itch.io

Thanks for playing!

I don’t open source our games but I am happy to discuss techniques. I assume you mean in terms of visuals, here is the jist:

There are two cameras rendering your and the goal’s view of the scene in an unlit fashion to two different textures, the levels each are a single mesh with a unique 1-bit handmade texture wrapped around it.

A third camera renders a fragment shader that gets the other two cameras output. Wherever that 1-bit on the player’s output was 0 you see the player’s view, and when it was 1 the goal’s view is rendered behind it, whereever that was 0 (so the goal sees the player’s color) we render the entire previously rendered frame with a bit of transformation so it fades out and moves (which results in the feedback effect around some edges and if you look around violently. There is also a standard sobel edge detect convolution done for the lines that appear when you win the level. Some of these feedback/sampling/blending parameters react a bit to the motion of your look and movement to make everything more dynamic.

That’s the main setup, but if you have any other specifics you are interested in, ask away!

Also, it would be nice to be able to pass with the mouse.

Not sure if the flashing point lights everywhere is intentional or a graphical glitch (they aren’t in the screenshots for example), but I found these to be a little on the excessive side even for the twisted aesthetic, in the smaller room I couldn’t see anything thanks to this flashing and I assume I missed some docs or path there as a result.

The controls could be simpler here, just left click to pick up and release to drop things could work, there’s no need for E/Q interaction as far as I can tell.

I am not a fan of the automatic pdf download aspect but it is definitely a fitting and funny idea here.

I liked how everything made the same sound when being dropped.

Dialogue system and the dithering looks great!

The circling mechanic has some potential but currently there isn’t much at stake with it. Maybe by talking “right” with some of the things, you could gain a form of ink that you could use to draw the circles, this would limit you how often you can deal with the baddies that way. Maybe some of them could be stunned with the right shape (if there was more than circles) so you could talk them out of hurting you and gain some ink and so on.

If you die while drawing your cursor mode seem to get stuck and can’t restart the game?

Either way, cool vibes!

Fell out of the level and couldn’t restart first. Second try, I escaped, although not sure what I did to do so, but the visual effect and the music was pretty cool!

Just adding a different color to the ground/ceiling could easily improve the maze’s look I think.

In our first person game I lock the cursor on every click which helps a bit with the browser unlock, fullscreen etc issue. I also found this repo by Jan since we’ve submitted that looks like a neat solution to deal with cursor (un)locking on the web, might be useful for you as well.

Neat twist on chess!

Not sure if pieces not showing up where they are and some ghost sprites appearing is part of the “you are slowly going crazy” or just plain bugs, but if the former I don’t think these adds much to the game.

Having a sequence after your turn where all of your attacking pieces wiggle for each damage they deal and get would make the core mechanic obvious.

Health bars (or some visible wear for like quarters of the health for each piece) in some form or another would be great, clicking on each piece to inspect it is less than ideal.

I think killing the King might still be a good end-goal to the game even with your rules.

The overall health could be reduced or some pieces could deal higher damage, maybe even based on distance for the long range attackers?

Either way, this game has potential and could be a solid and fun chess variant after some polish!

Awesome art and music, the paper designs fits together very nicely!

The Edge system is definitely the hardest to understand about the game without looking for the readme, improving the UI for this by actually having coin sprites for example (that flicker a bit then settle to heads or tails) would let you know how this calculation happens and what those things mean. Calling it “Edge” might also add to the confusion thanks to “edge” being an important and negative thing in the context of pushing each other down from the mushroom.

Would be great if the action being played would show up above the bug itself when they execute it, instead of on the sides from the beginning. This would make you concentrate on the cute bug characters more and it could add a bit of tension about what the enemy will do (if they come second) as you’d only see their action the moment it happens and if they failed their action, they could keep you more in the dark about their tactics.

The cards coming up on hover could use a bit of easing instead of the linear transition (ease out for both up and down motion would feel nice here).

It would be great if the bars on the level below and ahead of you would get highlighted based on the range of the currently hovered card. Bump/Push could even show an arrow pointing towards where they would push the enemy there. Such overlays could greatly enhance understanding what the cards do.

Thanks for this fun game!

Loved the presentation and irrationality here, the lowering of the window interaction is my favorite, it all felt very dreamy.

In my opinion 10 slams is too much, I don’t think I would ever find this, even if I spent more time with the game. You could squash the image of the meat by each (or at least every second) slam, so it is communicated that there is some progression happening there, cause most people will probably try a few slams and if they see they are getting somewhere, they are more likely to continue.

Thanks!

By “crashed” do you mean the tab closed or the game froze and became unresponsive?

