long haul. However, I keep being held up by what looks life softlocks?

• One happened when an AI landed on a 'go back' square which pointed into a 'go forward' square.
• Another happened when an AI landed on the '?' space.

I couldn't see any obvious prompt or UI to interact with, and I otherwise couldn't do anything or progress the game. If I'm missing something let me know and I'll come back and play again!

It looks like you've not packaged your build properly, I get an error about missing unity .dll files when trying to play. 

You should check the build folder that the .exe is in and include everything with the download next time!

I had a good time wandering around and demolishing the enemies. The rooms with a lot going on got the heart rate raised!

Took me a while to realise I could dash, not too sure if it would have helped or hindered me to use it before that point. I feel like I was missing another control. I got to a level with two enemies behind walls that I couldn't get inside.

I always love to play maze games. Some interesting twists here. I would say the controls felt a bit on the floaty side but not in a way that obstructed the game.

I was trying to not expect anything and yet I was still surprised. Great game!