itch.io

Short jam time gang represent! This was a fun little game, though the cursor vibrating when it is too far from the player is a bit janky. Makes it hard to pick-and-place your way to ~~victory~~ the purple block, tho once you’ve got that you kinda just scoop yourself right up with the cursor and win!

You have two misspellings on your first screen (“AHVE” instead of “have” and “HOARDES” instead of “hordes”). In the game itself, I am confused. I usually last about 15–20 seconds and then die to something, but I’m not actually sure what’s killing me lol.

On the initial screen, “Control: [blob of keys, half red and half white]” is very uninformative. Neither clearly indicates active, and it is unclear if the cluster of keys is meant to be WASD or the arrow cluster. It didn’t take long to narrow down that it means “arrow keys: use only left and right”. But once I got into playing, it felt like there was no design to the stage, felt like the space is procedurally generated without any guiding factors, without any regard for whether the generated sections are even possible. Procedural generation gives you infinitely many infinitely long worlds “for free”, but the cost is that it’s a million times harder to make feel good or to give players memorable moments.

There doesn’t seem to be a retry button anywhere. Does that mean you didn’t expect players to want to stick with it long enough to win? When making a Foddian adventure like this, it’s important to give fairly quick retry time! And “refresh the page, thus redownloading the entire game” doesn’t give that. I did eventually fight through that, the forced keyboard+mouse controls, and the very Default Movement mechanics to get out.

I got very close to winning before realizing that you can (must) feed the hourglass. I feel like you can probably do something in-game to indicate that possibility, even if it’s as subtle as making it clearly impossible to win without doing so.

I don’t feel that it’s all that different from other puzzle games, especially those in the genre like Shenzhen I/O or EXAPUNKS, but even in general considering things like Sokoban or Gentoo Rescue. I’m down to have that discussion: what is a game? To me, “gameness” requires a player, and at least one of a win-condition or a lose-condition. So Tetris would be a game (with a player and a lose-condition, but no win-condition), but Conway’s Game of Life would ironically not be a game (failing both criteria). Here you get multiple levels with both win-condition (progress) and “lose”-condition (try again) with a goal of “exploration”. What criteria would you add to (or remove from!) that notion of game?

I have cleaned the Micheal Box. It’s a fairly normal sokoban affair, with a couple twists: you can push multiple boxes at once, but you have a limited number of steps (before you… collapse of exhaustion on the warehouse floor?) The use of the limitation goes unexplained. Are we racing a clock? Probably not, as we can stand in place forever. Are we tired? Probably not actually, as pushing boxes deducts no more than just stepping unladen. So I’m left to believe that the counter is just there to be there. Only in the final stage was the step counter a real adversary, as many of the others gave you far more steps than necessary and provided few obstacles. Made for a nice quick trip to the end card.

I got softlocked on level D. Couldn’t move and so couldn’t die. I think it would be better if 1) you weren’t forced back into default arrangement on death but 2) you could press a button to go back into editing mode. That seems like it would avoid this kind of softlock and avoid frustration stemming from the distinction between “I have a bad arrangement” and “I have a good arrangement but mistimed my jump”.

I cannot fairly rate this game, as it uses Nintendo property in violation of both jam rules and international law.

I ran through the game twice. On the second, I realized that you can pick up your fired arrows — during the first attempt, all either ended up on spikes or in pits, or were otherwise ignored, so it initially looked like you only regain them at checkpoints. That aspect felt like nice resource management, during both runs, even though it’s easy enough to get through without ever using the arrows.

The slow recharge on everything else felt more like time management than resource management. Take some damage? Sit and wait. Run out of jump? Sit and wait. Run out of run? Sit and wait. Recharge systems encourage idling, metroid-style drops encourage farming, checkpoint-refills encourage getting a move on (or no refills! but that increases difficulty).

It is interesting that some pits cause damage when you fall into them, while others just respawn you without causing damage. Not sure if that was intended, or something that just happens.

Also finally I’d avoid sticking an “Exit Game” button on the web version, because that just soft-locks the embedded TIC-80.

Like everything else, that is random, rerolled alongside the season and the jump dynamics. Usually you are a hamster, but very rarely you get the freedom of flight.

Sometimes a bnuuy wants to dance — it’s not quite Micro Mages but i try to give them the ability :D

Bunny golf! What’s the par? Gotta say i was not expecting a golf game. One thing I would recommend working on in the future is coherence of visual assets. For example, the bunny and the bird are flat, unshaded, while the ground tiles are a lot more detailed. Having flatter ground tiles or more shaded character sprites would lend to a stronger presentation.

This was fun! Had a bit of weirdness with the movement tho: my keyboard is not qwerty, and you’ve got A/D for left/right on scancodes (good!) so i could swing left/right intuitively. but S for descend is on keycode, so the descend button was actually on the opposite side of the keyboard entirely. I switched to arrows, it’s fine, just wanted you to know that the french or germans or etc who might be playing your game might find themselves confused.

Your rabbits are cute but the controls need some work. I routinely got soft-locked, having to reset first in level 10, then level 12, then level 7, then decided I really cannot bear to reset again. The most effective means of traversal was to hold S and slide to the right or left, and to jump midair or when touching a wall, because wall-jumps are lenient and jumps are allowed at any point after walking off a ledge. Walking normally is a bad idea, because you get stuck hitting your head while bouncing in the one-tile-tall hallways at the end of some levels.

Gameplay Footage

I think your yellow “!” boxes are offset by one from where they’re supposed to be? Given the gameplay it looks like they’re supposed to span the track, but they’ve left a hole on the top side and they overhang the bottom side.

The green walls, as you can see from the gameplay footage, took me a long time to figure out lol. At one point I was thinking that I was moving too quickly, and that I needed to bring the large creature from the start up to that point to get through. At another point, I was thinking that the number represented a score that I somehow needed to attain before getting in! Not using a textbox that you have to click into could have helped there, and accepting Enter rather than forcing a click would have helped immensely, as both my hands were on the keyboard, neither was on the trackpad.

EDIT to add: i see that there is an explanation of the green wall in the info screen, but, i couldn’t easily read that screen because i don’t have notched scrolling. Trackpad scrolling does not get along with that screen! I tried to click+drag the scrollbar, but, that did nothing.

You are a cute rabbit in a bubble

You ARE a cute rabbit in a bubble. Very cute. Nice.

Thanks! Much better now!

Fun game! The hitboxes are incredibly intolerant, making the game feel more Foddian than I expected from the cute gameboy bunny æsthetics. I only wish the text were readable:

This was a neat little puzzle game. You did acknowledge in the description that the jump button is “finnicky”, so I won’t harp on it too much. I will point out, however, that there were times where i tried to jump and could not, but also times where i should not have been able to jump but could, which meant that most of the puzzles could be cheesed by just, jumping inside of a wall or in midair.

Playing in fullscreen is NOT a good idea, as if you do then there is this weird white rectangle that covers up the playfield and makes it impossible to see what you are doing. This might be related to the fact that my display is 4480×2520, but accounting for large monitors is a part of making games for PC.

I’ll note also that, because you used the default Unity movement system, players with gamepads can move their character with left-stick. Mapping jump, multiply, and transfer to face buttons would have been a nice accommodation feature.

You did a great job here making a boss who feels fair but fun to dance with. It encourages slow play over just spamming attacks, because if you dodge right behind the fox to take a swing during their attack, you get pulled in, possibly right into the damage zone. So you’re encouraged to hold back, to attack only between attacks.

Then the final phase comes and flips this on its head! That one took me several tries to get through, but really i think the hard part was getting to it with more than 1HP.

