itch.io

Thank you for playing it and for your feedback. In it's current state it's more like a prototype, but I plan to do some fixes and balancing later, as well as adding more content to bring it closer to the concept I had in mind.

Yes, I even remember reading about that game in the description on OGA! Didn't expect to run into the creator here, but it's so cool. Thimras made an excellent song, and I'm really happy it was made public domain because the moment I first heard it, I knew it would fit my exploration atmosphere well.

Thank you for playing the game and giving detailed feedback. Even though you did not reach the goal, it was more about the journey all along. I plan to develop some of the features that I left out due to time constraints and add some more events to breathe more life into the Archipelago.

Edit: Now I'll make sure to try War-Ships as well!

Very cool game, it was a chill experience to plan my moves on the map while the ethereal music played in the background. The various locations, together with the various characters and their surrounding gave me a lot to think about in order to find the optimal solution. I found it was the best option for me to move the character that's furthest away from the enemies. Ranger and watchtowers were quite useful to get more information and chart some big fat combos. I only have two suggestions for improvement:

• I was a bit confused about the tooltip for ruins. I read it something like 75% chance of 6.25% (so something like 4.68%) chance of aborting the path. It took me way too long to realize we have a 75% and 25% chance of two results. Of course I was tired, but maybe separate the two outcomes into rows would make it easier to read.
• It would be really useful to indicate which character is selected, I messed up my first few moves because I didn't know what I was doing.

Overall a simple to learn, hard to master game with enough depth and replayability to be addictive and one of the more interesting takes on the theme.

Wow, that's quite a large team you guys have, it must have been hard to coordinate the efforts between 9 people.

Some notes that I took:

• Love the lore intro and the announcer voice.
• The intro seemed to repeat unless I pressed Skip. Or maybe I just clicked right where the Replay Intro button was about to appear, not sure.
• I think the instructions screen before the game - while it was beatufil -  disappeared too quickly, I did not have the time to really read it. Maybe it could stay longer with the option to skip it with a click if you're already familiar?
• The gameplay itself was fun, with smooth controls, even though I realized I'm not very good at it (my highscores were just below 400).
• 🎶 STARS ON A MAP 🎶 STARS ON A MAP 🎶 STARS ON A MAP 🎶 STARS ON A MAP 🎶

Thank you, it was a short and fun game, overall very well polished. There's really nothing I can suggest to improve, so I mainly highlighted what I liked.

Some notes that I took:

• Great visual style and it worked really well with the music. I assume that you draw the sprites yourself, did you make the music, too?
• The controls had a nice flow. Maybe you could make it possible to play the game with only keyboard or only mouse, it would go a long way in terms of accessibility. Unless I missed something, the pickpocket part is keyboard-only, but the menus are mouse only.
• I liked the little dialogue snippets, the language seemed to blend well with the style established by the aesthetics and the music. My favourite was the "Skedaddle" button.
• At first I was a bit confused by how Suspicion works, I thought it's something that's affected by how much time I'm spending in the pockets. Then I saw the lady looking at me suspiciously and it all clicked. Nice touch.
• Perfect ending, didn't expect that, just like the other guy.

I guess you went a bit overboard with your scope, as a fellow solo dev, I can understand that well, one of the hardest thing to learn when you're working with a deadline as tight as 9 days is to determine what's the minimum viable product you should aim for, and which features to cut if you're running out of time. It's still nice that you submitted it, and I guess you already learned a lot while implementing whatever you could.

For actual feedback, I can mainly reiterate the things others already pointed out before:

• Some sense of speed and altitude would be really helpful, either by having a different terrain texture (that you can see how close it is and how fast it's flying by) or some kind of a HUD, which could strengthen the feeling of piloting the ship.
• I couldn't see where the turrets are, so it was hard to get out of range, but the dodging seemed to work fine. How did you implement that? Did you track actual projectiles that the player could dodge?
• After moving around for a while, the ship seemed to move not forward, but stuck in a diagonal direction, probably some bug with the force calculations?

