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My cousin Tom got the high score on this game. It was when he was 17 at an arcade in San Pedro and he played this game for 14 hours straight. His friend Dog had got him some weed ,and he said it had so many crystals on it that when they smoked a jibber in Dog's TBird he started seeing in slow motion. And that's how he was able to get such a high score. Tom died in 2019 after getting sucked into the motor of an industrial scale pool pump at a water park. Which is I believe how he would have wanted to go. RIP big man

First and foremost, is the title a Steely Dan reference? I really enjoyed this even though I sucked at it. Eventually got into a bit of a groove switching my tools and zooming up and down trying to keep each row occupied. Obviously this would have been out of scope for a jam, and sort of goes against the design element of things ramping up more and more, but I was wishing I could buy something that could be placed and auto-shoot certain projectiles on a row, or get the ability to chain shots, so like shoot the pickaxe and that automatically shoots a cart right behind it.

The sound effect that plays when you strike gold is very satisfying. As others have said, the main thing to work on is adding more variety and more  challenge to the game. Currently, I think it's probably impossible to lose. The sound and feel are nice. Digging itself feels good with the sound and the small animation.

I always enjoy a fishing game. Having the collection to complete is a nice touch, and I enjoyed seeing what the next catch would be.

My feedback is:

(1) It took me a couple of tries to figure out what controlling the reel meant. Because the meter for it is below the "game world" part of the screen, I didn't notice it. I had been thinking that part of the screen was a static control layout image.

(2) It's not clear if moving the pole with the dpad affects the catch or not.

(3) I think with the font, you end up with more than four colors on screen. Would just need a pixel perfect font with no filtering to fix that.

Thank you fellow vim user

I totally agree. I didn't manage to find the right way to balance the difficulty, so it's just completely random luck every game. A better version might have used a luck generation process that had some sort of progression to it, I think, and the betting would have happened at specific luck values, rather than at fixed rounds. Thank you for playing and for you feedback!

Debt is the sign of a life well lived -- they can garnish your wages but not your spirit. Stay up!

Thanks for playing! I think I should have communicated how luck affects the different minigames at the start of each minigame. For the marbles one, more luck means more time on the timer and a wider spread between the two guesses.

Thanks! The charm, tone, and cuteness are all due to our artist and musician. 

Thanks for playing! It sounds like you got really lucky with the luck meter on the marble game -- I think overall that's actually the hardest game. (The less luck you have, the shorter the timer is, and the closer the two options are for the number of marbles to guess.)

being a goblik sucks man. i'd rather be a sluglik. outstanding game.

freaky ahh game about turding out. died before I could crap

For criticism, I'd echo what Eli Haun said: I died a lot, and often I had no real reason to think I would die. I think a valuable lesson from tabletop RPGs is that you should always telegraph danger to your players when they're facing a potentially lethal choice, so that if they die, they feel like it was because of a reasonably informed decision they made, rather than the the GM just deciding to kill them. Other than that, I really like the concept of this game because it reminded me of adventuring with a TTRPG party in a hexcrawl or something and having random encounters happen. Cool ideas, and I'd like to see this or something similar with a bit more tolerance for suboptimal choices built in. Nice job!  

Definitely agree with your suggestion - lack of feedback/instruction in the puzzle screen is major missing piece of the game. Thank you for taking the time to play and leave your comments!

Thanks! Our artist is a real talent

Thanks for playing! We will definitely add some on-screen indicators of how to leave the puzzle view after the jam

Thanks for checking it out - we were very lucky to have such a talented musician on our team

thanks - it was made with godot 4.3

Why did you think this was a good comment to leave?

Thanks for checking the game out, and thank you for the feedback. I really appreciate it.

Definitely agree with your concerns about the lack of tutorial/clarity around the objectives and how to deal with bugus. We wavered back and forth on whether we wanted to leave it up to the player to discover the bugu clicking mechanic on their own or whether we should explicitly teach it. We ended up putting a blurb about it on the itch page but not the game, which is a half measure. I think adding a "how to play" screen in the game would be a nice post-jam follow up. As for the lore-appropriate justification for why you're doing what the objective is asking of you, I leave that to my co-creator since she is the brilliant mind behind gubus.

