itch.io

Pretty unique idea and nice artstyle. I did not understand the goal of the game at all or how to get there.. just kept clicking as much as possible and the magic mic kept walking :) could be a good idea to add health bars or explain what to do

I had the same idea in my list, it's so fun seeing how people used different aspects of the theme! Bummer that the game isn't finished.. I can only keep clicking. I like the idea of making a game out of social media, it's kind of perfect. Great job writing the posts and responses, they're funny :D

The idea has potential, I could see it being pretty fun. WHen I played I never got past the stage of 1-2 cars, it takes a long time to get through a day and to watch tens of empty cars go by with no income. I would suggest making it easier in the beginning to get things started. Impressive that you did custom art and everything! Wonder how you managed the physics, that was a pain for me (I also did a rollercoaster-y game) :)

One of the most creative ideas I've seen so far! It was very creepy, I think it's a great way to interpret the theme too. And loops are somehow also a horror trope, cycles of things and so on.. well done. I escaped and left my mate behind, but was not sure what I could have done. It said "eat" next to the pink creature, and previously when I pressed "eat" at a mouse, I violently crunched it. So I did not want to do that again.. also, I could not fulfil the wheel task I think.. no idea what I did wrong.

Suggestions

• Improve collision and movement
• Make clearer why the stats matter (do you die after no eating or something?), and what the green/red bar at the left is taht sometimes pops up

Nice idea, it really changes the vibe of tower defense. It's a bit hectic that my tower will get eaten in 30 seconds, but the teleport cards help me save towers which I love :) unfortunately the game is not quite functional since enemies stop coming after a while.. but I can see the potential. Also, you seem to have made all the art and music and sfx during the jam, which is amazing. It looks great!

It's a fun twist on snake that fits the theme! I liked the different challenges. Sometimes though I think I got a solution, but the game didn't count it as possible.. not sure though. Very cute art and animation :) And amazing that you were able to create so many levels.

I was unable to figure out how to play, I died a few times after 2 seconds.. plus the jumpscare is scary :D

I would suggest telling people how to advance in the game, and explain what the goal is somehow.

It's a very easy to understand, hard to master mechanic. I liked it a lot! The size of the "frame" changes the level so much, and it's great that the game has multiple levels where you need to use frames of all sizes to advance. The shaking effects fit perfectly, and the magician pose fits great.

Hi! I did not understand how to go straight. Also when I loop, the car sometimes changes direction and drives off the map. It's really hard to control so it stays on the loop to gain speed. Not sure how I would use the speed though, since the car can't go forward pretty much.. I kinda like the idea though, maybe doing two loops to gain necessary speed would be cool.

Suggestions

• Give ability to let car go straight (but put some obstacles for which to gain speed)
• Make car go towards where mouse is pointing (maybe this was built for touch rather? i used a mouse)

Hi, this is a super ambitious concept! I like how it's thematic in trying to break the loop, I had a feeling that many games will go for this sort of thing. The graphics are amazing, and the music is a banger. Also nice sound effects for everything. I'm impressed how things work so  well, so much can go wrong in this sort of level building kinda game. As someone else noted, I had a lot of bugs trying to select/deselect the right tiles. Like I wanted to paste one thing, grab another and paste, but it wasn't working, I had to past twice before i could copy something again. This made it somewhat frustrating, especially since you have a really short time to place things while mr. bot is walking over the new terrain. The bombs alsop sometimes just didn't do anything. It was really difficult to play! I didn't get to the end...

Overall really really well executed, especially for a jam game. Shame about the bugs..

This is a masterpiece of interactive technology! I love the storyline and it's always cool to see people create music for a jam. The gameplay itself is easy since you can just click the target over and over until you win.. or I don't know if I did something wrong. Oh boy can I relate to having to deal with trigonometry! Flashbacks to high school. Pretty cool to learn a bit about it though, it's gonna be useful in the future :) Congrats on finishing a whole game in 96h!!

The artwork is amazing! It's nice there's a whole scene witht he hero and villain explaining the game. The shooting and scoring works, but I figured out a strategy pretty quick that works every time: just press w to go up a big and then shoot down. The opposite guy will do the same and miss, and you can easily shoot him. So after a while it was not very fun anymore, just repeating the same inputs without any particular goal.

