itch.io

The audio rocked! The music added so much tension to when the bot searched for you. I didn't understand the lamp mechanic exactly, but I think it was something that made the timer green when the clock hit 0:00. I liked the walkie-talkie camera. Verily, the "Click to feel dumb" was the best part of the game.

Not going to write much because it's 2:00 AM here, but good job!

I loved the theme! We were actually thinking of a similar take on the theme mid-way through the jam, but didn't end up going with it.

I liked the writing, but the timer seemed to go against the flow of thoughtfully reading through the story, which made it hard to appreciate. I think "The count is down!" was creative enough on the theme that the timer wouldn't have been needed.

Out of the two cases, I thought the second one was more interesting, but the writing in that one often left out the third singular "s" on verbs.

In the first case, there was one point where the detective said that he hadn't mentioned the service passage, when in actuality, I had chosen the option "Who can open the service passage?" first when addressing the butler.

The custom-made assets were good! This isn't very important, but initially I thought the timer tick was part of the music, until it started to go out of sync. In a way, it made me notice the timer, which I otherwise might have missed.

Great job, both of y'all!  :D

Yeah, I <3 Linux. We were going to export to web, but there were some bugs with the render switching to Compatibility removing fog and the mouse cursor not getting captured. But exporting to web would have been nice.

Thanks for playing!

This was fun! (got to level 8!) I liked the character and UI art! Something funny is that I actually used the same soundtrack by Matthew Pablo in a game I made for an Open Game Art Jam some years ago. It's great to see the track used so well and getting more exposure!

I enjoyed the vampire survivors-like gameplay. Having upgrades even with the 4-day time constraints was really the cherry on top. Shotgun felt like the strongest ability, since the extra shot combined with the regular bullet took out 2-shot enemies quickly. Booarang was also cool because it functioned similarly. Shurikin was fun because you could use skill to ram it into enemies, but it didn't feel powerful enough relative to the amount of effort needed to use it. Would also be cool if you could get a shrunken that spins in the opposite direction later on. Though I think it's alright for things to be a bit out of balance for these types of games, because a lot of the fun comes in finding the OP strategy.

I didn't notice the player character strengthening when the time got lower. If his damage gets higher, maybe adding damage numbers flying off enemies when they're hit would make the player notice it more. I kinda wish the time crystals had bigger collection areas, though that might just be a skill issue on my part. The movement felt like it had around a 0.1 sec delay before it responded to the keyboard, which might be because of lag on my computer.

The enemy variety was awesome. Each enemy felt distinctly different, presenting its own challenges to the player. I never got to meet the cat boss, but I might come back and play the game again later to beat him.

This is a wonderful game! Great job!

Hello! I tried making a video playthrough, but it was too long for me to upload to YouTube, so I put it on Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yB7bK1z2bLc2QTVM9IBzNFbJG1DDBJ8M/view?usp=shari...

This was also my first time making a video review, so my commentary may be clumsy and low quality. I'll probably switch back to text reviews after this because the video upload time takes longer than it does to make a fully written review after playing.

Anyways, great job with the custom-made assets! Keep at it!  :D

Short, but funny. The game's judgment system felt balanced and fair, and it reminded me a bit of playing rhythm games. I really enjoyed it, excellent job to the devs!

Very funny! Loved how the game would troll you at every turn in such relatable ways. 5/5!

Very innovative! I like how it took a classic game with mechanics that everyone knows and loves, and puts a new twist on it. The music was pleasing to the ear, and the art gave the game a light and playful feeling.

I was confused at the first level, because I saw that I lost by dying, but didn't realize it was alright to die as long as you clear the level. But that was more my fault for not reading the game page carefully. The chained bouncing mechanic was hard to understand, and the ability to shove multiple boxes lined up was slightly unexpected, but by no means was it a negative experience in any way, shape, or form.

I enjoyed playing this together with my brothers, and one of them is still going at it solving the harder levels.

Great game!

The concept was interesting, the art & lighting looked fabulous, and I liked the elevator music! The first time I played it was with the computer's speakers while the AC was going, so I didn't hear the tones. But after playing it again with headphones, I could hear the soft relaxing notes in the background.

Anything else I would have to say has already been covered in previous comments, so I'll leave it at that. Great job!

Hey, I'm really glad you enjoyed it!

