That was surprisingly fun. Definitely impressive for a first after a long break. Welcome back.

Overall its nice and plays smoothly, but late game the grid background is tiring on the eyes at high speeds, and the people can't throw in time. I got to around 5000. It's thematically consistent and just the right difficulty for me to stay engaged. Nice work!

Cool concept, having sound and UI would improve the player's experience a lot. I agree that maths is really hard, but now that you have the core complete, aside from what other's have mentioned, it'd be nice to have more replayability. Like levels or randomly placed asteroids? I wonder how many possible ways there are to escape currently, I've only found two.

Oh hey a train game! The arts really good and the music's a bop. It feels like drag racing.

I wonder how the mechanics work, it'd be nice to know. I assume each gear has a top speed. I do think that shifting slows you down too much, making it not really worth it other than increasing top speed. I got to 28.000 on the dot spamming to max gears right before reaching the 9 o'clock on the top meter, which is kinda ironic.

Fun and cool game, congrats!

Glad to hear that! Two letters dropping off is a side effect of my naive approach, and it didn't occur to me how statistically often doubles appear.  Design wise, I think I prefer that you can clear any rail at any order, and I should make sure each letter on screen is unique. Thanks for the feedback.

THANKS

Go for it! This was my first typing game too. I really wanted the train and needed some arbitrary challenge to design around, and this seemed perfect at the time. 

Having words is a pretty cool idea. I did also have the idea of having to type out words to make choices too, like to "DEPART" and "HONK". That said, the speed difference for typing between people so varied that I wouldn't know how to balance it.

Thanks! The intention was to have a chill game, and to punish lightly for mistakes. There's supposed to be a simple money mechanic, where the faster you go, the more money you make, and hitting rails only slows you down. But the time was close to being up and I had to make a decision on the spot. Definitely my biggest regret to not have prioritized it earlier. Still, I'm glad you enjoyed it :)

Nice and chill game with a fun gameplay loop. It'd be nice if the attack took more energy to differentiate from just moving up normally.

Incredible! How did you manage to fit so many levels and gimmicks in three hours? Each level is so well-crafted, I especially love the orbiting planets. The visual effects are so good and the sounds are crunchy. Each level had a satisfying solution, I can feel the difference of having a play tester.

My only complaint is that there's no skip button, and I sometimes have to wait as I drift away. I think a button to restart a launch would be nice for impatient people like me. Other than that, this is a really solid entry. Well done!

Congrats! Your game definitely deserved the spot. I'll definitely try the new levels and hardcore mode once I'm free.

Thanks! The bar keeps getting higher and higher. Top 4 is insane!

We're updating the game as soon as the voting period ends if you're interested in checking it out (it's mainly just polish)

Thanks for playing! Dang you're right on the tail, I need to up my game too.

Thanks! Right after seeing this comment, I have added full controller support. It's going to be in the first update right as voting period ends. For the releasable part, we're discussing internally but maybe 👀

Thanks! More juice has already been made, and more is on the way. We're going to update it as soon as the voting period ends.

My bad, more things to add on after reflecting. 

For the music part, I think it's less of a music choice and more of a playstyle discrepancy. I played my last few runs in silence and I enjoyed the game even more. 

Even though it's supposed to feel chaotic and intense, I tended to play strategically and calmly, almost in a zen-like mode. It's so fun to clear the whole screen or narrowly eliminating danger thanks to something you prepared 5 seconds ago. Reserving good units, eliminating dangerous units asap, keeping easy stuff until they're right next to you and clearing them aside all at once. I can't praise this enough.

I think essentially it's about what your going for. With the complexity of the game I think it fits a more calm/upbeat theme, than if it was simpler with more reactionary gameplay.

This game is so intuitive I played perfectly fine skipping the tutorial. My only issue is not being able to go fullscreen, which I believe should be easily fixable from just the itch settings page. 

The gameplay is a 5/5. Playing as some sort of hacker and just manipulating everything around you is really fun. Enemy variety is great, they're all simple but unique to create near infinite number of situations. You guys nailed the Oomph and polish. Great colors and clarity, never felt any confusion or clutter.

Okay time for personal nitpicks:

• game scales a little too early, I think a 3-5min gameplay is ideal for this situation
• music feels a little too metal, a little too intense from start to finish. A buildup would be nice
• replayability feels low for the amount of fun I had, maybe because there's nothing pushing me to keep going
• art is too simple, certainly pretty, but not very attractive
• its kinda hard to tell when laser guy will shoot

That said, this game definitely deserves more attention. For a team of three, this is really well done. Also my highscore is 5025 :)

There's a downloadable Mac version that works. The engine we're using in it's latest version, Godot 4.1, currently doesn't work with web exports for Mac. 

Edit: I've added a notice now for future players, sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks for bringing this up.

Thanks! The performance issue seems to be due to the game engine's version we're on. Moving forward for now we'll focus on limiting the number of enemies and scaling with new enemies.

The technicality of this game wows me! I love the vibe, but the blend of 2D and 3D perspectives is what impresses me. That tiny box of what the human sees vs what the pet sees is really cool. I can feel there's a lot of things going on in the background to make this work. Texts shown in the back wall, the decorated external room through the celled screen, the  z-layering of objects in 2D matching it in 3D. The details make the world feel really immersive.

Personally, I think the main issue is the lack of direction. It's cool to just play as a pet, but it's not compelling enough for me.

I'd love to see this game delved deeper. More minigames, more progression, more story. I think this game would excel for storytelling, whether its horror or something heartwarming. But that's unrealistic for a 2 day jam, and I'm already impressed with this game even working as well as it does for such a complex concept.

This game really makes you feel like a Tamagotchi pet.

An endless mode is the only mode available for now, but with coming updates we're considering adding different levels, each with their own themes. Same goes for enemies and upgrades too :)

(still trying to convince my team that we need a boss fight)

Nice to see a fellow Godot developer. Thanks for the kind words, we hope so too. 

Yes, we are using Godot 4.1. We love the new features, but we're also waiting for many of the issues to be fixed. We didn't do anything special for performance, and have noticed the performance drop, especially in the late game.

Thanks for playing! The original idea was a guy with a gun in an endless horde, you upgrade yourself to kill more enemies. The reversal part is the gun shooting at you instead, and upgrading the gun is now also harmful to you. I think it's less clear when we changed the gun to a turret, but I think it fits better visually.

Thanks! We'll definitely add some of these ideas in the next update after the jam. They all do sound really fun and I'd love to make that game!

Cute, short, sweet. Great idea, great execution. I love that it doesn't overstay and ends just at the right time. There is literally nothing to complain about for me. Well Done!

We had four more complex ideas and this one was the only simple one among them. We chose this theme after realizing the potential in game design from its simplicity, so we're happy that it shows in the final product.

The scoring system was too daunting from the time limit to get it right, so instead we just kept it simple. The strategy of avoiding kills is interesting, as it's also balanced out late game with wanting to heal, introducing a more aggressive playstyle. We'd love to encourage any kind of playstyle the players would like to try, so we've been thinking about rewarding player for style points to reward more experienced players in the updated version of the game.

There was a bug with the keyboard controls for the upgrade and we didn't have time to debug it so we just removed it. We'd love to add it back later too. Thanks for playing!

Whew the controls are tricky but I got the hang. I like the vision when going into grass and getting jump scared by the trainers. Cool concept.

I like the final boss sequence. Cool game. Had a bit of issue with the AI player trying to go backwardsm but otherwise pretty solid. More levels would be nice.

Great concept, but it's difficult to know what the goal is and how the game mechanics work. You may want to add information on those in the description since it's a pretty original idea.

I love the scaling of the game, and very humorous and creative gameplay. Great concept and you pulled it off well. I think being able to let the player make decisions too would be great for replayability.

Love the music and chaos from the rats. I would like more verticality, since it's pretty hard to juke.

this is how I imagine the difficulty curve looks like

Nooo sorry for that. I think that's a bug that slipped through. My guess is the submit button disables the textbox. 203 is incredible, glad to hear you liked it.

Thanks for playing! 

I agree with the issue with running in circles late game. Maybe the gun should overheat once in a while so players can go the other way.

The leaderboard was done with SilentWolf for Godot, the setup for it is pretty quick. I think there's a few alternatives for Unity, but for Godot I can't recommend SilentWolf enough.

The windows build works. I've seen quite a few games with the same problem too in this jam, hopefully it'll be fixed soon from itch. It sucks to have to deal with it.

I like the concept of spawning enemies while the player navigates a maze. It is kind of weird for the ranged enemies to try to hug the player, I'd rather them stop if they're in range of the player. That would let me build up to save and stack a walnut and the ranged enemies.

The game is also pretty tough. I think starting from a small map and gradually increasing in size would be nice.

This is by far my favourite puzzle game so far! The solutions to each level are so simple yet challenging. There's so many levels here I don't know how you managed to design so many in so little time. I love that you never went overboard with the elements and stuck to just a few tiles on screen. It feels good to solve them and them being short and sweet makes them really addicting. As a puzzle game fan, this game is epic.

Wow this game is creative! Really makes you feel the stress in complexity of video games.

I love the dialogue from the beginning. it's explains the unique premise in a quick and easy way. The UI is easy to navigate at a glance and the gameplay is well polished.

I think introducing the actions a few at a time would help smoothen the gameplay, as it is very overwhelming in the beginning. The UI might've get too complex with new mechanics as well, so it's probably better to ease them in too if you decide to add more.

I think building a simple narrative and having unique mechanics for each scenario might be enough to make this a full game. Well done!

Glad to hear that you enjoyed it :)  Until we posted the game, none of us got to the three minutes mark either. Intensive playtesting is probably how most of us got to 200. 180  is already a really high score. Some of us are still competing against each other for a higher score instead of playing other jam games, for you know, bragging rights.

[Obligatory thank you for feedback]

You have brought up some pretty good points. In terms of game design, I'm uncertain as well whether this game would scale well. I think each upgrade will have parts when they are better than others. Off the top of my head:
- attack speed is good for late game to clear more enemies, but makes the bullet harder to dodge
- ricochet is good for early game as it helps clear those stranded fast enemies, but dodging bullets becomes a nightmare later

I think the upgrades work well for the game's current stage, but probably falls flat quickly. Perhaps having different levels with different enemies is the way to go, we don't want each session to take too long. The buff/debuff idea is interesting, reminds me of Shotgun King. That might be worth considering since the player doesn't scale in any way. 

Currently we don't have any plans to continue this project, but it's nice to get opinions on game design. Sometimes I forget that this jam is hosted by a game design channel lol. 

Cheers!

The rotation changing directions makes it really hard. I think the asteroids are also a little small. It'd also be nice to have UI to show what you're supposed to do in game.