itch.io

I might have to give this one another shot later but my first impressions are that It's very difficult to play.

It's too dark to see anything, especially on such a small screen. But playing if fullscreen doesn't scale properly and the text is unreadable.

I wound up getting stuck in a wall and couldn't play any further.

Seemed like it was going to be more complicated than it was.

I think you could have had mouse click advance the dialogue to make it a bit less tedious, we need the mouse for gameplay anyway.

 Third level was a neat twist and it took me a moment to get it. There were times I tried to drag the video clip and instead of it going where I wanted, it went back to the footage folder. I think it'd be nice to be able to place a clip between two existing ones, like a real video editor.

Having to click each clip to view them is a bit tedious.

In the end, the only twist to the strategy was to intentionally run into the wall to "waste" a clip. I think you could do with more variety. Like maybe a level where you have to have as many leftover clips as possible. Or one where you can have unused clips but you get a bonus for using them all, so players have incentive to look for ways to use all clips instead of going straight for the goal?

Overall a pretty good puzzle game, just could use a little more polish

First two plays and I got bad endings. Both times I went left when there were obvious anomalies, so it feels like there was a glitch?

Third play I just kept running to the right ignoring all anomalies. I thought I would be speed running a bad end, but it just kept going and going. I think I went to at least 40 rooms, and aside from the room number sometimes going back to 0, nothing ever happened. I eventually decided to go left for anomalies, and I got three in a row, and wound up with a bad ending.

Fourth play is where I got curious and finally found the good ending. That was pretty sneaky.

I tink you should keep keyboard controls rather than making players go to their mouse.

The platforming was a bit tedious and seemed unnecessary considering the style of the game, but it wasn't too bad. I actually found it kinda funny that lil dude was doing flips for no reason.

Love that you put the controls in-game and that they're relatively simple. I suggest that instead of having the controls listed on the page, you just say "controls are taught in-game" just to get players in game as quickly as possible, rather that feel like they need to memorize controls before starting.

My first play I did decently and hit a mine after a few moments. 

Second play I survived for a couple minutes and I think I did amazingly well.

The next 10+ games I died by the monster immediately. No exaggeration, I could't survive more than 5 seconds. It spawned right on top of me every time and I had no way to escape.

The vector-looking graphics are really nice. A lot of jammers forget how simple and effective graphics can make a game more functional and easy to read.

A similar thing happened in game where the player portrait was in the center but the enemy graphic and selectable UI was way over to the right. I think your settings are set to adapt to different aspect ratios, but your UI elements weren't designed to reflect that.

I'm glad you put keyboard menu controls in for a keyboard controlled game.

I immediately the UI is very distracting. Navigating the menu is already hard with small borderless white text, but the stylized distortion on top of it makes it worse. I think this is very much a style-over-function incident. The "low graphics" option wound up being a must just for the menu.

I tried fullscreen on my ultra wide and it didn't scale properly (I'll try to get  screenshots). This means it might also not scale on other resolutions, even if it's a more normal aspect ration.

Love the art style.

The art in the combat sort of reminded me of Mother/Earthbound, I'm not sure if that was intentional.

I liked the timed blocking mechanic on the fights, it was really well done. The rest of the fight was a bit hard to figure out though. I THINK I got it because I did manage to win several fights, but I don't know for sure.

First thing I tried to do was click "options" and it didn't work.

Cuitscene looks amazing, especially for a jam game, I'm not used to seeing that level of polish.

I'd suggest mapping the movement to both arrows and WASD, so players can do whatever they prefer. Diagonal movement would've been good too, I saw you were able to accomplish it on the bumper car section.

It seems you put int coyote time which is great, but no jump buffering. Usually those go hand-in-hand. I'm also not a big fan of the pause on landing, but overall the platforming is actually pretty solid.

Player animation is great, all art looks pretty good though it seems to clash against each other. A more limited palette would probably make everything look even better, I suggest grabbing one from lospec.com and sticking with it for the whole project.