Anyway, there are no bad results if you're learning in the process, and keep on doing it, one day I'd like to see this completed! :)

Prime example of making a fun game with very little assets. I liked the meta-narrative as a commentary on the current state of the gaming industry, but some of the text had typos and weird phrasing, I would recommend double-checking it or maybe involving someone as a proof-reader. The puzzles were nice, just the right amount of annoying. Not gonna lie, I was relieved when my guy skipped the last one. Just out of curiosity, could it be completed if I didn't make any mistakes, or was it hard-coded to skip? I liked the concept of having the puzzles on the exact same level, only with different mechanics.

Yeah, I must've missed it the first time, then I played without the tutorial. You can still add that info to the page, that would be useful.

I had much fun this game, bonus points for including stuff I could learn!

Some notes that I took:

• Sometimes the photo didn't seem to register, it looked like I had my cursor straight on the animal and got a miss. It usually happened with the Entelodon hiding in the background and the smaller similar ones (maybe also Entelodon?) that go sideways in pairs. In the latter case, it looked like their torso registered the "hit", but clicking on their head did not. The flying Eomys was also very hard to capture, but in that case I'm not 100% it wasn't on me.
• Sometimes the sprites of the swimming animals (mainly the Diplocynodon and the Eopelobates) came above the trees in the foreground.
• Beautiful art and very consistent style. I especially loved that the scrolling environment didn't feel very repetitive with enough variations of the environment itself and the placement of the animals.
• I felt like taking a photo of smaller or faster-moving animals could be worth more points from a game perspective, but that's just a personal preference and I understand you had a different design choice.
• I liked the upgrades a lot, especially the recovery (my favourite). At some point, it was confusing to me that it said 50 points for "Add photos" and I had somewhere between 50-100 and couldn't buy it. The next run I realized it was buying 2 at a time, but I saw nothing that indicated that.

Overall, great work, thank you for making this!

Unfortunately I didn't have the time to finish the game in one sitting, but based on the other comments I assume there is an end goal to the game, I just didn't find it. I still enjoyed it very much, it's amazing that some people (even as a team) can put together a full-fledged 3D game in just 9 days. I loved the snow deformation, the map and the strategic choices of leaving the vehicle on the road vs bringing it back, taking more food vs fuel. My choice was to fill up the tank during the night and bring more food for a longer expedition during the day, though it probably wasn't the best strategy since I miscalculated on the distance and no amount of food could save me once I had to leave the vehicle a long way from the safehouse. At first I was missing some music, but then it felt like the silence supports the depressing nordic atmosphere even better. Congratulations, a well-polished game!

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it! While I read a lot about the Ultima series, I never tried them, you got me interested though. Thank you for the suggestion about the event options, that's actually something that never crossed my mind, but I like it so I'll definitely implement it.

Very cute and fun little game, and one of the few where I felt like the developers had the time to finish and polish all the features, so good job with the scope! It took some time to get used to handling the minigames and keeping an eye on request, but once I got used to the multitasking, I went from 1 star to 3 an all levels. My favourite part was the world map, the main motivation for me to finish the game was definitely seeing all the locations. If there's one more thing I would've love to see is different scenery for the different locations (instead of the shore), but I realize it's probably too much for the jam's timeframe. Overall, congratulations on your first GWJ submission, you can be very proud of it.

Right, I died right before I could reach the shop, but that sounds interesting, I'll give it another spin!

Yes! Tab autocomplete was another thing I wanted to suggest, but I forgot.

Thank you, it's quite a positive surprise to me that anyone (and even multiple people) took the time to play it through the year. I'm sorry you didn't find the Lost City, but the whole design philisophy behind the game was that the journey matters more than reaching the destination. With that in mind, I plan to implement some additional map features, activities and events I had to leave out due to time constraints, which will hopefully bring some more life to the Archipelago.

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed the game. The movement could use a bit more love, one thing I planned but never had the time to implement as a point-and-click navigation, but I still want to do it because I want to practive pathfinding. The keyboard movement should use some more love as well, although I'm not sure how to adjust that, maybe by introducing some limit to the input processing function.

Unfortunately I did not have the time to thouroughly playtest and balance the resource economy, so you can absolutely go overboard without any downsides, but I already got some useful feedback and have some plans to improve it after the jam. Time matters in a way, because you only have 365 days to find the Lost City, but it's generous for sure, especially if you get luck with the map.

Thank you for playing it and the detailed feedback!

Thank you, I'm glad you liked it! While I tried Pirates! ages ago, I didn't play it as much so I could use it for inspiration, but nevertheless the comparison is very flattering. The resource economy is something I had little time to playtest and balance, but I got very useful feedback here already, so I'll definitely improve it later. Setting the story flags like the cursed gold is a feature I barely touched, and you are right, I imagine displaying them with some mysterious text like "The cursed gold will bring misery upon you..." or something similar. Anyway thank you for playing it and providing detailed feedback!

Pointcrawl, mouse-only gambling revenge RPG is a genre I can totally get behind! :)

Some notes that I took:

• Love the pixel art and color palette. The colors and the music together created this weird fantasy synthwave vibe, which was a bit out of sync when reading how my family was just massacred, but I won't lie, I wasn't really bothered about it.
• The menu and intro/outro UI could use a bit more love, but as a fellow solo dev I can guess you had less time left for those in the end. :)
• The pointcrawl map was simple but worked well, props for including two ways to look around (edge of the screen and mouse scroll), maybe a click-and-drag would be nice, but that's like nice-to-have bonus, not something I missed per se.
• The battlemap looked nice as well, how did you make those trees in the background? Are they 3D with some pixel art texture? Also, the aspect ratio and the anime-style clashes made it very cinematic, although sometimes I forgot which guy I am (but that's on me).
• I was a bit confused by the spinning mechanic, at first I didn't realize I need to spin, maybe a quick indicator or some other reminder on the first battle would be useful. What does the sword icon on green mean for the enemy? Also, how much is damage affected by the number of spins vs. the right color? I couldn't figure these out.

Overall, the gameplay was fun and polished, the menu/intro/outro stood out a bit, but I still liked it a lot.

Like others pointed out, the progression at the beginning feels too much of a grind, but for some reason I still had much fun with it. At first I was a bit sceptic about the the console aesthetics and interaction, but it soon grew on me. A few beeps and boops could go a long way.

Unfortunately I did not have enough time to grind to get past the first 4 levels, but I intend to come back and try it, especially if you have any plans to update it later.

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Your assessment is correct, I managed to set up some systems/features that I wanted and even partially made them work together, but unfortunately didn't have the time to give any of them the depth I wanted to. Maybe after the jam.

Fun game and really well polished. I always love wordplay in the title, I also used it before.

Some notes that I took:

• I really liked the map as a mission/level selector, it's a strong way to the get the player in the right mood.
• I'd be interested to hear about how you implemented the spelling feature. Are the letters completely random?Also, how do you calculate damage?
• I was almost finished with the mountain level when I realized I don't have to pick adjacent letters, but that's on me :)
• The size of the fireball scaling with the damage is a nice touch, feels even more satisfying to do 33 one.
• Did you create the 2D assets? They look really great.

Thank you, happy to hear that! I also wanted to make something like this for a long time and with this theme I finally got the motivation. :)

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed the game. More events / activities and improved tooltips / guidance are on my list of planned post-jam improvements.

Really fun game and impressive work for a first-jam solo dev! At first I was a bit frustrated because it felt like I don't understand the rules and I'm just making random bad decisions, but once I got the gist of it, it felt awesome to find some optimal path.

Some notes that I took:

• Movement: I liked the pointcrawl map, really made me plan my routes, especially when I realized that ship some ship routes need a minimum number of discovered nodes. One information that I did not find but would be really useful is the cost to move to a node. At first I thought that's what's displayed on hover, but that seemed like a gain instead.
• Upgrades: Really nice that some of them are tied to terrain types, I love these in all genres, I just wished I could hide them and check the map before selecting to make a more informed, strategic decision. I really enjoyed the upgrades in general, went out of my way to collect them (and sometimes died as a result).
• Sometimes I forgot where the crystal is and I had a hard time looking for it, something like the quest marker arrow with a different color would be useful.
• I wanted to ask you about the map generation but I saw you already explained it in another comment.

Very fun to play, and overall polished game. Altough I have nothing against using free assets, it's always nice to see games where every little piece was created by the developers during the jam. It was short, but had everything we need in a game, an atmosphere that's consistent with the story. I'll replay it for the different endings, I got 4/7 resourceful something. Couldn't find the doll for the little girl though. Went into the creepy house and got kicked out by the narrator, I'm really curious what's that about.

The only room for improvement I found was that the object interaction was a bit wonky in some edge cases, namely (1) when you were standing near the house exit door and you took the money from the container next to it and (2) when you discarded an item you had to walk away and back to the object you wanted to pick up. These are really minor things, just wanted to give some useful feedback.

I love this idea, really creative and the result is a fun game. Fits the theme and all three wildcards without being forced. I don't know if it was a conscious design choice or not, but having that stepped diagonal pattern is some of the dungeon walls really helped me cover all the cells without looking at the coordinates (but that was a nice touch as well). Two things that I think need improvement is volume control for the sound (I ended up muting it, but having the option to just turn it down a notch would be better) and the font, I found it almost unreadable in the intro. But I struggled with these exact same issues myself (didn't even have the time to implement settings), so cheers!

TIL the word cygnus.

Cute little game, it's really impressive that you did so good on various aspects of the game all by yourself. I'm not a fan of the CRT shader (?), I find it hard on my eyes, but that's just a personal preference. It worked well together with the music and the emotional story. Although I'm not sure what the wolf at the end was about. I'm just glad the little one survived as well, for a second I thought I have to fight a boss wolf and hoped that all the animals I helped along the way will come to my assistance.

The controls were alright, I had to get used to the movement but it fit well with the swan. The car-like steering was a bit confusing when the camera turned.

I also ran into the bug where I could not scare away the birds and I could not find the fourth baby so for a short while I thought I got stuck because I need to complete the sidequest.

Edit: also, while I'm not affected by it, kudos for including various colorblind options.

I finally got around to try this one, I knew I wanted to since I saw your progress on Discord. Overall, it felt like a simple, but polished game. Simple, as in there aren't too many parts to consider, but the gameplay itself was quite unique, I always like to learn some new concepts through games. The art style, colors, audio resulted in a mysterious and tense atmosphere, which was further reinforced by the little creepy messages you get at locations. I also loved that you used your own photos for that. It was also nice to try out an interactive voronoi map in practice, I'm also fiddling with these methods for a citi-based game I'm working on, but so far I did not get the results I'm looking for, at least not consistently.

Edit: one thing I missed after the tutorial is that I have to turn on the radio to get signals, and I was running around the map aimlessly, but that's probably on me.

I actually went on and bought the pack as well, it will be useful for some future projects or our tabletop rpg sessions.

Hey Carlos, thank you for playing it and giving detailed feedback, it means a lot! I'm glad you loved it. I'm also partial to management games (playing as well as developing them), aside from the art style that's another reason I usually try yours whenever I get the notification.

Unfortunately I had very little time to playtest, balance and create narrative content, it's a wonder I even ended up with something playable. Thank you for pointing out the riskless approach, it will be useful to balance the resource economy. I also plan to add some more map features, events and activities after the jam, to give the Archipelago some more life and character. And make use of the narrative flags that currently serve no purpose other than potentially scaring away people from unethical choices. :)

The biggest positive surprise for me is that so many people actually played the game for 10+ minutes to find the Lost City. Cheers to all the persistent captains!

Thank you for playing it and giving feedback. I agree with all your points, unfortunately I did not have enough time to properly playtest and balance the resource economy, so if you play smart, you won't ever run out of resources. I plan to improve it after the jam to at least bring it to a state of how I imagined it. Point and click movement is one of these features I'd like implement. The arrow keys should work for the navigation, I just forgot to add it to the page.

Nice game for a first-jammer solo dev! Of course there was a lot of space for polishing, but I know how hard it is to do everything by yourself, and it already had all the elements of a playable game, so you can be proud of it.

