itch.io

I like the timed flashlight mechanic, though I didn't realize exactly how it worked at first and wasted all my batteries in the first level. I still managed to finish the game without it since everything was still dimly lit. I think it would be cool to have the batteries reset each level and make only a small area around the player visible without the flashlight to encourage its usage.

The fuse tail mechanic is really cool. I like how it follows the player's movement, and I like the idea that fuse burns faster when crossing a fire tile (though I didn't notice while playing). I imagine there are several additional mechanics you could combine with the fuse for some really interesting puzzle gameplay.

I think the art turned out alright for having your artist dip. The particle effects on the fuse's flame and when the fireworks exploded were good.

I wish there was a level restart button as I got stuck in a dead-end blocked by a door (even though the description warned of that) and had to sit and wait for my fuse to burn out.

Thanks for the game!

Really cool concept that just needs a bit more dev time put into it- which I totally get, working a job alongside this jam is tough. I liked having to do some trick shots like shooting multiple enemies in a row and shooting while falling. Definitely more opportunity to build on those puzzle-like mechanics some more.

Loved this game. The take on the theme was creative, and the retro aesthetic was well-executed. I think the choice to only have dirt, coal, stone, and gold for the terrain generation was a good idea for a jam game to keep everything simple and clean.

I found myself wanting finer control over the drill, like having it follow my cursor instead of just left/right arrows. The time pressure could be retained by having the camera continue moving at its constant speed and trigger game over if the drill goes off-screen. Arrow keys probably are best, like you have. But out of curiosity, did you try out any other control schemes during development?

I finished the visual novel half expecting a simple win/loss message about whether I had prepared enough or not, and I was happy with that being the game. And then I got dropped into the second half where I actually had to defend the village. I wasn't prepared for that!

Wonderful little game with a lot of content, great art, and a fun narrative, especially for the time allotted.

This was very fun and satisfying to finish. It was difficult, for sure, but I like that the game trusts players to figure out how mechanics connect together on our own. I was scratching my head a few times, but the reachable areas of the world slowly expanding coupled with the subtle visual hints got me through it, and the connections always felt obvious and fair afterwards. Superb level design. I would love to see this game continued into a series of levels with a narrative.

Really enjoyed playing through all 7 puzzles! I appreciate the quick restart button as I got used to the moving off the moving platforms. Thanks for the game!

This gem is my favorite I've played in the jam so far. The movement and overall mechanics are fluid and intuitive so that it was super easy to enter a flow state. I finished all 32 core levels but gave up on the bonus level. So many bombs xD

Very chill and relaxing at first, then super satisfying at the end.

The game looks great, and the difficulty ramp was well executed with the later levels taking some time to reason out. As others have said, the UX could use a little love around undoing actions. Thanks for the game!

I'm not usually a fan of clickers, but this one was executed incredibly well. The music, combos, and multiplayer work in perfect concert so that I kept clicking just a few times more.

At the end of the day, it is just a clicker with a ceiling, but I very much enjoyed playing and could easily see this going viral, especially with the genius that is the clickprint.

The artwork is beautiful! I enjoyed that there were so many different levels and that the difficulty scaled nicely. 

Core mechanic was a lot of fun, though I wish it scaled to my resolution. It was a bit hard to see what was going on, at times.

I thought this was a simple Pac-Man clone at first, but it's much better than that. The looping shadows shift the focus from survival to exploration. It's okay if you die- just take a new path. I especially love how the clones contribute to the player's vision, allowing the player to more efficiently dodge enemies each time they die. That dynamic difficulty curve keeps the game accessible for everyone.

The only criticism I have is that it was difficult to read the dialogue while playing. I got the gist of the story and loop, but there were certainly lines that I missed.

This is a lovely little puzzle game that I'd be happy to play more levels of. The poem at the start explaining that you have to eventually loop back to the beginning was clever and fun. Little bit of game-dev-to-game-dev feedback:

1. As the goal is to minimize the number of moves to get back to the start, I'd like to see a personal best, a star rating, or a "dev's best" number to compare my score to, as well as a way to easily restart/replay a level.
2. Others have mentioned it would be nice to see which junctions will lead through which pipes before you arrive. I agree. Though, if you leaned more into replaying levels for lower scores, that initial exploration and discovery could be nice as you are rewarded for learning the level.
3. I'd love if my input was queued just a bit. There were many times I'd press a key just as I arrived at a junction only for it to be ignored because I wasn't quite there yet.

Overall, solid submission.  I'm happy to have played it.

Got to say I wasn't expecting anything this deep for a game jam. Wow. Fantastic narrative. I was a bit put off at first with the finicky platforming, but I'm so glad I stuck through it, and the platforming thankfully got easier as the narrative built. Out of the whole experience, my favorite part was that I could still water the flowers at the very end.