The bumper cars can be seen spawning out of nowhere. There's a Godot node that detects if it can be seen on-screen, I'd suggest implementing that so cars only spawn off screen (like the horde in Left 4 Dead)

The balloon stage made me realize that air control could use a bit of work. Like have the horizontal movement be faster while the player is in the air, and deceleration slowed. It's a hard thing to get just right.

 The water gun game is where I had to quit. Hit detection pretty much seemed random and even when I scored points, they kept reverting back to 0.

Yeah I assumed the bathrooms needed to be far away from the tents (who'd want to sleep next to that smell?) and I didn't consider right-clicking the buildings at all. It's best if players can learn your controls/mechanics intuitively rather than relying on menus or reading instructions.

Also, nothing happens if you left-click the buildings, correct? So right-clicking might be necessary.  I think stats would be better in a popup tooltip when you hover without clicking, and then clicking could bring up an upgrade menu.

Without any instruction I immediately tried figuring out what the controls are, only to realize there isn't any for most of the game. 

There's a bit of an art style clash between the daytime and night.

Stat leveling is very straightforward so that's good. I only got to the third day so I'm not sure if there's any rhyme or reason to what stats you decide to upgrade (ie if you buy more balls before gaining more skills, will you drop them or something?). Maybe if there was some commentary from the crowd, like "only one ball? lame!" to hint to your player that they need to buy more balls before research. You did good showing the effects in the form of extra money coming in, but not specifically what changes cause that effect.

Most of the game is idling watching the clown, which personally didn't appeal to me. I thought it might be okay to run in a side window while I get some work done or play someone elses game, but this one freezes when you aren't focusing, so you have to actually be engaged with the game window even when you can't actually do anything. iirc Unity does have settings to allow games to continue processing even when they aren't focused.

Played a couple of times. For the web version, getting in/of fullscreen and pause menus is difficult because they're all the ESC button, which also shows/hides the mouse cursor.

I found myself aiming fine but not turning way too fast. Tried adjusting the sensitivity, but then I could turn just fine but aiming was impossible. So maybe there's a balance issue there.

Got stuck on level geometry a lot, just trying to go up ramps and through doors.

The enemy AI was a bit overbearing. I couldnt' really use any tactics, I just had to constantly be moving and spraying bullets hoping I hit them more than they hit me.

I'm glad you used mostly-standard FPS input because that made it extra easy to get into. "F" to interact instead of "E" was a bit different but I could get used to it.

The Q to focus felt a bit awkard and I didn't know what was going on when it sent me back to a checkpoint. Maybe the purpose of that would make more sense if I could get further in the game,

Played twice. The on-screen instructions help and I THINK I got the gameplay down.

The first time I was killed while scanning. I don't think I was waiting too long between scans but the bear showed up quicker than I could put the scanner away, turn, and grab the gate.

The second playthrough I guess I died because I let go of the gate too quickly. I saw the gate bent initially but nothing after that, no visual cues on if it was safe or not.

You credit sounds but I didn't hear any while playing?

Neat idea and it's excuted well. Thje platforming feels good so it seems you implemented jump buffering and coyote time? Rare for a jam game but I like seeing that attention to detail.

I think a timer could add to the challenge, even if it's just to replace and find more efficient paths.

Since the game is entirely played with kehboard, the menus should be too. Going back and forth to the mouse just to click the start button is a bit annoying.

I really don't know what the strategy is. I've been restarting the game so I can do some trial-and-error to find out what works, but some in-game guidance would be appreciated.

It's a bit too slow-paced for me. Most of these jame games I'm playing during short breaks from work. This one I'm letting run in the background, but even when I come back to it, I find the cash is coming in too slow so I still have nothing to do.

up/down would probably be better. 

That’s how I am with every jam I participate in too: overscope and wind up with unfinished projects.

The best way I’ve found out to avoid that is plan your project to be finished in 1/3rd the actual time you have.

Chances are the game will take twice as long as you expect it to,

The final 1/3rd of the time is great for playtesting, bug fixing, and maybe adding some extra polish.

Only got to play this a couple times, got up to 107 I think, I might come back and play a bit more later. It's really fun.

Simple enough to play and and enjoy without really having to study too much, just as a jam game should be.

The CRT filter on the graphics I think was a bit too overdone, to the point it actually hurt my eyes a bit, and made a lot of the text very hard to read

I do appreciate the game feel minimal approach you mentioned on page.

At first I didn't realize that there was auto firing and WASD was all I needed, it was a pleasant surprise that it wound up being so simple.  I've never played "Vampire Survivors" but based on what I've seen, this is a similar idea?

It might've been nice to have keyboard menu navigation for the upgrade menus since I was already using keyboard for gameplay. But the fact that it was one-handed gameplay meant switching between the two wasn't as tedious as it is with other games.

Enemy behavior was perhaps a bit too basic with them simply running at you in a straight line. Having some with ranged attacks or trying to flank might've brought more strategy into how to avoid them

Graphics and music were pretty pleasant, some sound effects really could've juiced the game up some.

Having the in-game tutorial is definitely preferable to on the page, but it still seems like a wall of text. In general I prefer intuitive in-game teaching. For a jam game in particular, there seems to be way too much going on.

Between the over complicated move list, button placement, and steep challenge curve, I had to devolve into button-mashing pretty much immediately.

Starting off I had no idea what the goals were.

I wandered around and found the object in the upper-left. The "E" prompt is appreciated, more games need to have intuitive prompts instead of walls of text.

But then a menu came up asking me if I wanted to submit to a leaderboard? I clicked "No" but it showed me the leaderboard anyway. I'd criticize this because it doesn't seem necessary (especially right at the beginning of the game), didn't seem to function, and required me switching to mouse controls. In general, I think it's good to have your game/menu controls match and be consistent.

Going to the upper-right and I' say it's the same complaint. I'm already using keyboard to move, it'd be much better if I could use the keyboard to interact with the menu as well.

I played the space invaders game for a while, bought another machine that doesn't seem to do anything, and had to stop for now. I might check out more later.

Verdy unique in both style and gameplay.

I appreciate the unlimited tries, especially for a jam game it helps make it relaxing rather than frustrating.

Starting on the 3rd level I started to notice a bit more randomness to the animals movement and it made me wonder wether every loss was really my fault, or if I was victim to RNG.

The gameplay is all keyboard based so it'd help if the menu navigation was too, but unlimited retries meant I wasn't really going back and forth between menus and gameplay anyway.

I have some issues with the control. Sometimes I can skip the start animation, sometimes I can't. I think you need a clickable area larger than the actual children, probably even larger than their hiding place, so players don't have to be so precise.

The instructions said that once you hidden them, that's it. It implied they could never leave their hiding spot. I found out in a later playthrough that I actually can move when no one else is in the room, but had to be a little too precise with my clicks.

I noticed some of the hiding places turned red and didn't really know what that meant. Eventually the second monster came from the ceiling and got one of the kids so maybe it was warning to not hide in those places?

As for the first monster and also the caretaker, their searches seems random so I had no idea what the strategy was (if there is any)

Oh and I don't know what the timed meter is on the bottom, I assume it's the "breathing mini game" you mentioned on the page, but nothing I did seemed to affect it.

Overall it looks good and is a very interesting concept, I think it could just use better control responsiveness and visual/audio feedback to players.

This is the UI issues I was mentioning. The unit tiles are far from the gameboard, likely because they're anchored to the edge of the screen and was expecting a more normal resolution. The text is a bit small, not sure if that was intentional or if you tested on a lower-res setting.

I love some plants vs zombies.

There was some scaling and UI issues with fullscreen on my ultra wide. I bring it up because even on normal aspect ratios, different resolutions might render things different than what you expect. I suggest stretching your gameplay window to weird sizes/shapes to make sure UI looks good no matter what.