Some notes that I took:

• Some sound effects for the spells and maybe hit/damage would go a long way. Especially for the area spell.
• While we are at it, the area spell was my favourite, against the slimes I didn't even use the projectile spell, just herded them together and hit 5-8 of them with the explosion. It felt satisfying.
• The enemies in Hell felt like a leap in difficulty, because it seemed like they were at least as fast as me, so as soon as you navigated into two of them, it was hard to keep the distance and any distance you lost could not be regained. It could ease the difficulty and provide the player with some more tactical tools/choice if you could gain some distance either by using obstacles in the terrain or maybe some slowing spell.
• I liked the minimap, it was useful. Some of the text in the beginning took a whole lot of screen space and I had to hide the minimap to read it.
• I always appreciate procedural generation. Did you use Godot's noise library? Did you add any other rules, maybe to ensure that the map is always navigable?

Overall, nice work and keep developing!

To be fair, it worked well, I just wanted to confirm my suspicions :)

Thank you, this was a well-polished game and a fun experience, although I learned I'm not as good with memory games as I once was.

Some notes that I took:

• I liked the sound effects, they worked well with the theme. An option to adjust the volume would be nice, but I know how it works, I didn't get around to implement that either.
• I don't know if the keyboard-only controls are a design choice or not, but from the menu to the game itself I felt like this would work much better with a mouse. I know I could've done better as a player.
• The artwork was nice, the game had a consistent aesthetic. The UI was clear at all times. Some of the text was a bit hard to read due to the background, but that's really a minor issue.
• At first it felt like I'll never be able to beat Fred, and I was wishing for a damage upgrade. Then I got into the flow I realized how much the combo means. Maybe the damage we do and the combo could use a bit more juice to support the feeling of "yeah, I'm doing massive damage now!"

I'd like to see the version one day where you travel the fantasy word to fight other drunks. :)

Lucky captain! Once I found the Lost City on the island right next to the port. As of now, the procedural generation rules are quite simple, I'll have to fine-tune it later.

I'm glad you enjoyed the game, After the jam, I have plans to add some more features and content that I did not have the time for.

I'm not a big fan of the CRT (?) graphics, but I set that aside because the game looked fun.

Some notes that I took:

• Some parts of the map were so dark that I could not see where I'm going and the flashlight wasn't helping much, since it only the next two steps.
• Probably related to the previous point, but the ship was hard to see when I was returning from a more distant object. I saw the bright spot, but sometimes I had no idea which way I should go for the ramp and I missed it by a few seconds.
• Someone already pointed out the movement, I just wanted to note that I also got stuck with the ramp one time when returning.
• The narrative was simple but sufficient, it managed to create the right atmosphere for the game. I would maybe add 1-2 sentences information for each planet, just a little fluff text of why we are investigating that specific spot. It's easy work and I think it would add a lot to the experience.
• Most of the levels had the right challenge, I managed to get back with only <3-5 seconds left, so the tension was real. With some minor improvements (lighting/flashligh, movement and equipping Trusty by default) would make it feel more fair in my opinion.
• The ending was a nice touch, corporately depressing with a bit of mystery. I actually tried to escape the map just to see if I can do it, and it looked like I fell down some ledge and back to the main area. I'm just interested, was it teleporting me back at the edge?

Thank you, M&B was another inspiration, right after Deadfire. 200 Crew is quite impressive, I'll need to add more events and mechanics that use it in the future!

One of the top (or at least luckiest) captains so far! Once I found the Lost City on the island right next to the port. I wanted to create a roguelike explorer game forever, so I was happy to see the theme for this jam. I'm glad you enjoyed the RP part, I planned to include many more events, but I ran out of time. I'll definitely add more after the jam.

Thank you! The art started out as a placeholder I could create with my limited skills in a limited amount of time, but like most of the temporary solutions, it became permanent soon. I plan to add some more details after the jam, but maybe I'll keep the option to play with the limited style as well. I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the exploration itself, I plan to add some more events to make it more interesting later.

Thank you for the feedback, I'm glad you enjoyed the game! Unfortunately I did not have much time left to playtest it, so the economy might need some more balancing to pose a challenge, but I'll probably fine-tune it after the jam. I have quite a few features I did not get to implement.