Fun fact:

Originally, when the player reached the end of the game, all that was left there was going to be Gregory's grave. So the story would have been that Gregory had already passed away some years prior, and left behind the misguiding signs because he didn't want Streiter to go all that way just to find that he had already died.

But we decided to take it out because it might not be very relatable, since I'm not sure if anyone would really try to hide their own death like that in real life, and it's the Comfy jam, after all!

Thanks for playing!  :D

Thanks for the feedback!

Oh, I thought I might've been missing something with the colors on the skill tree! Thanks for letting me know!

Very juicy game! I loved the artwork and all the squash and stretch animations! The music was good, but it didn't loop.

Because the goal of the game was to max out the entire skill tree, I didn't see a lot of point in being selective over which ones I upgraded first, since I'd get them all in the end anyway. So I kinda clicked them without discretion.

I did notice that I might be able to maximize if I chose certain abilities like the coconut exchange rate upgrade first, but for the most part, I didn't want to spend the time to look through the skill tree and calculate it.

I think the salesman paused giving me cash while I was in the upgrade screen. It'd be cool if he would still give me coins while I was looking at my upgrades, because that would help me get my shopping done sooner (better customer experience). Plus, that would make the downtime of waiting for the coconut-to-cash exchange an excuse for the player to take a look at his skill tree.

Towards the end of the game, I was having trouble spending the excess XP I gained. It would be nice if the zoomed out icons on the skill tree showed the currency needed to buy the ability, as well as if they were maxed out or not, so I wouldn't need to hover over them individually.

While there was a clear attempt to implement the limitation, it left my mind not long after reading the sign. However, the strong summer vibes in the theme were sweet.

At the very beginning of the game, I was wondering why I couldn't loot the chest, but I think that was just me being me. Once I collected some coconuts and sold them, it became clear. I think it would have been fun if the abilities leveled up more exponentially, so that by the end of the game, you'd have the sky practically raining coconuts, but that might just be goofy, IDK.

I know there wasn't much positive feedback written in this post, but that's because the visuals were so good, that I really have no complaints about them.

This is going off-topic, but a cool way to get people excitedly talking about your game after they played it is through giving the player a story to tell. That could be through an actual written story, or through emergent complexity and elegance, like how an abstract game like chess or go can tell a story of a conflict between two sides.

Although I'm not really one to talk, considering the longest comment on my own entry is only 2 sentences long.  XD (BTW, would love any feedback on it! I'm new to writing, and I noticed the narrative I wrote was boring, so I'd love any critique and tips for improvement!)

This is an incredibly polished game, and I enjoyed playing it with my brother before we headed off to bed. Fabulous work!  :D

Hey! Nice game!

It took me a while to understand how to play the marbles game, but once I did, I had a ton of fun! I'll write down my best understanding of the rules here in case anyone else is confused:

1. Flick all the marbles out of the ring to win.
2. When you're about to shoot your marble, wait for the green arrow to stretch itself out fully before shooting. Then you'll flick the marble harder.
3. In the top-right corner of the screen are your marbles in-hand to flick. If you run out of them, you lose.
4. Any marbles you flick off the map will go to your hand in the top-right corner of the screen.
5. I used to think that the mushrooms were the enemy's marbles and the green marbles were mine, but I don't think there was a difference between them, except for the black marble. If you flick the black one out of the ring, you lose.

I'm sure I've probably misrepresented the rules in more than one place (And feel free to correct any of my mistakes). Though I really liked the mechanics, it felt new and innovative. And that crunchy pixel art looked fabulous. I liked the shadows on the marbles as well.

I was a bit confused by the first dialogue, since I didn't understand why the car was there. Once I talked to the grim reaper, I think I understood. The music sounded a bit on the redundant side, and the high-pitched voices were slightly hard on the ear. Though I did like the SFX in the minigame. The win fanfare and pling of flicking marbles out of the ring was so satisfying.

Bugs:

• When I entered fullscreen and exited it, my browser (Chromium) gave me the following error:
• The game's resolution didn't change; When I was out of fullscreen, it was too large to fit in the frame of the itch embed, and when I was in fullscreen, it would show fully, but it wouldn't expand to fit the entire screen.
• With the dog and grim reaper, after I talked to them at some point, it would still show their dialogue character sprite when I went to talk to other characters.
• Sometimes it seemed like one character sprite would be talking when the other character is supposed to be talking.
• The YSort origin seemed to be on the middle of the sprites instead of the base.

All-in-all, I'm glad I played this game! Thanks for sharing it and great job!

When going into fullscreen while loading the game from main menu, it would show the default gray background outside of the black fade-in. You might want to try setting Project -> Project Settings -> display/window/stretch/mode to "canvas_items" to fix it.

Using different buttons to grab/throw the box (E/RMB) felt a bit counter-intuitive. I think the water texture was scaled down too small, which made it look as if it were far away from my feet.

But with all that said, I liked the 3D modeling! The totem pole was especially impressive.

Well done!

https://crankycranton.itch.io/helios-golden-sea

Discord: cranton

Thanks for playing!

Bless you.

Gesundheit.

The quality of this game is through the roof, especially considering it was made in only 15 days! The only complaints I have are all so minor they didn't really affect my experience that much:

• There didn't seem to be any difference between the enemies. Not that it was a problem. The skill tree had all my attention absorbed, so I wasn't really thinking about it.
• Perhaps a slightly faster way to collect coins in the larger combat rooms? Or maybe I'm just too trigger-happy.
• In the larger combat rooms, occasionally enemy billboards would z-fight with each other.
• Invincibility felt more like health. And while everything was polished and balanced to the T, none of the mechanics particularly stood out as revolutionary. At the same time, "Invincible" is a difficult theme to deal with.
• While I could definitely see how some would enjoy searching for the corridor coins, it slowed down gameplay, which made it a bit fatiguing for me in particular. At first, I felt obliged to collect them all to optimize efficiency, but after a while, I ignored them so I could go through the runs faster. In contrast, I loved the weakness exploit ability. It added a thrill to combat.
• Eventually I got to the point where I could one-shot most enemies, so I didn't feel any need to upgrade my sword, which led me to ignoring crystals all together. Instead, I would try to upgrade chain lightning so I could take out multiple enemies with one hit.

I'm only writing the negative things, because if I wrote down the positive things, this comment would be way too long.

Excellent game! (and I'm not just saying that :D)

Thanks for playing. Our first time making a deck-builder. Colored-cards is a cool idea, maybe pale pascals for an old-timey Western style. We toyed with the idea of making it two-player PvP, but didn't want to gamble on the time, and wanted to focus on polish and balance. We tried it on paper prototype, and it was a different experience.

Nice puzzle game, and great interpretation of the theme: science fiction meets Old MacDonald. The intro text was tops. It was a little difficult to figure out what the bad guys did. I liked the strategy play-style, and the feeling of herding cows with a UFO. Having the spaceship far off the ground made it a little tricky to line up with the cows and dash on over. Even though the art style was simple, it fit the game. The cow-face abduct animation was nice.  I liked that you gave a few different sound effects for the same action, especially since this is a game where you spam the controls to get across the map quickly (at least, I did). Having some music might be nice, but silence is okay for a thinking game. Better than an annoying track.

For some reason, on certain levels, I would either run out of milk or win with a lot of milk left over. I tried to use tornadoes to save on fuel (i.e., M.I.L.K.). The bullets seemed relatively easy to dodge (same goes for cows, unfortunately). I found myself trying to line up with a cow from a distance of at least two blocks away to prepare my dashing direction. I found it helpful to hone in on him from a distance, like a rook's line of control, and if he steps into my path, I can dash. Otherwise, he's in a smaller box. The hardest part was trying to get to an opposite end of a map after abducting a cow.

Played it with my brother, much more fun together than alone. Good level design. More checkpoints on the long-distance horizontal jumping room to the right would be nice. Got stuck there before replaying it. Killed myself trying to figure out the jumping jacks spire, until I figured out you just let go, and let gravity do its propulsion thing ("What have I been doing all this time?"). It was a little laggy, maybe the particles effect. Dash sound repeating when you stay still on ice was a little annoying. Coyote timing would be nice.
Brother: The fire element worked nicely with vertical motion, while the ice element worked nicely with horizontal motion. Cool parallelism (or should we say perpendicularism?)!

This game genuinely made me laugh. The story, the art, the music, the voice acting; They were all magnifique!

I think a few small changes would have increased the immersion and overall polish immensely. In particular, slower mouse sensitivity, a more in-style exit door and target movement location, and perhaps using shuffle bag randomness to prevent Jacques from saying the same line twice in a row. But all of that didn't stop me from thoroughly enjoying it!

I really liked this game. One of the best jam submissions I've played in a while. Hats off to the developers!

Hi, thanks for playing!

