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A jam submission

Grenades, Please!View game page

A puzzle game about throwing grenades
Submitted by sim2han — 6 hours, 26 minutes before the deadline
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Grenades, Please!'s itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Creativity#2054.3534.353
Enjoyment#2054.1764.176
Audio#17963.3533.353
Artwork#50862.9412.941
Narrative#63812.1182.118

Ranked from 17 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?
When I heard "Count Down", I thought of cooking a grenade. The key to every puzzle is counting down in your head. Count wrong, and the grenade blows you up instead.

(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
see description for full credits

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Woah this game is great! I can't believe you were able to get separate levels and tutorials in time! The controls are the standout here, the grenade throwing gameplay is super tactile, understandable, and engrossing right away!

Submitted(+1)

the control of this game play and puzzle have a very huge potential, very cool project, looking for more levels.

Submitted(+1)

Very cool game, although I think there are two main criticisms I have.

The main one is that there is simply too much waiting. The last level took me 7 minutes in total, and a very large chunk of that was just waiting 6 seconds repeatedly for failed throws. Most of the time, there was not even any threat -- I was clearly outside of the blast radius. I don't see any real reason to make me wait so long between attempts for the puzzles. I think there should be a button to simply reset the current room, to avoid so much redundant waiting.

This ties into my second point, which is I don't think it is a good idea to make me restart the whole level when I die. Now, this one could be argued to some extent -- there is something more novel or crunchy about a puzzle game that punishes you like this. But to me it mostly felt more annoying than anything. Each section is already so difficult (and, with so much waiting...) that I figure I would have been much more likely to quit the game had I needed to redo any of them.

There is something quite fun about a puzzle game with such a high focus on execution. It reminds me of the kinds of platforming games that I like, where each level is sort of like a puzzle of how to actually traverse it, plus the question of execution of the solution. I think the puzzles themselves were also quite nice. To be fair, most of them did take me very little time to figure out the correct solution for (and then much longer to actually execute that solution), but I think there was a lot of good use of the mechanics. As an example, for the second enemy puzzle, originally I was trying to do something like bounce a bomb up to hit it, before I realized I could just chuck the bomb with a very short fuse. That's a nice interaction of mechanics.

One small detail I really liked was the way the various tutorial text would end up applying to multiple rooms, e.g. where you would go up and then come back down and read the same text in the next room. Maybe not intentional, but it was fun.

At least my initial thought when playing is that I would have appreciated a per-grenade timer. For me, counting manually usually resulted in the grenades exploding at a time I did not expect. But, once I started synchronizing with the timer, I managed to get a bit better (still not perfect). There is definitely some fun factor in having to do this kind of counting, and it is pretty cool from a design perspective. So, not sure exactly my conclusion about this aspect of it, but it is something I thought about while playing.

The graphics are nice and clean, and the grenade throwing action feels pretty good, although I definitely did not master it. Personally I thought the music was fine for the 20 minutes it took me to win.I did get a little bit jumpscared by the grenade effect sometimes, especially the first time I died to it, it might be a little loud but it might just be the screen shake (I usually disable screen shake in games).

Overall, I think this is a pretty solid entry, the puzzles are cool even if the waiting is a bit frustrating, and I think it is overall well executed. Nice job, especially for a first jam!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the detailed write-up! Reading through the comments, I've come around to thinking the game should have been more forgiving. I only finished the level design on the very last day, so checkpoints didn't cross my mind. I thought resetting the level added tension to handling the bombs, but making you wait 6 seconds every single time and redo the whole level was clearly a bad call.

Originally I was planning a complicated finale that mixed all the elements together for the last puzzle. I realized it wasn't going to work, so I switched to what's there now, which asks for timing and execution instead. Some of the puzzles are still hard, though. Maybe I should have looked into an easier way to control throw strength, an arrow indicator or something like that. (With its own trade-offs, of course.)

Not putting a timer on the grenades was the core idea from the start. I was trying to recreate what I remember from throwing practice grenades myself. Hiding the fuse time gives the explosion a particular kind of tension. But counting seconds with no cue at all is genuinely hard, which is why I added the clock later on.

This is the first time I've ever gotten a review this long. Thank you for putting so much time into it!

Submitted (2 edits) (+1)

This game is so fun and weird and cool. At first I debated if the fact that bombs could kill you was a bad thing, but there is something so energizing about accidentally not throwing the bomb that hard and having to figure out where to run so you don’t lose all your progress. The one thing I didn’t like was the background music :/, too repetitive and didn’t really felt like it fit the vibe of handling lethal explosives. Other than that amazing job for your first ever game! (Even if this was like your 5th or 10th game it’d be really cool)

Submitted(+1)

Very unique control. I really like it!

also I noticed that ticking sound in background helps to countdown timings. good touch right there too.

Submitted(+1)

Nice game! I wasn't very good at aiming things the way I was trying to but I'll consider that a skill issue. Great job!

Submitted(+1)

This was awesome! So fun! The last puzzle really had me thinking hard though lol (that's not a critique by the way, just saying it was hard but fun!)

Submitted(+1)

Good mechanics and nice level design! I'm really impressed.
This game worth more attentions.

Submitted(+1)

Great interpretation of the theme. Awesome work. 

Submitted(+1)

The base mechanic feels great and the level design fits it perfectly, although it was quite difficult at times. One of my favourite interpretations of the theme so far :)

Submitted(+1)

This really fits the theme, brilliant.

The controls are surprisingly fluid and the level design is really well thought, it's hard to believe this is your first GameJam!

I've really enjoyed playing this one, but personally I'd make the levels more forgiving (maybe with checkpoints), especially the last one, where I blew myself up 3 times at the last part while trying to launch the grenades into the holes 😅.

Still a very solid concept, I feel like it could be expanded further, good job!