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(2 edits) (+1)

Saw this on Spengo's stream yesterday but I wanted to play it myself!

First of all! Congrats on the choice that highlights the game! the cylindrical pov! While it might seem simple in retrospective, i think it's a great choice for delivering the concept really! the parallax in the background helps a lot too. Without it the game could suffer from the Programmer's art syndrome and you totally not only saved it but made the visuals remarkable and rememberable!

The puzzles are very well thought, the sound is pleasent and the art is cohesive. Also i liked the subtle humour the game has.

The only major downsides (Imo) I can think of are two.

I think the game is a bit on the longer side. This as an isolated game shouldn't be a bad thing. But in a Jam context it does end up feeling tiring! And the feeling of leaving a game mid-track is usually a bit jarring! I think condensing the game in 5 a bit longer levels would be the sweetest point.

And the other part, I didn't love the ball movement, it has a bit of a weird mix of mechanics, on one side is not linear enough to be a precision based movement, but is not smooth enough to be a feeling based movement. For example, when the ball is going at high speed to the right and you spin to the left, instead of slowing down first to decelerate, it instantly moves to the left while keeping that same speed. This makes it super hard to handle when you just want to brake or backtrack at high speeds! I want to clarify it's not that bad and the game genre makes it way more forgiving. But I feel it would have benefited from staying on the linear side of the movement or fully committing to a lerp (or whatever the equivalent in gamemaker is) movement!

Also, I think the theme is well implemented, is unique and original enough, while it can be seen simple, I have not played yet another game with this take on spin, so, congrats! :D

(+1)

wow, thank you a lot for your detailed review, i really appreciate it!

for the art, i tried to adhere to the limitations of typical "16-bit" era systems with up to 32 colors on-screen at once and resolution limitations (so tiles/sprites are 16x16 and almost all of them use just 3 or 4 colors, background layers are monochrome, and the screen resolution is 320x240). which was perhaps a bit brutal of a self-imposed limitation in hindsight, but i'm glad it reads as cohesive and holds up reasonably well!

i agree that the game is a bit long. looking back, a few levels less for more varied and polished wall graphics and longer/more music tracks would have been a reasonable tradeoff.

yeah, the ball mechanics are a bit cursed. lerp feels much smoother and less janky (and interacts well with the parallax background scrolling and the cylinder spinning), but it gets annoying when you want to sway to collect a heap of gems or when you try to suddenly reverse course to dodge spikes, so i kinda combined both, for better or worse. could have made it configurable or context-aware, but i ran out of time with the "everything solo from scratch" thing going on and slept through most of the bugfix day lol.

in regards to gamemaker, i actually made the game using gamemaker 8 from 2009 originally for sentimental reasons, as that was one of the first game engines i used when i was 8 years old, and i thought it would be kinda poetic to make my first game jam game using it as well. i then imported it into gamemaker studio 1.4 and then finally into the latest lts 2026 version, dragging the code through almost 2 decades of breaking changes. things hit the fan and i had to manually correct the migrated/auto-converted spaghetti without indentations but i gotta admit it was lowkey a fun challenge :)