itch.io

thank you Mr shovel (btw if you're here looking for IGTAP there's an updated private version I can send you)

🤡

i mean,,, sorry that offended you,,,,, but no its not joules youre collecting, its watts because this is a game where you collect a currency called watts, not a game where you collect a currency called joules. i've never claimed you're collecting energy, only ever that youre collecting power.

your history is public and i really wonder if IGR would be comfortable with how toxic you are all across itch?

Im glad you (mostly) liked it! and i do wanna reiterate, im not mad i didnt win the jam, im mad that a many of the games that did were much worse than non-winning games, including mine but also including lots of others. If the entire top-10 was made of games like 'staff only', 'world break' and 'back to square 1' then i'd be more than happy to not rank among them.

we're working this into a full game! i did a rebalance of the entire gameloop so itll hopefully be a *little* faster, and ngl the last bit of the game was made on submission day between the hours of 12 and 3am, so its not my finest work.

ohhhh ok what you noticed there i think was the low clone speed - level 4 starts out with very slow clones, and because of their very limited logic, i can only change clone speed by reducing the framerate the clones play back at. 

i've changed it since players universally disliked it

Performance issues have never been reported, and i've done tests with 250+ clones onscreen and seen no hit. They cull. i dont know whats up with your PC but its not my game's fault. it runs without lag in browser on my chromebook, which is,,,, a chromebook.

everything else you've mentioned has been fixed. 

about half of the winning games of this jam are batshit insane choices. it's obvious to everyone who isnt a pirate sycophant.

they're in the community discord - https://discord.gg/z4agXcsM

you might have better luck reaching them there

im really glad you saw it - i didnt write it out of malace as the mods assume, i was genuinely critiquing your game.

Keep going :) you show a lot of promise

This game is really cool! The puzzles you've created are great, and the time loop mechanic let you add a lot of gameplay for little dev time. Definitely a game deserving of jam-winner status! The only nitpick i can give is that certain items being single-use (teleporter and especially fishing rod) is a real QoL issue - missing the fishing rod just ends up sad and causes the player to walk back for no reason.

Sorry you wont get my feedback, but i did a fairly long write-up on the jam page and the mods both deleted it and banned me from their server. 

Mods are deleting all critical feedback on this game.

i thought thats what it mightve been! We've since changed the font, in the release version it should be more obvious!

https://varii.itch.io/igtap-but-patched 

This version might work better for you? not sure though.

more is coming!

The wall jump being broken is strange, its not something i've seen anyone else have issue with. ill have to look into it. 

oh theres a map?! i didnt even notice aha. nothing seemed to point me towards going outside

You had some really cool ideas here actually! Good job!

The camera needed a lot of work, since it spend a lot of its time clipped into walls. I dont know if there was a gameplay loop? nothing could be interacted with, and the time never advanced. Still though, i could see a cool game being built on these foundations with some QoL tweaks and a gameplay loop

we are continuing development! playtest versions will be posted here leading up to full release https://discord.gg/HMu5SkVwt9

we are continuing! we've set up a discord if you're interested, https://discord.gg/HMu5SkVwt9

ah sorry about that :( I already fixed that bug in the non-jam version, and I just got saves working on my end. I hope you're interested enough to play again once the big update is out 

coming from you, that means a lot. thank you sooooo much :)

I don't think you can shortcut them, only lvl1 and 2 

for the full release I'll fix the dash bug, though I've already got quite a few changes piling up that I don't really wanna make free & public. You know who to ask about em

This is a really good looking game with compelling upgrade and progression systems that unfortunately falls very short in the gamefeel department, which is a shame because had you gotten it right, this would be a smash hit

I think my biggest question is why the map scrolls *so* far? I dont know if you ever do this, i didnt get far enough, but i imagine enemies placed at the complete edge of the map would be just awful to fight - it would take a lot of scrolling to see where your shot landed. I assume that you push the gameplay in that direction because of just how far the catapult can shoot: it is *very* powerful, and fine adjustments are very, very difficult due to how powerful it is. Fighting anything at mid range felt like straddling a very, very thin line between launching 0.1m and the entire map; there didnt feel like much room for precision here, which is a shame. 

Level 2 was particularly frustrating - it seems *very* precise. placing demands of precision on the player with imprecise controls (why is it so easy to undershoot???) is a recipe for disaster honestly - if your game was any worse presented i wouldve quit there and then, but you'd built up just enough goodwill for me to push through that major moment of friction.

The main issue that made me want to stop playing was just a lot of clunk that i'll list below

• Sometimes i'd lose and have to restart the level, and i *never* figured out why. I assume there's some kind of counter? but i dont know where
•  The tutorial doesnt play automatically - you have to click the "help" button in order to see it. it should really have played by itself
• The tutorial only seems to cover the *very* basics of "click to shoot the catapult". idk 
• the "ammo" was quite obviously from an asset pack to me, and not integrated amazingly. Why is there a woman swaying her hips stood in a catapult? Sure, we can launch people as ammo, but why are they happy about it?
• The lore tab was,,,, presented in a way where i doubt anyone read it. It'd be better split up and trickled throughout the game
• Effects felt very inconsistent - they often just wouldnt work? Poison seemed consistent, but the chain lighting one only sometimes activated and I never saw the effects of magic arrow
• On my second playthrough, level 2 bugged out. The clear only registered on my 5th success.
• and for the second time - the catapult controls were so, so finnickly. They need significant changes to feel good IMO.

