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Thanks! The momentum is my favorite part too and I absolutely want to explore it more. I agree most of the current levels don’t let you build up that much speed. I’d love for more levels to have slow, safe ways to approach them, and faster, riskier ways that require more precise inputs and conserving your momentum, without just making two wholly separate routes (like the orange level).

Thanks! I added options to adjust the display scale and disable the background in v0.1.2. :)

Thanks! I added an option to disable the background in v0.1.2. :)

This has come a long way since the first version! The art is great! The new event chains are pretty funny too, and I like the inclusion of more simulation-y stuff. I can see a lot more opportunities down both of those paths!

My main complaint is the repetition of events - there might be a bug in your random selection, or you might just need to add more and further limit duplicates. At the moment, once you figure out the “optimal” choice for each event, the gameplay becomes kind of mindless outside of the rarer events. If the population distribution changed over time (randomly and/or as a result of your decisions), you’d actually have to re-evaluate what the optimal choices are.

Another pretty significant bug seems to be that when you lose a run, you lose your purchases, but they keep incurring their upkeep fee. There’s no way to sell them either! I also think it would make sense to be able to buy upgrades when you get re-elected.

I have a bunch of ideas for how you could improve the UI too:

• Compact, permanent display of the polls that doesn’t obscure the art
• View how many events are left until the next election; I think the format of month and year would look nice
• Use the same panel for choices and results, so you don’t have to click over and close the result popup
  • Currently, you can click a choice for the next event without actually acknowledging the previous result - this would fix that too
• View your upkeep/income on the campaign screen
• View your money in-game (and upkeep/income)
• Open the campaign screen in-game (even if you can’t actually buy anything)
• View the price and upkeep of things you can’t afford
• View how much money you’ll gain from corporate backing
• View exactly how a choice affected your polling
  • Or, if you don’t want polling to be exact, at least give a rough idea of which groups liked and disliked your decision, and apply some fuzz to the numbers in the polls view

I recommend checking out some similar games for inspiration. Despite the medieval themes, Reigns is the closest one that comes to mind, also Sovereign Tower and Sort the Court.

I’d take it as a good sign that I have so many suggestions - it means there’s a lot of potential. :D

Impressive that you made 24 whole games - even though they’re small, that’s a lot of coding! The Picotron style looks great as always. I think overall you did a good job making games that are intuitive enough to be doable on your first try with some quick thinking, but not trivial. My best score is 18 in one run. :)

One suggestion would be to make the transition between games be a manual input instead of automatically triggering on a timer. That way if the player wants to take a break or pause and inspect their progress, or if they want to get to the next level right away without waiting for a transition (e.g. on repeat plays), they can.

Password is “teamdistraction” ;)

Ah that’s a shame - understandable though. I’ll still look forward to it. Cheers!

Very exciting! I’m a big fan of the original tileset and these 2-bit versions look great too! Metadata will be a very welcome addition as well, and I’m curious to see how the new app turns out.

You mention the app will be paid, but what about the 2-bit version of the tileset and the metadata? Will those remain CC0?

Haha, that sure looks tricky! Adding that opening was probably the right call even if it enables my cheesy solution.

Congrats on your publishing your first game! I like the lore and how the voice of the god(?) taunts and encourages you as you walk along the path. Here’s some feedback/tips:

• Using free art is great but try to pick stuff that meshes well together. For instance, especially with pixel art, make sure things are scaled to the same resolution, so that there aren’t some pixels that are larger or smaller than others. Also keep an eye out for things like whether sprites are outlined or not, how thick the outline is, what colors they use, etc.
• The animation of the sword should match its hitbox. Right now you can kill enemies at a decent distance but the sword doesn’t look like it reaches them. That makes it hard to judge distance.
• The sounds are pretty good but some of the traps sound a little repetitive. One way to make them more varied without having to use multiple sound effects is to slightly randomize the pitch_scale of the sound each time it plays.
• It’d be nice if the game restarted after you die so you don’t have to reload the tab or relaunch the game. There’s an easy way to do this in Godot with get_tree().reload_current_scene().

Cool concept! It’d be nice if there was a better way to find the planets than wandering around randomly. Maybe a compass arrow or a sensor that beeps faster the closer you get? Also, sometimes you start orbiting a new object and immediately crash into debris. There was an asteroid on the way to the electronics planet was like that.