Unfortunately the former happens because Ctrl+W closes the tab in the browser which I didn’t think through when developing, so if you are descending in the game and start going forward as well, you close the tab. I’ll change this when we can update the games!

If the game just froze do you have any hints on when this happened?

Thanks for playing!

A creative use of typing and the character grid!

I especially love the way levels are presented and how responsive and seamless all of it is.

My only gripe with the design is that it is very undo heavy thanks to relying a lot on finishing the commands at the right point and counting where words will end up or if they fit at all, which is not really an interesting aspect of the game I think.

While it might take away from the simplicity a bit, I’d like to see how an autocomplete-like feature would work like that would print (with a faded color) the started keyword ahead of you so you wouldn’t have to type it out or count cells before typing to realize it won’t fit or if you’ll finish the word too early. So you type l and it shows eft ahead of you and so on. Maybe you could use tab to complete but the main point is the preview itself, not the completion.

Anyways, great entry that could definitely be expanded with more mechanics and levels!

Managed to run after a few reloads!

Cute art and unique sounds!

The puzzles were a bit too pixel-hunt-y for me but I know that point-and-click is definitely one of the hardest to design for.

The way you move over the stuff to interact that you want to click on later made it a bit hard to control and try things, maybe if each thing would have a distinct position nearby it where Slymon would move when interacting the game could feel a bit better.

Some visual feedback about whether Slymon is interacting or just moving somewhere could communicate the result of your clicks better.

I’d like an option to invert the colors to black background and white lines, would fit well with the sleepy theme, I think.

Love the design of Slymon, thanks!

I liked the cold sharp look of the visuals and the spawn/hit effects!

The blue enemies felt kinda pointless as-is, maybe making them weak but let them buff nearby enemies would be a nice change so you’d have a reason to take them out early.

I see, that is a bit harder to intuit as a player because I conceptualize bullets as distinct things once they leave my ship instead of being treated as a group where one hit “validates the rest”. If this needs to stay like this then maybe some unconventional rendering that groups the bullets visually might help with understanding? For example have them be connected together and back to the player and if one hits the connection turns green but if none hits the connections turn read and slap back on the player or something.

Alternatively, firing itself could always give you some fever so it would be more obvious that you have to turn shots into coolers efficiently, otherwise you’ll overheat.

Very nice and creative use of the game of life rules, being able to step back and forth felt good and the level design was solid.

I wonder how it would play if your moves were turn based as well instead of the platforming mechanics with more focus on puzzling mechanics and solutions like interacting with cells in different ways (like you have one insert/delete operation to do and you have to choose wisely etc). Or just with some form of undo as it-is to ease on the memorization/precision aspect a bit.

Think the level menu could automatically select the just unlocked level for you (or just go there automatically) for a more seamless experience. Having your progress saved here was a nice touch!

Overall a great entry with a high level of polish!

Very satisfying to watch the little guys battle it out and a good ethereal mood overall.

On the web I do get quickly deteriorating performance after level 3.

Personally I think the scrolling background is not the best match for the battle phase as it breaks the illusion of watching the tiny troops walk around, I think changing other parameters of the shader without such obvious directional scrolling would be nicer here to keep the battle feel more grounded (or just have another layer that does stay stationary could work as well).

Not sure if I just didn’t find it but an ability to drag already picked groups off the map to undo their selection would be nice.

Nice procedural animation on the rat, it was satisfying to jump, wish the game made more use of that! Maybe you’d need to stealth pounce the mice to not startle them or just do more platforming instead of the flat collecting goal.

Simple yet unexpected!

Making the bullets stand out more from the background would be nice.

It might be a good idea to have the boss hurt you if you fly into it to make it a bit harder to cheese this part.

Solid game, I really like the simple but functional enemy design with their drops signalled.

Being able to restart with Space would be appreciated!

The core concept is great but it is very counter-intuitive how much not missing shots matter in the beginning paired with how wide-angled your shots are. I think the simplest way to improve this would be to add some negative vfx and sound to the shots hitting the screen boundary (ie missing), to make it obvious that this is something that you want to avoid more than anything.

Without knowing this it is easy to just stay in the limbo of shooting constantly and wondering why you aren’t progressing. Maybe you could take it further to explain this better and have the game play out inside the body of something that you want to actually preserve (for example invaders are coming inside the mothership and you have fight them there), so the screen boundary would actually be the walls of the ship you want to avoid friendly firing at, then it would make sense that if you hit the wall enough the whole thing blows up. This would solve the “limbo state” by progressing you towards game over if you aren’t playing the game right, as you couldn’t heal the mothership the same way you can reverse your own fever damage ad infinitum now.

I’m a fan of “Hidden in plain sight” mechanics but never seen it implemented in a single player game, awesome!

The music was great!

Wish I could restart the game with Space.

My only gripe is that you can easily spawn into (or at least right near) the monster which feels a bit unfair when it happens. Maybe granting lives after some cabbages or something else to make this feel more fair would be nice.

It’s a very simple, yet cohesive game, good job!

Interesting idea with the separating visuals from the colliders, but having the camera look at the pills makes this very frustrating to play on keyboards where you can only move in 8 discrete directions.

Maybe if the platforms weren’t laid out in such an axis-aligned manner, this could play a bit more smoothly while keeping the unsettling feel of the auto-controlled camera. The block-based composition lends itself well to more arbitrary shapes.

Vast amounts of content and systems for a jam. Just coordinating such a big team must have been tough in itself!

The dialogues were funny, but by the end I did wanted to just stop talking to people for a bit so I wandered into a mouth while being spaced out on the field without having a chance to interact with the commune members, but I guess that was a fitting come down for this game.

The interface text could be a tiny bit bigger I think.

The stomach GUI definitely steals the show, this could be a game on its own, like an all-you-can-eat buffet survival game or something.

Great job!

Impressive set of systems for a jam!

The mood was perfect and the interrogations felt intriguing without being too obvious. I appreciated the writing staying concise while still giving character to each Marcus.

I felt something was missing in the end, wasn’t sure if I made the right choice first (I kept sofa Marcus) and even after going through keeping a different Marcus in speed run mode to see if I missed something I still couldn’t decide about what it all meant or if I missed something, but dreams rarely have an ending that makes sense :)

I kept trying to use the scroll wheel to pick dialog options, maybe this would be a nice addition to these menus. Also, reusing clicking for every interaction like doors, picking up objects and talking to people would streamline the controls a lot without losing anything, I think.

There are a few issues with the level colliders letting you see behind the walls or outside the building if you stand too close to walls or jump around 359. In general, I think it is best to disable jump and crouch in puzzle-like games that don’t actually rely on them so that it’s not something the player can overthink being a mechanic they should be using somewhere and keep trying it to find stuff (which can hurt immersion as well).

Overall, great job and a sophisticated use of the theme. I can definitely see this style of storytelling work in an expanded game!

Thank you for your kind words!

I refrained from including a cold/hot mechanic as I felt that would nudge us towards being more lazy with level design while using it as a clutch, I do think the last three stages (which I assume are the ones you had more trouble with) could be improved with more environmental adjustments, before turning to hints, we’ve spent a bit too much time on the rest to polish them (the game even started as a local coop, it took a while to let that go, hehe). That said, a hint system as an accessibility feature you could toggle would be still nice!

I am really intrigued by what’s possible with this new audio system but funnily enough, here we don’t utilize much of it at all. I did implement a loop section player in bevy_seedling during the jam but I discarded it in the end because a simpler solution worked better. The game uses a reverb node on the hum that plays when you move, but it is just a looping sample playing all the time and your velocity and rotation is driving its volume (with a bit of smoothing to avoid abrupt changes). The background music and the level complete sound are just dry samples. All sounds were made with the Surge VST synth and Renoise was used to sequence the chords and render to files.

Glad you liked the game!

Very fitting for the theme. My favorite part is the retry transition hand. More checkpoints would be appreciated to counter the difficulty on some parts.

It was satisfying to control this, the levels mutating and the background shader was a nice touch!

I think the border of the levels and the tiles you must not touch could use some different look.

Having something extra to do in these spaces would be nice, like evading some black hole while searching for the skulls :)

Nice atmosphere and visuals and a funny presentation to make the scary things disappear upon inspection.

At later parts of the night the game became stuttering when spawning a lot of enemies at once, maybe pooling or staggering spawning them would help here?

I feel that the torch kinda play against the main mechanic of evading enemies, as after upgrading it you can just stand there and idle out essentially. I think it might be nicer for the gameplay if the torch you upgraded wasnt actually with you like this, rather you’d upgrade the chances of torches spawning on the level and their time until they burn out and other stats, this way you’d still have torches but you’d have to keep moving to get their benefits.

Thanks for that detail! It seems it is indeed tied to framerate after all but inversely.. I’m using the frame delta but my rotate function runs in the FixedUpdate, ouch. So in your case the delta is very small but the update still runs at 64Hz (the default rate). Not sure why I’ve put it in Fixed to begin with but I’ll unfix this when we can update the game, thanks!

I like the premise of the game and the different upgrades and dream modifiers you can have but I feel that the control of the dog and the behaviour of the sheep actively go against the rest of the game.

Sending the dog to a location by clicking would be nicer I think and let you just keep using the mouse over the entire game. Buffs and nerfs to speed or response could still be overlaid on top.

