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Charming little game! Love the hand-drawn art style and cheerful little storyline :)

Great start! I wonder if it's better to introduce the sharks before or after the object collection mechanic, so that the water is first this place of good things, and THEN the bad things to balance it out. Maybe that was just my experience with the game but the sharks already taking apart my boat almost made me too anxious to try and grapple with the mechanics of navigating the UI. Strong start though, would be interested to see what else could happen. Maybe the radio can play some music perhaps????

Really nice art and progression of mechanics here. I do think the game could switch vibe when the watchers are introduced, like having the boppy music loop switch up to a dark, ambient one would be amazing. To me it would become a game of two halves almost, like the first bit is a tutorial and then the world almost opens up to much more...

Having a separate sprite for the watcher when the shark is on it would be nice too! the eye being squished closed by the weight of the shark... 

Overall though super nice!

As soon as I saw my Go Fish opponent, I knew it was over. A man shaped like a dorito is surely much too powerful an opponent for me.... Great job with pairing the music with the minigames!

Interesting concept! Next time I'd recommend listening to the music before exporting it ;)

tried to set speed to 50000 but the game would not let me! it was a slow burn out to the shark.... thanks to your sponsors for allowing you to bring this game to life! grëät tïmë gööd gämë!

Any game that artificially makes the music faster to mirror time speeding up gets a gold star from me - would love to see the fish randomly have thoughts also, I think it would suit the style of the game. "It's tough to be minnow these days"... "seagrass just doesn't hit like it used to..."

I never would have suspected the shrimp... and I paid the price. This was a blast to click through, although short! Love the art style too, so emotive. Would have been fun to see unique death art for all the deaths... and I'm so curious what happens after "look back"!

The description for this game really draws you in... but I wasn't quite sure how it mapped onto the game. Tried a few times and did end up with a victory screen but didn't know how I got there! The button in the right corner is still a mystery to me... other than that, the gamescreen seems to be set up well, although going full screen would really allow visibility of the text elements. Perhaps if there were more music states that matched the anxiety of the scene too!

Bonus points for Construct 3, goated engine.

Your dedication to leaving comments that end with "it's sad :(" is matched only by the vibes of this game. It's great :)

I adore the unexplainted reality of a human swinging around a shark! From a gameplay perspective, having one of the pair used for movement and the other for attacking is such a great start - I hope that you feel proud of what you have made so far and continue to make things!

Adding a sound effect for the swoosh and hit would really make the demo pop.

Thanks for your thoughts! The game itself has been released now if you would like to see how the ambience fits in - it's on our page! Regardless, appreciate the message.

I reckon you could really elevate this by inverting the balance between strings and harp at some point - like really strip away those strings and just give us the harp. Both pieces of this track are really lovely, and they shine together - but could they shine on their own? 

I was on the edge of my seat waiting for the quack... was not disappointed! There is a high trilling lead in the second track that I wish was brough out more, but on the whole I have a great time listening to these - they definitely feel cohesive. Nice work!

Thanks!!

i know right

Thanks for listening, and for giving some feedback! There is definitely a story going on here that I'm not doing a particularly great job of getting across - and the soundtrack suffers in exactly the way you have described. I was writing this while developing a game for a concurrent game jam, so I was operating on the game itself giving the context for these tracks - but failing to remember that the soundtrack itself is being presented alone. Again, thanks for checking out the soundtrack!

Thanks for the kind words! Agree about the modal swap - although I'm more of a dorian stan :)

Strand of Red Liquid - very nice beginning (LABS is great), i do feel like the main synth melody could have used some reverb or delay to fill in the abrupt silences in?

Yawning Black Infinity - I'd have to know in context why we're swapping between these delicate ambiences and the energetic beats. If there was a good reason I'd love it! Personally I could have had a whole track of just the ambient beginning!

Dream Emulator - Always love sound effect work

En's Theme - I love most of this! I feel like the panned knocking sound through the start is a bit too bassy though, it would draw my ear less if it was pitched up an few tones. Cool synth lead choice

Sunmeadow - I reckon throwing a slow auto pan on those arpeggios would be sick, really leaning into the "in the head" themes of the story

'of dew' - once it gets to about 90 seconds in, I get it. Personally think it could have taken less time in the intro to get the point across.

Betweem Dreams - Love the rhythm of the bass, I wonder if at the start you could gradually introduce all the rhythmic elements of it so it gradually becomes busy? Some of these instruments could have slow moving pans around the head again I think!

Secrets of the Baker's Hat - Uh I need to know the secrets immediately please, it's urgent. Love this one a lot.

Windless - I think if this one had a strong cutscene or cinematic moment tied to it, it would work really well. For me it's a bit too abstract to listen to on it's own, though all of texture work is great, the organ (?) fading in and out

'of stone' - some of these interjections are a little to loud for my taste relative to the percussion and bass. I had to wait a while for that upper melody but it was worth the wait, really nice processing on that sound!

