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The update has improved the gameplay so much! I managed to beat it first try :)

I had one comment / idea: using the bumpers still feels a little frustrating. There's 2 solutions I can think of. One would be to slow the ball down when its in the lower portion of the screen (maybe by like 5%) - so that its not noticeable to the player, but makes it easier to hit the ball if its moving fast. You could also cap the ball speed a bit lower. The second way would be to add in some upgrades to make the flippers longer, or add in powerups to block the sidechannels and bottom. But these frustrations are part of what makes games like this annoyingly addictive!

This is a seriously impressive game to have made in only 9 days

Amazing game! One bug I've found is that the apple a day sticker sometimes doesn't apply base mult on the first turn of a round. And I think there was another sticker that did that too. So there seems to be something going wrong with first turn base mult.

Also starting new games is a bit buggy - sometimes items left in the sell box stay over to the new game, and occasionally I've kept a sticker! Sometimes, it starts the new game in the rebuild menu, or just straight into the new game (like the shop is open, but I can still click to launch a ball and it counts). So theres something buggy there.

As for the actual gameplay, my biggest critique is the balancing. I think steels are too overpowered and come up too frequently in the shop compared to say, vampire or stone items. It seems like betting on steel early almost always gets you to round 17,18,19 ish.

  
Really cool game, I've wishlisted this on steam and can't wait to see where it goes!

Okay perfect! Ill look out for a post or notification, and make sure to play when its updated :)

This was soooooooo fun!! I loved it. I was pretty slow though, I got 15:52. I loved the artstyle, the voicelines and the overall gameplay! I think it could've been a little more retro maybe (maybe a pixelated artstyle or a retro menu would've convinced me it was retro, its pretty close already but I think it just needed a tad extra). I really like the pictures-used-as-assets style! The UI and controls are very intuitive too.

I'm slightly colorblind, which added some difficulty XD. If you expanded the game then I think the solution would be adding a colourblind mode where you match patterns rather than colours, but that would be massive overscope for a gamejam game. So here's a couple of points that wouldn't require too much extra work that would make it easier for me:

• Being able to hide rows that have been completed
• Having the sample colour to the left of the colour name, so they're vertically aligned and quicker to check against. Could also make the sample colour bigger somehow
• Having a button to reshuffle the stamp pile

Having the colours in the stampbook be in luminance-order (like brightest to darkest) would be a help, but it would also make the game significantly easier. So probably not that one.

But anyways, these are minor points. The game was really really fun. If you expand it somehow I would love to play it again / see the progress. Thanks for making a cool game and sharing it!!!

Thanks so much!

Yeah, its definitely not that good! I'm not that good at driving it either, I use a lot of countersteer but I usually just end up crashing anyway. Imma try to learn more about arcade racing and give it another shot sometime.

Thanks for playing though!

I played a little more, and I think part of the issue with the flippers is they move to fast for Godot to keep up with: I've seen the balls go through the bumpers or not interact that intuitively a few times. Them moving this fast also removes the skill of timing the flippers to launch the ball in a specific direction

I LOVE this game! One of my favourites of the jam, easily. Some notes:

• I think the gap between the flippers should be a little smaller
• The vibe and CRT shader feels very balatro inspired (in a good way!) - if that's the vibe you want, I think I need more crazy combos. Like I want to be able to score 8 bajillion points somehow and be able to get loads of money
• The extra bumper thing (see image) on the right hand side always led to the ball just going into the left hand one: if that is on purpose, no problem, but it did feel a little pointless? I think it would be better if it was less powerful and led to the ball going back down the pegs

If you work on this further (on itch or steam) I would love to play it - I really think this has potential and could be a great game!

Super fun little game! I liked it a lot. I think if the camera was zoomed out a little, it would be nicer to play as you wouldn't be hit from offscreen bullets as much (I found I didn't have quite enough time to react to enemies).

Really impressive game to make in 3 days!

Wow! This is super polished, and very retro. Felt like an excellent game jam game, and an impressive achievement for only 9 days!!!!

A few bits of feedback:

• I found some of the enemies difficult to attack, e.g. the flying eyes (when they fly diagonally, its hard to shoot them)
• The minimap in the top right didn't make sense to me - sometimes going through 1 door would move the minimap by no squares or 2 squares?

Really fun, and an excellent game. If this became a full game I would happily play it again!

Oh also, I had some issues with web mouse capture - I accidentally hit escape twice and then my mouse was free, and had to restart the game. The best way I've found to deal with this is when clicking resume on the menu, re-set the mouse capture mode to captured. That way there's a way to get back into the gameplay. (But mouse capture on web seems really annoying generally so I'm not lowering my rating because of this)

I love this game! The soundtrack was really nice, and it felt very retro. I won by running past the enemies, which felt a bit like cheating XD the fighting was pretty good for a game jam game, I didn't run into any bugs. A couple of points that would improve it for me would be:

• Randomise the gunshot soundeffect (can use an AudioStreamRandomizer) by a couple of semitones, so its not too repetitive.
• Add health bars above the enemies

Great submission!

Thanks! And yeah in hindsight I agree, the car is very difficult to control

Thanks for the feedback and kind words!

The wheels do tween back (maybe too slowly) to the neutral position if there's no input, it just doesn't feel like that because the car is too slidey. I think what happened was I set the grip to be so low on the back wheels to make it actually go anywhere, that the car became way too slidey and lots and lots of countersteer is needed to make it go where you want it to. I probably got a bit too used to that during development (I thought it was sortof passable, but the comments here indicate its pretty awful)

Anyways a steering wheel indication would definitely be a good addition!

Making this game was super fun, and its the first game I've made that feels like a game (rather than a walking simulator or something). I'm thinking about diving into arcade racing games and giving it another shot after learning how to make a better car / driving simulation.

Once again thanks for playing, and I hope to see you around!

Thanks! Yeah, this project has made me realise that the VehicleBody system doesn't work that well. I've since learned that there's other approaches I could've used (like using RigidBody3D's) for arcade-y driving. The driving is pretty awful in this one XD

Thanks for the feedback :)

This was a great story, I really enjoyed it. It was well put together, and I think the plot twist was a great addition. Nothing felt cheesy or overdone, and it was an original and compelling story. It also felt very retro so I think it fits the theme well.

Overall the game was amazing, here are some suggestions for very slight improvements:

• If you change the label's "visible_character_behaviour" setting to "Characters After Shaping", text doesn't jump around as you add characters (e.g. if you're tweening the number of visible characters). For me this is slightly more readable and less jumpy
• Personally I would make the scrollbar a little thinner (just a style choice though)
• It would be nice if spacebar progressed the game when there was only one option available to choose from, and also if the "press spacebar to continue" button was clickable with the mouse
• There was one text character which didn't load for me - I believe that the itch server doesn't have a default fallback font, so you have to provide one yourself in the font import settings (e.g. google Noto has all characters I believe)
• There was one missing bbcode tag ending, in the text block that begins "This was Mary's favorite stuffed animal"

All that being said, these are very very very very minor problems. Overall this was an amazing experience, 10/10 from me. I really like being able to press space to speed up the text, thats a great idea. Also the sounds and artstyle were really nice. Just out of interest, how did you make the images? Compress real world photos and then add e.g. the ladder and the family photos over them?

Wow. What an entry! Usually I list everything I liked, but I think I'd be here for a while! Amazing game; if this was on steam for a few bucks I wouldn't bat an eye. Its very very well made. I had a few (very minor) suggestions:

• I found myself swapping items a lot to see if they'd improve my character's build or not. It would be nice to have some way of seeing the difference between 2 items without manually switching between them (e.g., some pluses and minuses next to the current stats that appear when hovering over a new item)
• After a while I ran out of inventory space and I don't think the things I was picking up were available for me to use anymore, and I didn't see a way of throwing away items from my inventory to clear up space
• IMO the "GO" and "open door" buttons are off-by-one at the end of each level: you press "open door" to go up to but not through the door, but then "GO" to actually pass through the door (this is the most tiny nitpick ever, but it took me a tad to understand which button to press). TBH you could just use one button
• The shield button isn't in the manual (I assume its +50 defence?)

I managed to get through 15 battles before my brethren fell :( This is one of the best game jam games I've ever played! I love it. I would be super excited to see where this project goes!

• Amazing plot & cutscenes!
• Really nice artstyle, skybox & animations
• I found the movement pretty intuitive but a little difficult. I think the automatic "push towards the middle" that happens when at the edge of the track feels weird when going round corners. Like, its not a bug, it just feels like theres too many forces occuring on the car and I don't know where its going to go. But overall its very intuitive to drive
• For some of the items I found it hard to know if I needed to jump off the end of a platform or not in order to get them
• Great game length for a game jam
• Fits the theme super well!

Thanks for the fun experience!!!!!!!!!!

Super fun game and great art style!

• I loved things occuring in time with the music
• The controls and movement were intuitive
• I think the overall difficulty is good - it felt like I had to be concentrated, but it wasn't unfair
• Sometimes I would be hit by a purple glitch that was hiding behind an orange glitch: could be solved by making the glitches more transparent, or forcing a minimum distance between objects that spawn on the same track
• Currently the glitches slide over the ground as the ground texture goes at a different speed (this is a tiny issue but thought I'd mention it)
• One idea for improvement would be adding in hearts to the track you can pick up and restore your health with
• I loved the boss fight!

Overall, this was really fun to play! The image is my score on my winning run

Having two different versions of the game was so cool! It definitely felt retro, and the horror bit was extremely scary.

In the 3D version I ended up always sprinting. I liked (i.e., hated!) in the 3rd level being surrounded by enemies and having to dodge them. Having a limited sprint, or just slowing down the player, could help add to the horror.

Very cool game!

Thanks! Yeah, the car's handling is not the best XD

Wow. This is one of the best, most complete feeling games I've seen!

• I loved the artstyle, I think the Frutiger Aero visuals and audio were amazing!
• The game was fun, and it felt very very well put together
• I had one bug where a yellow platform (next to the circle platform where you have to do multiple tasks to unlock the door) didn't fall down
• I really like that you can shortcut some of the levels
• Oh also on the leaderboard you might want to put a small black outline around the text so its readable

This was super impressive, I loved it! 

