itch.io

yeah i wish i had a bit more time and energy towards the end there to make some of these points way more clear and less confusing! Glad you like the narration!

oh you could adjust it mid game, I should have written that large that P/Pause/Controller Start brings up a pause-screen with the settings available! Thanks for the feedback though!

I enjoyed playing this game and made it all the way to the end even though the controls were a bit unfortunate for me as space is on the right half of my split keyboard and WASD on the left so I had to let go of the mouse each time I needed to jump. But fortunately there was never any need to move, jump and mouse at the same time!

The art style feels very personal and looks good!

More comments in the play-through:

I really enjoyed playing this even though I struggled some with what felt a bit unfair things like failing to jump when I looked grounded as chicken and the egg breaking from just rolling. But even with that I made it to the end and got the answer to the question!

The art was very well made and the level design felt good with a varied set of challenges. So as I said I quite enjoyed myself.

More comments in the play-through:

It took two attempts before I manged to complete the game, but I did it in the end. The first time the main blocker was that first I didn’t understand what ore was and when I did, it didn’t even cross my mind that the enemies could drop it as they looked all soft and squishy. For that reason I stayed away from them rather than trying to attack them. Second time I got to the end with some time to spare!

I didn’t mind the movement speed per se, but in combination with the needed precision for both tree chopping and attacking, it was maybe the thing that added the most to the difficulty and in a way that as a player didn’t really feel fair.

But don’t take as a super strong objection, it was engaging enough that I played through it twice!

Play-through:

for my future optimization attempts, which rooms did you get to play? Count-down clock? Sports-Counting? Gun Golfing?

I was about to say “nice story” but I guess it might not be the most precise description! Well written stuff and cool text effects that still stayed reasonable enough that I could read without struggling. Which is of course important in a text-based game. For full accessibility, being able to disable the wavy effect on the font would probably be a good idea. But it was great that the story always waited for me to give some input before continuing. For me personally I could have had it typing out the text a little faster, and especially for replaying the game it would be nice if I could skip forward to branching points I’ve visited or at least make text reveals near instant.

I’m glad that I replayed too as the first ending I got was sort of the fast/bad ending in a way. Well I guess that there were several bad endings, maybe only bad endings? I would have liked to explore that a bit more but with the text reveal speed seemingly fixed, I didn’t have the patience for more than two runs.

Play-through with more comments:

Thank you so much for the thoughtful feedback! It does tell me I need to explain things better, but I’m glad you made it through to the end and didn’t give up on it after having had the two first rooms be rather confusing.

You are right, that it’s Stanley adjacent, personally I’d probably cluster it closer to “The Beginner’s Guide” as the irony isn’t directed at the player as much as towards the subject of the game “The Entrepreneur.”

The aim of the second room was quite obscure (as the narration hinted) but you were meant to count various things from the different sports and order them as decreasing numbers so for example “22 Football Players” would have been one of the lines. But honestly in the current version of the game the purpose is almost your experience. Go in look around, be a bit confused and leave and feel like “yeah there’s a reason that venture didn’t do too well.”

I’ve fixed the drift bug for a post jam build and will work on the ball physics and better signalling of “R” reset too. My initial idea was to only show that when it is relevant and a bit more prominent in the UI.

Again, thank you so much for the great feedback!

I’m really not good at music rhythm games and yet I managed to get two stars on all tracks and I think that speaks volumes to the quality of the game. Especially the ability the settings (syncing your beat delay, and having the notes highway or what it was called) but probably also in generally good amount of tolerance to be on the beat from the game. So the experience was very pleasant.

The fireworks were also very nice looking!

Play-through:

Glad you liked the poem. My poet will be happy to hear that!

That wasn’t actually a bug. You only get one chance to stop the count-down at exactly 00 and no second chances. But probably I could have added something that ignored player pressing if they did it too early like you did.

I do like myself a clicker, especially one where I don’t have to click myself (as it strains my wrists) and I was very glad to find this game. And I do really like the personal art style and great voice acting there in the beginning. Kinda almost forgot that since it did take quite a while in the boss fight. So while clickers need some length, I think my playtime without clicking other than upgrading and bombs (30min) is a bit on the longer side for a jam clicker game. I had some issues with the UI but I wonder if that is because I had the auto-clicker enabled?

Great fun though!

More on that and everything in the play-through:

It took me like three tries until I remembered the J for slashing! I think that is part my fault :) but also that it’s not needed until quite a bit into the game and thus easy to forget and the UI isn’t super clear what it is. I felt like I was doing a decent job getting the score I got but I see I’m nowhere near the level of other players. Still even with my limited skills, it was quite enjoyable jumping around and collecting swirly things.