My biggest critique is really more a Skill Issue™ on my part: it’s possible to have the dash animation with no movement (by holding shift but no arrow) and if fingers are confused in the midst of battle, that animation adds to the confusion: the leggies are movin’ but i’m very much not!

Congrats on making a fun, hard fight.

P.S. at the time of this writing the game page says to move with A/W but i think you mean A/D

that’s why each of the twelve games is available individually in its own mode, in addition to the “all” mode, though i agree that more thorough instructions could be useful!

I saw in the description that there are “boss stars” that are supposed to appear every minute, but i never encountered anything that looked like it might be a boss. Do i need to survive longer than three min to get the first? Is there a specific space they spawn in that i might have been too far away from?

You really leaned into the optional non-rated theme of “Gravity” but your answer to the “Use of the limitation” question doesn’t really talk about how you approached the mandatory rating category of “Constant Motion”. I’ll attempt an explanation here: “Player is a star constantly in motion, and its gravitational field adds to this by attracting nearby stars too” — how’d i do?

I could fly around and recruit white guys, the blue guys made a little chime upon being grabbed, the red guys were attacking, but i never found a way to increase my score above 0000000000 so i’m not really sure what’s happening there.

This game is really pretty with nice intuitive controls — though starting with “Press Left / Right” instead of “Press Spacebar” might have better conveyed that it’s a two-button game — unless i’m missing that spacebar does actually do something?

You’ve really captured that frantic feel one gets from antigrav racers like Fast RMX or the F-Zero games. I’m not sure if it’s just my 13” screen being difficult, but it can be tough to distinguish the shields from the other vehicles, so at higher speeds i mostly find myself trying to target the big rings, but the twisting turning track means sometimes i target wrong! I appreciate the full reset on speed upon taking damage, preventing spiraling. My high score is only 128860, but it’d be much lower without that! It also provides an opportunity to recompose and to appreciate the gorgeous backgrounds.

15:04.048 with 55. the timer could have been lower, except that i had to fight to even be able to see the game, as it is far too wide to fit on my screen and i had to find a non-game part of the screen to click in order to be able to scroll over to the fullscreen button that shrunk it. on the other hand, the timer should have been higher because a couple times the red borders failed to kill me when they should have. so maybe it cancels out.

overall, the game is fine, not too hard, although there is one point where the passageway is just 1px taller than your character and the ground is death. what’s the purpose? it’s not difficult, it’s just incredibly slow, because mashing shift kills your momentum, you get to move like 1px every second or two. I like the mechanics, and some flip animations might make them more intuitive. To make the control scheme more intuitive, you might want to make left/right swap directions (doing nothing when you’re already facing that way) and put jump on space

despite saying that you “did not” use the limitation, it seems that you were trying to do so with the use of the constantly moving red balls. that said, for a game entitled “Hard game”, i was really expecting to have the death-counter go above zero! did you accidentally make the playfield bigger than you meant to? you’re pretty much 100% safe along the borders

Your control scheme is strange and unintuitive, but clear enough from the description. The issue, however, is that the game page is larger than my screen is tall, and not locked in place, so attempting to move the ship with the scroll wheel results in scrolling the game offscreen! This makes the game extremely difficult to play, and not in the good fair way.

I will note that the english text in the tutorial says to shoot with the right mouse button, but you have that bound to the left mouse button (not sure what the russian version says, so probably check that one too)

This game plays like a 2D sonic game — doing everything it can to make you want to go fast, and then punishing you for it! The only way to die is to get greedy, yet still my high score sits at only 87077. The movement is incredibly satisfying, some of the best I’ve seen. It’s a game you play one-handed, and I’m only stopping because that hand is dead. I played the HTML version, so no music for me, but the sfx are great and really add to the retrofuturism vibes.

I can confirm that going to level four from the select menu is a new level that I did not reach during normal gameplay

This was a fun little game. The coins were sometimes a helpful guide, and sometimes an extra challenge. I did collect all of them on the second level though! The sfx are good feedback, though balanced a bit too low.

