Thanks ❤️! I was thinking making places inaccessible without figuring out the mechanic would be interesting, but the more feedback I get, the more it seem frustrating. Didn’t have much time for the sfx and art since it isn’t my speciality, but glad you still like it! Someone else also complained about using the same keys to rewind. If I spend some time post jam to polish, I’ll probably add keybinds customization, but yeah probably remap these as well. If you have any keybinds suggestion for that, I am open to them as well.

Thanks for the feedback ❤️!

Loved the sound tracks made/chosen for the game.

I made it, I have been writing music for years (and need to share more of it), so it was manageable for me to write my own. It is also just a 30 seconds loop, with instruments turned on and off, so from a musician perspective the workload was manageable (it was Tuesday when I started, so I didn’t have the choice anyway…). The trickiest was really the base piano loop and chord progression, and the guitar solo (not very good and rarely played it in the last years with university and personal issues). Once the foundation is in place, it is just building a drum loop from common patterns and working around the chord progression. It also does help that Ableton has very good acoustic instrument presets.

maybe slightly a little too floaty for my taste.

Really? Multiple complained that the fall was way too fast. Or are you talking about the jump?

The only portion of level design I didn’t enjoy too much was the “intrusive thought” portion. It was a bit frustrating constantly getting pushed, dying, resetting, but not being sure where to reset at. There are times where I would reset and still just instantly get pushed to the spikes. I can see the design metaphorically, but from a game design enjoyment perspective I think it’s a bit too harsh.

I agree with you, and you are not the only one to complain. I myself feel like it is much harder than the rest, looking back. The trick is to more or less take the wind areas in a specific order and bump around the blue plants, but the physics of it is too unpredictable, and the area very unforgiving. If I spend some time polishing the game after the jam (probably not immediately, I have other projects aside), that part needs a redesign. After making wind easier to figure out.

Thanks ❤️! The theme immediately rang with life struggles, so the messaging came quite naturally, especially after playing Celeste some weeks ago. Glad the gameplay felt nice, it is still rough on the edges but spent a few days just on that, trying to get the best feeling in that time-frame. If I had more time I’d had added difficulty tiers, but I doubt it would have been doable within 2 weeks with all the rest.

I tried making dynamic music for the first time in a university project, it was really fun, now I want to put that in all my projects! Especially as it doesn’t take more time, and on the dev side it is not so hard to implement (just smoothstep on volumes based on parameters, here the ratio of completion). But I agree the sound effects are hardly noticeable. Music was done on Tuesday, audio effects on Monday, and Wednesday was focused on fixing an atrocious music desynchronisation. So I lacked time for proper mix balance (not sure if it’d be better with stress, thinking about it). But some of them should probably evolve as well, since they are pretty calm compared to the music being a bit more intense in the end.

Thanks ❤️! That’s part of why those messages are around, I feel like they are much needed these days. They were at least needed for me. The difficulty slope is maybe too abrupt, but hard to make it different within a jam. I draw a lot of inspiration from Celeste in this aspect, where game difficulty is supposed to be a representation of life challenges, and to encourage facing difficult situations instead of fleeing them, within a safe space. Not as well executed though, Celeste is a monument to me. The fact that I played many platformers (including Celeste recently) and got very few play-testers pre-submission didn’t help to balance it all either. But I’m glad some people still had a good time despite the (almost) unforgiving level design.

I failed at making the game run smoothly on web which leads to the audio stuttering. In case you are curious, beside the binaries, there is a YouTube video at the bottom of the game page which showcase a play-through with non-stuttering music.

I incorporated music on Tuesday after spending the whole day in front of my DAW, realized late that audio was not syncing, fixed the sync issue Wednesday morning, then realized it was stuttering and frame-rate dependant. At that point I had to go to a job seeking event so I just let it be. A bit frustrating but that's part of game jam shenanigans. I wanted to start audio earlier, but I lost a lot of time understanding lighting and fighting color blending.