More importantly if the sheep had some form of herding behaviour, it would make the experience a lot more satisfying I think. If you wanted the game to be harder you can always increase other things like the ramp of targets needed or introducing more adverse effects, but overall it might be good to make it less about fighting the “spread in all directions” behaviour of sheep and more about choosing your upgrades wisely and what groups to prioritize herding.

For example regular herding would make the sheep form into groups and bark could break those groups up, this way you could herd out groups more effectively while still be able to select what to send first.

The space modifier for the dog feels overly sensitive I think.

Overall, it’s a fun idea that I’d like to see developed further, also groovy music!

Always awesome to see fractals actually be meaningfully included in a game!

The control overlays, text audio and transitions made this feel very polished and clean.

I’d love to see just the similarity minigame be expanded somehow, I didn’t care much for the rest although zooming in is fun and the variety is definitely good in the context of the jam’s theme!

Nice music on this!

In terms of puzzle design, I think a good rule of thumb to keep in mind for puzzles that you have to discover is to make it very obvious for the player what options for interaction exist and let the puzzles be more about how to utilize them. Having to press every button on the keyboard to see if it does anything felt a bit ill-conceived in this regard.

The monster looked and moved pretty menacing flowing through the obstacles but I couldn’t figure out what actually affected my speed or what “my mirrors” were supposed to be doing, some explanation would be appreciated even in the form of the game’s description!

Now that I could play it I can say it’s quite fun, the monster design is very cute, the music is cool and the story bits set up a good context.

I liked the idea of training segments to get better stats, but the stats I have gained didn’t feel that much different across rampages, maybe tuning them to be a bit more drastic would make the game have a more satisfying progression/leveling over the short term arc of the days.

For the minigames where there is some gui to play on (like the strength training bar) it would be nice to have the bar larger and/or closer to the monster animation in some way so you stay better immersed in being a monster even while focusing on the bar :)

I’d appreciate if I could punch without being locked to the ground while doing so, although this does make it feel more like you are a huge thing. Maybe just lowering your walking speed if you are punching while moving would satisfy this without feeling overly restrictive.

It would be great to have a ground pound with cooldown that destroys whatever building is already on fire in a given radius. This would make for satisfying finishes and tactical placement of destruction and usage of this.

Overall, an impressively varied game, thanks!

Thanks!

Mouse look is using frame delta (btw your 240Hz would lead to faster look thanks to more frames) but it is tied to resolution in a way, I assume you have a 4k display whereas I tested on 1080p? So your mouse travels over more pixels for the motion? I should use resolution in look calculation in some way. I am also using bevy_enhanced_input and I am not sure what it actually does with the cursor delta before passing it to me.

I did include a mouse sensitivity setting in the escape menu but I am not sure what range to offer here or what defaults is best to have (it can be set to (EDIT its only 2x max) faster in the menu than it is by default, but maybe that’s not enough?).

Thanks for playing!

Nevermind, I was running chromium on linux without vulkan support enabled, using the right flags to launch makes the game run fine. Sorry, first time testing anything that relies on WebGPU.

The art looks cool from what I’ve seen but the game is running at 1 FPS in the browser for me which makes the game part impossible to play.

Thanks!

Yes, that is intentional, in the beginning all levels were like this, then we opted for the fixed view for the background on more and more levels as the paired rotation means you only have to be in the right position without your angle mattering at all, which indeed made solving easier and somewhat automatic, which felt wrong.

But visually the background is more interesting if it looks around with you instead of being static. I guess we didn’t consider that varying this could be a confusing aspect but I can see how that is the case as there aren’t enough levels left in the game that do this now.

Thanks for your kind words, glad to hear our tutorial solution did its job :)

We are definitely aware of the issue you mention, hopefully we can fix this later by nudging the player towards the correct position more when you are close enough, so the finishing adjustments are less tedious on some of those levels.

Glad you liked it! We do want to offer some accessibility options to reduce the eye strain and have different color palettes, maybe in a post jam update!

Thanks!

I assume you mean the last level, it could probably have a bit more guidance/hints indeed.

Nice pixel art and the screen wrapping projectiles are an interesting twist.

The crosshair is currently barely readable with how small it is and being the color that blends into the level.

Being able to shoot by clicking would be nice.

I think a bit more spatious areas would pair better with the design of the projectiles.

What will bounce the bullet and what won’t could be a bit clearer in terms of coloring.

Having a finite number of projectiles that you need to get back didn’t seem to matter much as there was always enough coming back before running out even if spamming mindlessly. It might be interesting to accentuate this design more, having more damage but less bullets at your disposal could support this idea better I think.

Overall a solid entry!