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well it looked like this when it was originally reported. he has clearly since changed it to "look" hand drawn to try to fool people 

I can't believe you made so many level and they were so good! Diagonal movement is a real fun twist

Actually what's happening is you are leveling up, but I never got the level display or a level up message working. Every time you level up your damage and max hp increases and the amount of xp needed to reach the next level increases by 20 percent. You get a flat damage boost of between 50% and 100% of your level (so at level 10 you are getting 5 to 10 additional damage. If you have picked up the sword this bonus is doubled. 

Thanks for playing! 

This was really cool!
Lack of sound effects is a shame, they would help feedback of realizing when your water is full/empty. constantly having to watch the gauge to realize when to stop was a little tedious.
LOVE the cube planet and the way it/the camera rotate. Very cool and the green coming back as you progress was a nice touch.

neat little game! besides the bug where the wrong arrow disappears, just disappearing isn't enough feedback for hitting a note right, it would help to have little flash or something showing it was hit.

yeah a blur pass would have really helped with the eye strain. but also there is a toggle for it, you can press the 2 key to toggle the shader. 
But you didn't miss much if you did some battles and walked around. There's a second area with a different tileset and battle background.
thanks for playing!

So the story there is that I needed a basic enemy. The equivalent of a Dragon Quest slime. And I was doing concept art sketches and thought "why not have a demon king who evokes like, the devil?" And then his minions would just be little floating devil heads. And I never got to make the actual game art for the demon king (the in game sprite was going to be for another basic enemy). But I was also thinking that enemies in JRPGs often have names that don't quite make sense at first. They'll be abbreviated in some way or be a reference to something and once you know what it is it makes perfect sense, but it's kind of obtuse. So "Old Nick" is a nickname for the devil, and "sprites" are a type of spirit in lots of European folklore. So it's intentionally obtuse, but not nonsensical. 

yeah, so the demon king being one-shottable is actually a bug where he is supposed to have 100 health, but when instantiating from the resource, it tries to set his current hp before updating his max hp, so it gets capped at the default max hp value of 18. But it's kind of good this bug shipped, because of the other bug you mention, which is that the potion button doesn't properly update its disable status in certain situations. 
So yeah with even another hour i would have fixed those and also lowered the nick sprite spawn rate. I'm really happy with what I managed to get done, and I'm glad you liked the art, I had fun doing it. Really wish I'd gotten to draw the Demon King (the sprite that's in game was going to be the other normal enemy, but I didn't even get the boss in game until an hour before the submission cutoff)
Thanks for playing!

yeah the dialog box was actually the most difficult aspect of this. I tried several different implementations that did not work right and I had to change it yet again this morning just to get it this good. But the tl;dr is that there wasn't a proper state machine so there was a very strict linear sequence held together with await signals and chewing gum. 

one of my goals for this jam was to get better at implementing menus, and I can't say I really did haha. so definitely something I'll work more on in the future, thanks for playing!

hey, learning's the whole point, right?

This is cool! really nailed the atmosphere. great use of sound

I'm sorry, I don't understand the controls. I like that the name is a pun!!

I did!!

Big mood. great job! Took me a second to figure out I had to advance the phone calls with the interact button.
 

great job!

This is really polished! It would be nice if there was slightly more indication when you found a ticket by searching. 

This looks really slick, and I like the minimalist controls in concept, but playing on desktop steering with the mouse is basically impossible. it's not sensitive enough. 

Laughed out loud at the map route to level 4!!
Great job getting all these parts together. Sound and health bar effects add a lot, and the map screen is neat. 

Because they are nose-shaped, my concept was that their projectiles would be boogers. While you can't really tell, the projectiles alternate being fired from between the two nostrils. 

now I know why you liked the intro to my game so much! AWESOME

I really appreciate the blockout of so many mechanics, like the camera zoom to objective, popup text, in world text, and novel movement mechanics. 

Oh and being able to access the settings menu at any time from in game. Very cool.

