itch.io

I really, really like this game, potentially my favorite I've seen in this jam so far. The basic premise of survive X turns of an overwhelming attack works really well, both in terms of fitting the theme, and just in terms of enjoyability as a gameplay mechanic in and of itself. Maybe the fact that I'm a Fire Emblem player is showing here, where manipulating a predictable AI and baiting them in different directions is kind of the foundation of a lot of the strategizing in that game. And you even came up with a few different roles by way of limited-use resources (until the wizard in the last level which as far as I could tell was infinite-use) so there is some variety in gameplay and it's not just entirely "run away from the enemy."

A lot of the levels did feel a bit fiddly. I restarted level 3 (or whichever was the one the one with three wood at the top-left) probably a dozen times, doing almost the same strategy but being one or two steps short because I happened to position my people one tile in the wrong direction on one of the turns. An undo button would've been nice (which would make this lean more into this being a puzzle game rather than a strategy game), but even if not, a simple "restart level" option would've been a nice Quality of Life feature. And of course a level select.

And of course, the sketchy artstyle and silly grunts are on one hand products of the extreme time crunch of a game jam, but on the other give it its own charm, focusing you on the gameplay by feeling more abstract like a chess game while prompting you to not take it too seriously outside of the core gameplay.

This was a fun puzzle game. I think the main issues are ones of UI/UX. It can be hard to tell what's going on a lot of the time. The swap action button isn't clear if it means "currently Moving" or "click this button to go into Move mode" - and if I'm understanding it right (which I might not be), it's also bugged in that it doesn't always show the correct currently selected unit's action (Convert/Attack/Poke). It can also be a bit hard to distinguish what team each unit is on. If you fail a level there's no way to restart. And finally, the sound effects are a bit loud compared to the music.

This all said, the actual puzzles (up to level 4; I accidentally messed that one up despite just about having the solution, and after being booted to the home screen didn't feel like playing the same few puzzles again) are really cool, and I love the concept of "fantasy siege as puzzle game" and how all the different units interact and have distinct roles that lead to mechanically interesting puzzles.

Thanks for reviewing this! Yeah, I had all of about five minutes to do a balance pass on the actual numbers, half an hour before the deadline. In an ideal version of this game, even with exactly the same strategic options, the twelve states that each quarter can be in (three food states, two military states, two "under attack" states) would be more noticeably different and thus meaningful to select between. But even more ideally as you suggest, a couple more mechanics (quarters affecting each other, and the enemy having more tactics than just random binary on/off attacks are the two I had toyed with as stretch goals that never materialized) would've made the strategizing have more depth.

Thanks! Yeah, I'm not an artist and I especially don't really know how to do digital art (though I did draw the castle itself with a mouse in Paint.net) - but we all learned how to use colored pencils in kindergarten, so I figured that's the direction I would lean in.

A reasonably fun shooter. I will say the "count down" aspect kind of got lost; the fact that there's a set number of enemies in a wave and it happens to be indexed backwards does not have a significant effect on the overall game.

I really like this game! The puzzles are genuinely engaging. The later puzzles, where multiple pieces attack multiple pieces at a time and you have to move some of them out of the way requires a good amount of thought and tracing pieces back and forth - it feels like the traditional physical puzzle game Rush Hour. Great job with the sound effects and art as well.

The theme of "count down," however, is extremely tangential. You never run into the problem where you see a solution that would take too many moves so you have to find a new tactic, so the countdown never comes up. In fact, you're already limited by the number of pieces on the board, since every move you make removes a piece and we start with a finite number of pieces on the board, so we don't really need an external countdown to limit the number of moves we can make.

By the way, the game is extremely large (in terms of screen size) on the itch page which can make it hard to play. I think you should be able to resize the game area on the itch project without messing with your submission to the game jam. (Don't quote me on this; double-check before you do this.) But if it is possible to shrink down the size, it might let the game be playable for more people, ones who don't have enormous monitors to fit the game on.

Ah, my Chinese is not good enough to fully play this game. I imagine most others playing this, coming from the GMTK community, would have even more trouble. If your target is an audience that primarily speaks English, I would suggest doing a game that doesn't depend so much on text.

我中文还会读一点点，所以还可以慢慢地用字典把一个词一个词翻译，玩了游戏里面的第一天。（要继续这样玩下去会太累，所以我停了。）这个游戏好像是detective-style的游戏，跟《Return of the Obra Dinn》和《The Roottrees Are Dead》相似，蛮有意思。就是要查探的东西我只看得半懂。

The concept of setting a scene up to withstand a physics-based earthquake is interesting. The actual implementation, though, ends up with not a lot of variety - just get the objects far away from the human. If you could iterate on the idea so that there's more strategizing or choices to make in your object placement, this could make for a cool gameplay mechanic.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure what's going on between Hizir and the AI. What they're talking about seems to have nothing to do with saving people from Earthquakes. Googling it really quickly, apparently Hızır is the Turkish name of Khidr, a figure in Islam, which I'm not particularly familiar with, so maybe their conversations would make more sense if I had more context/knowledge of Islam?

A couple bugs - Level 4 doesn't seem to open at all, though the other three do. Also, it seems easy to glitch objects out of bounds by pushing another object into it really fast, which means it will never bump into the human during the quake.

It feels very reminiscent of the game Minit - forcibly restart after X amount of time, but you are able to go farther because you've figured out what you're doing. The fact that you aren't told what you're doing and you have to figure it out each level is a interesting aspect to this. It sounds like on paper that would be bad game design, but actually it all gets wrapped into the learning that happens in your initial exploratory runs, so it feels like it's supposed to be underexplained, in addition to the obvious "figure out all the rooms in the level and where things are and what the best path between them all is."

The difficulty on these is a little high, I will say. The first level I had to do a couple of times even having figured out a good route in order to complete it; even then, I barely finished, with only 1 second left.

I really liked the basic idea, trying to put together multiple different sources with spotty data in order to pinpoint down the suspect. That's really the core of any good detective game. And here it was executed well for a game jam, though I would love to see a more fleshed-out version if this ever becomes a bigger project - once you've played the current version a couple times, the logic that you go through is kind of the same every time. Maybe you could have multiple setups with different room layouts, or multiple different Accomplices/handoffs you need to track down, or the Spy's identity is also obscured in addition to the Accomplice, or maybe certain characters can move in special ways (e.g. only the Chef and the Housekeeper have access to the Kitchen, or there's a secret passage that only the Boss knows about. Or you could have different sources of data, like possibly-faulty testimonies by the suspects. There are a lot of ways you could extend this basic logic puzzle if you were so inclined.

This was a great puzzle game. There are certainly nitpicks, most of which it looks like other people have already pointed out. I guess I can say that sometimes it felt like there wasn't an "aha" moment like in some other puzzle games, but instead found myself just kind of almost randomly moving the blocks and hoping that would be the solution - sometimes the solutions are very chaotic (especially with the purple blocks), and I don't really see how I was supposed to logic those levels out without basically guess-and-check. Maybe a "replay animation" button after you beat the level would help with that, because then you can really focus on what happens with the blocks the second time you see it?

But still, again, this is nitpicking. The overall concept, presentation, and execution were all very well done.

I actually have a solution in 20 steps! I don't want to give it away here in the comments (not that I know if mine is optimal either), but I'll say that it does not contain A at all.

This is really cool in principle, but it's hard to judge properly when there's not much of an actual challenge yet. Mechanically, it's basically a detective game. What it would have over a standard detective game is that the conclusion isn't "you're either right or you go do it again"; with this you can have half-wins of things like "you got X/3 job boards right" and just keep going with the plot without forcing you to figure out old puzzles. You can also have multiple solutions, and maybe which jobs you post on one day can affect what jobs are available (or even correct) on another.

But as it stands, none of those more complicated ideas are implemented in the game, so it ends up being a rather basic matching game.

Yeah, I was planning to have a mixed-enemy level too, but didn't have enough time to really think it out. (If I was going to be really ambitious, I was thinking about having further levels where you have the sword and wand and the opponents have the shield and book and are trying to escape, and then you're role-reversed that way. But that definitely was impossible for me within a single weekend.)

