itch.io

yeah, i agree it would be difficult to do the balancing definitely. i think sometimes i would get hands that were just completely hopeless -- no rerolls open, and then 4 blues that had no wildcards and no hope of adding up to the value. i think maybe what would help is just doing like a sum of what the random draw is, and then adding randomly to one card enough points to make it to within the margin of error of the cauldron request maybe? so not being exact, but at least being closer than a guaranteed 4 blue into a 15 request. 

by least possible discontent, do you mean like during the addition, having the game calculate what the best possible score would have been, and then normalizing the player's score (or at least telling them what the best score would be) based on that? yeah i definitely think that would be valuable! esp in the early rounds. imo it'd be nice, if you don't want to balance the ingredient draw, then to scale the player's score based on the best possible score. i'm not sure how that would work with the rerolling though -- is it that a reroll is always randomly fixed in the "seed" at the beginning of the round?

Thanks for playing! Yeah, it would def be nice to add a zoom function -- that's a good idea that it essentially just expands the map. I had to think about how small to allow it to get -- you were actually just one off! The last size decrease was on level 20 haha. But thanks for sticking with it! 

whoever said no substitutions was lying out of their ass!!!!!

You can only cook one at a time; so if you pick it up while it's cooking, the one you're holding starts deteriorating and the one on the stove will cook. So best not to try to cook two things at once! I found the best thing to do was to just try and stockpile finished foods on the floor, because those wouldn't rot.

I loved how there were so many creature types! I had to be strategic about how I managed the eggs because once they hatched, sometimes I forgot which one was which haha! Very lovely work, the biome and animal design was top notch. 

Really cute!!! 3D is so daunting, but the entire cafe design is adorable. And the omurice looks so yummy hehe! Wish I could be a customer. Very nice work!!

Wow really nicely done!! Super polished, and such a well scoped idea for a game jam. 

Cuuuute!!! I really like how you left it a puzzle as to what the last ingredient was. The dialogue with the prince was fun, nice job with the writing! Would love to see the final game, nice work!

Wow!! I had a lot of fun playing this, can't believe it was such a complete game for such a short jam period. Really great work, can't imagine how much it took to design all those enemy types! And the different waves on the boss dragon. Great job!

This was really interesting! I wasn't sold until the donkey with the coat started coming out. It made it a lot more complex as to determining what ingredients you would want to dump in. I know you didn't get a chance to finish, but if I had any suggestion, it would be massaging the item generation a bit to be able to guarantee that the player could fulfill the order *if* they're clever enough to use the power ups correctly. Obviously there's still an element of chance with the secret ingredient value, and that is something that makes it fun for the player to do some minimization around what those wild cards end up being. I thought it was a clever idea though, thanks for sharing!!

I think you're right -- I feel that head empty no thoughts when I code at work so it probably is just an experience thing!! One day I will be like that about game dev coding but that's not today LOL

And thank you! I really think being around my regular team and talking with them about coding stuff, even if I never looked at or touched the code, did really help me learn and I passively soaked up all that knowledge. I found those Flappy Bird style tutorials super hard bc I would run into bugs and not know how to fix them because I didn't actually understand what I was writing; I was just copying the video. So in some ways having that control in a project made it a lot easier since (most of the time) I knew exactly what I wanted to do, even if I didn't know the details of acheiving it.

look at her getting up to no good!

had to sweat a little but I thought the difficulty was perfect! honestly the one thing that would help with difficulty is that i think just ending the level and letting your progress is better than letting you keep guessing till you die. i beat it in 2 runs, but the first time the failure was bc i tried 3 things for the same prompt and were wrong all 3 times. quitting that prompt after the first pull would make the game more forgiving and the 3 hearts more meaningful! 

The sock one totally had me in stitches hahaha that was funny! I was out here sweating -- thank god you showed the cards and then let us choose them in the same order, because I ended up doing a lot of positional based memory -- e.g. remembering the layout of items in a flavor group, and so if I knew the group had apple, it must be the acidic group. Tricky, but loved the animation work on the cards, felt super smooth to play!