But I think the idea has potential, you could for example make the boss mirror you in different ways (literally horizontally or vertically mirrored), they could use obstacles, or bounce projectiles off walls.

I started playing and just tried to complete the huge ring. I got pretty far before maybe 50 knights chased me down and I couldn't swipe them away anymore. I tried again to kill knights before I started working on the ring, but it was really slow and difficult to draw rings, and I didn't understand what would happen. Sometimes it's an energy ball, sometimes spikes. I also felt like more knights spawn than I can take care of.. I was just getting swarmed left and right. It was also difficult to knock back enemies while drawing circles, because it will mess up the shape and produce a poop. I'm assuming that's what I did wrong :D

The artwork was cute and I like the idea of making witch circles to cast spells!

My suggestions:

• Tell players how to get certain effects (how to get the energy ball, how to get spikes)
• Be more generous with circle shape being fulfilled
• Make big circle fill faster
• Make circle drawing faster in general
• Spawn fewer enemies
• Tell player how much HP each enemy has somehow

Hi, this was a fun idea. It took me a while to figure out what is happening, but eventually I figured out that the slime moves up, right, down, left and loops again (aha, theme!).  I did not figure out when the boss does that AoE attack. It's pretty hard to get a hit in, and very hard to not take damage. I think this is a case where the playstyle that is optimal (= fewest knights needed) is not very fun (figuring out the pattern, and when the slime is nearby, try to sneak a hit, before waiting for next loop). That being said, there are different strategies for sure, like just brute force rushing at the boss until you die in a few seconds. I think there is a lot of potential as well, you could add a whole range of classes and attacks, and bosses, and environments :) and it's kinda fun to have your army of ghosts rushing a boss "together". I gave 2 stars for the assets since they're not original.

Interesting idea with the drawing your own platforms, kind of like frozone in the Incredibles. However  I don't really get what I'm supposed to do, or better said, I tried some random stuff for dozens of times until something worked but it doesn't really feel satisfying, more like gaming the system. Also often it doesn't work as I would expect, like for example often the blue bar at the top goes down but no path appears in the level. The cursor is also so big I wasn't sure at first where the drawing happens. I think it's at the top of the snowflakey thing.

The game is also light on the theme, the freezing doesn't really seem to affect gameplay, it's just the thing that happens when you die?

Overall I was a bit confused, maybe it could help if there's a tutorial level or maybe a frozen element already so you can see what you're supposed to do with the drawing mechanic.

One thing I liked is that you can respawn very fast, like super meatboy, so you can keep trying.

With some improvements or instructions could be a really nice game! One way or another nice job making a whole game in 9 days as a solo dev!

Also btw the description sounds like it was generated by chatGPT. It's a bit long to read and I think people just want a quick fast "how to play"! So I would suggest making it much shorter, and it's always nicer to write it yourself rather than let a robot do it ;)

This is a cool take on the freeze theme, I could easily imagine this being a really nice game once fully fleshed out. 

It's good that you get unlimited shots, this lets you experiment a bit and shoot everything to figure out what can be used in what way.

I have one big complaint though, and that's the aiming. I nearly gave up on the second level because I understood what I needed to do, the aiming was just jumping around so much that I could not execute on my idea... Maybe slow down how fast the angle changes or something? It is killing a bit of the enjoyment for me.

I would also suggest building the levels in a way that lets you understand them step by step. In the second level for example I only saw the mirror kinda thing pretty late and only then understood that it's part of the solution. In the third level I would suggest some color-coding to help the player understand which gears control which part of the level. I had some trouble understanding how the pieces of the room work together.

Overall a great idea, fits the theme, and an impressive amount of levels and gameplay!

It's the first game in this jam that let you slow time rather than freeze something completely. I think it works well here because it makes the game easier. However, bullet time is not really new. And usually you can only do it for short periods of time, while it seems like in this game you can just slow down time for the whole game? Which makes it much easier to play. So I didn't really get the point. 

For me on a Mac keyboard it was hard to press left ctrl btw, would be nice if you also allow right ctrl! Or shift maybe.

It's the first game in this jam that let you slow time rather than freeze something completely. I think it works well here because it makes the game easier. However, bullet time is not really new. And usually you can only do it for short periods of time, while it seems like in this game you can just slow down time for the whole game? Which makes it much easier to play. So I didn't really get the point. 

For me on a Mac keyboard it was hard to press left ctrl btw, would be nice if you also allow right ctrl! Or shift maybe.

Super unique idea, and it's right at the core of the theme! I think a lot of games gave players control over freezing AND unfreezing, it's nice to see one where you can only freeze. It works out quite well and feels like being a babysitter lol.

It's great that you made your own music for the game, I think it must have taken a lot of effort! A bit of a pity you can't hear much of instruments that aren't strings as the player lol.

Btw I also did music on my team's game and I also used some strings. In my case it was from the logic pro library. One thing I learned during the jam is modulating expression in midi. I used it to give the strings a bit of a feeling that they are being played for real, that are being kind of faded in and out, so it doesn't sound like someone just pressed the strings button for 1 beat. I used this video to help me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCmH-YMtVPU it's for Logic Pro, but maybe you can find something similar in your DAW if you use something else. Hope this made sense, I just found it super useful and thought you might too!!

Overall a nice idea, and it could get quite varied with different types of music and such! Well done for a solo dev.

Neat little platformer. I was surprised there are relatively few platformers, but this one incorporates the theme better than others I've seen. It's kind of a nice game flow to make it to the next fire and stay in safety for a bit. Sometimes this waiting felt a bit long to me, I would suggest make the temperature go up faster if you're staying near fire :) 

One time I turned to ice and didn't know why, I think the collision box was maybe a bit big and I hit the spikes when visually I wasn't touching them. Also in one of the gaps I could stand on the spikes and they didn't turn me to ice!

For a solo project in a short game jam, not bad mate!

I'm sorry, I thought it would be easy to find out about mixels but I've been looking for like 20 minutes and I didn't even find a website or video that explains it! Basically the idea is not to mix resolutions. I read this in Michael Azzi's "Pixel Logic" book (page 21), you can find it on gumroad if you're interested. It says one should never mix resolutions. Basically all the pixel art should fit on the same "grid", there shouldn't be a sprite that looks like it was resized 2x, if that makes sense. Another way to say it is all the outlines of the pixel art should have the exact same thickness.

I love the blue color palette and that everything sticks to it! The scrolling backgrounds also look great, though from time to time there were some black bars that appeared in them when I was playing.

The mechanics are very creative, it's fun to change the position of your boat, and you always have important fast decisions to make while in the level. Unfortunately it was often frustrating for me because I had three actions that did nothing to solve my problem, maybe they are all "move right" when I'm already at the right side of the screen. I would suggest making the swapping a bit faster or the enemies less numerous lol.

It was also often frustrating how slow the sub moves. When you have to swap abilities and quickly press the right one, you don't have a lot of time, and this could be improved with faster movement or swapping I think.

The music felt a bit monotonous, but also kind of fitting for the atmosphere. Could have used some more instruments, or a longer melody maybe!

About the art by the way, I would suggest sticking to a single resolution for the pixel art sprites, that ties everything together even better! Maybe google "mixels" to see what to avoid. Ideally you would also make the text and UI elements pixel art, but with the small resolution I see why you went for a different approach. Also it's a lot of art to do for one person :D

One thing that is unique about this game that I really loved were the crew members. There's so many different ones to choose from, and they have different abilities that really make a difference. Again nice work giving the player choices that matter. It's also nice that you can upgrade crew, though I wasn't sure what to do once I all upgraded them. Getting more money at that point is kinda pointless I guess? The designs of the crewmembers with their names and stuff are really cool though.

Overall a game that presents a nice unified experience that flows quite nicely. Especially impressive that you did this all yourself, including coding, graphics and audio. Very well done!

It was a great idea to limit what the player can do to two things! I'm really impressed by how well the mechanics fit the theme and how well it still works as a mechanic.

The things you can do are very simple, yet the ways in which you can use them are super varied and creative. It involves thinking about what is possible, and it involves executing tricky combinations of the two inputs like freezing to turn at a corner. It seems like this game applies the design philosophies you hear about in video essays like those from Mark Brown's GMTK. Well done!

The music fits (although you didn't make it) and you put some real effort to also theme the whole game about ice and freezing, with the penguin and the snow effects and the backgrounds. I also like how the penguin freezes at the goal area and again recalls the theme. Talking about it, you did so well to make the player character so expressive, I love the flapping as well as the freezing, and love the sunglasses!