Oh this is fun. It's not complicated to try to think through just one turn of Uno, since it's such a simple game. But with the time pressure this becomes a fun system of trying to go fast without overthinking.

It would be cool to see the other Uno cards (skip, draw 2, and especially on-brand for this jam, reverse), but that does make it a bit more complicated, both in terms of the two players' AI and what you have to think through as the card.

This is very fun; I love the core gameplay loop of playing conversation cards. It's an interesting take on role-switching, a co-op game where you play both sides, and using card-drawing randomness to make up for the fact that you essentially have infinitely perfect table talk at all times since you are both sides and therefore know the hands on both sides.

The theming is also cool with the nice art and smooth music giving a perfect "secret undercover agent" vibe.

One thing that might've been nice was an improvement on the sort of meta-game of finding which of the four people is the one you're looking for. I don't see much of a reason to leave a conversation and go to another one until you're just kind of done searching one person. Maybe having the characters' decks influence each other, or locking trust progression behind earning trust with another character, or somehow give clues on which of the other people is the actual target person. Just some reason to go back and forth between different conversations.

Thanks for checking this out! Each unit can actually stay in place by clicking on the tile it's currently standing on. There's no "End Turn" button for the entire team like there is in something like Fire Emblem, but there are only two units to go through.

Oh this is very fun, a bullet hell where you have to dodge lots of things, but then dice mechanics throw a wrench into that.

You have full freedom to move around the board as necessary, but every step of the way, you have to keep thinking about what the current number means and what the next number you roll to will mean. Your movements are also restricted by the 6's, but it's something that's punished rather than disallowed, which again adds an interesting mental burden because you have to remember. Also, having the second side-view screen means you can directly see three sides and using the "add to 7" rule you can theoretically know where all six numbers are, but it takes more mental energy to decipher that image. That's really the main source of fun for the whole game: making very fast decisions and deciphering the situation quickly despite having so many parts that require your attention, even though each individual part is very quick to understand.

A couple small UI suggestions: I cannot remember which of the two shields is which. 1 vs 3 doesn't mean anything to me, and green vs blue doesn't mean anything to me. The resource meters at the top left, as well, I can't really tell which bar is for which resource. I know the dice images are supposed to represent this, but I can't really decipher it.

But those are small things. All in all this is a very fun game that really uses the theme very well.

Oh this is really fun. It's simple enough that you don't need to explain too much to get it - you can kind of figure it out by trial and error a couple times (though I was thoroughly baffled by what "Juke: 5 minutes" was supposed to mean throughout my entire first attempt at playing). The art and animation are clean and simple, too, in a way that works really well.

This is a very fun game. The principle is simple and understandable, but there's a lot to the back-and-forth between you and your opponent. And the pixel artstyle is also very well-done.

Great presentation in terms of visual design and general progression through a world, and the basic functionality is all there. Unfortunately, as a lot of others seem to be saying, this is just not very fun. The player has literally no agency, simply watching repetitive things unfold as you click.

This is a great base to make a bigger RPG-like game out of, if you wanted to extend this, but you'd have to make some sort of new gameplay system to keep the player's interest, more decisions that you have to make. Even simple decisions can compound into an interesting overall experience, but as your game stands now there's literally no choice at all.

This is very well-presented in terms of artstyle and mechanics - I really love the tabletop aesthetic of this, and the basic idea of this sort of 2-player game on a tile map. Except I can't quite figure out what it is I'm trying to be doing. I can move the dice and activate the abilities (except some faces don't have abilities on them, in which case I can't end that die's turn - and in cases where I am blocked off from rolling to a face that does have an ability, the game softlocks, as far as I can tell - I don't even know how to exit to menu or restart the game). I also have no concept of health, nor victory.

Still, from what I can tell, this looks like it would be very fun if I knew what I was trying to be doing (and I had a friend to play it with). The mechanics of rolling around and doing the various attacks and jumps and things is fun in and of itself.

A nice little game, with the "pay with life" option making this not a completely choiceless gambling game. A lot of my complaints are UI/UX issues (e.g. it would be nice to know how far there is left until the end - I didn't even realize there was an end until I read the description page) but of course as a game jam game I can't complain too much about that.