itch.io

Neat little puzzler! This captured pretty well the feeling of confusion and then the satisfaction of figuring out exactly what was going on, once I got the hang of controlling the hourglass and the character.

I got stuck on one of the puzzles (one of the activate / deactivate platform ones) because my sense of timing is not good, but I had a good time with what I was able to get to.

Thank you for playing, and for your thoughts! I’m happy that you noticed the (unnecessary) amount of time I put into coding animations.

As an aside, I learned about the definition of the word ‘situationship’ from a random news article a couple of days ago, and it’s popped into my mind since. I appreciate that there is a word for that now.

I answered this via email, but for posterity - I'm happy to accept bug fixes, features I'd encourage you to tell me more about them first because it'd depend on the scope of the feature.

The rating system doesn't seem well set-up for physical games, so I tried my best there -- more interesting is going to be this commentary, anyway.

I'm a pretty big connoisseur of solo tabletop RPGs, which normally take the form of 'journaling' games; roll some dice, write a little story or entry about what happened, move on. The 12 episode format works pretty well for the theme, and the structure lends itself well to episodic, monster-of-the-week shows. 

Numbers in general are pretty low; this tends to be good for tabletops, since that's less math and less to keep track of. Your player starts with 4 HP, and the kaiju tend to hover around there as well. However, in the context of a kaiju show, the numbers felt 'small'; I think I'd have appreciated a little more context into what 1 HP, or 1 round means. Is the 1/3 HP for a kaiju an entire, well-fought maneuver? Does lowering the HP of the hero or the kaiju cause their appearance, or shift the tone of battle? Is there the possibility of a transformation sequence or a form shift halfway through? How much time should a round last? Etc.

The structure also necessitates the construction of a lot of kaiju, especially if you get through all the episodes. The game as written makes all creation very freeform, and I struggled with coming up with enough enemies to fight. I think I'd have liked to see a list of, say, possible attacks, monster inspirations, special abilities, even environmental conditions, etc. that could be used to color a kaiju or an encounter (or even a hero), that the player could roll against to create random kaiju, or choose features from to splice one together. (with the option to still ignore it on their own, of course.)

I can't speak much to the mechanical balance of the game; I am curious if you had designed with the expectation of getting all the way through episode 12, though. In my first run, I ended up sort of ignoring the dice after the kaiju wound up winning 6 rounds in a row in episode 1 and caused me to burn all the heroic acts immediately...

Either way, I think this is a fascinating game and a pleasure to read through the rules, with some catches in the actual gameplay and some more areas that can be fleshed out in terms of providing guidance and structure. I think the structure and frame of the game is really cool, and could lead to really interesting stories being created, and I think there's a lot to work from if you decide to expand this.

Concept and visuals were very nice. It's a small thing, but I especially liked the roundness of the world. It added something to the experience, somehow.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get any sound to work. I'm operating off of an M1 Macbook, if that makes a difference. I did verify that Faust's web demo worked on my machine, though I didn't try to play with any specific local backends.

https://amorphous.itch.io/two-stand-to-fall

I enjoyed playing this, and the sound (especially the voice acting) and visuals were great. Dramatic and fitting. There was a point where all of my dancers would suddenly collapse, and I was never able to survive that. I'm not sure why that happens, but it's funny enough that I found it appropriate. Thanks for making this!

I usually like to think I'm decent at bullet hell games, but this was a challenge! I usually see bullet hells almost as strategy games, where you're trying to position your player in such a way so that you can defeat enemies and avoid being trapped by waves of bullets. The physics weapon adds velocity to that equation, since the weapon only really moves when you do. It's an interesting concept that threw my usual instincts off by quite a bit, heh. Thanks for making this!

This was a fun little game; I spent as much time randomly dragging around rocks and playing with it as I would a toy as I did actually trying to complete levels. The graphics worked well for it too; I especially liked how the connections would move and thin as you pulled rocks apart. Thanks for making this!

This is a charming game. The art style worked nicely, and it was quite a bit of fun flying around the island after collecting a few parrots. Thanks for making this!

This was an interesting game to play. I enjoyed the room sliding as well as the zelda-esque exploration of the rooms. There's a lot of room to expand on this idea, if you want; I felt like it could work very well as a medium for a narrative game, or as a sort of puzzle dungeon crawler. As it is, the concept is fairly bare-bones, but solid bones they are, and nice work for the limited time scale.

Thanks for making this!

https://amorphous.itch.io/two-stand-to-fall

Steam version is unlikely, as this is a web-based app and I don't know how to wrap that up for Steam and get it onto the marketplace.

Thanks for playing!

If I'm interpreting your question correctly, then yeah, I think so. At least, I didn't intend on there being a 'correct' way to use the knife, and let players experiment to see what's most efficient for them.

https://amorphous.itch.io/recording

This should be fixed now! Thank you for the detailed bug report.

Thank you!