There are some UI issues at play. The “next level” button on level three was, I think broken? I ended up playing through that one three times, thinking that the first two I may have locked the next level by dying at the same moment as my finishing, but the final time I was very thoroughly on-screen and it still sent me back to the start of that level. Level 4 was never reachable. On the topic of buttons: avoid having a Quit button that closes the game. Just, in general, it’s bad to have such a button at all, but it’s especially heinous in a web build because it doesn’t actually close the game or defullscreen it or anything, it just stops responding to events, basically killing the tab.

Gameplay-wise, everything felt good and responsive. Simple, but that meant you could really focus on making each part good.

Menuing was a bit difficult (see below) but this game has potential. The RNG detracts from the experience though: you do not start in motion, nor do you start aligned with the arrows, so only the orange slimes are a real threat. For the levels without them, you can win by doing absolutely nothing for a minute. Only level seven actually required left/right movement at all for me.

The music was nice, giving Tetrisphere vibes.

On presentation: It’s a simple game and your actions have reasonable feedback. I actually think they may have gone a bit too far: the slowdown when you jump is a bit overextended to the point of being jarring. Moreover, your description promises a minimalist pixel art style, yet no two elements have the same pixel size. The parallax backgrounds are a nice touch, but they don’t quite cycle cleanly; occasionally there are visible jumps. All of these are little things, but taken together they detract from having a good, cohesive experience. I like that the traffic cone enemy gives an anticipation as to what it’s going to do, and you give plenty of time to react to everything.

On gameplay: I reached a score of 300 before letting go of the controls and letting the run end. I mentioned earlier how there’s plenty of anticipation and room to react. On the flip side, this means there is no challenge in the game, and after a couple hundred points rack up it’s hard to stay engaged. It’s hard to overcome that in an endless runner, but one approach might be to slowly dole out new kinds of hazards, or to have any kind of non-flat difficulty curve.

On the limitation: You certainly used it, the gameplay elements are constantly in motion.

impressive! the music is a banger, could listen all day. eddie is overly generous and got me fully powered pretty quickly, netting an easy no-miss in the first couple loops. then after a death-spiral in the third (loop 2) i ended off with a high score of 124100 so far. i like the creative shot type fired by the gold guys, which looks like it’s designed to discourage just sitting at the bottom — i feel like you could lean into that harder with some enemies that aren’t popcorn who have wide-scatter shots, starting at one point but expanding outward as they descend toward you. too wide and the bottom becomes a safe space, but if the spread is narrow enough, it makes going higher a more viable strategy

i don’t think it’s a bug, i think it’s lack of clarity in the tutorial. i was interpreting the mechanic as “shoot anyone who has ever been here” as opposed to “shoot anyone who has or will be here”

that was neat. i think the plunger would be better with a keyboard shortcut so that you don’t need to involve a whole ’nother input device (the mouse) just for that. i found that the “power ups” were more of a hindrance than a help, just eating the balls, but i was still surviving after going through what i think are all the levels a few times each

i had fun! from the other comments it sounds like the ui could use more clarity — placements and all that were working just fine for me, and i think the asteroids only stopped spawning when the time till rescue became zero (tho i may be mistaken there). i was trying to get negative rocks but by my back-of-the-envelope calculations it seems like that’s going to take about a month, so i will concede and keep only the positive rocks

i reached the end! level 8 was my favourite, but i’m a sucker for that mechanic in particular. i think it’d be neat if in level 6 the music followed the theme too

i love slidey ice physics! try to keep your game elements at the same scale though, the skateboard has these real big chunky pixels but then other elements have differently sized pixels or no visible pixelation at all, so it feels like a mishmash of parts rather than a coherent whole. my high score is 37, let’s see who can beat that!

this was an engaging puzzle game. i’m not sure that restarting actually clears the path, and it is hard for me to distinguish enemies from civilians, but i made it up through level 8 with 100% so far so it’s pretty fun