I had trouble with the Bee Glide. I'm not sure what I was supposed to do differently, but I could never get enough altitude for it seem like it did anything besides briefly switching to be form while falling, which seemed about the same as the regular bunny hopping.

Really love the overall aesthetic and how many different game features you showcased.  
 

this was really fun and I liked the look of it, but the controls where confusing, the spin charge didn't seem to work consistently. it was very unclear what hud elements meant. Overall very good though. 
really loved the art style. 

this is a cool idea for a game but I literally can't figure out how to play it. I can select a noun, enter up to 3 letters in a box and click the button and it... prints those three letters below. I can look at the consenants to try to figure out the words but... 

there's not enough instruction and not enough feedback to figure it out, I'm sorry :(

Very funny change of expectations from "going around the world saving frogs" to "q to fire rocket". Really great first game jam project! You movement feels way better than mine.

That music loop though... thanks for including volume controls :P

Difficult to understand what to do. Lack of feedback on incorrect medicine. Neat concept.

Pretty fun. Very slow to get started. Great visual style.

Good effort! I did download it to try it and while i could drag the tools around and get negative score for accidentally slicing up their face, i wasn't able to actually do anything to the mutations. But the visuals were quit cool.

Game itself is pretty impressive, but the menus to start playing are very confusing and I almost gave up before figuring it out. 

Even once I figured out N to select on the main menu, it was not clear what was happening on the next screen. Just something to think about for next time!

The presentation of this is SO COOL! Had a bug with cards overlapping in hand so I couldn't read them a few times. But I really enjoyed playing and its a really neat idea with the best graphics I've seen so far this jam. Great job!

Unfortunately your language setting only seems to work for the main menu. 

Game is HARD! Why do the clippies have so much health!? Lol

Played until i got to a level where the enemies kept knocking me off. Had a weird aim drift issue once and also once projectiles started shooting the wrong direction. But overall, great start! Good job making so many levels and having so many different enemy types/behaviors.

I love the way the mutations show up on the sprite!

This is pretty cool! I didn't understand some of the cards/upgrades, and some seemed to not work (lower temperature was very inconstant, but raise temperature always worked). What is the rotating arrows?
Neat concept and fun visualization of it. 

I put in a ticket for a bugfix and was allowed to patch mouse capture. It should work now. 

I drowned SO MANY TIMES. Didn't get to smoke ANY stogies

hmm. Thanks for letting me know. I tested it in chrome and I was able to use the mouse, but once the mouse lost focus I was not able to get it back. 
Thanks for trying it out, though!

discord: snak

https://wolscott.itch.io/dr-turtle-saver

Agree with all the content, but really like this format of information and the way it invites me to engage with it like exploration. 

This is a very good read. As someone who struggles very hard to turn my creativity into actual things that exist, I have found it very disheartening to read all the manifestos that say "you actually don't need any tools and the way that people who have succeeded at doing things is bad and wrong actually and you should do it a different way or your work will suck". 

Thanks for writing this. 

I'm glad you like! It's kind of a rough outline, the tip of the iceberg, of a larger thing I'm working on exploring these ideas.

As to the problem, I certainly don't have "an" answer, but part of the point of this work is to examine the different ways inventory designs shape gameplay and player experience. I plan to do some actual case studies comparing different systems. But, I do think a big part of it is changing the relationship to item collection so that there isn't an expectation to picking up everything. A player hoarding potions and never using them may change their behavior if they can only have 10 potions and they keep encountering potions. But if the result is then that players always have 10 potions, then why even have the item, just use like an "estus system".

The other part of this for me is that you can't focus on just one of the Design, UI, or Implementation aspects and solve this problem. These things are interconnected and therefor inventory design needs to be approached kind of holistically. At least that's my conclusion, as this whole project of mine has grown out of my attempt to focus on just concept or just implementation. 

Interesting. Maybe there is a bug. On level 3 you need to bounce both lasers off the same mirror in order to hit both boxes at once.