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Iterophage's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #2296 | 3.662 | 3.662 |
| Artwork | #3811 | 3.054 | 3.054 |
| Narrative | #4414 | 2.230 | 2.230 |
| Enjoyment | #5707 | 2.459 | 2.459 |
| Audio | #8224 | 1.500 | 1.500 |
Ranked from 74 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
Iterophage fits the theme "Loop" by making loops the core of both its gameplay and narrative. Instead of controlling the virus directly, the player defines a repeating logic loop that determines how the virus behaves each iteration. This loop contains actions like attack, defend, and conditions such as if, creating a modular AI system that executes automatically. Each iteration, the virus follows the same instructions until the player modifies the loop, making iteration a key part of strategy and progression. The virus itself becomes an extension of the player’s logic, running in a cycle that evolves over time.
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
All Art and Code was either made by Eterna Studio or procedurally generated via code and PIL library (not AI)
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Comments
A really cool take on the theme and the art style and UI are great too! Too bad the mutation system is trivialized by the crazy amount of points, otherwise it could be very fun to play.
Heyy, thank you so much for playing and for your feedback, im glad the only negative comment from you is just a bug we patched by giving people enough points to play around with so that they're not softlocked, after jam we will be sure to fix it so that it isn't trivialized :D
Had some hitching after every kill in web build. Felt like it was constantly loading assets?
Actually it wasn't, i preloaded all the assets before the game is run, so thats weird. I believe its the GPU particles being run after each kill
Very interesting concept! We were also thinking about theming our game around viruses and bacteria at first before settling on our 80s aesthetic. I think you have the core of a cool game idea; I'm actually surprised that this is the first programming-type loop game I've played so far this Jam. I think the main thing a more fully fleshed out version of this game would benefit from is a tightly scoped tutorial section to walk you through some of the decisions you would make in choosing which upgrades to buy and which actions to choose to put into your loop. I got through level 10 with just an Attack and a Defend action repeating quickly in my loop and a bunch of the visible upgrades unlocked, but I think this has a ton of potential!
Thank you so much for the thoughtful feedback! It means a lot, especially hearing that the loop-based gameplay stood out during the Jam. We were definitely toying with the virus/bacteria theme for a while, cool coincidence that you considered it too before going with the 80s aesthetic (which looked great, by the way).
You're absolutely right about the need for a proper tutorial. The upgrade system and loop design have a lot of depth planned. A future version would definitely introduce more structured onboarding and incentivize experimentation with different logic patterns.
Glad you saw the potential. We’re excited to keep pushing it further!
Interesting concept and fun little game! Unfortunately there is a freeze with every shot down particle on the web build, but I assume that this is not the case in the downloadable version. The repeating logic loop system seems to be great, but my little owl brain needed a little bit of time to understand it, lmao.
nice work nevertheless!
Haha yes unfortunately web builds hate GPU particles and so it's a bit off for that, but yeah on the downloadable version it runs buttery smooth. Thank you so much for your kind words and im glad you found the concept interesting. Yeah we're planning on adding some sort of onboarding to ease in the player rather than throwing them in without any explanations!
Very cool concept! Reminds me of Plague Inc. I think mine was crazy bugged though cause I started with 1,000,000 mutation points, but im not complaining! I do wish there was a type of tutorial though, but I also do love figuring out things for myself when im confused!
Yes, we unfortunately ran out of time to make a tutorial, and for the mutation points, we had a bug that didnt render the points correctly, so i just gave everyone mutation points so that they dont get soft locked. Thank you :D
Wow this is crazy, it's a cool idea and you definitely should further develop it after the jam. I think you have a lot more ideas which are just too much out of the scope of a game-jam. Great stuff
Exactly, there was wayyy too much to add in 4 days, let alone 2 days that i worked on this. Thank you so much :)
Nice idea, really different take on the theme!
Thank you! :D
in the web build when enemies spawn in and die, it lags the game for a bit. However, I find the loop editor thing really cool! Great work :D
Thank you so much! Yeah web builds really hate anything to do with GPU's
Wow! well done!
You made the game really user friendly imo.
The idea is super cool and I would love to see it be expanded and polished!
It reminded me of scratch and the visuals like spore :P
Well done! :D
Haha thank you so much, thats exactly the look i was going for, im glad someone noticed that its like scratch. I will for sure be expanding on this game post jam. Thank you again :D
well done for adding visual coding to a game, that must have been a headache! good job :)
Don't even get me started, it was the biggest headache to do, but it was well worth it in the end! Thank you so much :)
A proper tutorial would go a long way, but after having spent a good chunk of time with this game you start to understand the systems and there is a good amount of depth! I really liked the visual scripting component and think that it is such cool mechanic and take on the theme.
Great work.
Heyy, you're completely right, if i had the time, i would've for sure done a better job at onboarding the player, hopefully after the jam, it will be a priority on my to do list, im glad though that you stuck through and gave a go at understanding it, and im glad because it seems it paid off since you noticed the depth that i've put into the game, thank you so much again for your kind feedback :D
gameplay is super fun and satisfying once you get into it. My only gripe is that it throws a lot at you early on: tons of upgrades and information with no real onboarding. It can be a bit overwhelming at first.