(I follow you and got a notification about the game but I'm not part of the jam)

THIS WAS SO FUN

I love the story and the dialogue ("These side effects are something else" made me chuckle XD). A good length for an itch game. Really smooth movement, I like how the abilities are tutorialised and added in. Nice music too. And beautiful art and animations!!!

Here are some bugs / things I found:

- some characters didnt display for me (I believe some chars fallback to system font, and the local system font during development can be different on web / different browsers. I think I remember the fix being to set the fallback font manually to something with all characters e.g. Google Noto)

- It was confusing that talk, dialogue skip & grab item was mapped to enter, but the item get screen could only be skipped with z (and press z wasnt hinted)

- I softlocked myself once xd i think its something to do with using the grappling hook whilst in midair after a jump

- being able to grapple through spikes led to my inevitable death a few times

- section below was difficult - sometimes grapple would go through the lever. only way i could find was grapple from below lever and hope it works. i had to do this section quite a few times because i found the next section a little difficult. maybe a checkpoint after this bit would be good

- i was confused with the spikes - the first time i saw the spikes i didnt realise which bit was the spikes? (they didnt look very spikey XD). in one area near the end, red blocks act as the spikes (which is confusing as red blocks were safe previously)

- I think its difficult to see where things are. I think the camera being zoomed out would help. Oftentimes I can't see where the spikes are and have to leap of faith

But this was really fun, thanks for making it :P I look forward to future games you publish :)

Thanks so much :))

Yeah I agree, I definitely rushed the laser placement! Thanks for the feedback :)

It took a little while! It wasn't too bad though using LaTeX (I used a newspaper template). Thanks for playing :)

Hey, thanks so much for the feedback, I think there was a bug :/ sorry about that!

Thanks so much! I think for the next jam I might try to leave a little more time to add some lore. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for playing :) Yeah I think it would've been more intuitive to be able to disable the lasers (as you can disable the other objects too). With the remapping, was it both the controller and keyboard screens that didn't work? Or only one of them?

Hey! Thanks so much for playing :) Yeah there was a bug and it broke the lasers on the web version :/ sorry!

Such a cute game! Only one (very small) thing: I personally wouldn't bind space to both jump and skipping the intro UI box (the one that shows you about the new pastry for the level) - it was easy to accidentally skip that whilst trying to start the level.

Really really good game!

Cool idea! I loved the art. I was a bit confused with what was going on. A tutorial (either in-game or just on the itch page) would help. Also I would recommend having a look at Godot's stretch options so that the game is still playable in small windows. I think I got the game into a bit of a broken state as I managed to get a lot of money!

Also, massive ++ for controller support!

This is such a cute game! I loved the sound effects :) And the overall idea was really on theme and well executed!

One bug I found was that the same item could be picked up multiple times. In order to add more difficulty, you could not tell the player which room some of the objects are in. Or you could only allow the player to look at their task list when outside of the house (so they'd have to remember what they need to steal). Just some ideas though!

Overall I really liked this game :)

Apparently I suck at driving lol... I ended up with -$32. Super super fun game! The driving felt smooth but challenging, I liked the artstyle and audio. My only point would be about visibility: maybe you could zoom the camera out at high speeds, or place the camera slightly ahead of the vehicle's path (I think there's some plugins for this e.g. Phantom Camera). Also controller support would be an added bonus.

Really fun overall! Very very solid entry, I really enjoyed playing! It was a nice length for a game jam game too :)

Cool game! The music was really fun, and the artstyle / animations were nice too! I think it could benefit from a bit more variety, e.g. different enemies with larger vision cone. Also binding some controller controls would help accessibility. Overall though, a fun game!

Oh also, the audio was a bit quiet

This was a really really fun game! Genuinely one of the most impressive game jam games I've ever seen! To have done all of this in 9 days is awesome. Lots of content, and the puzzles overall were fun. The bits I liked were:

• Artstyle & cutscenes
• Speedrun timer is a great addition
• Controls were intuitive
• Puzzles were a good difficulty
• Felt like a cohesive full game experience (which is probably the most difficult thing to do in a game jam!)

Some point for improvement would be:

• The black tutorial text was hard to read when it was on a dark background: you could use a white outline to help - or make sure to always have the text on a white background (e.g. it could be placed within the level itself)
• It felt unintuitive that the player couldn't push the objects (even just a little bit) - it took me a while to understand how the physics worked (e.g. that most objects can be moved, just only by the drawings)
• The game window felt a bit cramped and some of the tutorialisation bits happened off screen (e.g. the first roll-the-circle-down-the-hill puzzle)

Sorry thats a lot of text! Its a really really really good game I just wanted to point out some simple ways it could feel even more amazing to play :) But they are very small points really. This is (easily) one of my favourite entries this jam :) Well done on such an amazing game!

What an amazing game! I really like the graphics and game loop. And I think the difficulty curve is really good for a game jam game. It was fun trying to strategise a little on how to get to the cows without spawning in loads of farmers.
Also a technical question: how did you get the leaderboard to work?

Oh also, massive ++ from me for using a cool font :)