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Discount Elysium (complimentary)

It’s crazy how well you nail the style here, and the whole thing is just packed with solid lines. The silly VO chirps are the icing on the cake. Really great entry!

Reposting this critically important gameplay footage

Thanks! I'm running through all the narrative games now so I just played yours and thought it was incredibly sweet.  I think nearly anyone can identify with the feeling of struggling to find a "right" way to say goodbye to someone.

Really stellar! I ended up with 24:11 remaining: not too bad but I kept accidentally coming in too fast due to firing into groups, whoops.

This is definitely the strongest use of the theme I've seen this whole jam. There's thousands of entries where the theme tie-in is "you're on a timer" but it's something else to make one where the player literally counts down out loud as they play.

Wow that background is gorgeous! Love the visuals

The page views for this one are probably about to jump by quite a bit, and as they say a rising tide lifts all boats, so if you had a more narrative-focused game in the jam this year that didn't many eyeballs on it, please reply to this comment with some shameless self-promotion.

I'm genuinely so touched that this thing connected with people! I was pretty anxious right up to the submission time that people were not going to like it or that it was too sophomoric and whiny. I kind of can't believe it ended up anywhere in the top 1000 for the category, let alone top 10, especially when there were so many great narrative games in this jam. I'm excited to go through the ratings now and check out some of the other narrative ones that I missed.

Thanks so much to Taeko Salter (https://www.tumblr.com/paintingpuff) for turning around the art assets for this on such an absurdly tight deadline. I gave them practically zero time to do a half-dozen characters and a whole environment and as you can see from the captain's dorky-ass ladder climbing sprite, I don't think my own art is quite up to snuff. It would have looked absolutely miserable without their help.

What do you mean "Narrative: #1"

That's a typo right??

Visually this is a really interesting concept, it has the feeling of looking at a stereogram and trying to sort out what you're seeing by the fuzzy edges of the pattern. I'm not quite sure what it's doing thematically or mechanically though, besides just making it more difficult to play.

The static loop could be longer; at only a few seconds the cutoff is noticeable.

Really love the art style, and the core concept both mechanically and narratively is very strong.

I'm not great at these types of games so I didn't get far but I like this premise of a game that gets more difficult because enemies stay the same but the player gets weaker.

Man, this took me back. Just stumbled through the first two levels and will have to come back to the others when I have some more time.

I love an educational game. This one does seem to be a little all over the place in terms of difficulty and the expectations you put on the player.  Concepts are presented without clear definitions or explanations, just formulas, so I assume the target audience is calc students who are reviewing known material. But the questions themselves would be pretty trivial for anyone who already knows the material to the level you're expecting. (slope of x^2, area of rectangle [2;0] x [0;5], etc)  Edit: Then again, the time pressure makes even the simple questions much more difficult! I like that the boss fight is a more involved, multi-step question.

The formulas themselves could be presented better. I had a really hard time just visually parsing something like this:

∫_0^1 dx ∫_x^1 f(x;y) dy = ?

I eventually figured out what was going on here but if you could get some latex like formulas working in here it'd be so much nicer.

I say all of this but I haven't touched a calc textbook in a million years so I was remembering how all this machinery works on the fly. Overall I had fun waking up some long-neglected parts of my brain for this one and would definitely play more.

You've got the bones of something interesting here. Was it intended that I can keep drawing cards indefinitely? I was able to repeatedly buff the soldier with strength and just defeat all enemies without taking any damage.

Agree with what others are saying - the level layouts are nice but the platforming is difficult due to just how fast the character accelerates.

Really great visuals! I think it would have been nice to have a speed up function or something, since the frogs move pretty slowly and it takes some trial and error to get them to jump at the right places.

Nice, I like the dual pressure of finding good places for your bombs and exploring while also making sure wherever you eventually detonate is ore-rich. It was pretty easy to get far ahead of the curve. I liked hunting down the lava cloak, I think if you develop it further, more artifacts to find would be a highlight.

What kind of a fake made up name is Ethan C 🤔🤔🤔?

I like the creative setting. The platforming feels pretty floaty, making it hard to judge jumps, especially since the pulsing effect on the player obscures how high off the ground they are. You might consider implementing some "coyote time" to make it easier to nail the jump timings.

A really neat and satisfying incrementally game. I can see what you mean about some elements being a bit underdeveloped but what's here is already pretty strong. The emojis are a nice way to make economical use of limited assets.

If you develop it further, I'd love to see more meaningful differentiation between weapons. As is, I just kinda tried to estimate the DPS of each one and pick the highest.

Neat twist on the theme - the idea of each enemy dropping a custom bullet that'll fire off in the future is great, just needs some polish. You could definitely iterate on this after the jam.

This concept of needing to align automated units with the timers is cool, but since rocks last for so brief a period there's not much use in micromanaging and it's easier to just click. Still, it'd be cool to see some development of this idea. I really like incremental games that include these more puzzley optimization mechanics.

A neat start - might want to make it so that using an item's cooldown power doesn't count as a turn for activating other cooldowns, otherwise you can just fill your inventory with weapons and cycle cooldowns to take infinite turns.

I like the visuals a lot!

Clever! I struggled a lot on the spike maze, it's pretty tight quarters to maneuver in. I did like the puzzle with detonating the bomb to turn your corpse into a raft. The sounds are nice and punchy - landing on those spikes makes you wince!

The CRT screenbend effect is too strong IMO, it's a bit nauseating. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do and couldn't tell what effect my timesteal ability was having (using both Give and Take on enemies didn't seem to do anything, nor did they do anything when they touched me.) I'm curious if I was missing something big.

Pretty fun one - I like the diversity of minigames. At first I thought it was a mistake that the minesweeper game doesn't reset after losing so you can just memorize the board positions, but after my second run I had a good time trying to memorize each puzzle solution to zip through as fast as possible.

I think I got the best ending (saved the crew member, disabled the transmitter, and escaped) but now I'm curious if there were other tidbits I missed. Good bit of mystery.

I don't know what an Even G. Alien is but I did find this to be a fun jumble of ideas. I like how hectic it gets as is goes along and the health midpoint starts to shift while the new minigame is added.

I liked the art style but found it a little hard to parse what was going on in the comic sections. I'm not sure if I failed or if the game always restarts immediately upon completion.

Aww, this is really sweet. As someone who spent a lot of my childhood building horrible failed terrariums for the isopods in my backyard, it's nice to play a game that engages with my true power fantasy (knowing enough about insects to not accidentally kill them).

Fun game - I seem to suck at it so I didn't get super far. Man, that combo saver minigame is tough!

There's some good potential here! You communicate a lot of great worldbuilding in a short amount of time and the world you build is vivid and interesting.

I'm not really a strong enough writer myself to give feedback, but I think you could get by with cutting out a lot of the prose. Drop descriptions like "in a curt tone," "with a defeated look," "the scientist in front of us looked like this was nothing special" etc, as well as minor actions (like blocking and body language) unless it's a strong, motivated, dramatic choice.

For instance,

As we headed inside, I heard a strange noise. "Sir, did you hear that?" Zechria looked at me in confusion.

"The beeping, I think there's something around here..." I spoke cautiously, trying to keep my voice low. Zechria merely laughed in response. "What beeping? I don't hear anything."

"Cautiously" is implied by context and by "trying to keep my voice low." Zechria's reactions could be shortened or just left implied by dialogue ("merely laughed in response" doesn't do much more than "laughed" here). The strange noise could be a sound effect added over the dialogue rather than in prose, which would build the atmosphere, immerse the player, and allow you to cut out more text.

In this format especially, dialogue first, visuals second, foley third, and action fourth are your strongest and most accessible tools, so instead allow the dialogue to communicate how characters are looking and feeling and trust the player (as well as your own writing) to pick up what you're putting down. Use alternate sprites to communicate mood or body language (I assume this was constrained by the game jam timeline). Use sound effects to build the scene and atmosphere. Use occasional strong, motivated actions (not just minor blocking and body language descriptions) to move forward the dramatic question of a given scene.  It'll keep the pace up and reduce the amount of dry descriptions.

Take all of the above with a grain of salt, as it seems like you're intentionally going for a more prosaic style, but I think what makes visual novels shine as a medium is that they can use the multimedia tools of videogames to communicate the same story that prose would with much less text.

Overall well done; based on this I'm interested to know about this world and its conflicts.

Thanks! I ran shy on time and only implemented a small amount of reactivity. There's two slightly different endings, both equally fatalistic.

If I go back to touch this up I'll definitely add the alternate route, some more reactivity throughout, and cajole my friend into giving the captain a walking and climbing animation haha. That ended up being an "oh crap, it's the morning of the deadline and I still have the placeholder stick figure asset in for the captain" decision.

Really clever! Remind me a lot of Dupery, if you haven't played it check it out. Great mashup of genres. This one is definitely on my list of games to come back to after the jam.

Haha I've played mouthwashing and was definitely struggling to figure out how much I wanted to lean into or away from it as an inspiration. Originally you were going to be able to kill each person on board for more time but that ended up being both out of scope and, I think, probably not the right tonal choice for something more "moody angst horror" and less "psychological serial killer horror"

Really nice visuals, love the skeuomorphic board design (<- did have to google how that was spelled and did not believe it). I think you could punch it up a lot with some classic pinball ping noises and more upgrades that give the player more diversity of choices. As is I found I mainly just found a range of launch power that yielded decent score and spammed balls around that region, but maybe you can do a lot better if you're more intentional about where to shoot; I only made it a few levels in.

Cool concept, really solid execution especially on the visual front.

The funniest jam entry I've played so far by an absolute mile - the grotesque screams during the opening had me in stitches. It might be nice to be able to skip that section when restarting though since it takes a couple tries to win. I also think you've got clearly got enough voices in you to differentiate the two starting characters a bit more, but hey, maybe they're identical twin brothers or something.

I'm amazed at how much you fit in here, even making time (hah) for all the little environmental gags, and due to the frantic pace, every joke lands. The ticket forger talking very slowly, the little metacommentary quips, even just the way you can just run off during conversations and characters keep talking is hysterical. This one's going high on my favorites list from this jam.

Creative idea, and starting with a set amount of resources that you have to selectively discard is a novel take on the theme I don't think I've seen someone do yet. It does mostly become an exercise in quickly vibe-checking the cash to weight ratio.

I actually really liked the scrolling ringworld style backdrop, it's a neat effect.

Really clever inversion of an existing concept, great chill/relaxing vibes.

Very creative take on the theme! Like others say, having to re-aim after each miss is a little annoying, especially when you have multiple cannons that each need precise timings. I liked each puzzle, though - fireworks was probably my favorite.

Loved the newspaper gags at the start of each level!

I'd like to give this a try but I'm not sure how to run it from the downloadable file - should I be running the HTML index file or is there some other application launcher I'm missing?

Nice and simple but well executed. I like the light/shader effect a lot. Trying to do the little mental path-length-optimization of "is it worth drilling through all this rock for this chunk of gold" is a nice risk-reward.

Clever idea, and the character art is nice - interactions are a bit clunky, and I wonder if you could fit it all on one screen instead of needing to click back and forth. A bit unclear on the timer at the top as I don't see what changes when it fills up.