itch.io

Didn't expect to find a rhythm game in the jam entries, so that was a neat surprise!  Really struggling to get a good handle on the controls, though.  Maybe if the up+left, up+right, down+left, down+right combos were their own buttons, but I might just need more practice.

I did kind of struggle to realize the medium box/rock were actually the medium ones and not the large ones, so my first attempt earned a solid 0 score.  Maybe some other way to distinguish them (color?) in addition to size could help with the readability - or some in-game tutorial explaining what buttons to press for which obstacles when you first see them would help.

Game has finish gg

It scared me when the numbers jumped from 10 to 100 before I upgraded the planet because that was starting to look like a whole lot of clicks...  Thankfully the planet (moon?) unlocks helped make that a lot more manageable.  Very thematic sound effects, and I enjoyed watching the moons orbit around the planet after being unlocked.  Even if they seemed to disappear off the screen for a while sometimes.

I'd like to see some more depth in the upgrade paths or things you can upgrade to give the player some more choices and things to think about while mindlessly clicking.

Really enjoyed the size changing mechanic on this one and  getting to break things with it!  By the end of the 3 levels, the doors and minecarts were starting to lose their uniqueness as gimmicks, so I think it was good to stop there.  Would've liked to have seen more levels with additional elements to play with, though!

Roughly beat them in 40s, 50s, and 65s :)

I wish the music looped a little better.  Felt a little abrupt whenever it ended.

You've got the structure of an idle/incremental game here, but I think it needs just a bit more to make it interesting.  More choices for the player, like upgrades you could save up for that affect multiple buildings or improvements with an AOE.  Good work for 2 days, though!

Felt like I missed some tutorials regarding the wall jumping and swimming.  Maybe I missed them?  And the vines felt very weird to control.  I felt like I couldn't get the right combination of keys down to stay on them when I wanted to be.

Neat group of mechanics, though!  I think there's room to expand upon them.  Felt a bit like early game Portal before you have the Portal Gun.  You could add a whole second part where the player has more control over their size changing and make a bunch more puzzles and stages around that.

I could tell you went for the no text challenge as soon as I tried to figure out the menu :P

Took a couple vehicles to get some idea of what I was actually doing.  Then it was a breeze... until I got to the point where I wasn't sure if I was winning or not, or even if I could win at all.  I guess I didn't even realize there was a timer in the top left and only lost because I scrolled down to the description to check if I missed anything.

But I guess what confused me the most: what did the icons in the options menu mean and do? lol

Silly game that's for sure.  Controls and camera handled smoothly which made this feel good to play!  

I was a bit confused by the choice of music.  Felt kind of out of place with what was otherwise rather relaxing.

Didn't expect the first submission I played to be a rage game lol

Very nice atmosphere, and I like the shadow you put underneath the tiles.  Gave some depth to the simple scene.

Not a fan of the portals.  I went out of my way to get to one thinking it'd be something useful only to be teleported back down and have to replay a bunch.  And the tiles vertically above each other are incredibly difficult to work with to a point where it stops being fun for me.  Of course the challenge is the point, but it feels more like it's challenging because it doesn't control as well as I want (re: no coyote time) rather than the level design itself.

If I had a dollar for every time Tetris control muscle memory kicked in and I pressed Up to rotate the pieces...

I'd have too many dollars.  It's a neat puzzle game, though!

I won't repeat what everyone else has already said regarding balance and randomness, but I wanted to say I like the concept you have here and had fun playing with it even if I couldn't get past the 250 total round after a few attempts :)

Quite a unique word list you have for this.  Both times I played I'm pretty sure it gave me words I've never seen before.

It felt to me like if I didn't hit the wrong keys a couple times that I could just keep playing practically endlessly - but maybe the timer speeds up over time?

Personally, I'd ditch the lives mechanic and give a time penalty when the player mistypes.  And then if you gradually decrease how much time the player is given or gradually make the words longer, you'll have a bit more of a difficulty curve to give the player a sense of progression - compared to right now where you might get a 12 letter word and then a bunch of 4 letter words in a row just by random chance.  Could also have a fixed timer replenish a few seconds for every completed word.  Lots of options to spice it up I think.

