itch.io

Thanks a lot, really kind of you! And yes, I agree that the battles seemed a bit long. We didn't want the player to get so strong they just blew everything away in one go - what fun would that be? But early on, they take a little too long I think. We did plan on having a "dice tray" mechanic that took unused dice from a throw and put them in the tray for some kind of special power, but as you can imagine we did not get around to coding that aspect, as awesome as it sounds.

The strategy is to eventually forge enough combos onto your dice that you can take stuff down faster, but you probably wouldn't see that until much later in a normal game, which I think will likely be 2-3 maps, maybe 4. We certainly didn't have time to make that though during the jam. :)

Thanks again for the kind words!

Great first entry for anyone! Very complete for a first entry, way moreso than my first entry ever was. :P I don't have much to say that hasn't been said already, but great work and would love to see more from you!

Conceptually, I like this a lot! Some of this may sound harsh, but I honestly don't mean it to be: Genuinely, there's a nugget of a game here that I think you could easily hammer into the real thing and sell it on the market. The combination of adding stuff together and getting combos is very interesting and there's a grain of truth to it that could make this game really take off.

I think there's a few things to improve on for this attempt. For one, hand-written stuff can sometimes be charming, but it's much better to just go get a free font and use it, for readability purposes. I like dafont.com for those purposes, just make sure it's a 100% free font so there's no trouble with you using it. At the same time, this would actually have dramatically simplified your game because you wouldn't have had to worry about writing stuff out and turning it into images, which aren't very readable for accessibility sake anyway. But really it's the simplification where it's at, so you could add more cool stuff.

Secondly, instead of stuff just disappearing if you tried to put it into the staging area (or whatever it's called) when there's something already in it, I'd have liked it to just go back to the inventory, perhaps with some kind of indicator that it was not a valid move.

Finally, indicators for the various states of the screen would be really good to add, like "Forge is in-use," "there's a new customer," etc. I think while the timer adds a decent and fun amount of pressure, it might make sense to spread out the customers a little bit and give them some random timings, instead of just one after another, to simulate that there are not adventurers going around all the time, but also at peak time, they can crush you and make it hard to keep up. There's something there, an economy management type of game, and I think you've almost got it!

Very good submission for only your second (or third, never know how to interpret those) GWJ!

I'm a winrar! :P There's one main thing that makes this game a little less enjoyable: no control of the camera. I think if you could just implement that, possibly using this tutorial from KidsCanCode, and get some better graphics and sound going, you'd have a great game! 

https://kidscancode.org/godot_recipes/3.x/2d/touchscreen_camera/index.html - note that in this tutorial, he goes into the project settings and enables "Emulate touch from mouse," a useful tip for also making your game slightly more mobile-ready, where tower defense games are really popular. If you look at my game (this is not meant to get you to rate my game :P), I used the above tutorial to create the moving around the overall map.

Great try, would love to see more from you!

Edit: Something I forgot to mention is that this is an incredible submission for just one person working alone. I've tried to make tower defense games before and they are hard. Very impressive that you submitted this even with the very basic graphics and stuff! 

Art was cool as mentioned before! I did also struggle a bit with the controls, but I could definitely see myself getting used to them, which means this could be a really, really fun game. Good submission!

Thanks, that means a lot to us! We are really proud of it.

Wow! For a first submission, this is incredible! Also very, very difficult. :P Main thing I'd say is a pet peeve of my own, which is to include WASD as valid directional controls - it's easy to do, and helps those of us that don't have arrows on our keyboards (I had to do a remapping for this and a previous game, so it was okay, but still, easy to add in project settings under input). At some point I thought I was really kicking butt, and then I got absolutely nusted and wanted to start again to see how far I could get - that's a great sign for any game!

I can't wait to see more from you! 

Oh, thanks! That really means a lot to us! 

Fun little idea! I think there's a number of improvements that could be made, just going to list a few and hope they're helpful. The game overall had a great idea behind it, very fun conceptually - I love games with mini games like that, especially when the mini games make sense within the context, which as far as I can tell they all did very well. 

But I didn't fully understand what I was supposed to do with most of the mini games. While eventually stuff kind of made sense if I just clicked about randomly, when there are some different mechanisms involved, it's always best to have some kind of explanation, even if it's just on the itch page itself, for how to achieve your goals, or otherwise the point of the game can be lost. 

You can turn on YSort for your scenes very easily; anything that inherits from Node2D has a YSort property on it now, and if you have that, your character only shows up behind things when it is actually behind them, while appearing in front of them when it is supposed to be in front. It takes some tweaking, but hopefully that's a helpful tip for you!

A simpler tip that is perhaps my own pet peeve is to include WASD as up-left-down-right controls in your project settings under the input. It's not hard to do, and can make it easier for some people who don't have arrows on their keyboard to play the game.

Finally, even though there weren't a lot of animations or anything, it's still useful to have your character flip when swapping left/right. The easiest and generally best way to handle that is to look at the sign of your input.x  and do something like this:

var sign_x = sign(input.x)
if sign_x != 0 and sign_x != sprite.scale.x:
  sprite.scale.x = sign_x

This will make it so that it flips left and right, along with any children, such as hit boxes, of your sprite. Note you don't want to flip the physics body around this way as it can cause weirdness in Godot.

Overall, it was an impressive effort for a short period! Several mini games can be really hard to pull off. 