Thanks for the suggestion re: the performance issue on big selections. Each time a gubu is selected, I start a tween to beam them up and turn on their individual particle systems. In the smaller levels that's ok, but in the larger ones, the game can really slow down. I'm actually not sure if it's all the tweens, particle systems, or the combination of everything that's really killing the performance. I'll be doing some profiling to figure it out. I like your idea of batching the processing into groups, but I will admit that I'm no expert in optimizing godot games, so I'm not sure the best way to handle this sort of thing.

Thanks again for the thoughtful comment!

This is instantly fun which is a really admirable quality for a game to have in a jam. My biggest complaint is that the round ends too quickly, I wish I could keep going maybe twice as long in a round. Nice work!

I'm in the process of reading Procedural Storytelling in Game Design edited by Tanya X. Short and Tarn Adams, so it's on the top of my mind. It's worth at least skimming through if you end up going down that route.

I think all the concrete suggestions I would give have already been given by other commenters, so I'll just say I think this game has great potential and hope you keep working on it after the jam. Procedural narrative generation could be cool here to keep the cases exciting and to have decisions clearly affect the subsequent cases offered.

My code is also pretty rough (in my game, there's a bug where you can get part of your previous round's score to count towards the score of a new round :D). Awesome job - I'm looking forward to seeing how you update it!

Really neat game - simple and a lot of personality. It's great that each boss feels different, and I felt pretty smart when I realized I could bait the enemies to eat the wrong orbs. My two comments/suggestions: 1) it would be great to have one more verb as a player - maybe a dash or knockback or something like that and 2) I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but diagonal movement is faster for the player than cardinal direction movement (if it wasn't intentional, you probably just need to normalize the player movement vector to have a magnitude equal to 1 - if it was intentional, ignore me!).

This game understands the fundamental cycle of life:
1. acquire mass
2. one-tap pencil necks into piles of protein gunk
3. eat them
4. ascend

Very nice.

Wild and slightly disorienting in a wonderful way. Cool VFX when you ventilate the cowpokes. I think my preference would have been for a fixed viewmodel for the gun, but maybe that's me being uptight. Either way, that sort of drifting movement for an FPS is a great idea. Hope you keep working on it or take the movement system into another game.

Very neat little game - I especially liked the timed mechanics in a turn-based setting. Cool devlog, too!

Cool game that feels nice to play! One suggestion I have is to not kill the blob just for touching a wall, since it's hard to be that precise as the player

As everyone has already said, the visuals and atmosphere are terrific. I really like the gameplay of resource management using physical instruments in the world. My small suggestions: allow the player to turn off the tv once you've heard everything (or only play the same thing a handful of times), and decrease the time between events/stations. Really cool game!

Really impressive atmosphere considering the economical use of assets! I'm not sure if it was intentional for the mouse to get stuck in the blob after being dragged into the center- if so some sort of way to indicate that to the player would be great. Cool game! Made me feel like I was about to die/being sucked into a Burial song.

Pretty cool - I hope this never happens to me in real life!

Thank you for checking it out and for your feedback! I really appreciate it.

Definitely agree that the results of a selection need to be made way more clear between rounds. I didn't do a good job of making that kind of stuff explicit. 

You found the bugu bug :D We have that patched out and will upload the fix once the jam ends. There's a good lesson in there about why you should try not to have mutable global state in your game, because if you're like me, you'll forget about one of the cases where it needs to be reset

I know you can do it

Some really nice stuff here. I had one of the cooler moments in any of the jam games I've played where I was being shot at by two mechs, I dashed, jumped, and dashed mid air to make it around a corner of a building to avoid being hit. Thought the overall vibe, etc was cool, especially radio-ing in the attacks to the friendly mech. A lot of personality packed in there. I'm probably just a really dumb guy, but I couldn't manage to get the mortar strike to actually kill any of the mechs and it was very hard to find the bombs.

gubus is already the plural of gubu :P I noticed your submission is called BECOME LARGE, and my initial idea for the jam was a game called GET HUGE, so I thought I'd let you know we were on the same wavelength

PB: 332

Very nice game, would love to see some even crazier stuff get added, and maybe a hard mode where you die if you touch a nasty guy

A leaderboard would be rad. Right now we're just working on an honor system to determine the Rank 1 Gubu Gamer. Thanks for checking it out!

Thanks for playing and for the feedback! The levels are "procedurally" generated if I can use the term loosely, in that the density of gubus spawned, positions, and objective are all generated from noise functions. Other than that though, I definitely agree there isn't much variation - something we might look at addressing post-jam.

Rank 1 NA - nice work, gamer