The only criticism I have is that sometimes you feel a bit tricked, like when you go on a platform and you don't move with it like in most platformers. The levels with red ice behind the goal area also kind of fall into this category, it's very hard for those to get the timing of freezing right. Though I did it after a while, it didn't feel as fun as the rest. I would also suggest adding some checkpoints so if you brave one difficult stretch, you can tackle the next one in peace. But this is maybe a bit beyond the scope of a short game jam, and it's just as great to have more levels, which you made a lot of! Totally worht spending the time on that.

Overall, a phenomenal game that integrates the theme at every step, is fun to play and offers lots of content for a jam game, especially for a solo dev.

The idea is quite original and not something I've seen before in this way!

I played three times and each time I did not understand what I was supposed to be doing though. My guess was to match reaper traits with traits on the top card, but I lost points when I would have expected to gain points.

For example, one person likes gastronomy, but when I click the reaper who likes cheese and wine, that resulted in a failure, even though in my opinion those traits fit together.

The theme is only loosely met in narrative, and even then, it's not quite a strong connection. I like that not everyone made a game about ice and penguins though :D

I love the title screen where you see the cute slimey aliens, they're really the stars of this game! The art of the icea cream truck and the cone mountains in the background are really cool.

I also liked how they slowly melt while waiting for their ice cream, and how the freeze theme was tied into the narrative. Apart from customers slowly melting, the gameplay doesn't really involve the freeze theme though in my opinion. The idea of the main game is also essentially a single-player version of Overcooked, which is fun, but also not necessarily a fresh idea.

For the controls I first tried clicking the ingredients and stuff, maybe you could think about this input method in the future. I think it might be more intuitive. Since you need the key controls from the start, you might also consider just always displaying them, I found myself constantly having to press space anyways.

And finally, for the art I would suggest going for either pixel art or non-pixel art, to my taste it looks better than if you mix the two. You could also look into "mixels", which is when you mix resolutions between or within sprites of pixel art. It happens a lot on this game, and in pixel art it usually avoided because it looks less like a unified visual style!

I have given a lot of criticism, but this game deserves a lot of praise as well. There are two main parts, cute art that is quite unified in terms of colors, nice music and sound effects, and for a game made in 9 days it's quite good! Especially with what seems to be the largest team of the whole game jam. Nice job coordinating everything and producing a whole game together!!

To add to this, I was using QWERTZ and I didn't know at first why I couldn't place the colorful sprinkles :) I had to press Y instead of Z to do it (on mine I think Y and Z are switched compared to US and UK keyboards).

Hey! As the guy who did the music, thanks for the feedback on the feel of the track in the main portion. It's really useful to get specific feedback like this. Also very good to know that it can be hard to find the clickable areas. Thanks!

True, I think if the enemies were faster the game might be impossible to beat haha. I tried a kind of stop-and-go strategy before that and it didn't work so well. so that's why I resorted to just running through.

Lmao I started doing the same thing, it really helps!! And is in the spirit of the game :D

You can pet the dog in this game, which is the most important sign of quality.

But it was generally super fun, and it ran better for me than any other game, probably because it's made with phaser :D Great job on the artwork especially, it's cute, perfect for a game like this and was easily readable for the game purposes!

It was a bit difficult sometimes ot tell what I did wrong, or what you can even control. I didn't get for a long time that you can change the color/fur of the animal, and the collar. I was also sad to get thrown back to level 1 after I did a single mistake in level 4 ;(

Also the theme is very loosely applied, but hats off for a creative interpretation! At first when I saw this I thought of a part of Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga where you have to get your passport photo taken and you can sabotage it by making faces lol. Maybe something like that could be a future game ;) Also very reminiscent of the kinda games kids play.

First off, it's amazing to find a fully voice acted game in a game jam. What a nice surprise! It added so much to the experience as well.

The enemies are a very cool idea for a sort of Zelda-dungeon style enemy. I noticed after a while that they can't catch up to me, so I never really had to freeze and just ran through all the levels. It works if you don't run towards them too much. Because of this strategy, the second enemy was not a challenge at all... However, it was still not trivial and I had a lot of fun trying to ourmaneuver all the enemies, and sometimes I did have to freeze still.