I have no idea if I did well, but I enjoyed it!  Satisfying sound effects and particle effects of the chopped food items :)

Unique puzzle game!  I think my biggest oversight was underestimating how strong the move-multiple-spaces-at-once power was.  Once I started doing that, the chess pieces were no match :)

I think it might be easier to understand if the chess pieces highlighted the entire danger squares rather than just the arrows.  The arrows work okay for the rooks and bishops, but it's very noisy when the knights get involved which squares are actually a threat to the player.

More challenging than it appears at first!  Eventually I figured out that the "move in circles" strat seemed to work out :)

I lost a few times, and it would've been nice to skip the intro cutscene on subsequent attempts!

A good start to a little platformer game!  I like the little idle animation the player has.

I would recommend blocking off the right side a bit more until the player learns about the shrinking power.  Otherwise, they can accidentally go to the right at the start and not know which buttons trigger that power :)

Sound effects were one of the last things I implemented, and I think they add a lot to the experience!  Glad you liked them!

There were a lot more levels than I expected!  You did a good job of presenting the player with simple tutorial levels to explain mechanics.  A lot of people struggle with this in puzzle-like games.

I think the enemy type controlled by the same movement beacons as the player was a neat twist, but by the last level, it felt like there was a lot to keep track of (as well as timing button presses to).  Mouse controls further complicate the input scheme where I think even multiple keyboard key presses would have been challenging.  If you were to expand on this, I think some sort of keyboard input scheme would help a lot.

Neat little puzzle game!  I like the different types of chain reaction blocks you came up with for the player to work around.

I did seem to run into some cases where all of the light blocks turned on, but the door didn't open until I cycled them all a second time.  Maybe because I hadn't pressed all of the buttons yet?  Not sure.  But I felt like my cleverness was not rewarded in those cases :P

Definitely a silly concept for a game.  Really causing chaos with an oversized truck haha

I was a bit confused by the vehicles with red circles around them.  Was I supposed to be avoiding them?  They didn't seem to do anything different, but maybe I didn't pick up on it.  And after a point, there are so many that they can't reasonably be avoided (especially if you got + truck size).

I don't like how RNG can just end your run if it decides not to give you any oil refills even after your rerolls.  I probably got rather unlucky to have a string of like 9 in a row without a refill option, but I think it would've been better if oil was something you acquired actively outside of the upgrade menu.

But overall, I hope your junior game designer had fun seeing the idea come to life :)

Increase laser speed simulator

This was fun!  Good balance of upgrades to choose between and balance.  I like that I could undo and move around my reactor points as needed depending on what best suited the situation.  Would've enjoyed playing it even longer past the end :)

Jam of a background track too

Conceptually a pretty fun game to mess around with.  It's like an asymmetrical auto-battler... though maybe don't think too hard about killing all of the pacifist aliens...

Floating point and negative number weirdness aside (look into string formatting 😉), I had fun with this one, but it did start to get a bit slow for me after level 5 or 6.  Might've picked the wrong types of crosshairs and been underpowered because of that.  Not sure!

Incrementally more things to worry about :D

And yep, having a failure condition on top of the chaos felt a bit too punishing for the jam, so the only way you really "lose" is closing the game without sending the SOS Message :)

And from the range of times I've seen it take people to beat it, I think that was the right call haha

The concept of this is so funny to me.  Great pun lol

Loved the win dancing animation as well :P

Wish it was longer!

What a fun little game!  It didn't seem too bad until suddenly I had 10 traits I was working with and trying to decipher...

Poor Narwhal... I think I got him on being the only not-symmetrical one like 3 times lol

It's a bit of a puzzle to find!  You just need to press the "Send SOS" button on the Comms module to win!  It's one of the last ones you unlock :)

(But you'll have to finish the Navigation module to get that button enabled!)

This is a fun concept!  Made me feel like I was really good at poker for a while because it felt like the bar was hardly draining... and then all of a sudden I'm playing with eyeball suit and wizard hat suit, and I'm wondering what is happening haha

I don't think there was a score or timer anywhere, but I wish there was one so I knew how well I did (or didn't do :P)!  And some sort of indication of how good the different hands are refilling the bar would also be helpful!  I mean I assume a Royal Flush is better than a Full House, but kind of hard to keep track!

I really like the environment you put together for this one - just enough atmosphere but not too much that it becomes distracting from the game itself.
I think the different weapons were just cosmetic, but it probably would've been nice to have a coin counter on screen to know how close I was to the next unlocks :)

I think this touches on a very fundamental game design lesson that you can learn a lot from.  Because the player and enemies both scale at approximately the same rate, the end result is that the player feels equally as strong 1 minute into the game as they feel 10 minutes into the game.  They're never given an opportunity to really "feel" powerful as there are no low-level / easy enemies that they can wipe the floor with once they've gained all that power.  To make the game feel engaging, you need spikes and valleys in the difficulty curve where the player gets to feel strong and where they can be challenged.

I'd definitely recommend you experiment with that :)

I really like the style of the game here, and embedding the Sparknoids into the environment makes them fun to find and interact with.  I think my biggest issue was the difficulty of triggering the puzzles.  I had to give up after the (first?) coin one because I couldn't get the one in the next hallway to trigger.

I think it might also be more immersive if after you complete one of the puzzles, the wall environment updates, ex: if it goes into a pipe, it should disappear rather than reset to its spawn point - but that's just my thought!

For as simple of a concept as this is, it's deceptively difficult.  Best I could manage was 545kg after at least a dozen attempts!

Haha, I actually turned off the loss condition(s) in favor of a time-based result screen because I felt like it was too punishing.  Puzzling out what actions to take in the right order to keep all of the modules happy is a challenge on its own!

Glad you liked the authorization questions!  I had fun writing those :)

Sometimes jams don't go as planned, but you still made something in the end that you should be proud of!

Could definitely use a few more features to help the player out (like minimizing the number assign screen to view the board again!), but you've got a solid start to a puzzle game here!  I'm sure there are more level gimmicks you could explore too :)

The second level took me a bit to figure out what exactly I was doing, but after that point, I enjoyed figuring out the right way to move to solve the puzzles.  And good red herring numbers strewn about!  An undo button would also be helpful with the amount of times I accidentally went the wrong way lol

But of course- game jam, not enough time to polish everything :)

The sound effects when clearing numbers makes this really satisfying!

I keep accidentally moving the numbers past where they needed to be for the matches to score which makes the late game pretty difficult.  And one time the combo somehow made the sun move faster and instantly game over - not sure what happened there haha

Some of the other comments explained the exponential scoring mechanic to me, and I'm not sure if I played better before or after I knew how that worked lol

I've always enjoyed match 3 games, so this was fun to play around with for sure :)

Golf With Your Friends PvP Enabled

Love the little squish animations on the balls!

I had a lot of fun with this one!  It gets hectic really fast lol

I love the detail of the planes nearing the ground as they approach the landing strip :)

Would love to see this expanded upon!

I didn't understand at first that the food tiles refilled the entire meter, so I was picking them up as soon as I saw them and then losing because I didn't see another one spawn in the next few tiles.  But once I had that figured it, I had no issues!

I think you could easily expand this to include more tiles types and resources as well as add some sort of goal the player is ultimately working towards.  I'd also like to see a right click or middle click mouse panning aside from just edge-of-screen scroll.

Simple, easy to understand exploration game!

Interesting little adventure for a wizard to find himself on!  I wandered through the forest to the west and then the rest of the world to the east after getting some potions from TownA.  I did notice a few things seemed a little off.  Everything seems to be drawn above player, so like if you walk up to a tree from the south, the player looks like they're underneath the tree which seems a bit silly.  And some of the enemies when they move towards the player seem to get stuck on the walls (especially in the forest) which made them easy targets for my magic.

I would also suggest adding some sort of animation to the chest opening.  I opened a few and wasn't sure what I actually got from them!  I figured out it was more money, but it wasn't clear to me at first if there was an item in some inventory menu somewhere that I wasn't aware of.

Thank you for providing a map to the player.  The world is rather large and easy to get lost in without one.  Also neat background track!

Very silly barrel character!  I like them :)

Exploring the unknown tiles is interesting, but besides avoiding spikes once you see them (and memorizing the maps), survival kind of feels out of the player's control which makes the game seem less fun to me.  I think I'd prefer if there was some way to strategize your movements to avoid the spikes rather than blindly walking into them (maybe they're timed for example and poke up an down every other turn for example).

Might also be easier if the camera was a little bit more top-down.  It can be hard to see the tiles behind pillars sometimes!