Re: the bug - what kind of issue are you seeing when you change brush size? I haven't noticed anything myself, but I'm also not sure what to look for.

I've been meaning to make comics for a very long time, and somehow it took a HyperCard game jam to actually publish a thing that resembles a comic. HyperCard as an art program is really quite nice for these storyboard-esque scenes - just rough enough that it feels 'okay' to create artwork that isn't precisely polished.

However, the programming aspect of HyperCard was painful enough that I'm not sure I'd want to revisit that bit. Maybe one of these days I'll end up making my own HyperCard-esque paint program...

Thank you!

I typically write overly long stories, so it was quite a challenge to get the plot down to something that would reasonably fit in HyperCard.  I'm glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for playing!

Thanks for playing! I was pretty worried about the alternating repair section in the middle, since it was the most branching / coding I had to do for this project, but I'm glad it seemed to work out!

I actually wanted to make this into a jigsaw puzzle game at first, but I definitely didn't learn enough about HyperCard to make that reality.

Thank you for playing! I've got a lot more I want to do with these characters and the world, but I haven't quite figured out when and how yet. But that's for future me to explore.

Thank you! The characters are part of a much bigger story that I've been working on for a while, but this particular story (and the designs for the environments) were created for the jam.

Hi there, nice little adventure game. It worked fairly well given the low resolution, and you had a good sense of atmosphere, especially with the sounds.

I had trouble figuring out where to go, though; I got the to the mushroom fairly simply, and got stuck for the next few minutes wandering around the first screen. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that there was a second screen behind the tree grove, and I'm wondering if there could've been some visual cue that that area was of interest?

Nice work. I wasn't very good at the game.

Graphics and sounds worked well together, and gameplay was intuitive and simple. The graphics themselves were not quite as intuitive; it was difficult to tell how many bees you had with you, whether the bees were on your person or protecting the flowers, and aside from the arrows, whether the foxes were attacking the flowers or getting stung by bees. This might be because the bees are 1 pixel large, but maybe some visual distinction might be helpful?

Pretty and nice little game, though it was very challenging for me - I don't think I ever got past the first few obstacles. I like plot driven games, although with how difficult the game was, having the beginning cutscene play every time made it seem a bit tedious. I don't know if there are additional scenes (or if I was just not good enough at the game to get to them), and I think I would like to see a running game with a more full-fledged plot like this, though the difficulty might get in the way of that.

The graphics of the game were pretty good, and especially the character was very readable and had nice animations despite how small it was. I wasn't in a place where I had audio though, so I don't have any comments on that.

Nice work!

I've gotten some feedback expressing difficulty with collecting the last few stars - and I agree with them entirely. This game is about exploring the environment and hunting down the stars to light up, but I don't want it to be incredibly tedious to reach the ending, either. In light of that, I will be uploading an updated build later on to relax the requirements for seeing the ending (though people who want to collect all of the stars will still be able to).

In the spirit of the game jam, though, I won't edit the game until after the judging period is over (unless that kind of thing is accepted in this jam).

Thank you for all the feedback thus far.

Hi there, nice game. I got to about maze 3 before I got lost and game over'd. (I do not have good directional memory.)

Graphics are very nice, and controls are slightly clunky, as has been stated. I don't know if you're intending to continue work on this game, but if you are, some issues I noticed:

1. The UI jitters a lot with motion. I don't know if it was intentional, but it was a little distracting
2. When I pressed 'R' at the game over screen, the music started again, but the track never stopped, so there were two versions of the song playing out of sync with each other.

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it! This version's pretty short because it was for a game jam, but I definitely want to expand it in the future~

I've been quietly working on a game for the past week, which has quickly turned into a monster:

It was supposed to be a small strategy game, which in hindsight was probably not possible. It's playable, though, so I can most likely get a demo of sorts by tomorrow. (and then finally get back to working on my thesis...)

This might sound a bit strange, but my self-imposed challenge was to make a plot-driven game in less than 100 words, to go along with the spirit of a low-res game. I'm normally a very verbose writer, to the point that I've made bullet hells in the past with >1000 word plots, so I wanted to make something where every word counted.

(In the end, I think there was just a tad over 100 words in the game's script, though in my defense, a few of them are for instructions.)

Thank you. I'm glad you liked it :)

I believe that shuffling games in jams is an existing feature, though it's up to the jam organizers to actually set the feature and have the entries page shuffle. I've seen other jams that do shuffle the entries.

Has anyone contacted the jam organizers about this?

...so against all reason I decided to enter this jam incredibly last minute, and made something short and simple over the last few days. I'd actually heard about the jam itself a few days after it started, and it just kept sticking in my brain until I felt like I had to do something for it.

You can find it here: /jam/lowrezjam2016/rate/62192

And some screenshots. It felt good to do some pixel art again after several months (years???) of not pixeling, as well.

Hi, had a little silly idea for Itch-o-matic (and wanted to draw some block letters), so here's my contribution: