itch.io

Your feedback has been very valuable and i am so thankful to have talked to you! Due to this, i have managed to release a post-jam update which attempts to solve the most glaring issues that were pointed out by you and other people.

I’m honestly surprised how different it feels given that the changes are so tiny.

Just finished the post-jam update i was working on and the game now has downloadable files for Windows and Linux!

If you happen to be using something else, let me know and i’ll try to figure it out.

Just released a post-jam update and the end is now a little bit nicer!

I’ve released a post-jam update, the game now has camera sensitivity settings!

Thanks, this is very helpful!

I was thinking “hey what settings could i add” and totally forgot about sensitivity. Reviewing my code, currently the sensitivity is multiplied by delta which i thought should make it FPS-independent, but turns out this is actually a bug! If you’ve got lower FPS, the mouse sensitivity increases because time between frames increases. The Godot screen relative system already gives me FPS-independent motion, oops! Also turns out it’s capturing raw mouse position difference, which means it ignores OS settings and mouse acceleration, so there is little to no way for me to make it feel normal except i just so happen to get the default sensitivity just right, and this “just right” will be different for everyone.

So yeah, the post-jam update is going to have sensitivity settings to adjust however you want and i’ll fix the delta multiplier since that is just bad logic on my part.

Clippy!

Yay, videos really are worth a thousand words!

I am on a slightly hardened Firefox (i implemented just a few of the things shown in https://brainfucksec.github.io/firefox-hardening-guide-2024 ) and it has been causing issues, such as Unity using WebGL, which is why i had to ignore this hardening technique, however recently it has been very stable for me. My OS is Linux Mint which should not interfere and it is praised to be the most stable Linux ever. Browsers are usually OS agnostic as they run completely separately, but idk, i’m not a browser expert!

I usually try something random, but most commonly i just take the fire orb and win using that. I would like randomly use the orbs on the wall and then take the fire orb and usually it gives me the win screen. I did use the fire orb right to left, but not always.

As for your feedback on my game, i would rather we keep both organized in each game’s own section, it gets a bit confusing. However thank you for providing this feedback, it certainly is interesting as i have not programmed anything physics related other than freezing and un-freezing physics to lock and unlock stuff. There is no code to reset anything, to move anything, etc. (well there is, for the floating mechanism and for the springing sliding mechanism, but it just applies a directional force) That must be a problem with Godot or the way Google Chrome handles this type of game, or maybe even load order, as i am using web multithreading which is a brand new and not very stable yet Godot feature. But it dramatically improves web performance. Also about stuff clipping through the floor, i also had no issues with that, but i decided to keep it since during development the drawer door that you clog the water pool with, that fell through the floor several times.

Your idea to share a video is actually quite genius, we’ve been explaining stuff that is so much easier to just show! I appreciate it a lot.

Here goes (i don’t want to use YouTube, so a random file website it is, hopefully it works): https://files.catbox.moe/at31xj.mp4

Also forgot to mention about rating. I did count the rates earlier and the average seems to be about 3.8 currently (61 rates / 16 entries), so if a game in this jam has 3-4 ratings, that should basically be average and you have 5.

Thank you a lot!

Indeed once you get to the open, that is the unfinished, abrupt ending. I planned on adding a little bit of text to read, to formalize that it is actually the temporary end, but didn’t get to that during the jam :)

Interesting, i did get the win screen multiple times and you say that there is an entire combination, which to me means that it has to be bugged, but it’s okay! You’ve actually done a lot more than i would have in the short timeframe you had.

I was also contemplating GMTK, but i decided not to split my attention and while i missed out on a big jam that could have gotten me a lot of feedback, i also really liked the limitations of this jam and stuck with it.

About the last room, i don’t know what you’re talking about with coming back home because when i get the win text on the balls, nothing opens. Maybe it’s because i am getting it with the wrong combination intentionally to test for the bug? This time it seems like i got it when the 2 left frames were correct and everything else is wrong. I’d assume the combination goes left to right, where the end is near the water orb.

