Very jank but in some charming ways. Incredible sound design, that jump sound is insane
XenoZane
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It took a little while for me to understand it (I somehow didn't realize that there's more than just the starting platform) but once I got into it it was very fun to blast through the courses. Very hard to course correct to hit the small targets but I like the leniency of the tricking to recover if you might fall off. Bowling ball mode was cool but a little hard to utilize. Very funny game, I like that there's a whole variety of end cutscenes based on your rank, that's a lot of detail for a jam game. Get a Celine Dion song in here and you might surpass the original Titanic.
I really like how the hazards are all timed to the music, and the music seems to build as I go through the level, that was very cool. Fun character & enemy designs too.
I do wish there was more clear feedback on death. For example, I was unclear what was actually killing me for a while because I thought the sound waves from the speakers were decorative, I didn't realize the red waves killed me. The camera was also a struggle, it felt like it was lagging behind me where I'd prefer it to lead ahead. The movement felt surprisingly heavy and it felt like inputs got dropped sometimes (maybe I'm too used to games with generous buffers?). I realized quickly that I can jump infinitely in the air by shooting repeatedly which broke a lot of the level design. Also the respawn time is very slow which feels bad in a game that kills you in 1 hit.
Neat game, I like that the buffs stack permanently. Some things that should be good, like speed up, begin to have drawbacks (too fast is hard to control!). Although, it makes the starting hand really important, I had my best runs when I reset for a good starting deck. It would be nice if I saw which bad cards were in each draft, since I could then make a more reasoned decision.
Ok, after playing a few more times (and beating it), I think it's very shallow strategically as a deckbuilder, but I like the weird outcomes from permanent buffs. There's a dominant strategy (get multishot, health up, and heal early) but I had fun finding it. Because of the enemy AI, I tried to avoid ever jumping, since it was far easier to manage the slimes when they stayed on the ground. This left me opting out of every single movement card.
The art is cute, but not as legible as it could be. I'd like to see more feedback on getting hit. The lighting is very nice. I'm not sure the music fits the tone. My only note on SFX is that the player getting hit should probably be a different sound to hitting the enemies.
Funny little Daniel Mullins-style game. The ambition is impressive, there's 2D art, 3D art, and voice-acted dialogue here. had a great time with the story mode. I tried the endless mode. I don't think this game is as fun when you've already seen the gags, so I'm not sure an endless mode & high score leaderboard is warranted here, but I'm still impressed they're there at all!
Wow, really fun and impressive. The scoring mechanics are really satisfying and quite deep. It clicked for me when I realized the chasing fish only give a small additive score, so combining them with the stars was optimal. Very clever, and the VFX + SFX on loop completion are incredibly satisfying. The gently scrolling camera adds a lot of depth in some subtle ways. Graphically, I particularly liked the filled loop background and the stars. Really nice work. There are a few enemies that really need sound effects, like the laser-shooting clams. But overall this is a very tight, compact little game.
Cool idea! Timing the attacks with the board was interesting, if a bit difficult. It would be cool if there was more control over what gets added to the board and where. It would also be nice if there were more sound cues and maybe warning indicators for the spike balls, since you often have to run to the edge to pick up a gem.
EDIT: I had to go back for a few more runs. Actually quite a cool concept. Had some interesting moments where I would deliberately avoid a heart on the ground when I was at 3HP, giving an additional thing to dodge. My best score was 29.
Thanks for playing! We made this for a jam and haven't gone back to do a balance pass since, and I agree with these points. Enemy scaling needs a lot of reworking, it scales up too quick early on and becomes completely irrelevant once you get strong enough. And Twitching Eye is easily the best item. There are at least multiple routes to breaking the game right now, but most of them do involve the Twitching Eye, which makes those runs feel pretty homogeneous. Would love to hear any thoughts you have on how you might rework some of these items or shop mechanics.
Wow, really enjoyed this one.
The writing and characters were fairly simple but I was surprised at how much the branching paths were fleshed out over the course of a jam. I only had time to get 3/4(?) endings, but was surprised to see even that many. The different endings actually give some meaning to the power struggle theme, where different characters having power leads to drastically different story outcomes.
The mood of the game was really good. It was very ominous and quiet. The lack of music makes the music in the ending scenarios really striking, and the songs chosen for them were evocative and well-fitting. The way the environment changes over the course of the game gives some physicality to the relations between the characters and the characters' personalities. Great job doing a lot with a little there.
The character sprites were nice too. Something about billboarded characters in 3D environments always evokes Danganronpa for me, especially when you have a cast of visually distinct characters like this.
Pretty nice style. I really enjoyed the synthwave soundtrack (especially the way it doesn't cut when you retry, keeps me in the zone and makes me want to play again).
I did find that going for 1 parry -> ultimate was so powerful that dodging, attacking, etc were just entirely irrelevant, which is a little bit lame. The resource management aspect of attacks using your power is a fun idea, but in practice there's almost no reason to ever attack BECAUSE it drains your power. The dodge roll also feels pretty poor to use. It would be nice if it sent you a larger, fixed distance away (as a safer, but more committal option?), rather than just adding I-frames to your regular movement (isn't this what parry does already, for more benefit?). Generally, I would have liked to see more viable playstyles.
Also (I'm only nitpicking here because the aesthetics are otherwise quite solid) I would make sure that pixellated fonts like the one you chose do not render with antialiasing (those blurry edges). Usually just picking the right font size eliminates this problem. Nice work on the game!
Great style, great sense of humor. I wonder if you could've conveyed the difference in acceleration from a dive vs just merely gliding more strongly, maybe with some visual effects overlaid and an FoV change (but that could also be nauseating...). There are some visual effects for a fast enough velocity, but conveying the difference in acceleration somehow would be nice for new players. I'm not sure where I need to touch the [TIMECUBES] to pick them up, since it seemed to be a little inconsistent. Either way, I had a lot of fun with this very funny and cute game.
Neat game, would be cool to see such a thing with an actual physical crank. The slow rate of fire and clunky reload gave a lot of importance to careful play and cover, which I appreciated. It has a very different feel to, say, the fast action of a game like Factory Reset. Some might see this clunkiness as bad, but the slow pace of it and needing to fumble with awkward UI in the heat of battle is very compelling, and it would be fun to explore this more, with even more elaborate ways to reload or swap weapons or whatever. I do think the accidental firing when trying to crank is a little bit sloppy, and it'd be nice if there was some obvious screen area where I could only interact with the crank and not accidentally fire my gun.
I hope you keep making games and, like you said, this ends up being your worst one.
I like the interpretation of the theme, but found it very hard to control my player, and hard to judge how far the jump was. Maybe having some gradient across the background would help me understand how high my jump was, which would really help me feel the exponential growth. Also, since the game is very vertical, it may be fun to run it in a narrower, taller aspect ratio like a portrait mode phone might use.
Cool use of GB Studio, if I had a flash cart I'd give it a spin on my actual GB. The puzzles worked well, but it would be nice to subtly visualize the flow of electricity on the actual wires a bit. I would've liked to see some more complex puzzles at the end that combine multiple pieces from the previous ones. Most of the puzzles had such a small possibility space that it was trivial enough to reach the solution by just trying every option available to you, which doesn't make for a super rewarding puzzle. The visuals are very clean though, and there are some great ideas here. I particularly enjoy the sokoban-esque batteries. The limitation on how far you can push them from their charging spot could make for some compelling challenges.
Competently made (I didn't encounter any major bugs) and well-animated. I liked the mechanic of planning a route and running to a power source in the 3 seconds before power runs out. Some of the vertical wall climbs felt janky, and it would be nice to see the path that moving platforms follow (easier to time a jump if I can see where it will stop). You have a good amount of levels here, and it's easy to imagine how you might add new mechanisms to power/depower to expand on the idea.
Really good and polished visuals. I loved the creepy little portraits for each level, and appreciated the unique mechanics for each level. I'm not sure how much the "roguelite" items actually affect gameplay (maybe I just chose bad items :P). Actually, I'm not sure I'd define this game as rogue-like in any capacity (no permadeath, very little procedural generation), but that's just semantics. The game is a neat little puzzle, and the visual work really impressed me.
Unfortunately I encountered a lot of bugs with this game. You can get softlocked when you defeat the slime vase, and it seems like you can also interact with them again as the fight is starting, which makes the dialogue overlap with the actual battle (and then softlock at the end of the fight). These bugs made it nearly impossible to play the game for me. It was kind of an interesting puzzle to solve how to defeat the boss, but as an RPG it was very shallow, having just 2 rooms with 2 enemy types total. Overall, this is a fine start for a game but you should be careful with the way you check inputs on your next game. I think you might be using an is_key_pressed or is_action_pressed when you really want is_action_just_pressed.
Super fun and polished! The visual work is excellent, and the game was immediately snappy and fun. I love throwing enemies and watching them burst into shrapnel, although I wish it was a little more clear when an enemy will burst into shrapnel, especially since the different enemy types seem to have different health? I didn't notice a single bug or performance hitch, even on the web build, which is very impressive for a game jam. The short length was great. I think ideally an expanded version of this game might have 2-3 additional levels with new enemy types, but I love the amount of polish packed into this single level. The inclusion of a timer and rank is really fun. I'm not actually sure what the pads I stepped on do. I assume they're checkpoints for if you die, but I didn't die once so I didn't get to confirm that.










