itch.io

Well, sort of. The web version only saves your progress for the life of the tab, so playing on mobile isn’t ideal even if the controls are there. And making a bigger, more involved mobile version with a more touch-oriented control scheme sounds like a great idea, i’m 100% on board!

now that i’m actually seeing how to play, i think this would make for a neat puzzle game. like, if you in the background generated a layout and got some output, you could show the houses wanting that output and then the player could have to figure out an arrangement that would produce (at least) that. i’d play a lot of that

oh!! i was thinking like, this:

Cute game! It should not be tagged “Windows” or “Android” though, as there is now download available for those platforms. (HTML5/web is its own, separate platform that has nothing to do with those!)

On the gameplay itself: There’s no risk vs reward here. Because the changes are random and there is no transition period, players can’t react to anything. So the only reasonable way to play is to walk a foot or two, and then sleep through the rest of the day and the night. Opening up a short transition period and forbidding day-sleep would make people need to react, but that would come at the cost of entirely changing the feel of the game :c

For context, I reached “128 foots” without even looking at the game while scrolling through twitter on my phone, just paying attention to the changes in brightness in the corner of my perception. Didn’t lose, just closed the tab.

I’m not entirely sure what’s going on, or how to get jars? But, the game looks super nice, good job

It’s not a Nintendo game, so it wouldn’t be their place to go after you. But I don’t expect HAL Laboratory to assert ownership over the achievement system either.

I took heavy inspiration from the checklist in Kirby Air Ride. It’s the kind of system I’d love to see in more games, so please, go right on ahead!

Consider using scancodes (keys-by-position) instead of keycodes (keys-by-name) so that your game doesn’t rely on people having qwerty keyboards [I don’t have qwerty]. Thankfully most Unity games support gamepad by default, so I was able to move with my controller, while holding my little finger on the E key, and maneuvering my trackpad with the other hand. Not a comfortable control experience, but it worked! Didn’t get to experience the SMITE, but I did get to experience the crash in the boss room!

I can’t play your game (it’s Windows-only) but having submitted to 23 of the 24 jams I’ve joined, I feel like I can comment on actually finishing things.

In general, you want to know what the “core” of your game is. What is the thing you want the player to be doing most of the time? Start with that, with no real assets. Personally I’m often making movement-focused games, so I’ll start by making just the physics in empty rooms with boxes for characters.

At that point, you’ll either have something that’s already fun, or you have nothing. Make a snapshot. (You are using version control right?) From there, you can add features, but always make sure you have a playable game. Snapshot frequently, basically whenever you get the next playable thing. If you have a list of “NEED THIS” and “NICE TO HAVE”, focusing on the needs first, you’ll be fine.

When time runs out, submit that latest playable version, that’s your game!

All that is on planning. Estimating timeframes is always going to be significantly harder. That’s the kind of thing you can only get with experience, and even then the typical recommendation is to double or triple everything you imagine. For instance, in my submission I have an achievement system, and I was sure that I’d be able to fill out a list of 48 achievements in a few hours. But the reality was significantly beyond that, and as a result some things just didn’t happen. This is fine. 72 hours is not a lot.

There’s a couple solutions to that one. If you have spare MP, deploying a second unit should keep you safe. If not, just consider that you don’t want to begin your turn on the same colour as your opponent.

Satisfied that I managed to softlock myself! I think some of the rooms were cheeseable by having time stopped and slowly moving up a trail of knives. The physics were fun, tho a bit of coyote time and jump buffering will always make a platformer feel better (except maybe Crash Bandicoot)

On Firefox I’m getting the “Error: The following features required to run Godot projects on the Web are missing: Cross Origin Isolation - Check web server configuration (send correct headers) SharedArrayBuffer - Check web server configuration (send correct headers)” message — should just need to enable SharedArrayBuffer in the upload’s settings here? I’m running the LTS version of Firefox if that makes a difference. Still not sure what was happening with Safari on my M2 air.

As for the updated version: the rule here is that updates are allowed as long as the original version remains available. Whether you want to make use of that or not is up to you, but even if you’re waiting for post-jam I very much look forward to playing through this again!

You tagged this as a downloadable executable for Windows, Linux, and macOS, but it is not any of these things. Change the game type from “Downloadable” to “HTML” and select the box that says “This file will be played in the browser.” (Also, it’s brotli compressed. That causes problems, so might as well go into the player settings in Unity and set that to Gzip or Disabled instead)

EDIT: fixed, thanks! Now that the game is playable, I am confused as to what the goal is.