Very interesting, thank you a lot for the additional feedback and answered questions, you’re being quite comprehensive and i like it!

There is indeed some overlap between our games, but i think that’s because of time constraints and the fact that we chose what the game engines do well. However, our ideas are vastly different. My reason for a space-themed main menu is because the game is set in space and you’re someone who is being tested on a remote spaceship. I didn’t get to the point of modelling the spaceship, hence the abrupt ending with the empty rooms that are just layout for more undone puzzle ideas. If you have a keen eye, the lights are slightly cold in color which indicates the cold idea of you being a test subject. Though that really doesn’t fit with the orange i put everywhere, does it!

I even planned HUD glasses to make the game more interesting. You would use them to see what everything is, there would be text and tooltips, and dragged objects would glow. However just like you, i also ran into time constraints. And i also planned gravity generators you can toggle like the lamps to better indicate you being on a spaceship with artificial gravity.

You’ve answered my questions quite comprehensively and i am very thankful for that! Will be looking deeper into the feedback as i work on this update. Adding some seams to the models will definitely make them more intuitive.

As for the invite, thanks, but i don’t think this is going to happen! My main skill is programming and i use Godot currently by writing GDScript. You used Unity and need artistic skills which i don’t yet have, at least i don’t think i’m good enough. And even if i was good enough at those, they’d still be support skills to programming, rather than main skills.

Thanks for letting me know!

It is a common error, but is usually fixed by allowing itch.io to have experimental SharedArrayBuffer support, and it seems to work for me and other people. So i want to ask, what browser are you on? Did you modify its settings?

Additionally, jam games are locked during voting and if i make an alt game just to upload a downloadable build during the voting period, this will be a problem as i have already made just about enough changes to the game for it to be different. So unfortunately what is uploaded is uploaded… I’ll give you a Windows build after voting ends!

Very thematic to its own concept, great idea!

Very creative!

If you plan to update this after the jam, i would love to see a sound rebalance so it is easier to hear the important sound of the enemy nearby, rather than it being half drawn-out by my walking/movement sound. Also i would love it if i could actually see a bit more, as the game is currently quite dark which makes mimics very difficult to spot when there are 2 empty tiles between you and the wall.

Other than these improvements, i like it a lot!

Lovely!

I like how you’ve done this. The opening with waking up and voice lines, the first room with the sound sequence and then completing it with that white sphere.

The one thing that confuses me is how did i win? I simply don’t understand the room with the 3 books in the middle. Saw that moving the spheres on the wall frames changes their color, and i heard the sounds each sphere plays, but even though i won, i didn’t understand why. May you tell me how that works?

It is also genuinely interesting how we both had a lot of similar ideas! Like both our openings start with a black screen that opens (in different ways). Then we both have a grabbing system to move things around (in very different ways).

My assumption would be, we have to look for these colored card things and get them back to the door.

This is very unique!

To pass level 1 i had to read a lot of text (itch.io game page and in-game help menu) since i didn’t understand what all these souls and sanctuaries actually meant. However, once i got it and passed level 1, it started flowing and it felt a lot more fun!

So if you work on it after the jam, i’d suggest to focus on that. Make it flow. Let the player easily pass level 1 while also learning the basics, then introduce something new with each level until you get to the full game. This effectively removes the need of having to read a wall of text just to know what is happening, because it is now intuitive!

Sorry for spam, i think itch.io glitched on me and i pressed “post comment” multiple times.

This is very creative!

I think a way to make it much better is to randomize or create several preset sounds which you can play, this will make it unique every time and is good for replayability.

This is lovely!

The game is clearly polished and i already went through it three times.

The enemies feel a bit out of place though, but that’s the nature of a jam game. What i mean is, once you kill the enemies, the gameplay is back to being tone pillars only. However i love the addition of the ability to shoot pillars on level 6! What you could do is make the enemies feel more integrated.

Maybe killing a specific type of enemy activates the pillar next to it? Maybe the note gun gives knockback to you, which players can use for faster travel on earlier levels? Just some food for thought and improvement!

Thank you :)

Thank you for the feedback and patience, you’re helping me a lot!

What i think you missed

This game is physics based, so you can grab the cyan key, it is moving with the bookshelf (big box) because of physics and not because of a bug! It’s like if you place food on a plate and move the plate, the food moves with it! (it is possible for the key to slide which is normal physics, or to phase through the bookshelf if you yank it too hard, which is not normal) Note that you may actually grab onto the bookshelf by accident instead. (more technically, the shapecast used to detect dragging has a bit of a radius to it, making it inaccurate, i’ll fix that)

The other colored boxes with the doors are drawers. (i’ll give them handles like real drawers)

You probably noticed (if you play with sound) that every key use plays an “unlock” sound. Every key has only one place where it’s useful, so after you’re done with a key, it’s useless now. (i’ll discolor each key after it’s used to better show that it has been used)

Also there’s a subtle hint with the colors. Every key is a rainbow color and the order in which the keys are useful is the rainbow order.

You’re not supposed to phase objects through walls which is why i have the restart button. An object that was necessary to progress was falling through the floor and it made the game unable to progress.

I won’t spoil much else for now, i think this isn’t too much as the keys aren’t really the main appeal of the game, but you’ll have to progress to see what is! Remember that this game uses physics and what works physically also works here even if it’s sometimes difficult or inconvenient. (in fact for me, that aspect of it not being trivially easy makes it feel like a small, earned victory when you solve it)

Updates

I’ll make some updates, but since games are locked during jam voting periods, that’ll have to be uploaded later.

The updates are related to communication, but not limited to. The static orange box you see first is like a counter or a table or something that blocks your path. The next room’s floating orange box is a drawer, the big sliding one is a bookshelf and it should be made of wood-like material.

It would also be useful to optimize the game since i’m sure one doesn’t need all these physics objects being simulated and rendered all the time.

Questions

Since i want to make the game better, i want to ask several questions:

1. Do you usually play/enjoy/make games where the interactions involve having to physically move objects, or the interactions are not that physical at all (like E to open door)? Which do you prefer? (i looked at your jam entry which didn’t really answer this question, so i wish to know! also i’ll give feedback on your game soon)
2. What did your instinct first tell you when you saw the yellow key on the floor? What did you do with it?
3. Did you have struggles opening the first glass door (if yes, what was it like) or did you immediately find the way to open it?

Last note

This really became a massive reply, sorry! At least it shows that i love writing about this!

Oh interesting, i’ve missed this. Considering how much i cared about SFX and music choice in my jam entry, that would have been a nice opportunity ;)

This is unique.

You could make it even more so by adding a few more mechanically unique entities, like a creature that disables your eyes for a moment and one that damages your eyes somehow, so it could potentially destroy some of them.

Then you could add different challenges that make it much more interesting and incentivizing to keep playing. Stuff like “use only X towers” where X could be multiple levels of progressively less towers, say 10 -> 5 -> 3 -> 2 -> 1. Or “never upgrade a tower”. You could even make it so when you die, you get a card certifying all challenges that you achieved and how far you got (wave number).

Thank you for the kind words!

You’ve understood my color picker correctly, congrats! It is indeed structured like this: Red, Green, Blue, Alpha (transparency). The top row is more, the bottom row is less and the left slider says how much each button adds to its corresponding channel.

Glad to hear you liked the shaders!

Ah yes, good old Dodge the creeps tutorial, keep on learning!

Oh, “This ad was selected by using the same technology” means randomly, i absolutely love the wordplay on that! Shush, don’t tell me that i’m writing a thesis Mr. Narrator.

That is an extremely creative and stressful way to pick colors, well done!