Solid submission. The dialogue was fun, and I liked that you cleverly included the tutorial in Alice's base prompt. It was also really cool that each  guardian had their own, unique attack patterns.

Even with the unique attack patterns though, each fight felt fairly similar in that you couldn't directly attack the guardian and were left to only dodge their attacks.  I believe the rewind mechanic was meant to alleviate that, but I only managed to get the cat and caterpillar to hit themselves with it a couple times.

The character art was lovely. No notes there except maybe some simple drop shadows to better ground them into the world. Again, solid submission, and I hope you continue to participate in jams.

So much silly fun concentrated into just a few minutes. Wonderful submission.

I'm so glad the grading had you on the edge of your seat. I spent a fair bit of time specifically on that animation sequence! "A?" is a true A- you scaled it perfectly. The question mark was just supposed to help convey Todd's surprise.

There are a couple of objects Todd asks about that are difficult to see on the diorama without crawling onto it. Maybe we could have leaned into those more? The camera and movement speed changes were indeed meant to confuse your sense of scale. It's part of why I added the "for-scale" banana for players to reference while both on and off the diorama.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful comment!

Thank you so much for the kind comment! And you might not have seen the pumpkin the first time. It's hidden away in a place that's hard to see without climbing on the table.

Thanks for the comment! I think you're right about having fewer objects- we got a little carried away. I tried to alleviate that by always asking about the same three objects for the second and third dioramas, but the first round of each is still pretty overwhelming.

Level 9 was devilishly difficult! Merging the fish felt very intuitive. The lily pads and cattails a little less so for remembering which fish could pass through, but it was easy enough to figure out again for each puzzle. Great game with some lovely art.

Very creative and unique concept! I enjoy the idea of having to essentially stay in second place, though it took me a while to see that my health bar was depleting at all. Adding some indication that the player took damage would help, I think, be that audio or visual. The art style was a good quality and very consistent.

Thank you for the kind feedback! I think we will indeed have to take a look at when the spell target locks in, if we do a post-jam update. The biggest reason it finalizes after the charge-up was to be sort of mobile compatible, so you can tap the button then tap where on the screen you want to place it. That could probably be a separate mode, though I wonder if it would make it more or less difficult to lead shots with that extra second or so of charge time.

Thank you so much! We've had some submissions to previous jams with pretty rough difficulty curves, so I'm glad to hear we're getting that sorted out now-a-days. Same deal with the level feel; I personally love puzzles, and @Duckblade loves arena shooters, so I'm glad the game reflects that mix.

Thanks for playing our game and leaving the kind response!

We were hoping to do the art ourselves as well, but we had an unexpected power outage that set us back a fair bit. The 1-bit style was really just the fastest thing we could throw in, but I am very happy with how it ended up looking. Post-processing is magic. Looking forward to next year!

Thank you for the kind comment!

• I'm glad you think so. We had tried the micro-tutorials in previous jams, and they seemed to go over well. I know I prefer that to a wall of text at the beginning.
• We've had a number of people mention that the spell key-binds were confusing, so we'll definitely have to look into that. I was hesitant to give them individual keys during development because I didn't want some worst-case scenario where the only active keys for a level were Q and P or something crazy. Maybe if we kept it to Q, W, E and then A, S, D it would be manageable. And the shooting through walls was just a result of time constraints, haha.
• Definitely agree on the UI. We didn't try full-screen until we were uploading to itch, and then spent the last hour or so making sure everything was at least visible on different aspect ratios. We'll have to think about UI sizing earlier next time.

Thanks again for the feedback, we really appreciate it!

A few others have voiced similar thoughts on the key-binds, so I think we'll be looking into a solution for a post-jam update. There are a total of six spells, so we initially didn't want to give each its own key-bind in a row as in a worst case scenario we might only have the Q and Y spells available, and surely that'd be too uncomfortable. We'll have to do some thinking, maybe use Q, W, E, then A, S, D.

Thank you for playing!

What a delightful and cohesive game. It took me a while to realize I was supposed to be helping the frogs to eat the flies, but I loved it even before that when my only goal was to keep the little guys/girls alive and happy. The art is beautiful, and I love the generative music. I haven't seen hardly any games that do that, game jam or otherwise, but I feel like it adds so much when everything meshes into one beautiful melody.

Thank you for letting me pet the frogs.

The storytelling was my favorite part of this. It was super cute, and it fit the theme well. The pictures in the book and the book itself were really nice, and the models in-game were good.