Places - for me, this was the most tiring listen so far. I think you could have condensed these elements down into 45 looping seconds and still gotten the vibe across. Cool vibe, for me too long!

'of stars' - i have really mixed feelings about this one, but only because the opening is perhaps my favourite thing in this soundtrack. Grimy, purposeful, immense. The rest of it just doesn't live up to the promise of the opening for me!

No Longer Lone String - Ugh tasty, so tasty, love the choices at the start. I do feel like there are a few mistimed arpeggio runs in the middle section that sound not perfect enough to be perfect, but then not out of time enough to sound casual, if that makes sense?

Static Waves - ah I see, this was Bioshock the whole time. I was unfamiliar with your game. This is a looooong one though, a tiring listen after the rest of the album

Domingo En la Playa - a nice cleanser to bring the experience to a close

Wow! Great effort to see this entire project through. Some of the tracks could have benefitted from cutting down to really show what the point of them was, but overall I had a nice time listening to many of these.

Wow! Some great instrument choices here, although I feel like Whispers Beneath the Canopy could have benefitted from stripping back to fewer instruments, to let the melody shine? It's almost hitting the same "epic" notes as the main theme, which feels a bit wrong (to me!). Your main theme itself, very well planned and structured - was thinking about where a human singer would breath though! And that last note, I'd definitely consider having lower harmonies to support how naked that high note sounds in context. 
My heart was crying out for some filthy acid synth in the boss battle, and would have loved a cheeky solo woodwind in the piano reprise, or at least a growing and shrinking amount of reverb to tell more of a story through the piece.

But well done on completing this for the jam! Hope you enjoyed your time with it :)

Hard to say! maybe 14 years? I mean there's a difference between writing music and producing music. The orchestral music that I used to write was always performed live, no production required :D

Thanks for the feedback. Many of the first tracks are meant to be barely louder than the atmos, kind of a blurring between sound design, music and atmosphere. But I agree with Sequitur - it needed another pass of levelling. This period of writing was very short as I was developing the game alongside it over a weekend... if I had a whole week of time to spare then the tracks would definitely have benefitted. Appreciate the thoughts!

Thanks for taking the time to write this! Appreciate it

Thanks for the feedback! Really appreciate you taking the time to listen through <3

Just to follow up, the VOD is now up on youtube. The video is timestamped, these are the games we managed to get to!

Chicken Chicken
Chicken!
Chicken, Up!
Chicken Champ
Chicken Defense
Bok Hop
Poultry Rampage
Chousting
Nervous Chickens
Chickenelly
Egg Game
BEBE CHICKEN
Portrait of a Chicken
The Bloody Chicken Escape
CHEKKEN
Where are my Chickens?!
Chickens: Free Range!

We had a blast with them all :D

outstanding use of looping animations for the background elements. the theme and audio tied together well. was the main mechanic tough to work out? we wish it could be a little faster but maybe there were difficulties in developing it?

great aesthetic, really polished retro feel. Some unforgivingly fast and tight movement that demands time spent with the game. would be interesting to add a button that pulls the chick a little tighter to you in tense moments. we gave up as soon as the escorted chick bonked the ceiling and fell to it's death. a level of stress that we don't need in our lives. otherwise awesome work!

interesting to mix such a slow, deliberate shooting mechanic into what is usually a fast-paced spray and pray genre. a diffcult self-imposed task to minimise your total number of events too! well done on the game

this game feels like you had fun making it, which made us enjoy playing it!

When i squint, the capybara on fire look kinda like chickens

If by "horrors" you mean "the joy of watching number go up", we understand completely. Thanks!

Hello Jammers!

Firstly, congrats on submitting and thanks for your lovely comments on our chicken farm! 

The Vandervas Generator team will be streaming playthroughs of all these wonderful games in a few days, we hope to see you there.
If you would like any specific feedback or opinions either let us know live in chat, or here in the forum replies.

The stream will be at roughly 0830 on Sat 24th (UTC) at this link, an unfriendly time for some but for us a necessary compromise - hence why the recording will be uploaded and made available here!

We will also be rating the games but not as part of the live stream, that would feel weird.
Anyway, we think that's all

*concluding chicken noises*

We will adjust our wording accordingly

Thanks for your detailed time spent with the game! We're glad you liked it. Surely a bigger factory would be.... more efficient? No? More money? Tempting? Come on, it's just a little capitalism

<3 And the chickens did it all without opposable thumbs!

*happy clucking*

*multiple overlapping chicken noises*

thanks for the comment! we definitely agree that our economy could use some love. rome wasn't built in a day, but sadly our economy scaling was

*muffled chicken noises of discomfort*