This was super cute!!! I found it very relaxing to just sort stuff, and I thought the dialogue between the characters was so funny. I loved seeing their little feet wiggle haha! 

If I had one suggestion, it would be to enable matching input that's slightly more complex. I found it a bit tiring to play on trackpad, one thing that might be nice is to tap/click the item, and then tap/click the box you want to put it in, instead of having to drag. (Dragging is tough on trackpad!) Another option (which I would totally love to speedrun) would be to do keyboard only matching -- so maybe something like a cyclical highlight going over all the boxes, using the arrow keys or WASD to navigate the board. Enter once to enter the box, and then a cyclical highlight to pick an item inside with another enter or something, and it autoejects you out of that box and back to the box select after you pick. Then you can WASD your way and enter to drop it into a box. I think that would be a really fun set of controls for a game like this! Easy on the hands to make the repetitive motions a little comfier.

Let him cook!!!! Tricky on trackpad but a very nicely done bullet hell. I'm pretty tragic at these types of games but I loved seeing all the veggie types come out! A whole horde following me...

This was so fun!!! I loved all the detailed backgrounds, the funky tunes, and how much character was in each of the contestants. They had such strong personalities -- I'm only sorry we never got to see Benedict on screen!! A very fun adventure, would love to know how it ends!

Thank you Mr. Poo happy to torment! Just imagine a Cafe Dot ice cream truck with Matcha character popsicles teehee

Hehe thanks!! Yeah, I had refactored some of the object generation midweek which means I probably could have taken some of the off-screen buffer off, but I was too nervous to fiddle with the math more than I needed to in case I broke the game. And yes!! I would love to have special stuff happen when clicking some of the bonus characters. If I made this more robust one of the things I would have done is add powerups you can find to help make the game easier; e.g. one that removes a random number of objects, or one that points in the right direction for a few seconds. 

thank youuu!! naurrr sorry to hear that it froze!! i am really still baffled about how to manage such a large quantity of objects...i continue to mull on the problem. Hopefully one day I'll figure it out!

music to my ears hehehhe

all the matchas are my beloved children!! ty echo :matchaHuggies:

thank you tuke!! really appreciate the kind words 🥰

Hehehe thank you Zenleath!!! And yes I think the game would be way easier if there weren't so many Matcha popsicles psyching you out mwahaha

not done yet but soup good love soup...soup in da balloon!! ultimate little guy game and beautiful reskin!! 

My highest score was 670! I definitely found those three ingredient requests kind of tricky! Can definitely see the Cisco-core in the sprites -- don't forget to add credits when you have a chance! It was a cute gameplay loop, fun and well executed. 

Very nice work Katy! I admit it took me an embarassingly long time to figure out that I could double jump (may want to add that to the controls description), but I really enjoyed traversing the area and finding all the droplets and sunberries! I didn't really understand what the throwing stars were for, but I found them exceptionally satisfying to just jump around shoot around everywhere hahah. 

This was really fun! I thought it was quite clever the balancing of joy and anguish, the balancing of deck drawing and energy replenishment, and the way you had to configure the deck for the colors. I could never figure out -- was there ever a mechanism to cull your deck in the game, or would you essentially have to keep maintaining equal proportions of the cards as the game goes on indefinitely? (Or stop buying cards...) I found that my highest priorities were to maintain high and equal amounts of drawing and energy cards (+4 energy my beloved), and then just hoping and praying I would eventually be able to draw enough of the color I needed with the energy I had.  I used a lot of those 'hang-on-for-dear-life' +1 blue +1 energy +1 draw cards until I could get the big hitters (+4 energy and +4 cards). I kind of felt like you structured it so blue cards = drawing and green cards = energy, but I couldn't really figure out what the niche of the red cards were. 

It wasn't clear to me early on that I could exceed the potion requirements for a color, but eventually I threw all caution to the wind and started making like 6-8 green/blue potions out of necessity LOL. The other thing that was never super clear to me was the joy/anguish ratios. I wasn't able to trigger either of the actions (I forget what the Joy one is, but the Anguish one was the customer killing you, right?), but eventually I had progressed in the game enough that both bars were quite near the top. I wasn't sure if the line in the sand was that the *ratio* of Joy/Anguish had to be maintained, or that both had to be in the mid levels, because as I went on, I felt like I inevitably accumulated both and they both remained near the tops of the bar. 

I also found a bug where if you tried to submit a potion too quickly after a level started (e.g. I knew my anguish was too low and I needed more, so I just submitted asap), the game would get stuck and it wouldn't let me progress. There wouldn't be any cards and the Submit Potion button didn't do anything, so my only course of action was to kill the character! (And then eventually I met my demise by facing the bug again, but not having a full kill jar so I could only restart the game :pensive:)

I thought this was a great and really polished jam submission, and the aesthetics from the art were very nicely done! The only comment on the art I had was that I wish there were more dialogues from the characters! I got tired of being called ugly all the time ;)

This was cute! I really liked the upgrades and how they made you think about balancing your bag. Kind of like whether adding more items would end up diluting your powerful items, or if it was worth it to dilute the ick ratio. I also thought the mummies were super funny when they were heckling you haha! I wish the tutorial was maybe a little clearer, but making a good tutorial in a jam timespan is nigh impossible, so no big issue. I got the hang of it eventually; my trick was to build up the potion to either a 4 or 5, and then just apply that to whoever had the least time left! Thanks for sharing, this was fun!

Aww, this was cute! I picked the candymaker route and I was very happy with the options ahead of me! All that candy goodness in my future! Also, jumpscare with the Vicky name option at the start woohoo! I wonder -- was Lisa meant to be a romance option like Dexter and Hector, or was she meant to be a platonic route? 

yeaaaa i couldn't figure out how to fix the lag (i don't notice it but others have def reported it). i refactored to moving the whole row object rather than moving individual objects off screen but even that didn't fix the issue 🤔 I'm still puzzling over how something like that could be optimized.

and i agree, def wish there were sound adjustment sliders in the menu, but sound design has always been one of those afterthought bits of a jam for me oop

Level 18 is so wicked of you I usually struggle somewhere around level 12 unless I cheat with my debug statements LOL! you're a trooper for making it that far!

thanks for the lovely and detailed comment,  super nice to know where all the pain points are so i can get better at polish in a game! you gave me the idea of maybe delaying the level start with a cute animation of the objects populating or something at the level begin, but i think that'll need coroutines which i haven't been willing to learn about yet 😅

yes, i probably should have found someone more experienced to make the music but i was stubborn and wanted to do everything alone 😅  there are an infinite number of levels, but i do cap the difficult at around level 30 (max speed, max number of rows, and max overlap of sprites) so the matchas don't get infinitely tiny and the game is still playable! but even level 30 may take things too far lol! thank you for playing!

the matcha hats (esp the lemon and banana!) are definitely evil lolol! yes, i def wish i had time to squeeze a sound slider in there because my amateur attempts at music get obnoxious quickly. but glad you enjoyed, thank you for playing!!

thank you!! it has an infinite number of levels but i do cap the difficulty at around 30 levels (max speed, overlap, and number of rows). so you can play an infinite number of days but the matchas will not get infinitely small lol

okay BEST REVIEW thank you emmett!! bwahahahah

hehehe thank u echo!! frogbert cameo :matchaPoint:

yaurrrr thank you ri 💓  i am sure matcha will put your possessions to good use

yayyyy so excited!!

AWESOME JOB SO UNDERRATED 10/10!!! art beautiful, game was super clean. the puzzles ramped up the difficulty well and the platforming felt super snappy. 

yooo ZENLEATH ART :matchaLFG: this was so cool, the concept was simple but it's super well polished and i love the different waves you designed. and of course, zenleath art goes so hard. ughhhh awesome work! love love love!