The whole game is very on point with the freeze theme, with the gameplay, art, music and narrative of course. Nice job producing a very unified game with a bigger team!

Oh also, I really loved the option to go back. Unfortunately I pressed enter and so accidentally chose the same ending again, and after that I couldn't go back anymore lol. Also gotta love the Skyrim joke ;)

The beginning is really good to get you oriented because it can be a bit hard to find your way. The art style with the glowing "stars" in the walls and objects is quite unique and I really enjoyed it. It lends itself well to the genre and feel of the game, too.

This game is probably most on point about the theme of the jam than any other I've seen. The having to freeze is quite fun and tense as you don't know where the monster is coming from. After a while it also led to me freezing before I hear anything because my reaction speed was too slow so I was "expecting" a note soon and froze pre-emptively. It makes you quite tense and paranoid as to when that note is gonna come and it feels very fitting that you get scared in advance and just stop and listen.

However, the fullscreen didn't work for me and it was very hard to find my way around the maze, I didn't know where I had to go either (where exactly is the center? Do I have to go up or down or what?) It is fun that you can jump over many gaps but it was too hard to find out where I was going after a while, and after I dropped into a hole after getting very far, I gave up.

Overall, a super great game idea and great fit for the theme!

Thanks! We were wondering how much we should help players with the puzzles, it's good to know many people made it without any help!

The visuals look really cool for a jam game, I like the sort of comic-y feel and the colors are nice and soft and comfortable. It works well ith the music, too, even if you didn't make that haha.

In the beginning I didn't know that I was supposed to find the room in the hospital after I arrived. I also didn't know what the bar on the left does with the blue and red and which way it moves and what makes it move. I now think it's a timer, and it symbolizes the organs heating up and unfreezing. Perhaps some explanation or an arrow, or even a timer on top of the bar could help!

I think finding the room could be made easier by a bigger minimap, because even once I understood I had to find a room, it felt like flipping a coin which path to go down, because there's usually only enough time to go down one path, and if the room isn't there, you're out of luck. It might be benficial to add some basis for the player to decide where to go. Maybe the names of different hospital wards, and the player has to remember which organ they have, and then guess which ward is most likely to contain their goal room?

Driving fast was fun, but at some point I noticed that I can't do that because missing the exit basically means losing, and the exit can come very unexpectedly. It creates a nice game flow though of first speeding up super hard and then slowing down and waiting for the exit. Maybe you could announce the exit sooner though that the player can have more fun with fast driving and doesn't have to be nervous all the time :D

Désolé pour mon français!

Les graphismes sont trop mignons! Le cri du pengouin a eté déchirant lol.

Au début j'ai pensé que je nage dans l'eau, mais plus tard j'ai remarqué que c'est un platformer et qu'il faut sauter sur la prochaine plateforme. Si tu utilisais un autre arrière-plan, peut-être ça communiquais mieux que c'est un platformer :)

Parfois j'ai été resté coincé sur une plateforme et je sais pas pourquoi. Et parfois il y a eu trop des plateformes et je n'arrivais pas à avancer. On pourrait remédier à cela en reduisant le nombre de plateformes peut-être.

//

The art is very cute! The penguin scream when you lose is heartbreaking lol.

At first I thought you're floating on shoals on water! But only gradually realized that you fall down and it's more of a platformer. I think a different background could communicate better than you're looking "from the side" rather than "from above". 

I also found myself stuck on platforms, not knowing why, and I played probably 20 times where there was just nowhere to go, and I couldn't reach the next platform. I think one remedy could be more careful collision programming, and for the other issue, you could put fewer platforms! Quite often they were blocking each other.

Sent a request!

Hey! I'm a self-taught game dev with 4 years of programming experience, check my games on my itch profile! Love the soundtracks and sound designs, do you want to team up? I'm most comfortable in the LÖVE2D lua framework but also thinking about finding a team where I could take more of an assisting role with code, maybe in Godot or Unity. Unavailable on Aug 5, partially available Aug 6, free for 8h+ on other jam days. Timezone EEST. Let me know if you're interested 😁

The feeling of the game fits the theme incredibly well and everything works quite well together. Loved seeing my little players spread out over the map :) I also liked their little speech bubbles and the fact you can click everything and it will make some particle and sound effect. Though I didn't quite get all the mechanics, I was just clicking the spawners until I won... seems to have worked!