itch.io

Thanks! We worked pretty hard to make the whole I’ve physics thing work. I know I was a little worried at the start, but once we figured out the dash breaking thing it really started coming together.

And you’re totally right about the no input dash thing. I actually noticed it fairly early on, truth be told the only reason it doesn’t work the way you describe is because I couldn’t figure out how to code it in. It’s something I want to fit in the big post-jam cleanup update, but it’ll likely require refactoring all of the dash code and therefore a lot of tinkering to make it feel the same. It’ll be worth it in the end, but it was beyond the scope of the jam for something that was ultimately very easily played around, ya know?

EDIT: So, your comment inspired me to go back into the code, and I managed to fix the dash issue while keeping the speed of the dash the same. Unfortunately I can’t upload the build this very instant because of the jam lockout, but just know that as soon as the voting period ends the new build will have the dash work based on the direction the character is pointing (and therefore not have the no speed dash issue). The solution Godot has built-in actually made the fix really easy and meant that I didn’t need to change anything else in order to keep all the numbers the same. It really shows how much I’ve learned over the course of this jam that this issue that was causing me much pain and grief back when I started was a 10 minute fix now, it’s both encouraging and annoying at the same time.

For real. I only found out about autoloading scripts to use them as global variables (singletons? Something like that) after the jam ended, so the code for my game as it exists now is a bunch of spaghetti of nodes passing variables to each other back and fourth like the world’s most confusing game of telephone. I was able to keep track of it ok with only a couple of objects on screen at any given moment, but for a game any larger in scope it would’ve absolutely murdered me lol

He’s just a little guy

The sense of style here was fantastic. Some of the minigames could use a little polish (looking at you hide and seek), but the some of the like the racing felt really good.

I love the little lizard guy, so much character and personality!

I highly reccomend you put a mini-tutorial in the description of your itch.io game page, as of right now it’s entirely unclear how any aspect of the game works and for a game with experiemental mechanics it hurts the gameplay experience quite a bit. I love card games so I want to enjoy this game, but right now it just feels like pressing buttons.

It’s pretty darn impressive that you managed to build something like this within the alloted time. It’s amazing how powerful Godot is.

I like the central mechanic, but the movement was a bit difficult to control and the masks were a bit buggy. There’s a lot of potential here, but it’s a bit of a struggle as is.

Top 3 games I’ve played this jam for sure (and I’ve played like 50 at this point lol). It feels less like a gamejam game and more like a fun puzzle platform which was made, finished, and then released because it’s what the author wanted to make. I’m extremely impressed.

The jumping felt a bit jank (aka not being able to jump on slopes or the way you couldn’t jump if up against a brick), but I like the mechanics and there’s a really fun puzzle platformer in here somewhere.

The enemy abilities didn’t seem to work for me, and the gameplay loop got repetetive a bit quickly beecause there weren’t really many interesting decisions. Still, I respect it as a proof of concept and it can definitely be built on into something.

Don’t worry, you don’t have a skill issue. We may have ever so slightly overtuned the boss, our bad! The upcoming Game of the Century Edition update will be more fair in the later phases. Still, I’m glad you were able to have a good time with it in its current state.

Yea, those rockets will mess you up if you let them get across the screen lol

That makes sense. We didn’t do a very good job communicating the mechanics, which can make the first few minutes before you figure everything out a little bit frustrating. As part of our post-jam reflection my co-dev and I have gone back and fourth on how we could’ve included a more natural tutorial, and it’s been a tricky problem. Next time we do a jam I definitely want to make sure a clear tutorial is a priority, since I think it makes the gameplay experience far more enjoyable. Game dev is actually kinda hard, who’da thunk it?

Yea, I think we may have made it a bit too hard. The last phase especially is going to be a little more fair in the post-jam build, but I’m glad you managed to enjoy it despite the balance issues!

I’m glad you had such a good time with it! I know I was a little nervous at the start about trying to make a “slick” bullet hell because I wasn’t sure how slippery movement could be made satisfying in a game about precise dodging, but to toot my own horn a bit I think we pulled it off at least a little bit.

It really is unfair, thank you for doing your part in fighting this toadtalitarian menace!