I suck at these kinds of games so I couldn’t finish it, but this is a neat idea! The loop theme is a bit of a stretch, but the standalone idea of a conveyor belt/factory themed Sokoban game is pretty cool.

There’s a bug where sometimes you walk onto the conveyor belt you’re trying to push. Might be a race condition? Also if the duck gets pushed into a crate by a conveyor, and then you push the conveyor, the duck seems to get stuck on the crate and you can’t push it.

Interesting concept and good execution! Some feedback:

• If you make an object big enough that it overlaps the top middle buttons on the UI, you can’t click those buttons - it counts as clicking the object instead. The layering should be the other way around.
• It’d be great if you could drag around objects that you place instead of having to delete and re-place them. Similarly, being able to duplicate placed objects would be nice.
• It’s not immediately clear what objects are interactive and which aren’t. Maybe use a different color or something to distinguish them.
• It feels little cheap to just be able to delete spikes and stuff. I think it’s a little more interesting to have to change gravity to get rid of them, for instance.
• “Best time” might not be as interesting a metric to track as “fewest changes to the level”. Or maybe assign a “score” to each block/change and try to get the minimum score? IDK.
• The direction squares are kind of unintuitive due to gravity. Not sure what can be done about that.
• Bug: if you place a direction square right where the player starts, it “falls” from the gravity perpendicular to that direction, and while it’s falling, it seems to be immune to spikes.
• A level counter (e.g. “Level 5/10”) somewhere on screen would be nice. I completed all the levels but there was a point where I thought it might go on for way longer. Similarly, a level select would be nice.

Great job overall!

P.S. I definitely found the intended solution to the final level:

Balatro on a piano roll is a cool concept! Creative interpretation of the theme too. I’d love to see this idea expanded on. Some feedback/constructive criticism in case you feel like working on this some more…

Gameplay:

• I don’t think permadeath makes any sense for this game, unlike Balatro, because there’s no randomness. If you lose, I don’t see why you should be forced to replay the first levels in exactly the same way just to retry the one level you failed on. Now, if you added some randomness, like choosing random instruments to unlock or random challenge modifiers or mandatory starting instruments for certain levels, permadeath might be justifiable.
• As you pointed out, the order of placement matters, meaning you can violate the rules if you just do it in the right order. This doesn’t really make sense, although I get that it’s easier to implement.
• I wonder if you could come up with better placement rules to encourage creating an interesting song. Right now it’s pretty flexible so you can kinda make whatever. I was able to cheese every level by spamming crash cymbals.
• Speaking of which, is it just me or are most woodwinds objectively worse than the hi hat and crash cymbals? I was afraid of using them because I thought I would lose (causing permadeath) so I just stuck to my dumb cymbal strategy.
• A free-play mode where you can just make a song would be fun.

The game could definitely use some quality of life features. I know it’s hard to justify squeezing them a jam game, but I figured I’d mention them. Think of these ideas as low-hanging fruit to improve the player experience.

• Option to fast forward playback (increase BPM).
• Button to skip to the next round once you’ve reached the target score.
• Save your song between levels (with a button to delete all if you do want to clear it).
• Left-clicking an instrument should automatically deselect the previous instrument.
• The instrument shouldn’t be deselected after placing it, to make it easier to place multiple copies of the same instrument. Or you could require holding shift or something for multi-placement. Right now it’s annoying to click the instrument, move the mouse to click the note space, and then move all the way
• There should be a way to restart the game/go back to the main menu etc.
• It would be nice if there was a preview to tell you for sure if you were gonna trigger the multiplier for placing an instrument. Sometimes it doesn’t trigger when I think it should or vice versa, which is especially painful when placing something expensive like a guitar.
• I kinda like how you made an unncessarily cool shimmer effect for the backgrounds.

Some bugs/random issues:

• You can place drums on row 1 of the “Woodwinds” area.
• On the first trumpet level, the drum preview sprites were way larger than normal?
• Guitars are considered woodwinds? News to me lol

You’re probably aware of a lot of these things but I just wanted to point them out in case it’s helpful. Cheers!

Probably too late at this point, but feel free to include EverSector: https://maugrift.itch.io/eversector