I love how i can see the wind speed and gravity, and kinda judge where my shot will go based on that. Would really want to give it a high rating, but the criteria are backwards!

Cramp? WASD controls are standard for every game. It wouldn’t be the case if everyone was getting cramps. You could use two keys for one action, allowing people to use the keys they prefer.

It’s quite OP that when you have any support module and run a wave, then remove it, the bonus from the module stays. It looks like a bug because every wave i can add and remove shields and it’ll cause me to have an unkillable ship with too many shields.

Yeah, could be thought of like that. A template being a custom combination of rules that you can use like a normal rule.

Here i use P from P^Q and then Q from P^Q, but instead of using this twice, i would make a template with both rules and it will then say Q from (P^Q)^R. It could be a big technical hurdle to make it work correctly though, or it may end up being easy using the already existing way to create trees from rules, just replacing A, B, C with P, Q, R.

And now that i think about it, functions/templates could be very useful if made persistent.

For example i want to more easily say that things are commutative. I create a new template Q^P from P^Q. Now i can reuse this custom template everywhere like a rule.

I love backwards solving the “crab” way, but it is also very useful to solve forward. Maybe you could dynamically hide the forward-solving elements of the UI if the level doesn’t need it, but also let the player take control over it just in case i want to do something you didn’t expect.

I agree, but what would be more useful is instead of copy-pasting the same thing everywhere, you write it once and you can reuse it like a function. This will require it to be able to be extracted as a separate tree and then be referenced when needed.

Could you please add a way for people on web/linux to play this? I intentionally don’t have Windows, but this also means i can’t play the demo.

The concept is very cool with the way you have to manage the physics objects. The cat also adds a cool layer of something happening.

However, currently the user experience is not well done. For example you could let us click things instead of pressing E on them, you could highlight which thing is being looked at, for visual clarity, you could make the items disappear far slower and actually tell you when they disappear, because it is frustrating to get them spilled from the table and then you have the time to only get two or three items.

I think with a bit of polish to the experience itself, this will become much better because the concept is strong.

Was about to share a way to address the game’s typos, but first i want to address this efficiency problem.

RadTad mentioned something very touching, trading off efficiency and human interaction. It’s a topic that i think, i should spend some more time pondering about.

So my suggestion was, you could use AI with a big token count like Gemini for some of the fixes. Recently i have no idea why they stopped letting me upload .zip files, but i worked around it by coding a quick script that writes to a file the name, path and source of a bunch of files, thus making one big blob of text instead of a .zip archive, so i can just copy-paste into the text prompt and the 1 million tokens will just tolerate it.

While this does make you less connected with people, i believe it’ll help to find a big amount of plain typos and maybe some logical problems like a very frequent pronouns misalignment that i find when you use “they”. You know, he has, she has, they have. That kind of problem.

Also i’ve been finding some other typos which i simply can’t remember off the top of my head, some of them are just aesthetic, such as ending a sentence with “this.That” instead of “this. That”.

Another thing you could do is write a regex script that either asserts some rules, or tells you about it, so you can decide if it’s important or not.

Hope it helps and don’t forget the human aspect. :) I love the writing and puns.

I think anyone would want to have good relations with something like that, in case something happens 😉

I love how when you made the orbs get discarded between runs, this naturally created a minimum skill-check in order to keep progressing.

Understandable, it did cross my mind that you might not have had the time, considering i struggle with this a lot, getting distracted on many projects and not finishing specific ones definitively. Thank you for the reasoning and best of wishes with future projects!

That and a bit of QOL.

This dev has shown they can do amazingly with the latest GMTK 2025 entry they've made, so i'm sure they have the experience.

Why only arrow keys and Z instead of WASD and space? Those controls are much more standardized and you can have both with such a simple control scheme.

Also show, not tell. The tutorial opening every time is very annoying and it could just be opened with a ? button and the game can be designed to show how to play.

I think at first we should get a slower speed too which ramps up to the current speed, just to ease off the learning players at the start of a round.