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The controls make it difficult to jump at where you want to go, and there are a few issues on collision with the platforms, especially the green slime ones, but I do admire the endless spiral tower climb.

The top concept and its upgrades is fairly predictable but well-realized and polished. 

The gameplay rules felt inconsistent when it comes to dealing damage. It seemed like speed contributed to the attack power, but upgrades like durability, spin power, and starting combo don't show tangible buffs despite them suggesting to do so.

The audio did keep me playing for a while, admittedly. Hearing instances of clanging for high damage with the soundtrack and launch countdown hyping the battles were exhilarating to experience, even if I didn't really have much of a strategy going into any battle.

A nice enjoyable sample of puzzles revolving around committal turning of 2D platforming stages. Was quite surprised on the number of times I had to readjust my approach for every step of each level.

The basic platforming controls were ironically the most difficult thing to figure out. You use the arrow keys to move, but it's only space for jumping?

Here's my team's game. Wish you luck on getting to day 7! https://itch.io/jam/theveryseriousjuniperdevgamejam/rate/4719579

Here's my team's game. Wish you luck on getting to day 7! https://itch.io/jam/theveryseriousjuniperdevgamejam/rate/4719579

Here's my team's game. Wish you luck on getting to day 7! https://itch.io/jam/theveryseriousjuniperdevgamejam/rate/4719579

Here's my team's game! Hope you manage to get to day 7! https://itch.io/jam/theveryseriousjuniperdevgamejam/rate/4719579

Thanks for checking out my page!

Greetings jammers!

I'm a game designer and Unity developer who's currently setting up a jam team. I have done several games and demos and attended some game jams as a game designer and engineer on Unity, working on 2D and 3D projects. 

Below are previous projects and my GitHub page.

Itch.io: https://witherwarrior817.itch.io/
GitHub: https://github.com/will316work-cloud

My timezone is PST.

I currently seek for the following:

- 1 or more VFX artist

- 1 writer?

-  1 or more sound designer

- 1 or more UI/UX designer

Reply on this post should you be interested in a collaboration for the jam or even any project!

Funny interpretation of the theme alongside some equally funny gameplay of narrowly screeching onto the final parking spot.

Landing on the parking spot can often feel strict. I often have the car heavily engulfed (80-90% of the body) in the red parking spot, only for it to not turn green still.

Although the game's interpretation of the theme is the furthest stretch I've seen, I cannot deny its addictive puzzle solving, par system, and its surprising ways of tripping the player in how to mix up colors.

Only thing that irked me is that the color brown often looked too similar to some mixtures of red and yellow, and the sandy background doesn't help with this distinction.

Played, rated, and commented!

I genuinely had a lot of fun with bargaining how much I can fight and how much I can collect before needing to retreat or dying.  The preparatory nature of shining light in selective areas before delving into a round and gaining upgrades for increasing visibility made delving into each round engrossing and unique. I also adore the upgrade system granting random buff choices by threes and gradually increasing price for all of them the more upgrades you purchase. It really makes one consider which stats are the highest priority for the next round for playstyle and strategic purposes.

I see that the visual and audio assets are not your creations, but when they are at serviceable quality, I value the considerate usage and placement of them more, and you do so very well for both. Every visual asset is crystal clear, with enemy spawn points and collision environmental objects being the most notable. The sound editing for the audio assets are well-tuned for their impact.

My only complaint is that some of the paid upgrades don't seem to have impactful effects for each incremental payment. Upgrades like larger vision from selection or players, health, and projectiles cutting through darkness are noticeable, but firing speed and movement speed aren't.

Played, rated, and commented!

What a surreal twist there! It's an interesting of the player being the murderous metaphorical storm instead of being a force the player needs to oppose. 

The only complaint I have is that the energy ball attack uses the mouse button and movement, which is not only never prompted unlike many of the other controls but also ditches the interact button (F) that was used for direct attack actions with the axe.

Go ahead and check out my game! https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-12/rate/296740

Go ahead and check out my game! https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-12/rate/2967403

Go ahead and check out my game! https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-12/rate/2967403

I understand muting the siren for accessibility purposes. I just never found a reason to do so due to its low volume and importance as a gameplay indicator.

Played, rated, and commented!

This happened to you before?

This is pretty impressive concept for a game, with the emphasis on quiet dread, suspense, and deception coming full force with its trading and feeding game loop, grayscale watercolor aesthetic, and quiet isolated sounds somewhat startling the player. It's an experience that effectively injects a small but long-lasting fear in the player's subconscious. 

Some complaints about the game are the UI for the microwave and the stand, the skewed imbalance of the first batch of items compared to the incoming trades, and the puzzling existence of the siren off button. 

When starting out, it was difficult to find my first items to start with. That is until I randomly clicked buttons on the microwave, which I didn't know were interactable due to a lack of visual hovering feedback. Additionally, the stand's interactive elements are pretty unintuitive, with only the counter being the interactive element for trading while the entire window is for opening and closing it instead of just the roll-up gauge. This often made me accidentally closing the shop instead of trading, which lost me the customer.

As for early-gaming balancing, the items given by the microwave are often worth little in value, especially when constantly dealing with numerous expensive trades that needed to be exceed in value without individual selection of items to trade. If trading for all items is intended, then having lower value trades showing up more often would aid the early game.