The one-hit kills seemed a bit much and missed an opportunity for strategy. Ie if it took longer for an enemy to kill and ice cream tree vs a shooter, it'd incentivize putting trees in front of the shooters to act as shields, when novice players would instinctively do the opposite.

All around more visual feedback would be good. Ie grey out a unit if you don't have the money to buy it, show a transparent version on the tile before placing, stuff like that.

Pretty nice. First game I'm seeing this jam with some sort of AI, and it seems relatively good.

I'm playing on an ultra wide, so dragging my mouse outside the play area was pretty easy and allowed me to get a bit more power from avatars closer to the edge of the screen than poeople on a normal monitor would be able to.

UI for the most part is scaled good. The time and some other elements at the top of the screen seemed to overlap some stuff. Overall text was pretty small.

I like the soccer/hockey/shuffleboard mechanics.

There was a glitch I saw where the moving blue obstacle actually pushed the ball into my net and there was nothing I could really do about it. It counted as a score the moment I tried to make my next move but until then it just sat there.

Also the clock not stopping means it's very easy for players to run out the clock if they're winning rather than risk being scored against.

Pretty good overall.

I think you could use some polish on the user interface. Keyboard-navigatable menus would make the whole experience a lot better, rather than having to go back and forth between keyboard and mouse.

An alternate control scheme I was thinking of: Up (instead of down) to do a controlled drop, Down (instead of space) for an auto-drop, left/right (instead of up) to cycle through the colors. This will give it good one-handed play and utilize the left/right buttons, many make it quicker to chose a specific color.

Gameplay was definitely unique. Not sure it's my cup of tea. Even though the timing is somewhat forgiving (good job on the snapping for that btw) it still felt a bit tedious to wait for a precise moment to place a specific block after several misses.

I played about 20-30 minutes because I didn't want to stop until I'd completed at least one puzzle. So it is very engaging. Finally fixed one with a 3:17 time, might try again later.

I love that the instructions are in-game rather than needing to read the page description. It was worded a little odd so I didn't understand everything at first. Some visual examples might help.

But otherwise this one is really great, very polished.

Not sure why you're asking me to "calm down". Are you taking my notes as a personal attack?

Generally, developers appreciate feedback on their projects. I'm making an effort to provide feedback to everyone who participated in the jam.

It's not very useful to just glaze everyone. The most useful feedback is critical feedback. There's issues in your game that you might be blind to, so I'm just trying to be helpful.

Personally, whenever I participate, I directly ask players to be as critical of my games as possible. I don't want everyone saying "omg your game is the best, I love it!", I want them nitpicking every little flaw so I know what details I missed. It's better than players disliking my game and me never knowing why.

No problem. Hoping to plan a post-jam version too.

Sounds good. Yeah running out of time is always the key, it's the reason most of my jam submissions suck pretty bad. 

Lately I've tried the 1/3rd rule. I consider how long I have to make a game, then divide that into 1/3rd. I assum it's going to take twice as long as I thought, so that's 2/3rds of the alloted time. The remaining 1/3rd I keep as buffer time for playtesting, bug fixes, and polish.

But yeah looking forward to seeing your pro-jam fixes and seeing what you make for the next jam as well.

I think the simple rotate/fire would be preferable to mouse aim, but players have different preferences so there's generally nothing wrong with more options.

Aside from the skipping nodes and hangtime bonus, the only other idea I'd have is a mid-air shoot. Maybe something like Celeste where if you touch a certain powerup, you can shoot an extra time midair to correct course. Maybe with a time slowdown effect at the same time?

Anyway I'd be interested in seeing what other ideas you implement so I'll have to follow up, and looking forward to seeing you in the next jam too.

Good start to twin stick shooter mechanics.

It took me a moment to realize there was mouse aiming, probably becasue the lack of visual feedback. Generatlly the player should look where they're aiming.

