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Oh, thank you so much! :)

Thank you! It's a good question. :D

I have industry experience as a professional game artist while the rest of the team are super skilled and passionate hobbyists with years of transferable experience in their own professional fields. Our team was formed through Discord's team finder channel a day before the jam started. I was really fortunate to have a few people message me that they liked my art and wanted to work with me.

We also had lots of free time to put into this project. I was working really long hours and did a fair amount of self-imposed crunch to make the game look and feel as good as possible. Crunch is of course bad when it happens in a professional setting but here it was my own choice.

We picked a game engine that both programmers were familiar with (Godot) and I chose to do pixel art with a limited colour palette since it's a very cost effective medium. You can make lots of assets really fast.

Once we had a game idea we focused on building the core features first. The game was functional on Monday and looked like this.

Any complicated additional features were quickly cut for time. Like the player being able to walk around the battlefield and fight.

We'd hop on voice chat each day to share development updates and to talk about how to improve the game. You want the game to feel good to play early on so you stay motivated to develop it further. Usually it's small things you can add between larger tasks which add up to make a big difference. Enemies don't need to explode on death but it looks cool when they do. The game should have a satisfying response for any action the player does.

With the visuals we had this cool scrolling background shader for our main menu and I realized we could reuse it to create cloud cast shadows and fog effects for our levels. It transformed the game's atmosphere 1 day before the deadline. The intro cinematic went in 30 minutes before the deadline and was made in roughly the same amount of time. The team thought I was joking when I said I'd be making it, lol.

A very ambitious platformer for a jam setting. Seems like a lot was planned from the start. Interesting to see how it will shape up after the jam.

For that I'd suggest honing in on the the player controls and making sure those feel super good. Feels like there might be coyote time implemented but an input buffer is missing. Ideally jump should never be up arrow or W but space. It just feels a little awkward. Pressing Z to punch also feels odd when using A and D to move. The reach of the punch could also be longer and the size of the fists exaggerated. Sometime it's a little hard to tell what's part of the background and what's a platform. Here you could use colour, saturation and contrast to gently guide the player's eye around the level.

I had a challenging time with the second level. It's difficult to get on the first platform without taking damage from the above enemy. I managed to fall off the map here as well. It also took me a while to realize there was wall jumping and how to perform it. Sometimes I'd get stuck in the glide animation but I beat the level eventually.

The visuals have a lot personality. It reminds me of something you'd find on Newgrounds. I wouldn't mind seeing more of these characters. Very impressive for a week of work!

This was really neat! Almost like a 2D Luigi's Mansion.

Gameplay was pretty fun and easy to understand. Sometimes I'd end up breaking a piece of furniture by accident. Making the search input into a 0.5s long press could be considered. Would love to see a more complete version of this with spookier atmosphere.

Interesting puzzle game. Reminded me of Portal and Superliminal.

Couldn't figure out how to solve the puzzle in the room after the one where scaling mode is introduced, though I was able to solve the logic gates room in a few seconds with brute force and blind luck.

As you're encouraged to think outside of the box it's difficult to determine when something is a bug, an oversight or a feature. In the room where you're asked to cross the gap with a box, I discovered that any physics object can be used to fly and clip through ceilings. I was able to see a lot of the map this way and even got to the final room.

I might be wrong but the puzzles don't always seem to be contained within a single room where they're introduced. This makes them feel extra difficult. Other times I solved a puzzle and didn't understand why the solution had worked (thinking about the trap ceiling room specifically). I saw that surfing gets introduced at one point which is a pretty strong curveball to throw at the player in a logic puzzler.

Still there are an impressive number of rooms here and the scope feels ambitious. The main mechanics with the transform and scaling tools were easy to understand and fun to use.

Nice little platformer! Solid level design with a good ramping up of difficulty and concepts. Although I struggled with that big leap with the fans. I do wish the different states had faster movement across the board. A quick restart option would've also fit right in with the speedrunning nature of the game. I wouldn't mind seeing this idea expanded.

PB: 218.7s

Good old Tetris with a twist! I really liked this one! The weather specific music and backgrounds really add a nice bit of atmosphere.

I never really learned to play around the weather system and was more reacting to whatever changes it did to the board. The weather report was a little off to the side so I didn't really engage with it either. Some of the pieces too had a habit of blending in with the background and could've used a solid black or a white outline.

The upgrade system brought a Vampire Survivors type feel and gave a nice rush of dopamine anytime it popped up. The ghost piece was also really cool and really made up for any bad +block placements.

Personal Best: 710

Thank you! :)

The current iteration is really challenging for sure. One good strategy we discovered while testing was to space out the towers across the map into 3 chokepoints (giving yourself more time to react) and to group them by element (reducing cognitive load). There's one more level after the first one if you'd like to give it another shot.

We've thought about continuing the project beyond the jam and have talked about different ways the difficulty could be addressed. Some were planned for the jam build but didn't make the cut.

Well it does look like digital concept art first and foremost. You could say it's influenced by 19th-century impressionism (closer to post-impressionism). These works were always oil on canvas and the artists tried to convey their ideas without necessarily over rendering the image as you would with realism.

It's a good fit for digital concept art since it too is about conveying ideas quickly.

I hope this helps. However, you might have trouble finding free CC works like this depicting a modern city at night. I wish you luck.

I'm only familiar with Bloodlines 1 so all my ideas come from there.

Could maybe make a game where you run a black market out of the back of a van like Fat Larry. Or a murder mystery game where you as the Malkavian detective have to talk to the objects in the crime scene to solve the case. Or maybe a haunted house experience similar to Ocean House Hotel.

I am looking to join a team but if I end up going solo I'll probably do the haunted house idea since it'll likely require the least amount of code to get working, letting me focus on the assets instead.