The gameplay was on the verge of being good, but needed some in-game explanations to improve the experience. Things like the chicken egg knocking over pitchforks and the emu egg exploding were not intuitive to me, and I only figured them out after re-reading back to the web page. I also found the invisible walls to be a bit confusing. I understand they're meant to keep you on track, but for things like the spikes in the emu level, I ended up just walking around the full border looking for a way to escape assuming that the invisible wall had a hole somewhere because the spikes didn't scream "breakable" to me.

I still enjoyed the adventure of becoming a dinosaur though!

Really digging this art style. Never thought a pixel-y white silhouette could make me feel so much dread as it approached. Very simple, but that works well here. I did find a way to cheese it: if you spam-click the button, the enemy never gets to take their turn.

Wow, that was quite a levels with some good puzzles. Like @Jaylus said, the items were very intuitive, didn't feel like I needed any explanations except that the bomb at to be falling to explode. The music and art style complemented each other well. My only suggestion would be to let the player move the cursor more quickly by holding the button down instead of having to tap it repeatedly.

Looks like had very similar takes on the theme! We even had thoughts to add endless waves and a crystal to protect in ours too. Very cool to see the path we could've taken!

I loved the art in this game; it was very cute. And having a variety of attacks to choose from was also very nice. I do wish the keys for each ability were shown in-game as well as in the directions because I kept forgetting which was the explosion attack and which was the spin attack. Players (i.e. me) are forgetful and won't remember any but most basic of controls after they navigate away from the directions haha.

Also, you made the music for this during the jam too?! That's awesome! I had just assumed it was pre-made or borrowed from somewhere else until I read some of the other comments and checked the "Did your team create the vast majority of the music" answer. It was just that good. Great submission, esp. for your first jam! Congratulations!

That was a lot harder than I was expecting, especially with the timer. I didn't fully appreciate the "next move" indicator at first because the timer had me convinced I needed to move the map as quickly as possible. Because of that, I thought the snake moved independently and was frantically just spamming keys trying to get it closer to the snake. Once I realized the snake only moved after I moved, things got much more think-y and less spamm-y, though that timer still had me anxious! I think I agree with @gerrrard that seeing a couple moves ahead could be cool.

Fun game and good submission!

Our games look pretty similar! Even the same base art pack and with chargeable abilities, just different genres. It's cool to see a similar take on the theme that turned out so differently.

I really enjoyed the game. I'm not really one for the match-three genre, but adding the chargeable summons/abilities makes it a lot more fun for me, plus the adventurer moving along the top with a health bar. 

I really liked the polish in this game with the sound effects and animations upon matching, very satisfying. And the ability to summon boss minions was really cool too, though I was never quite able to fully charge the boss summon. Nice entry!

This was a lot more fun than I was expecting from the screenshots. While there wasn't all too much content, I enjoyed all the dialog and thought it was well-written, and it matched the "Role Reversal" theme pretty well. I just wish there were a second and third day.

"Come back tomorrow and I'm sure there'll be more puzzles and mechanics." Liar! 😆

This game has some great potential is seems to only be held back by that 48-hour time constraint. I really enjoyed the platforming, esp. with the twist two kinds of gravity. The art was also top-notch and very stylistic, and I thought matched the music pretty well.

As others have echoed, I had some difficulty understanding when things would and wouldn't try to kill me, as well as what was triggering the gravity to switch. The first tutorial was awesome and clearly explained everything. I especially liked the double-jump being communicated with a second, smaller space-bar on top. Just do more of that, please (if you had time, that 48 hour limit is rough haha). Just something pointing to the timer in the top-right on the second level, or some text saying that you can't collect the key until all the enemies have been killed would go a long way, or that health packs only actually heal you in certain gravity. 

But that's all polish, and what you made in the time limit is awesome. With some more time to expand the tutorial and such, I could see this game doing very well.

I got to the end of the game and was like, "Wow, that was short and didn't really fit the theme very well." Then the screen faded out and back in, and I saw the twist. Very nice, and clever level design to keep it interesting despite the twist. It made great use of the theme, too.

Unfortunately, I got in a death loop after falling in the water with the jumping fish. And that was fine, and I replayed the game and got back to the same spot again, but then I fell again (after getting a bit farther) and got in the same loop again. I'd love to see the rest of the game, but I don't really want to replay it a third time just to potentially get in that same loop again.

All that said, even from the bit of the game I could play, it looked and felt great. The animations on the knight and goblin especially were top-notch, and the platforming felt very good. Solid submission.

Man, I love me some diegetic UI. Everything looks great and feels great. I loved that the adventurers and king had so much character without ever needing to read a line of dialog. In fact, beyond the tutorial, there wasn't any text that I could see, and yet everything was so intuitive. I think that's indicative of some masterclass UX, right there. The only bug I ran into was not being able to see how many coins were in my purses, but I managed by just trying to be as conservative as I could.