Quite fun! I had some good strategies with subbing in and out hamsters and the upgrades were pretty cool too! I'm quite curios as to why purposefully polluting the planet is something we'd WANT to do but other then that pretty awesome and fun submission, great work! (Also a little tutorial explaining what everything is would be nice, though I got the hang of it after a bit of messing around)
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The Hamster Engine's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Seriousness | #612 | 3.721 | 3.721 |
| Creativity & Theme | #647 | 3.811 | 3.811 |
| Enjoyment | #721 | 3.486 | 3.486 |
| Overall | #832 | 3.474 | 3.474 |
| Audio | #845 | 3.261 | 3.261 |
| Visuals | #1554 | 3.090 | 3.090 |
Ranked from 111 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Game Engine
Comments
This is honestly really fun! I like the management aspect of it a lot and you can't go wrong with cute little hamsters. xD Really well done! :)
Great game and a fun challenge! The theme is fantastic and the upgrades are clever too!
Quite fun! The hamsters are really cute, and the hamster wheel walking animation is top notch.
I really appreciate the voiced tutorial, and for a jam game that's already more than enough, but I would consider adding subtitles/captions for accessibility reasons, possibly even needing to click before the next part; especially for tutorials you don't want players to miss information and be unable to "backtrack", and it's easy to get distracted with those cute little hamsters around.
No hamsters were hurt for the duration of testing. Nice premise and concept! I like having the tutorial section, and the ability to skip it. The whacky theme/visuals do lend to the concept of a mad scientist; even detailing to things like hamster watt hour (i presume this stands for HWh). Good job to the team!
Cute addictive game! My face dropped when my hamster died... :(((( hampterrr nooo congrats on the release!! Very fun!
This was a cute game! I loved the voice acting, you make a very convincing mad scientist.
I won on my second attempt, on my first attempt I died because I didn't realize that if you bought a module and went under 0 energy from it you would instantly die. This makes sense in hindsight, but maybe it would feel better to not be able to buy things you can't afford.
I would've loved to see a little more depth to the mechanics! I didn't really need to interface with the hamster stats at all, since I was able to gain energy at a pretty solid rate just from 3 base hamsters. Some form of scaling as the game progresses could fix this.
But overall this was a fun time! I had a lot of fun dragging my hamsters to and from the wheels, juggling them all to make sure they wouldn't die. You could definitely lean harder into this aspect of the game and have a very thrilling and chaotic gameplay loop as you get closer to winning but more and more to manage at once.
Thank you so much for leaving feedback and playing! I 100% agree. We currently have it set so that you can buy the module if you have the exact amount... so if you do and it goes to 0 you lose immediately. Probably should greater than and not equal... Trying to balance the game was a little tough, and I think with more time we could have figured it out! The game bounced back and forth between being too hard and being too easy
Quite interesting. Personally I experienced frustration, but I have a skill issue so take it with a grain of salt. The voice tutorial went a little slowly, so by the time it started explaining the hamsters I had already figured it out myself. The game could've done with more juice as well. But overall, I had a fun time forcing hamsters to do unpaid labor, so thank you.
Thank you for the feedback! This was our first game jam, so there were a few things we didn't get to till the end. One of the things we realized is the lack of juice and that the tutorial was a little long. We tried to get something in because for our first submission, we just had a text tutorial and people didn't want to read it. You can however, also choose to skip the voice intro by clicking "skip tutorial" in the start menu. We completely forgot that people might not even know how to play our game till the last day 🤣
nice game! i liked the concept and the main gameplay loop. also i really liked the voicelines, the mad scientist part reminded me of steins gate
One of the best games I've played so far! The art and audio were both amazing. 😊 I really enjoyed having to manage each hamster's stamina, health and regeneration, it made the gameplay fun and strategic. I ended up spending about 15 minutes finishing the game! I'd love to see more levels, additional upgrades, and different types of hamsters to make the game even more challenging. Great job!
Was a fun game juggling the hamsters. The light micromanagement keeps you on your toes.
LOL, took me a second try to figure out that I needed to be upgrading my hamsters XD
Cute little game, well done!
Interesting concept. I liked the control of juggling little hamsters around (and their cute meep noises) trying to avoid them dying as I'm quickly cycling out who's in and out.
Thank you so much for playing our game! We both really liked the idea of using hamsters to generate power. Fun fact thoses little Meep noises were the other developer ThisGuyCaleb - itch.io
Any game with an upgrade system no matter how simple it is, it becomes instantly a favorite of mine! I enjoyed the VA, the goal was perfectly silly and the gameplay pretty straight forward. Great job guys!
short but sweet energy-based tycoon game that was very enjoyable! tutorial dialogue at the beginning was a little long winded, but at the same time it was honestly kinda nice to listen to while getting familiar with everything. good work!





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