All I did was the design, animation, and code. Most of the 3D art was from kenney.nl. The HDRI/panorama texture was from freestylized.com. The road assets were provided tile-based, which allowed me to use Godot's GridMap node for the majority of the level design. The asset pack already came with a curved slope tile, so all I needed to do was give it an automated Trimesh collision shape and align the Path3D that the cars follow along that slope, which wasn't difficult with its built-in bezier curves.

I went for a goofy theme, because as much as I enjoy a nice and dark setting, I've noticed that often people are more likely to overlook unpolished elements if the game gives them a good laugh.

Its very messy, but I decided to release the source code on GitHub: https://github.com/CrankyCranton/freehand-driving

OK, thanks!

Ha ha, that made me laugh. Thanks for playing!

Hello! Perhaps it was already on the page and I missed it, but how will the jam be rated?

The amount of juice you managed to pack into this game in just 3 days is amazing! The SFX are nice, although I wish there was music. Stars don't seem very useful. Replacing them with health/ammo pickups could add more motivation to grab them. Though the current amount of health the player has per level feels pretty good.

The enemies seem like they're hard-of-hearing the way you can shoot right next to them without them being alerted, but once they know your presence, they're fun. The map design feels rather redundant. Maybe it'd be more exciting if you couldn't see the enemies until they're in line-of-sight, or when you enter the room.
Sometimes the enemies will shoot backwards. After finishing the game and returning to the level select menu, the cursor is hidden. I like how you did the gun cooldown system.

Nice juicy game. Well done!

Nice time! I was considering following the theme, but I couldn't think of an easy way to make horse controls, so I decided to go with cars instead, since the theme was optional anyway. But thinking back, I probably could have used the same control scheme and themed it as a horse.

Thanks for the review, and glad you had fun!

Wow, the fact that you could beat it at 10 FPS is impressive!  If you were playing on the web version, you might want to try the downloadable version for better performance. The 3D graphics can slow the game down quite a bit.

Thanks for playing!

Hi, thanks for playing! The reason behind the delay was because enemies take time to move on the board after the player. So, as you said, we should probably put some visual feedback in to indicate when a turn is done processing.

OK, thank you! I'll try to integrate the theme better throughout the design process!

Hi, I started working on a game yesterday, and was wondering if I could submit it to this jam.

The problem is, I started work before knowing about the jam, so I didn't have the theme in mind while thinking of the game. However, it coincidentally did vaguely follow the theme. The game's a mix of PvP fighting games and rhythm games. But rhythm games are typically more about hitting in time than they are about hitting out of it. Although, I do want to try to put in some mechanics to throw your opponent off beat, such as changing the BPM and approach rate mid-song.

I was wondering, because I might be able to receive more feedback if I submit the game to a jam. I'd also be happy with receiving a 1 star in the theme category.

Anyways, I only want to submit it if it follows the rules & spirit of the jam. Cheers!  (^^)/

Wow, thanks! Nice short game!

The drifty-controls made me feel like I was a drag racer! I liked the elegant & innovative way the panna mechanic was implemented! Though there was a way to break it by spamming the kick button.

The custom-drawn art was nice! (I don't know how I would have drawn all those soccer ball panels. ;) ) Going around the track backwards and then forwards triggers bugs, (saw Santa's leg flying across the track, lol), but nobody would do that unless he was just trying to trigger bugs. (like me! :D)

Thanks again, and merry Christmas!

Hey, thanks for the bug report! You were 100% on the dot. Fixed it on the local version. We plan to upload the bug fix after the voting period.

Hi, loved the smooth animations! The symmetrical map and the occasional darkness made it somewhat disorienting. Wasn't sure if there was a win/lose screen, but if there was, I hope I didn't miss it. The settings menu was a nice touch.

Nice work!

Yeah, we were running way behind on the art, so we just jammed in whatever assets we could scrape together before the deadline. Glad it didn't turn out looking like a monster. The player character is from here. Koroded drew the splashscreen/thumbnail in the last few hours of the jam, which to my non-artistic programmer mind, is just incredible.

Thanks for playing!

Hi! I think I took for it granted that I already knew the entire map as a developer, lol. Will probably have to at least double the respawn times, and most likely even more than that.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hello! To be sure, the narrative was (*very*) rough at best. Making things too loud has become a bad habit of mine. I should learn how audio producers manage to get the perfect volume on things.

Thanks for the review!