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Thank you truly, but we're quite happy with our ratings. Even that category is still in the top 7% of all submissions!

Some nice puzzles here. Rules for when something can or cannot be scaled down anymore are a bit confusing. Would have been great for the theme from two years ago (built to scale)
Character doesn't really look much like a vampire, more like a ninja, so the vampire count thing didn't really translate to me.

Thank you very much!

Nice, I like word games and this one's quick and fun to play! Best I got was 134 points.

I enjoyed the extra challenge of not only building any word but specifically aiming for keeping a good balance between vowels and consonants as to not get into hard or impossible situations afterwards.

Took me a while to understand how to press the button until I finally looked at the page to see that I have to press "E". That was kind of unclear to me because you don't have any onscreen button prompt.

But the game overall had a clever premise and the multitasking required is interesting. At first I wasn't sure how to avoid the cars because of the auto-walking, but then I figured out you walk more slowly when you press S.

Someone has to tell this bomb defuser that it's NOT a good idea to throw away the instructions as you reach the bomb!

It's impressive how many systems you managed to layer into this game within the jam time! It was also an enjoyable experience to play despite me apparently sucking at the game. I got totally overrun by the skeletons!

Visually and feelings-wise, this was great! The idea and setting were so cool and it was a neat idea to use public domain art. You definitely put those artworks together well into a cohesive whole. 

It's also very impressive you made this all by yourself!

During the collecting phase, I think that the circle for collecting a flower, especially vertically, should be a bit bigger. I had quite a few frustrating near-misses.
And during the fireworks phase, my frame rate dipped to like 5fps or so whenever a firework particle system was playing. And that then affected my ability to play the rhythm game for the next one so I had quite a lot of failures due to the laggy frames from the particle effects.

Simple and cute concept, and I like the drawings on the cards. My best score was 111, but it was pretty close to that most of the time. The Fish is definitely the trickiest one for me, because the exact opposite action looks almost identical since it uses the same artwork. I'd maybe consider having a different color variant of the fish when you need to reverse the button order. Maybe it's a rotten fish or something.

Either way, I liked my time with this little game :)

I don't know what to do with all the jobs I got while playing this. Or moms for that matter.

Delightfully weird lol - I admittedly didn't understand what was happening throughout most of my run, except the minigames basically, but I have a feeling that that's part of the design goal, to make it feel like a drug fueled party night where nothing makes sense and everything is vibes.

Looks and sounds really nice! I like the designs of the different modules and the music loop has a catchy melody to it.

I found it rather hard to control since it was always so floaty and the rotation of my construction shifted dramatically all the time so aiming is a real pain. I also felt that it's hard to control what to build where since you're under all this time pressure constantly. I think it would be nice if it had some kind of separate build mode without time pressure in which you can attach modules you collected with higher precision and a better plan.

Overall it reminds me of a game I once worked on where this same issue came up that the building was also running in real time and didn't give players enough time to construct things the way they want to. Pausing time during building solved that for the game.

I reached wave 5 in 3 attempts! I don't know, not the best ever but it's the best I could get

It's very fun to control and I like just how fast paced and flowy the movement is. That being said, the visuals, although they look very nice and original, didn't really help me understand what is going on. I often felt like the game was just over and I didn't know why. Maybe it's a lack of ingame tutorials, not sure. Once I at least understood I have to AVOID the orange circle rather than collecting it, the game still felt incredibly hard to me right from level 1 and I only made it to level 2 once. I think you could probably ramp up the difficulty more slowly.

I got a score of 28! Not sure if that's good, probably not but I had fun and that's what counts! I like the idea of slowly modifying the level over time. Maybe it could have changed even more dramatically. But it was cool like this. At first I didn't get what the point is of collecting the thingies but I just kinda accepted it until at some point it gave me my score and then I understood.

Would be even cooler if some kind of "new"-effect would show up on the newly spawned spikes so you can see what changed more easily. Like maybe they could blink or something.

Good work on the controls, it felt nice to play.

Thank you so much, means a lot!

We  may have created it but believe me when I say, we hate it too

Hm you definitely have to organize things a bit more, even before the jam starts, if your team becomes bigger.

For our ideation phase, we pretty much did the same as usual: We start just chatting about the theme and different interpretations of it in an open round and then we all go into our own corner of the miro board and each person writes down ideas within up to 15 minutes. The thing we did differently this time was that everyone was only allowed to write down up to 2 ideas. Rather than ideas, these were supposed to be a bit more like game concepts with a little more thought put behind it.

And then we went ahead and explained ourideas to each other in vc, taking turns. Once all ideas were clearly explained, we went ahead and voted on a difficulty vs awesomeness matrix, taking the average of all the votes on both axes. We then evaluated the top themes a bit more closely on various other scales and it became clear fairly quickly that we could all rally behind one of the concepts. There were other great ones too but this was the one that seemed really feasible while also sounding like a lot of fun stuff could be made with it. We then clarified any open questions and varying interpretations of details and discussed it in the subset of people who'd do design and programming tasks. Then we split the tasks, but it became clear that it would be good if the initial prototype should just be built by one single person (Jonas) while others took on some other tasks like making an art moodboard or setting up some prefab objects for later or went to bed. That helped because then on the next, first proper day, we had a solid base that everyone could work on.

Generally, not everyone was always there at the same time so quite often we worked in groups of 3-5 people rather than having all 8 members of the team present. That made these work sessions pretty managable and chill.

For these availability hours, we always set up a kind of time table on miro where everyone drags boxes to the times they think they'll surely be present. That kind of visualization helps a lot, especially when, like in our case with one of our programmers, multiple time zones are involved.

We also all have experience working with at least some others in the team. So I guess that probably helps.

I hope this is useful to you :)

Thank you very much for playing and commenting!

Yeah we've been thinking about that as some rounds can feel a bit slow. At the same time, getting mad at the AI overexplaining and taking super long with it is part of the intended uhh "emotional journey" so to speak. But I'm still thinking about whether a button to skip pauses *after* a character is done talking / signing could make sense. Or perhaps if you press the button while they're already talking, they'll start talking over each other which is honestly also really fitting for those voice AIs... Worth considering...
Glad you liked the mixed levels, they're also my favourites!

Oh, also that explosion effect was such a last-minute addition, like we had an effect from an asset pack but only in the last hour found out that it was using some shaders that weren't visible in webgl. So we scrapped it and I quickly threw this one together from assets I had made for my other game, Glitcheon. Having those graphics around came in clutch in the end lol

Hahaha that gave all of us in the team a good chuckle!

Oh dang, hope you still had some fun with it? :0

Aww thank you so much!

Thank you for the kind words and rating!

Also, woah, that'd go so hard, like everyone's taking on a different species role and one has to flag mistakes or something, IRL? Gotta do that some time!

Thank you for playing and commenting, glad you liked it!
You out-ocomplod the ocomplo! I actually thought about plasma for a while too but then thought "most people won't think of that". It would be very in character for this species though to be pedantic like that haha so maybe we'll change it to be a version of "4" in a post jam version.

ow.

I think the common control scheme for this kind of game is that I can aim the direction of the sword hit with my mouse. That usually feels great to control.

Good work on the game, Ali! It took me a bunch of attempts but in the end I managed to get the cherries! Just sad that the ending is still what it is but that's how life goes. It ends.

The one thing I found a little annoying was that I was unable to aim my character's view direction with my mouse which often made me miss my hits. But it's fine it was overall still an enjoyable experience and it kinda added to the challenge. Good design choice to make the HP time and the fireballs cost you time rather than an extra HP bar.

Thanks ö löt!

Thanks, but... *Presses your button*

Thank you so much for the high praise and the GRUNT GRUNT GRUNT GRUNT GRUNT / GRUNT GRUNT GRUNT GRUNT GRUNT rating!

Thank you so much! We just HAD to get the clankers in, even though it hurt us a little lol

exactly

Thank you very much for the detailed feedback and ideas!

It's so interesting to me, some people have no trouble live-counting the Grunzers at all and others find them the hardest. Great job still making it through!

We actually early on did think we should create an alien language and maybe a translation table but didn't get there in the end. Would be really cool and right on theme with the space stuff though!

We also talked about speeding things up the lower the numbers get but I think the sequencing code got a lil complicated towards the end so we didn't do that, even though I do think it would be cool! Especially with some of the species definitely getting quite a lot easier around 5.

:D

Thank you for playing and commenting. And yeah especially some earlier rounds can feel a bit slow. Perhaps a skip button could be an idea... Hmm, then again if you can just skip past the clankers, it kind of ruins the feeling of losing your mind to their endless drivel haha

Thank you so much! Yeah adding that detail of them floating in the back was very important to me, glad we got that in!

Thanks for playing a game. If you want to give it another try to see what happens in later levels (your progress should still be unlocked), here's a tip: The clankers either say a number while they speak or they just ramble and talk about counting without actually mentioning a number. If they don't say a number, they are definitely wrong and you have to press their button. If they say a number, they'll usually say "I'll say" or something like that. For the number that they mention that they're saying, you have to check if that's the current number in the sequence. If not, also press their button.
But if that sounds too annoying, you can also load the game, press Unlock All Levels on the level select screen and just start with level 4 :)

Also, thank you very much for the praise regarding our art <3

Thanks! I'm glad we could deliver for you!

Oh right, even when I just watched rug play it, that line got burned into my brain hahaha

Nice, this was a pretty enjoyable lil papers-please-like. I liked the little ways you made in which something could be wrong. Of course if this was a bigger game, you'd likely introduce the elements one by one. But I got around to it pretty quickly and it sorta helps that there is no time pressure.

I just wish that when I get something wrong, it'd tell me what I missed. And it would be cool to have two different bad endings, one for letting through an alien with a problem and one for stopping one that was fine.

Also, damn, nearly all of these aliens had some kind of mistake with them haha.

Haha it represents our state as we were making the game, listening to AIs trying to count so much and writing / recording those horrible, horrible voicelines for them 🤪Exactly!
For real though, thanks so much for playing. We really enjoyed your game too!