Sometimes the axes made sounds on impact, so collisions seemed to be detected, but damage seemed to be random. And I'm sure you're already aware of the projectile momentum issues.

But yeah it's  a good start. With more time I'm sure it would've been much better.

Tried to start the first song and just got a black screen. Refreshed the page and it looked like that game was gone so I just started the next one instead.

Menues being mouse-only while gameplay uses keyboard means players constantly have to switch back and forth. Why not have the menus navigable with the keyboard?

The UI voice is a little annoying, I'd prefer a more standard sound effect. 

I didn't see much of a difficulty curve, prompts come from all directions immediately. I think it'd ease more into gameplay to have arrows start from only one direction, just to teach the players the pattern. Then entirely from the opposite direction. Then alternating between each direction for full sections. Then mixing those two directions at the same time. Give them a chance to master that before even adding a third direction, or the forth. Let them ease into the challenge instead of being bombarded in the first moments.

Aside from that, the prompts should match with the music. There seemed to be no prompt/note correlation, making the music more of a distraction that a feature.

Nice, simple concept, simple controlls, easy to pickup and play. I could see this being a Warioware-style minigame in a larger project.

Crashed the car a couple times, really didn't find much more to it that that. I noticed when I tipped my van I could still drive it but it just messed up the camera. I hit a few buildings after going on ramps and just went right through them. The button to go to the garage didn't always seem to work.

SImple easy to control, that's a plus. I'm not a huge fan of the 1-bit graphics but I see you submitted this for another jam at the same time so that makes sense. I thought the carrots were suppose to be fish.

Since first impressions are very important, I'm going to mention some stuff I noticed within the first few minutes.

- The fact the game can be played entirely with one button is beautiful simplistic. Consider jam games aren't suppose to be played very long, the easier it is to just get into a play, they better. This nails that.

- This is the first game I've played so far with a keyboard-navigate menu. It's such a breath of fresh air to not have to go back and forth from my mouse. Pretty sure this would be very easy to play with a gamepad if I were so inclined.

- The timing mechanic and ability to recover is also appreciated, rather than a one-mistake-and-your-dead system. I haven't actually gotten it yet though,

- I got a lot of frame slowdown my first few plays. I know it says to download for best performance, but it doesn't seem like a game that should be too demanding even for web.

After a few more plays:

- I haven't had any more issues with skipping

- the shop system is pretty good, but could be better. The amount of money you have is hard to find, much smaller than all other UI elements.

- it could just be me but I think the timing is off on the prompts. I always missed them, until I intentionally tried to hit them too early, then I got a lot of perfects. Maybe a web performance issue?

- I find myself staring at the guage as it's actually a bit hard to see the ground. Not too big of an issue as the gage is where you time your clicks anyway, but that means players aren't focused on the rest of the artwork.

Interesting concept.

The UI scaling is a bit unpolished. Stuff is cropped in certain resolutions (including the in-browser), strecthed in other (like an ultrawide).

The windmill puzzle was a kind of clever but a little too ovious. Aside from that I basically just used wind to cross the whole level without any opposition.

Nice simple concept. The games playable with keyboard so I think it's be nice if the menus could be navigated with keyboard as well. Music is very calming. 

I'm sorry but I really don't understand this game at all. 

There's no visual feedback on which hand is selected, I don't know what using the fingers accomplishes, I don't know the goals of the game.

Theres some of the common UI scaling issues. IE when I fullscreen the description for MAP_1 cuts off the description. This might be because I'm on an ultrawide or it could be an issue with regular monitors of different resolutions. I suggest as you're bulging the game to make stretch the window to all sorts of odd shapes and make sure nothings cut off. Rule of thumb, scale by vertical screen size, not by horizontal.

I couldn't play the actual game, it starts with a leaf texture, like maybe I'm starting at the ground, and every slight mouse movement has me stare at the sky and spin super fast.