The modularity would’ve been a huge plus, I found out how important that is later in the dev cycle when I ended up with a bajillion functions shooting all over the place because I hadn’t thought of trying to compress things. Thankfully for us, computers are fast and so in a lightweight engine like Godot you can really get away with a lot of stuff. In the hustle and bustle of modern computing it can be easy to remember that even with a fairly regeular cpu like mine I’ve still got 12 threads performing over 4 billion calculations every second, that’s a lot of math.

Also, you were totally right about the Area2D vs Body2D nodes. The cattails were the third thing I made for my game (right after the walls and the player character), so at that point I didn’t really understand the difference between the two in any meaninful capacity and I was still struggling to wrap my head around the collision system. By that point I had a hammer in the form of my ability to get collision calculations to work, so those cattails were looking suspiciously nail-like. Even later on I couldn’t figure out how to fix it because part of how I got the cattails to work to begin with was by them sending a signal to the main game node, and I didn’t know about object.connect(“signal”,local_function). In hindsight it should’ve been obvious that such a function existed, but I didn’t really have a feel for the way information flowed between nodes so I didn’t think of it. Yesterday I went back in and finally made the cattails work the way they always should’ve (which also cut out almost a dozen lines of code only to add like 4), and now it’s just a really good example of how much I’ve learned through this whole thing (like you’re chessboard example!).

By every combination, what kind of depth are you using here? Just simple “one move white one move black” or what? 600-1k Elo isn’t half bad for a random chess engine whipped up in a week! It even fits in with your modular things since I’m sure you could pump that up another couple hundred elo with some more tuning.

I’m so happy to hear that! The movement was a huge priority for us to get right, since the rest of the game lives and dies off it. For better or worse, we definitely made it a bit on the harder side, but we’re going to fix that and it seems like people are having fun anyways!

I love water striders too! I remember seeing them zip abount on the creek at my grandparents’ cabin and being facinated by how fast they were and how they could just sit on the water’s surface, it’s a shame they don’t get as much representation as they aught to.

I’m glad you had a good time with it! And don’t worry, common consensus (as well as the opinion on my co-dev before we even launched the game) seems to be that we made the last stage a bit too difficult, which is one of the things we’re addressing in the (probably) upcoming Game of The Century Edition. Aside from any hard mode we may or may not include, I feel like by default most people should be able to beat it with some doing, and right now it’s just too easy for bad raindrop rng to kill you in that last phase.

I don’t think it’s a skill issue on your part, I think we made the game a little bit too hard. The missiles will mess you up if you don’t destroy them before they reach the other side of the screen, and while this is by design (another thing for people to juggle and another way to get the player to move around), I think we may have taken it a smidge too far. I’m still glad you enjoyed it though, and for what it’s worth the more polished version we’re releasing once the game jam ends will be a little more fair.

That’s probably the highest complement we could receive! As for a no-hit run, we plan on releasing a more polished build once the Jam lockout is over that should make the last phase feel significantly less rng, so depending on how you take it that’s either a reason to stay tuned or a reason to beat it now before it gets easier lol.

That last phase is rough. We actually nerfed the blood rain spawning a little bit in our internal dev version after the jam submissions closed, and I think it makes the game feel less punishing. I’m super happy that the attacks were easy to understand, I know I was worried that since we didn’t have a tutorial the entire thing would be too difficult to grasp all at once.

I totally get it, the last two or so hours of our dev time was spent arguing over difficulty lol. It’s hard because you don’t want to make it too hard for people to enjoy, but you also don’t want it to be too easy to the point where it’s not fun anymore. Normally I would assume this is solved with beta tests, but that isn’t really an option with this limited a timeframe

It’s really interesting to see you reverse engineer in some cruel sense, since because I have a good deal of chess experience and almost no gamedev experience my first thought when seeing the raycast thing is “Why on earth are we not using some expanded/customized version of an FEN to keep track of what’s where? Using raycasts for this is like taking your Bugatti into a supermarket to use as a shopping cart!” Don’t get me wrong, my code is a disaster so I’m in no place to judge, but trying to use physical objects moving to keep track of what is ultimately non-analogue data seems like a solution to beautiful to be true, like trying to create an oil painting every time someone at your bbq joint needs a moist towelette.

In the spirit of not sounding like I’m just clowning on your, let me share one of my own development gems: I couldn’t figure out how to properly get Area2D nodes to work in Godot, so I decided I would just make my collectables rigidbodie2Ds and it’d be fine. Turns out it wasn’t entirely fine, since in a game where rigidbodies bounce off each other trying to “collect” a rigidbody without bouncing off of it isn’t default behavior (wow, so crazy!). My solution? free() the collectable as soon as it detects a collision but before it starts move_and_collide() proper, hoping and praying that it disappears before the player character detects it. Somehow this strategy has managed to work, although if I told you I understood why I’d be lying.

With that out of the way, I’d be pretty curious to know how your evaluate_position() function worked. Assuming you’re not going the ML direction of Lc0, Stockfish, and Alpha0 (if you are I’m super jelly of all the compute you have lying around), are you using a similar “these squares are worth more” framework but set by hand? Or are you trying to brute force finding move combinations that lead to positive material exchanges? I’d try the brute force version myself, but for some reason itch is saying that it cannot be found every time I try to start it.

No en passant literally unplayable 0/10

In all seriousness, it has a lot of personality and the pieces are satisfying to move. I would comment on the ai being too easy, but you already addressed that in your dev log post and I’ve spent way too much time playing chess so I don’t get to complain.

a simple but effective idea (Inscryption but with 3 cup shuffle) executed incredibly well. The only thing I’ll say is that I think the game is a little bit easy as it stands, and that the Devil should cheat a little bit more. Something along the lines of cups that teleport with an effect rather than moving, cups that add or remove a ball mid-game, or other random nonsense meant to confuse the player and make it less possible to beat the game with pure 3 cup skill.

Still an incredibly strong showing for a game jam game, I’m very impressed.

Thanks! That last phase is still tough even for me.

Thank you so much! What do you mean by variation in the bullets? Currently there’s the rain, missiles (which explode into projectiles on impacting a wall), and a tadpole which bounces around the screen. Do you mean more attacks, or more variety in the way current attacks work?

I concur.

So, fun fact that we didn’t communicate very well because we didn’t have time to write a propper tutorial: You don’t need any cattails to finish off the frog. All you need is to ram him with a charged dash and that’ll be enough.

I’m glad you thought the difficulty was good, that’s probably the thing we went back and fourth on the most. The rockets were me trying to squeeze bumper car mechanics into the game somehow becaues I felt like the controls suited it, and thankfully for everybody invovled my co-dev shot down my initial (and far worse) idea for how to impliment them. That’s the beauty of working with someone else, you have someone to tell you when your stupid ideas are stupid.

While our dev time may have been limited (and some features may have needed to be cut), one of our main priorities is to make the finaly two phases feel like a real bullet hell boss fight, and I’m glad that that vision came across.

Happy to hear it! Fun and slickness were the primary objectives

Thanks for the kind words! Good to know that your childhood was only saved by the fact that I hadn’t started game dev yet, future generations won’t be as lucky

It’s a known fact that moustaches are the most evil of facial hair, I’m glad we we able to communicate this incredibly consequencial reality.

Thanks! The difficulty scaling had a lot of thought put into it, and while it’s still rough around the edges I think we ended up in a pretty good place.

That’s so good to hear! Lack of SFX was 100% a poor time management thing, I’ve already started working on them and I’ll release and updated version once the voting stage of the jam is over. And totally, things can get hectic quick especially if you don’t manage to get to all the missiles.

Fun racing game with goofy but satisfying controls and a fittingly silly concept. My favorite part is that, once you get enough armor and damage upgrades, turning around and racing the track backwards to destroy the competition becomes a completely legitimate strategy. Destroying all the other racing by driving the wrong way into just a leisurely stroll around the track to easy 1st, absolute cinema.

We spent quite a while on the movement, I’m happy to hear it payed off!

Nobody ever expects the water bug, my co-dev hadn’t even heard of them before (dang city slickers).

Adorable, wholesome, and fun. Just a lovely experience with just the right amount of difficulty.