The gameplay was very addictive, and I liked the ending too. The news headlines were very fun to read. Excellent game!
Play game
Helpings Hands Inc's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Enjoyment | #4 | 3.825 | 3.825 |
| Use of the Limitation | #4 | 3.900 | 3.900 |
| Overall | #7 | 3.769 | 3.769 |
| Concept | #18 | 3.675 | 3.675 |
| Presentation | #21 | 3.675 | 3.675 |
Ranked from 40 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Team members
PixelPax: Design, Art & Programming. Josiah: Additional Design & Optimization. Rikka & Will: Playtesting and concept refinement
Software used
Unity!
Use of the limitation
You start a robot hand startup company to help people. As you play, the game gets completely chaotic as you manage 6 buildings at once. The news ticker will progress the story, depicting a story in which your robot hands are destroying the economic and political systems of the world on their own agenda, there's even an ending sequence which depicts a dead earth where all material resources have been allocated to building more Handy robots. Also, you know, "hands."
Cookies eaten
We were munching on some chocolate espresso beans mostly, probably like 20 of them. I think Will came in with some kind of brownie or chocolate muffin at some point but didn't eat much of it because his tum-tum hurt (don't worry he's feeling better).
Comments
hahaha, oh man, I feel so seen. It was a major pain to get it feeling showable and I still feel that it needs more tuning.
I actually ended up building a separate simulator that runs outside of the unity game engine and plots the expected progression curve. A lot of up front work, but saved soooo much time on playtesting and ended up being pretty accurate.
60 days ago(+1)
Thanks so much homie! I put a lot of love into the writing, so I'm thrilled to hear someone enjoyed reading it!
I took a look at your past entries and, daaaaaaamn, you sure know how to churn out super polished games in lightning speed. Mind if I ask-- Do you make games professionally? Or do you want to?
Wait am i evil?! lol Great submission, loved the micromanagement and the different buildings having different upgrades, towards the end i wasn’t ready many of the upgrades though i was just a clicking maniac filled with money clicking any and all upgrades that popped up lol. Frantic, Chaotic and quite frankly, shit was Getting out of hand.
Bravo!
60 days ago(+1)
Wow, thank you so much for playing to the end!!! Your games are always legendary in these jams, so it means a lot.
And yeah, you hit it right on the money; at some point your eyes glaze over, you lose the plot and just start greedily taking everything can can to recklessly grow without even thinking about the consequences-- just like a modern tech company amiright?
Thanks for asking :D
As you play, the game gets completely chaotic as you manage 6 buildings at once. The news ticker will progress the story, depicting a world in which your robot hands have automated and collapsed the economic and political systems of the world, there's even an ending sequence which depicts a dead earth where all material resources have been allocated to building more Handy robots :)
Thanks so much for the review :D really glad you enjoyed it overall, and I appreciate you sitting with the tension transparently instead of just reacting to it.
I definitely feel you on the irony, it's done with some intention on my end; it even gets called out a few times in the news tickers to lean into it, and I deliberately used lower-tier models for the capsule and banner to keep them a a bit uncanny.
Under that, it's also a resource call: I'm solo devving this and had only 24 hours. Half the challenge and practice of a jam has always been self-honesty about my resources; what's core and worth hand-building versus what I grab "mostly-fine" off the shelf and refine later if I have time. AI feels like an extension of that. I put my greatest allocation into the thing only I could do — the gameplay, the balance, listening and integrating feedback from playtesters — and as such some of the art got hand-crafted, but a lot had to stay as the AI placeholders, which I still put love into building.
Hopefully you can evaluate along those terms-- I did as much as I could by hand here and put in a lot of love into this game. Even the AI bits are the tip of the iceberg, you don't see the 30 attempts I didn't use, the retouching of artifacts, the recoloring/resizing to match palette and design bible, etc, etc.
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