We genuinely appreciate feedback like this, so thank you! One thing to note, in addition to what Gamma has written, is that if the game was longer, you would really feel like you're starting to control the chaos/randomness by forging your dice however you want. As it was, we simply didn't have time to include more maps and such, as I had mistakenly made the map navigation much harder than it needed to be. Thank you for playing though even though you don't think it's for you - I fully understand, and if I didn't know I wanted to have it "eventual controlled chaos," I would be right there with you!

Thanks! The only reason I can think of for a value not sticking is the drop targets were too small. That's good to know and is feedback we'll take and use. 

Thanks a lot, that means a ton to us! We are intending to. We knew we had a runner as we playtested it and just kept playing. :)

Thanks!

Yeah, creating a game in 9 days is no small feat! It's good advice - we'll try to create it in 5 days so we can properly balance things next time.

Thank you so much! Our team is very thankful!

Thanks! Yeah, it's funny, everyone loves tornado, but ice was my favorite too! (Though tornado was more fun to program. 😂) Thanks for playing and the kind words!

Thanks for playing, really appreciate the kind words!

I just get the next integer from a random number generator and put it in there. Everyone knows I GWJ a lot of the time and I haven't kept track. 🤣

Crud! I was going to implement level restarting and completely forgot. My bad! That's a great call-out.

Thanks! I went with the music that reminded me the most of the Rockman theme from FTL, and thought it fit, but for sure it's controversial! And that's cool, I was inspired by Hoplite. 😂 Glad you liked it!

Hard game, but interesting! Make sure to remember to set your scaling to keep and canvas items, and then make sure you set the size of your canvas on itch to be a multiple of your actual resolution, so it expands nicely and is easier to see everything. Generally though the game seems good! Couldn't figure out how to get away from the one guard who chased me and died immediately, but figure that's probably a difficulty tweak that you didn't have time for, since it's such a short time. Great submission for a first-time sub!

Yeah! I wanted to do that but ran out of time. Thanks for playing, appreciate the feedback!

Very cool! Glad you were able to finish this. It plays really well and could be expanded in the future!

Web.

Interesting game! Had some difficulty getting around the rat immediately, but overall the game was pretty fun. I liked the music and while I can't play 3D for long (I get motion-sick easily), this one felt better than most 3D games somehow!

I had quite some difficulty trying to figure out how to make this work. Perhaps it was just my own inability, but I also didn't get any sound, and I'm wondering if I missed too much based on that - not going to rate it for that reason. But it's very, very cool otherwise!

I ran into the same issue as Not-Only But-Also below, where I kept falling through the floor and it caused me a lot of problems that weren't able to be fixed without just refreshing the page. I think conceptually though you have a really sweet game and should definitely develop this into something more if you can. It's good stuff!

Incredibly weird and interesting game! Very abstract while still having a very concrete purpose. Conceptually I loved figuring out how to get around the map and stuff, very cool!

Interesting take on the theme, felt it could have been integrated a little bit more, but it was still a fun, little interesting game! Now if only real life had a grandma whipping cookies at me, I'd be happy! 

Not exactly family friendly :D, but the game plays well and has interesting puzzles! Difficult at points due to the ability to get stuck with the pinning problem (getting pinned into corners by butterflies), but overall I liked the game! 

Oh thanks! Really appreciate it.

Oh, that was quick, thanks!

Agreed! I was very annoyed with the darkness and how hard it was to play at points. I tried to be pretty careful with it, but the last level was designed in the final 30 minutes of the jam. 😅

Reminds me a lot of Dome Keeper! Great game, very interesting stuff! This is definitely a puzzle game that could have legs, as in it could be significantly improved and sold if you were up for it!

I'm glad you were able to submit! I think maybe reducing your base resolution would have been helpful, or as Noskire has mentioned below, perhaps zooming out a little bit (would effectively be the same thing). It would allow the camera to sit a little further away from the player so more of the screen can be seen. At the same time, the drag margin on the camera is massive, to the point if you get anywhere near an edge, you'd normally want the camera to start moving so you can kind of see where you're going, but it had remained still. I recommend for a first full game to just reduce your drag margin, or turn drag off entirely.

That said, I'm really glad you were able to submit! Very impressed you were able to, since this is your first in Godot and only second overall. I think you have some real skill, given that, functionally, it was a good way to the point of being a decent platformer! Keep it up!

It was a good try! I'm glad you submitted something. I hope you are able to stick with the engine and make more attempts in the future - I think you can get there! If you need any help, make sure to ask in the GWJ Discord server! Plenty of people there can help you.

Not a mathematician, and that's a bit wrong. There are a lot of programmers who are both not mathematicians and not even in science at all. Hell, my best friend has a degree in English and is a fantastic programmer.

Very interesting little game! I enjoyed it. I think while you need the gecko to have a lot of speed, it might be helpful if it was a little bit less. I overshot everything on the second level, which led to my death a couple times. Conceptually though, I really like it! Well done, and good to see another good team joining the jam!

Excellent, will check it out again then! Thank you for doing that. :)

Yes, I needed exactly that! I realized literally immediately after posting it that I needed just generic lights around to help with that, didn't have time to put them in though. Thanks for the advice!

There's apparently a bug where if you try the door before getting the card for it, it won't open again. I didn't have time to fix that. Oh well.