Luckily, the dev was around during the stream to guide me through the early steps, and once I got the hang of it, the experience became way smoother and way more enjoyable.
Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys programming-based mechanics or systems-heavy games. Definitely a gem for enthusiasts!
Thank you so much for your kind feedback! I completely agree, the game definitely needs some sort of tutorial or more gradual introduction, rather than throwing everything at the player all at once. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I wasn’t able to implement proper onboarding during the initial development phase.
That said, I really appreciate you sticking with it, and I’m glad to hear you enjoyed it once things started to click. Your feedback means a lot, thank you again!
Very pretty game. I'm not at all sure what I was doing for most of it, but I think that says more about me than the game. The loop works very well.
thank you so much :D I think i should've made some sort of tutorial so that all types of gamers can comprehend the game, because as of now it might not be as intuitive to others
I really wish there was some more sound. The game itself is a great concept tho! Definitely didn't just upgrade fully immediately...
Yeah i think having SFX's would've put the game a tad bit higher than it is right now. Also haha i would've done the same if i had enough points from the start. Thank you :)
Really cool premise! It's a shame you ran out of time to fully execute your ideas, it's clear you had something intriguing going on with this project and I would love to see it fully finished.
Thank you so much and we truly appreciate your feedback. Yeah i had tons of ideas to implement, i was only able to get the basic functionalities from each part of the game to work in time, but yeah keep an eye out, we will hopefully be working on it post jam !
Cool Game)
Thank you :D So is your's i saw it on stream, i enjoyed the concept!
I like the concept! i was getting a big lag spike everytime an enemy died. the upgrade tree was super cool too! however i started with almost infinite points and im not sure if that was intended. would love to see this fleshed out more!
Thank you so much :D!, I believe some browsers run slower than others, because this game uses GPU particles, i believe if you try microsoft edge, it would lag less, let me know how it goes. And yes the points weren't intended to be almost infinite, however we ran into a bug 3 minutes before submission that made rendering the points not work correctly, so i decided to give people enough points to play around with the tree rather than to get soft locked :D
Interesting concept! I can see this game to be pretty interesting when fleshed out.
I do like those "programming games" quite a bit, but I feel like the visual node representation in your project is too "on the nose" for a game, and feels exactly like you are doing programming instead of playing a game. The web build of the game on my PC also lags quite a bit.
Heyyy, thank you so much for your feedback, It is indeed very program like, and im not too sure how else i would be able to make it more game ish like, if you have any suggestions, we'd be happy to hear it.
Also i think its an issue with the web browser, on chrome it usually runs slower due to the amount of bloat. Try it out on Edge and let me know if its any better
Thank you for your kind words :D
I use Firefox as my web browser of choice. I also tried it on Edge and it also seems to run slow on my PC. Maybe it's a specs issue.
I wouldn't know exactly how I would solve it haha, it's not my game after all. One thing I thought of is that you could keep the mechanics as is, but just give it a different visual representation, kinda like interpret it in a different "theme", rather than a 1-to-1 representation of a visual programming language. I think what could be interesting is that instead of representing the node as having if-else statement etc., you could make it like a bunch of geometric shapes, and each shape represent a different "programming functions". The virus can link to different shapes, and you have to configure your virus to have those shapes to link to them, exactly how real virus behave, where they binds to specific molecules based on their specific genetic shapes.
ahhhhhhhh i got what you're saying, like a flowchart of some sort, yeah thats a nice idea, I will for sure think about how to improve the visual representation going onwards, and about your specs, yeah thats a bummer, im sorry about that :p
VERY impressed by the no-code node editor system although I found an exploit - more on that later. I like the graphics, although the health bar should be smaller and directly above the virus to make clear what it is, at first I didn't notice it. Also the root of the tech tree should already be unlocked because I didn't notice (again '-_-) and I immediately tried to go to attack and defense and I couldn't get it and I assumed there was a bug (because I forgot to unlock the root -_-). But that didn't matter because I found an exploit to easily beat the game before I realized my mistake.
SPOILER + EPILEPTIC WARNING:
so the exploit is that it's possible to chain multiple paths. The simple example is to use the base node, an attack node and a defense node, and to connect all the combination of input/output. The result is a flashy unstoppable virus that spams attack and defense
Thank you so much for the detailed feedback, yeah all the points you bring up are very valid and i should've done them all from the skill tree root being unlocked to the players UI being more intuitive.
as for the no code editor, it seems i forgot to make it only possible for one output connection per node :P thats a big slip up from my end, my bad, i do believe though if you just add some wait nodes on both ends of those two paths, it should fix the issue, but yeah thats for sure something to get fixed ASAP after the game jam.
Again, thank you so much for the amazing feedback and im glad you found the game impressive :D
I'm a big fan of the code editor great job with that. Really fun to play around with!
Thank you so much! I'm glad you enjoyed playing around with our game!