Play-through:

This feels like a really cool game. Unfortunately I’m hard stuck in the very first tutorial area getting nowhere. Or rather, it doesn’t really feel like a tutorial area, but a skill-check while also attempting to read the instructions. So I only got to see the first couple of jumps no matter how many times I tried, which means I’d really like a difficulty setting and tuning on the tutorial level. The lava should probably not be involved until the very end of that level if you ask me and at least never start before the player starts to move. I did really like the way you blast away by holding D and then pressing Space and S at the same time. And the music was cool.

Play-through:

Nice little puzzle game. I found the levels quite intuitive, but I also totally broke at least two of them! You’ll see in the play-through what I mean. The story was nice too and added some compared to just solving logical puzzles. Personally I think I really would have liked to see the grid, at least locally around the active player, to make things a bit clearer.

Well done!

Play-through:

I liked the the last mode the most, I think (I only tried that and the first). There are some QoL improvements that could be made (would be nice to not have to use the mouse at all, clearly showing what the limit is) but with the way you had cheats in the final one also got me thinking of how this game could play out if rogue-like…

Play-through:

Thank you for the thorough comment! I should have, I will treat the sports counting a bit more serious and make sure the user gets enough tools and guidance to actually complete the puzzle. I thought it was a silly idea, and fun to make, but not that engaging to the players. It honestly could also have been better humor if the narrator insists it is a failed and too complicated puzzle and it is a banger for those that like a little challenge. I’ll also make a big “Get your results” arrow so no-one accidentally steps into the solution area.

The unintentional difficulty in the gungolf is really annoying :( And that bug I caused to the aiming. It was really hard making it easy enough but I have some ideas I’ll look into after the jam.

Glad you liked my aiming bug ;) It wasn’t intentional at all (but let’s pretend it was)!

I’m also a bit interested in what the entrepreneur will do next…

Thank you for the voice appraisal! <3 <3

I should probably have made it clear that you can adjust mouse sensitivity in the settings. You can even play the game with keyboard only (though aiming the gun probably gets a bit hard).

I really wanted the gun golf to be fully playable. But I had introduced that stupid bug with push back/drift on fine motions and struggled to get the ball bouncing feel good so even though I spend considerable time tuning it, it remains much to hard. I’m gonna try to fix that after the jam though.

The sports counting was a bit of a meme, but people seems to like the puzzle so I’ll try to do the sports counting justice and make it more intuitive. I’m not sure what you mean by the scoreboard being obscured though. That does sound like an unexpected bug. You are given some initial hinting info, but you can fill out all rows.

First button room definitely isn’t meant to succeed in.

Unfortunately the web build is single threaded so even though there is a loading screen while each room loads it doesn’t really help the experience, I think.

Thank you for the great feedback! I really didn’t think the sports counting would get people hooked. It must really have been a bummer then to not get perfect score, or even bad one. I’m gonna totally revise that scoring and UI to guide the player about having done stuff right!

I’m very glad I had worked on my other project to have reusable settings so I actually didn’t need to spend much time at all just dropping all that QoL stuff in.

Yeah that was a really unfortunate bug I had introduced with the aiming. My thinking though was that people would try it a bit, maybe score on one or two holes and then progress out of the room.

I picked your brain about the subs on the discord. Thanks for pointing that out, I’ll go through and make sure they are saying what I’m saying and are correctly spelled!

I really wish I had takes some more time with how that solution in the sports room worked! And that stupid stupid bug (took like 2 minutes to fix that mouse push-back/drift) I had introduced into the movement controller! Thank you for the great feedback!

I must admit, I was extremely close to give up even on the first level, but then I think I actually made it all the way through? I at least got back to the menus and saw an extra option but I didn’t notice anything happening when I clicked it?

I think they puzzles were great and had a real mind bending design. What I do think could have been improved wasn’t so much the actual puzzles but the pacing of complexity and tutorials.

Right now you basically throw all the tools at the player at once, and some of them you don’t even need until a couple of puzzles down the line. And that is asking quite a lot of the player to be honest.

Another thing that I wonder about was why T reset and not R? Not that it mattered much, just seemed a little strange.

I did very much enjoy my time and of course it would have been epic if you could just break down the game more and more and evolve both the puzzles and get a bit of story in that way.

But still this was a great puzzle game for a jam.

Play-through:

Cool little card game. Easy to grasp, even though I probably wasn’t that good at it. The one thing I struggled a bit with in the UI was the small hit-boxes for the cards which cost me important parts of seconds over and again. It was fun enough though that I replayed it a couple of times.

Play-through:

I really like the airport signage throughout the game. The interactions were simple to learn, though I assumed mouse scroll would rotate so for a bit I thought there was no rotate. I couldn’t help myself cutting up stuff but it would have been very nice to regret one step at a time rather than needing full reset. It would also have been good narrative to have a some small thing happening when you’ve completed each level. Especially with regards to what got cut and trashed.

Play-through:

Interesting concept. I did get fired in the end. I had quite some problems with playing the game as it was scaling incorrectly and placing a good part of the clock outside the screen and only when I zoomed out the tab to 70 percent could I start flipping the clocks around!

