itch.io

Nice job finishing your first game! My first real game was in a game jam too and it felt so great that it encouraged me to keep learning to make even cooler games. I hope you do another game jam and shoot even higher next time!

Sadly I'm not smart enough to save my hot cow gf. I liked the juice you added which made it really engaging (the sounds, the text effects). I think it would be interesting if there was more questions than population of things.

Also while it was obvious I think a basic "calibration" question could have helped as well - e.g. "how many sides does a triangle have" and have it slowly count down from 10. Then you just throw that result away and bam - they know how the game works and they don't waste time getting a question wrong trying to understand the interface.

Really enjoyed the atmosphere of the game. It reminded me a lot the conceit Outer Wilds - down to the imminent spacey demise and also the "snapshot effect" when rewinding after you die.

It was a little hard to map the playing cards to abilities and I wasn't sure why they were playing cards to begin with. At one point I got a pair or a straight or something and they collapsed into XP - wasn't sure what that got me. Maybe that has something to do with the leaderboard? The abilities themselves were fine though, I got lucky on my second play through and was able to fly through the air quickly to the 2nd frog.

The leaderboard idea makes this really viable as a game to come back to - I love the idea of telling a friend "yeah, I got the world record in Poke All Toads". 

Also! Loved the music. It made me feel really tenser and buy into the idea a meteor was about to hit the earth.

THE LORE.

Opening cinematic was great, excellent world building. Made me think of the movie "In Time".

Unfortunately the gameplay wasn't well explained and the countdown made it much harder to play since the tutorial lady was only half way through explaining before I ran out of time.

Awesome use of your own voice for the characters btw - I really love when people do that.

I'm impressed you have so many levels! Seems like they are randomly generated which does make the difficulty sometimes swing up and down - but it's very relaxing and chill so that's not a huge deal.

The art was nice and the music was relaxing.

I do feel like the "counting down" aspect was a little shoe horned in - in fact I think the game would probably be better without it as it did add a little stress whereas no limit on rotates would encourage more experimentation. But still a good game that I could see someone spend a lot of time on.

The art was great. The countdown was also really funny and sold the suspense as I waited for my definitely aerodynamic and not at all slapped together rocket to take off.

I did find it struggle to get to the later stages as it seemed a bit grindy to get the money to get anything substantial. But I did enjoy the art.

Very cool that you wrote this in something that could compile down to run on the atari. If you ever put it up in a form where it could be flashed to an authentic cartridge let me know - my brother has a collection and would love to have something kooky like this.

As for the game it self pretty fun! I got a little tilted trying to get them all so my count will unfortunately have a bad sleep tonight.

Awesome! Happy to hear you're going to keep working on it. I look forward to watching it progress :)

> Remember you can bounce the opposite way you jumped and also you can still perfect land after one bounce

Ooo I did not realize that. When I return to this I'll be sure to try it out

Simple, but that means it was real quick to pick up. I think it gets a little overwhelming a little too fast - it would be better if it scaled up more smoothly. Also you should have the time count down faster if you shoot but miss - the optimal strategy is to just spam click which doesn't feel very skillful.

Add a few upgrades and variety to enemies and it could be really engaging.

Nice twist on the theme! A literal interpretation of the words.

I wish it was quicker to get back into the game play after losing. I like the sound effect on the menu when you enter the game, but having a faster "restart after death" would have made it easier to keep playing. The animation of the bricks flying off the tower was also a little distracting. 

I really like the art! Especially of the count.

I'm not sure dashing ever really made sense to use since I more often thank not flew out of control straight into a stake.

I assume the aspect ratio is so it works on mobile? If it does work on mobile (I'm playing on a desktop), hats off to you as that's really cool and accessible. But if the screen was wider I think it would be easier to use the horizontal dash since there would have been more leeway.

Like watching the movie itself, haha

Score: 548.

I liked the music and the vibe! Creative use of the different file names you could come across.

I do wish there was more gameplay though - I was happy when it gave me a minigame to play (choose numbers in order) but I wish there was more of that. It also didn't seem like there was a way to affect the time counting down. It also could have been cool if there were ways to have multiple files downloading at once so you could feel like you were more in control rather than just waiting for files to download. 

This took a longer than I'd like to learn the controls but I really enjoyed the difficulty of this - it's really hard! Also really gives me "Jump King" vibes. 

For anyone else confused: you hold down space to charge your jump. But you hurt yourself unless you land perfectly. To land perfectly you tap left and right arrow keys JUST as you land.

The art is honestly perfect for the game. I love that silly little goblin face. I'm not sure why I'm a rat and why I'm trying to get to the goblin king - but I assume those were my coins and I want them back.

I audibly went "You $#&%" when on the gap level I walked off the edge and hit the pointy thing. It was hilarious. Definitely going to come back and try to beat this one later.

For anyone else confused: you hold down space to charge your jump. But you hurt yourself unless you land perfectly. To land perfectly you tap left and right arrow keys JUST as you land. Then when you get to what looks like the 2nd level it's actually the place where you allocate coins to health/jumps. You press C to deposit money to whichever one you want.

Wow I liked this game a lot! The movement took some getting used to, but I always enjoy a 2d platformer.

The AI was quite good! I even briefly wondered if it was human players since they played so well. I thought this is a great use of the "health is counting down on a timer" mechanic - fighting with your friends like two monkeys in a phonebooth lends itself really well to fighting for a limited resource.

I liked the coins and the enemies, but they didn't respawn after the first round! It would have kept the gameplay fresh. I assume that's a bug. More NPC enemy variety would have made it more fun. I unfortunately didn't get a chance to play test with another human - also not sure how well it would work on my keyboard since multi keyboard use is limited by the key rollover which is usually quite low. But I love the concept and could see this being a fun couch game to play with a controller with friends.

I survived 326 seconds. Was hoping to beat your score, alas I couldn't quite hack it.

The core gameplay loop is solid enough, though I was a little confused by "duration" vs "timer". I eventually realised the timer is acting as a sort of currency since it was ticking up? I'm still maybe a little confused about the relation ship of the timer to the rest of the game.

I do think it could be better demonstrated to the player how differentiated the units are. It seemed like some of them could shoot further vs have more health vs "tick" their damage at different rates. But that may have been vibes that aren't real - I assume there's a difference since they cost different amounts.

I think it also would have been fun if you utilised the water in the middle - there's boats but they just go on the roads. It would have been interesting to limit those to just water or air units because there's a bit of strategy on making sure you can afford those units to keep that lane safe vs the others.

I survived 326 seconds. Was hoping to beat your score, alas I couldn't quite hack it.

The core gameplay loop is solid enough, though I was a little confused by "duration" vs "timer". I eventually realised the timer is acting as a sort of currency since it was ticking up? I'm still maybe a little confused about the relation ship of the timer to the rest of the game.

I do think it could be better demonstrated to the player how differentiated the units are. It seemed like some of them could shoot further vs have more health vs "tick" their damage at different rates. But that may have been vibes that aren't real - I assume there's a difference since they cost different amounts.

I think it also would have been fun if you utilised the water in the middle - there's boats but they just go on the roads. It would have been interesting to limit those to just water or air units because there's a bit of strategy on making sure you can afford those units to keep that lane safe vs the others.

Sorry you had so much time restarting the levels while playing in the browser! For others annoyed by this, know that you can rebind the buttons in the menu to anything else.

For our next jam we'll definitely have to have some better defaults for our Web build.

Love the input controls, especially how right out of the gate the menu feels almost didgetic - it's really cool how you just have the menu options floating in space as something you shoot/click.

I had some issues when I stood on the fragged bits of the enemies - if they were spinning they caused me to spin, a little annoying.

From Boat level onwards it gets quite hard! Especially the Matrix (the platforming might be asking a bit much for first person perspective). I liked the difficulty though as someone who's quite versed in FPS it felt difficult despite the AI not being the smartest.

Tip for those on the Clown Car: ignore the back left door. Shoot a few times in the hallway to alert them then pick them off. Clear the room, then back right room, then disarm.

There is a level restart! There's a button in the pause menu. You can also restart with Ctrl+R (which is rebindable, also in the pause menu).

Enjoyed this game! It didn't outstay its welcome (though it did get a bit monotonous, I was always looking forward to what came next). It did feel like some of the attacks I landed should have actually hit, but if anything that's just a funny reversal of the classic feeling "how did that hit me!?" when I've played Souls-likes.

Really liked the "feel" of the boss. It felt like I was controlling this big, unwieldy thing. 

Freezing updates to this page as the jam will end in 10 minutes.