I beat the game, but was a bit concerned when the last level didn’t move on to an end-screen or something. The sfx played, but I had to count to make sure I really got it!

the cpu player is too good, i never manage to score against them before the browser force-refreshes the page for “using too much memory”

The control scheme was a bit uncomfortable — had to put my right hand over top of my left hand in order to move and attack at the same time! Why not attack on space? (Or, better, rebindable controls and controller support.) That aside, there doesn’t seem to be much challenge here. Never was sure how much HP i had since that doesn’t seem to be shown anywhere, and the attack cooldown could be made clearer, but it was quick and easy to get through to the end.

This game doesn’t work in firefox when embedded, and tends to get force-refreshed by safari due to excessive memory usage after a death sure what’s up with that. But, after playing all the way through, I can confidently say that I like this game a lot. The art is good, especially the boss, and the controls feel exactly how you’d want them to. The little “plick” when you’re grazed is a nice touch.

I have only two complaints: The high score is never saved and gets reset to zero every time you start, so it’s impossible to compare runs. And the first mini-boss will sometimes spit out impossible patterns where the last lightbar goes directly off the side of the screen.

Related to that last bit: I think some of the randomized directions could use tuning: the barrels liked to be unreachable, just going directly sideways.

Not sure how to die, we’ve just been chilling like this for a few minutes. The upgrades are way too numerous, where at one point I was having to mash click just to be able to move because there were so many of them piled up.

Looks like you’ve got a good start on things here. I don’t like the automatic fullscreening though: the game doesn’t need to be played at 4.5K! If you can disable that it would be cool. I appreciate that you gave multiple control options (arrows and wasd) since w/a/s/d are nowhere near each other for me, thank you! If you’re able to use scancodes instead of keycodes, then you can talk about keys by position instead of by label, which is better for movement controls.

Thanks! And the PICO-8 is so nice for prototyping in, 9/10 product would recommend

Is this an endless game? I reached room 201, and there’s been no challenge at all so far. Am I building up to some kind of boss room at 1000?

It looks nice tho, and the music is a bop!

Concrete design analysis: I think the rooms here are far too small in comparison to the shield and dash abilities you have. You can reach the end in a split second while being completely invulnerable at all times in every room layout I’ve encountered

I jumped too high and left the screen entirely! Then enemies kept pouring in, and soon the page refreshed because it was “using too much memory” (probably from the flood of enemies).

I appreciate that you added controller support, that makes it much easier to play comfortably!

The running animations feel really off at slow speeds. I know it’s a jam and time is tight, but if you want to expand on this then you should definitely have per-speed animations

This is a nice game with some good art. Crashed during the (first?) boss fight tho, so that’s as far as I got. What controller-button is the dash mapped to btw? I was able to move and jump and shoot with my controller, but couldn’t dash. Not that it was needed during the part of the game that I was able to see.

Is the wall-cling intentional? If so, i’d like to see an animation for it. If not, your collisions might need work.

In terms of level-design, there’s a lot of blind falls. Might want to consider something like what Sonic has where you can hold up/down to move the camera?

Ah, thanks for the tip!

The sequel we needed! And I didn’t even need to cheat this time :3

I love this! There’s a bit of garbage at the bottom of the screen, and the contrast is a bit high, but I managed to get a good full run in from start to finish. Great job!

This one will be fun to revisit, there’s a lot of interesting mechanics in the movement!

This was fun! My high score was 26,900 — it’s a fast-paced game with quick retries, but some indicators of what is approaching would help a lot!

This was fun! I love how varied and responsive the enemies feel! I feel like I recognize the music from somewhere, is it the same as was in your submission last year?

Oh, thanks! It looks like there’s a lot of cool stuff in there!

Looks like you win, nobody else submitted a real game!

woah neat :D i’ve been looking forward to this all year!

oh! i don’t have a mouse so right click / mid click never would have occurred to me. mid click doesn’t exist at all, but right click is ctrl+click (or a two finger tap, but i actually don’t know if that method is draggable!)

the game has looked like this, with nothing visibly changing, for the past half hour. i suppose i should consider this a win-state

i’m not sure what the cell towers (?) do, and it feels like there’s more terrain cut off by my screen? (the last upgrade didn’t visibly change anything) but stuff feels pretty alright.

there is a bit of easy cheese tho: you can harvest honey from the hives while the game is paused!

my first attempt: i probably could have gotten further if i actually had a mouse instead of just a trackpad

i’m confused as to why the “score” differs from the “high score” here, as i have only played once so far

the day/night cycle is a nice easy way to add challenge

the PICO-8 version was actually an afterthought when i realized that people might not have printers or dice lying around. but i’d actually consider it to be one of the easier dev environments — took less time to code than it did to type up the instruction sheet!

the game is deceptively difficult! multiple times i thought i had something but then realized i had in fact made winning impossible. but after four hours, i finally managed to win, with a final score of 4140

i think a good board state looks something like this

once you’ve got that, there’s some degree of luck involved but it’s not just hoping and praying with a single die