I think I got to the end though, just not the good end

Play-through:

It 100% was the butterflies and the art style that got me interested in this game! When I saw that it was running on time I got a bit scared, but the stress was quite manageable in the end. I stumbled a little in the beginning but after that it was clear what to do. I did check out the butterfly collection once, but I think, because the game was quite stressful in the end it just slipped my mind looking again after having hatched more. I also totally didn’t look at the ball-drop progress bar much because my eyes were focused on the other side of the screen. It might have been easier to see/keep track of it if it was moved to the right, next to where the food was dropping.

Great style and fun game!

Play-through:

oh i just missed that one directional section on the lower bit of the number there i guess! Good that it wasn’t a big jump thing with precision that was needed and just a bit more observation on my part!

Oh but when I walked slashing towards the second enemy it felt like I didn’t loose health or at least as much, even though I wasn’t in combat?

I made two runs and I got extremely different outcomes in my scores, both four digits negative and positive, I think! I really like how you worked narration into the game and the management was interesting. You had me really stressed though, so a bit clearer UI and that the fullscreen actually had scaled the game to the entire screen would have been nice.

Good game!

Play-through:

The rewind helped a lot and it was a funny thing! Maybe the timer could have been tied to the actions I took rather than actual clock time, like I think it is now.

Cool design and nice use of the light-droplets to hint to the player where they should/could go. Also cool that you gave a lot of light sometimes to give me a chance to see further.

Unfortunately I never managed to complete the second level. It was a BIG jump in complexity from the first level and I feel like the time you give me with the light is very low for someone that doesn’t know what the perfect path is or how the level is structured.

So, I think it could be a very cool game if a bit more forgiving and allowing to explore.

Play-through with more comments:

Unfortunately this game was absolutely impossible for me. I really dig the style of it but I got hard stuck on the second tutorial enemy. I feel like there must have been a bug with me getting hurt just walking from the first enemy to the second right? It does have a very cool vibe to it and I wish I could experience it more, but I think it also is much much to hard for me even at the very beginning, bug or no bug.

Play-through, or rather attempt:

Very cool concept for the theme, and the realization with hints/comments as post-its notes. Felt very much like a work-place microwave. I did really struggle with the platforming controls though. I don’t think there is coyote time for allowing jumping after having left a platform and the momentum made me over-correct and struggle on narrow/precise jumps. And at least this latter could be fine if the resets were kinder. But sometimes, not always, it seemed to require me to replay the previous level and that started to feel like a cost hampering the will to explore and try jumps and paths that looked hard/impossible.

I got level/time 38 before I gave up. I might have misunderstood something but I didn’t see any path forward that at least was within my abilities to perform.

Very creative game and I quite enjoyed my stay even with these struggles, which speaks to it having a very solid core.

Play-through:

Oh you have volume up button on your keyboard and that triggered holding button pressed to skip cut-scene and for some reason didn’t capture the release of the same button? That if that is the case I sure need to fix it.

Thanks for the feedback! I know about a bug there the aim gets pushed back when doing fine motions and I’ll be looking into what mess caused that, but if you have more things that seemed bugged to you I’d really like to know what.

Oh closest to the count! I totally didn’t read that. I wonder, if when you kill a innocent person, if the game could have showed you how that was wrong before going to the other screen. Then I would probably have understood that I had misread and that it wasn’t the game that was wrong. Ofc it might be a bit tricky logic to include that. But I think it would have made it more likely that I’d try again.

of course you can share the clip!

I didn’t catch, or rather happened to execute some randos. I think it has some very cool ideas with combining minesweeper with clue (board game) into a murder logical puzzle mystery. And it even changes things up between runs so you cannot just learn the solution.

I did however not exactly remember minesweeper rules and adjacency on a grid has at least two common meanings (4 vs 8 neighbours). I was also uncertain if it was one big board because the room divisions made it look like it was 9 smaller 3x3 minesweeper games.

But there were enough clicks available that even with some silly ones i had enough to reveal everyone, i think, i hope! But then I had more problems with the word use, and the shortness of the instructions in the game. In particular while a murderer can be a witness at a trial, it feels wrong to me to call a killer that when doing the investigation like we did in this game. But i think? Maybe it was just meaning “person” here?

So yeah I felt a bit robbed by the in-exactness of the words used rather than failing the logical puzzle. But might be that I’m also to tired at this stage.

Play-through:

Very good voice acting and well written. I really viscerally disliked quite a few of the characters! I hope that was the intent! The art was also really nice. The game was perhaps a bit in the long side (clocking in at 30 minutes to reach the end) for a jam game and my preference, especially when it doesn’t mix it up more in the game play. I did not for the life of me understand the interactions in the coffee game and the name sorting was a bit too repetitive. Maybe I was unlucky in getting three in a row, but it made me inclined not to want to help my co-workers out, rather than having story reason not to want to do it.

Overall though I liked the game and as I said very good voice acting, well written and good looking art!

Play-through: