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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

Love the suspense on this. Wandering around the ship for awhile, seeing each object, wondering what significance they may hold later, and then backtracking a bit to see that they are interactable to unravel more information until the climax was really engrossing to experience. The grayscale tone also helps drastically, especially when it becomes darker the closer you get to the spooky bilge. 

The big issue is the automatic text scrolling, which is currently paced in a way where many text entries don't last long even though they were quite long to read. This is especially troublesome when the player can miss critical information from someone's dialogue and cannot talk again for a a repeat. Either proper generous timing is read, or a manual text continuing button is needed. Additionally, the white text from dialogue and inspections can sometimes blend into background filled with gray or white filling and strokes.

It works! :)

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It's another tower defense game, this time heavily inspired by PVZ, but it is one well executed with the dark stormy setting, nice variety of towers and shadowy enemies, and constant dynamics due to the variety of game elements. Many towers hold a unique purpose, and each enemy type makes sure that these perks are valuable in some way. For example, the jumping shark enemy makes both the pink beacon that deals with flying enemies and double-barreled ship that deals with enemies behind far more applicable than most PVZ iterations make these archetypes out to be. It's a game that shows understanding of its inspiration and incorporates its own ideas to elevate itself and what came before. The only issues I have are that the towers not being effective against flying enemies don't really convey that with just projectiles passing through the enemies, and some towers are still difficult to make use out of, like the insta-kill beacon, lane cleaner boat, and the light beacon to an extent.

The link leads to the general submissions page. I sadly can't find your visual novel from your given link.

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I really like the self-imposed difficulty aspect when creating sandwiches to serve. I can imagine it adding many hours of replayability when constantly serving sandwiches for a better high score. It's quite a simple yet riveting source of play.

That replayability, however, gets squandered the moment the player starts delivering them. The vehicle controls are functional when moving forward and it adds to the hectic life of operating a food business on the road. However, backing up is completely unintuitive, with left turning right and right turning left as soon as the truck is in reverse. The acceleration of the truck isn't really an issue until I needed to plant myself to make sandwiches for the customers. When serving them, they are sent as small projectiles from the back left of the truck, so I always had to micro-adjust and reverse every time I want to position myself to serve my sandwiches. Additionally, the hitboxes on these projectiles are unforgivably small that makes giving customers their orders tedious even if I'm positioned correctly. If the reverse controls were adjusted properly, and the means of giving sandwiches to customers was a lot more robust, like simply being near the customer or having some top-down aiming control scheme, then I can see more replaying this game for what it's worth.

Played, rated, and commented!

I'm amazed by how well you pulled off the arcade aesthetic, not just from the visual style, but also the in-game and out-of-game audio. With the ambient sounds happening in real life, including the segment of bickering behind the player, the games does feel like it slots right into an arcade building. The audio may need to be louder at base, and the pause menu doesn't actually pause the game nor has a UI background to make the text for the settings and controls visible.

The gameplay, however, leaves a lot to be deserved, unfortunately. The tower defense genre does suit well, but the execution in terms of balancing and tower abilities are not where they should be. Only the archers feel remotely useful, and the enemy waves don't change much or at all to overwhelm or at least encourage the player to change strategies. In fact, from a certain wave onward, there's only one enemy coming out per wave. This quickly led to a monotonous game with archers on the front and all the other towers being either empty or completely idle. Additionally, the UI for selecting a tower is obscured for the tower bases at the bottom of the stage, preventing me from selecting a witch for any of the bottom towers.

Played, rated, and commented!

I really like the colorful and humorous aesthetic. The premise of lively but unsuspecting vacationers on the beach being encroached by a large tsunami that swiftly hides itself when needed all because a small pink bad-omen boat across the sea is trying to reach to a lighthouse is well executed with the sudden shifts in soundtracks, saturation and value. The solid paint art style also lends itself well to both phases of the game that it's a bit of a shame that there's not enough room for attention on it when playing.

The real criticisms, however, aren't due tot he aesthetic, though, yet they unfortunately dampen the humorous tone of the game significantly. The floating objects in the sea are cute details when engulfed by the tsunami, but the sailing ship does confuse players by being closer and holding a stronger silhouette compared to the pink ship off to the horizon. Perhaps changing it into something else would prevent such confusion. As for the gameplay itself, it is quite unforgiving on either its time constraints or length of the lifeguard watching the sea. Both factors often robbed me from my rounds, and many did not feel like my fault. One or the other could be adjusted to be slightly forgiving, though the increased frequency of the lifeguard checking the sea in the end should be kept for amping up the tension and eventual catharsis.