I do see some of these concerns addressed on the jam page; Inconsistent effects mightve been partially due to your system where you get +1 effect per shot (which i dont love, but dont have much to say about), though that doesnt explain why i never saw the magic arrow do anything. This isnt nescessarily a bug with the upgrade itself - it might be a deficiency in VFX. 
 

The ammo counter, too, seems to be based on the number of total effects you have, but again that system was never conveyed to me through gameplay. I intentionally never read the jam/itch page because i want to judge games on how they tutorialise, and i dont think your game did a the best job in that department (though you tried - which is way more than most aha)

This sounds very negative, but the core of the game is very compelling! Your systems are very interesting, and i genuinely wish they were packaged alongside a better-controlling catapult so i could experience them more 

nah, its watts

that bugs already fixed in the patched version 

it definitely does increase real gains! clones just gain 50% of the listed amount.

In future, I'm gonna just halve the listed amount - game balance won't change, but it'll probably feel better that way.

that's already fixed in the patched version 

23 seconds was mine!

cats!!!!!!

strange, i've had multiple reports of controllers working.

woah! My record on lvl4 is just over 23 seconds, so thats a great time! its a hard course aha

just QoL and bugfixes

im pretty sure it has controller support? at least, i watched someone play it with a controller yesterday. i dont own one myself so i cant test

that bug is already fixed in the patched version https://varii.itch.io/igtap-but-patched

The visuals and sound of this game clearly had a lot of work put into them, this game looks *very* good for a game without a dedicated artist, and honestly better than a lot of games i've seen with dedicated artists. Theres a lot of nice touches - the main menu especially bought a lot of goodwill with how pressing a button caused the cute train animation! i liked it a lot lol

But if i had to summarise the gameplay of this game, i would call it a roguelike without player agency. 

I was never short on rails, so the whole rail planning aspect was a bit of a nothingburger. Maybe if i had the mountain synergy upgrade it might've, but i never saw that upgrade at a point i wanted to take it in all of my time playing. I would usually make no changes to my rail network each day.

The between-level upgrades were maybe this game's weakest point. I believe there were 5?? But of the bunch, i'd only say 3 were worthy of inclusion. Im gonna go through them all here

• The weakest by far was "safety cuts", which read "increase passengers by 200%, but 1% chance per rail to lose 50% of them and this upgrade". This upgrade doesnt form part of a build and the balancing is tight, so to me this read far more like "1% chance that you might just lose at any time".
• Next, i'd say "returning train" was just boring. It was just a simple quota reduction. Sure, it might work alongside a wider roster of more wacky upgrades, but alone it was just a bit of a nothingburger
• Railroad workers, by itself, does nothing. Even without taking it i never struggled for rails, so with it,,, yeah. 
• Savings is what made railroad workers interesting - Together, the two apply a scaling multiplier bonus. This synergy was very appealing, but i always died on day 3 or 4 so it never came into effect
• Finally, the *best* upgrade (and the one you should iterate on) is the mountain one. Its peak.

The worst part of this upgrade system was how you could be shown multiple copies of the same upgrade, just at different rarities. I very often only had an effective choice between two, and once i saw the quota upgrade (my second least favourite!) 3x at once, being forced to take it. Definitely change this!!!.

The random map was fine i think, but lead to *wild* imbalances from run to run. This is part of why i dont think this game has any player agency - The map generation is 99% of whether you'll live or die on day 3. The only time i ever made it to lvl4 was because a large number of large stations spawned close to the middle. You need some additional map gen rules to ensure each run is equally balanced.

i dont understand this - You put as little effort as possible into a game that looks kinda dogshit, then spam it across jams. What is wrong with you?

Well, this is definitely a candidate for jam winner - which is scary for me aha, i was starting to feel kinda confident until i saw this game.

These critiques are very unfair for a jam game, and mostly consist of me saying "more systems pls", but they might help you if you're aiming for a full release

• The game really needs to start smaller and grow - i was kinda overwhelmed on the first screen seeing 15 different cards for the first time lol. If you make this a roguelike (which it kinda felt like you were doing?) you should start the player with far fewer options.
• The between-level shop didnt seem very consequential, i think i used it twice. The game kinda already started me with a very balanced deck, so like, i didnt really wanna change much. 
• Some enemies felt a little strange. I watched a regular archer guy just run away from the fight and had to chase em down, and i dont really know what the witches do? they just spawn passive eyes. 
• Much of the tactical depth in these type of games come from party actions, but this is, obviously, a game about one main character which really limits the tactical depth you can reach. But i dont think that should change! i really like having one focal character. What i might suggest are summons! I'd suggest you make a totally different system for them - Dont make them cards, but perhaps let the player assign a subdeck of cards to each one. Theres so many possible ways you could go, but without them, i think you'll quite quickly cap out tactical depth. 
• the "imp" card felt very weak. Yeah, vision is valuable, but the range is very short and it only lasts 1 turn. it didnt matter much. 

I think you've got something really good here, but to reiterate: i do not think the design space of "fire emblem but you only have one guy" is viable for a full game. Your game plays like a mix of DND combat and slay the spire, a small party that provide support to the staff would significantly increase the amount of gameplay you're able to offer players at a relatively small cost to dev time.
 

thats a very fast time! good job

its just a minor bug. should be easy to fix

your game is really strange because it's just *awful* to play and completely unfun... but thats the entire point, and i really respect that. I'd like to watch streamers play this