Finally, there's the siren off button, which is the most pedantic critique I have, but still a bit baffling to have, due to the siren been the only indicator of darkness lurking around.

I got this page when I try to download the game folder.

Your page is apparently flagged at this point for suspicious reasons.

Played, rated, and commented!

The tutorial for the game is done pretty well, showing off the basic rules and player abilities in a digestible step-by-step manner. It's just a shame that it somehow soft locked when explaining the ability to place down chests from the wood I harvested.

For what I did experience, though, the major gripe I had was the placing feature not registering when dragging it around. When placing chests, doing so one by one was functionally fine with the units correctly placing them. When I drag the RMB to place multiple chests in a line, the units place the first chest, but then nothin else until I click on the remaining slots again. This doesn't feel like it's supposed to work this way, with the buildings being highlighted.

Overall, this is a nice foundation for a potential spin on a RTS game, but there are several quirks that don't work intuitively that would need ironing out before expansion.

Sorry if you weren't able to play. I went into it and actually was able to fix the automatic closing bug.

Played, rated, and commented!

It's said that there was some story that would progress whilst playing, but by the time one of the characters suspected that they were in a loop, it definitely felt going in a loop but not in a good way. The game loop quickly lost its edge when repeated through every character and through every level, especially when nothing but the coin requirement increased by measly one at a time.  This simply results in gameplay that doesn't hook the player with any emotion and especially doesn't fit strongly with the core theme even though the idea suggests that it should.

This would be a situation where the aesthetics would more than make up for the gameplay's shortcomings, but they sadly don't. The art style doesn't look cohesive, the soundtrack is substandard even for a mellow spooky theme, and the story, as explained before, rarely picks up steam to hook the player.

I apologize if this comment turned out condemning, but when playing, I simply did not find any appeal nor direction this game was trying to go for, and it suffered as a boring experience as a result.

You can review my game below:

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-12/rate/2967403

I already rated your game. It had a great aesthetic, but also didn't have much of an interesting game loop.

When I read the game description about frantically balancing the need to serve the dragons food and gradually digging up a tunnel to escape, all the while not angering the customers without food or showing that you are trying to escape, I was tried quite intrigued and was ready for a frantic game loop. It was a bit disappointing that this wasn't the case, and all that left was a bare-bones version of Overcooked, down to not having much tension to begin with when all one does is serve dragons food from one all-purpose cooking station. This is definitely due to the lack of time in the game jam, but it felt like a lot of effort was put into everything but the core game loop.

That being said, the rest of the game is done well. The art and music are splendid to look at as I played, from the intro cutscene to seeing the many details in the background of the main game.

Played, rated, and commented!

Man, was that a moving bit. You definitely feel the impending feeling of violence and bloodshed coming up just by walking around and conversing with the locals. I really like how you present various fantasy archetypes and their supposed array of feelings they have before an actual war starts. It also feels grounded and impactful with both exposition, story, and emotion intertwined together when conversing with the NPCs until the end, where the outcome of the war is left ambiguous with only the dreary cries of battle to be left with. The choice of audio was stellar for this game, really feeling the weight of mournful dread whilst also seeing a slimmer of hope that they can make out of this alive.

The only two things I found off was the scaling of the sprites and the lack of clarity of the environment in terms of platforming. Using pixel art, the NPCs' sprites are pretty obvious that they were scaled, leading to mismatching pixel sizes, especially the prince who was shrunk in order to look smaller than the King. Outside of the art style, the environment often doesn't communicate well what's a wall, what's a platform, and what's foreground. The most prominent example is the first building the player needs to jump over to meet the second NPC. It's not a full building segment that blocks you but instead a balcony with many boxes underneath, which are the same boxes used for the foreground with no color changes. This led to many struggling attempts of platforming when the edges of the platforms are hard to identify.

Played, rated, and commented!

Simple and short, but brings a lot from a little. I know you stated that the graphics and audio are from online sources, but I can say that you had a good eye for both in order to up the hilarity and awkwardness of the situation in this game.

My only real complaint is that there very little contrast between what is clickable and what isn't. One of various examples is the pacifier that not only blends into the rest of the assets, but can also go under certain sprites, making it hard to recognize even if one knows to find it. For a game that requires you to respond as soon as possible, being confused to what is and isn't clickable leads into either the player not clicking at all for a response or luck rapidly clicking all over hoping to fix everything that way.

Good news! I managed to (or should have) fixed the scrolling and the automatic closing in the opening scene!

Played, rated, and commented!

Quite surprised to see a visual novel within this list of submissions, but I can't say that it doesn't work! The story extends the theme to heart, wondering about the aftereffects of the storm (explosion) and how people respond to them if they survived. I really love the detail given to the alternative endings, especially the one for wandering in the school to meet the ghost. That might have moved me emotionally more than the main story.

That being said, the three things that I took issue with are the lack of highlighting characters in dialogue scenes, the lack of soundtrack shifting, and the abundant use of lyric tracks. The most prominent example of this was in the second chapter when Eishin meets the three girls in the bunker, where he was talking with all three. The three shared their names, but I was very confused as to who was who until very later on because no one was in focus in the scene. The constant lyric track in the background didn't help my focus on reading the story, with it often interfering my reading and not matching the tone of the instantaneous moment.

There were also spelling and tense mistakes, but, as a fellow writer, I know that to be a comparatively pedantic error to point out.

Sure thing!

Played, rated, and commented!