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Museums and walking tours are definitely touchstones for the design. It wasn't meant to be slapdash initially, but placeholders stayed in as the scope narrowed, and honestly I think it fits well enough that I'm going to try to keep some of that energy in the final version (some buildings will need to be replaced so they can have interiors).

"an XCVG game with physical dice as a mechanic" I think that's a matter of when, not if, but on a technicality and maybe not the technicality you think.

Last day of school is an apt comparison. Closing the book on a pretty long chapter, but also moving on to somewhere (hopefully) new and exciting. Stepping back is definitely bittersweet, but I do feel it is the right decision because it does give me room to do things I'm much more excited for.

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I'll be sharing an update on my plans for the full game soon.

I love the graphics, but the actual gameplay felt like Calvinball with cards. Putting aside the central conceit, I have no idea what the rules of the game are or what the win condition is. I just put cards in the middle, sometimes more cards go into my hand, and sometimes I can't play anything and have to pass. 

After playing a bit and re-reading the page I think it's supposed to be War? Or maybe Uno?

I think the basic concept of "you don't know what the cards do and you have to figure that out" could work, but there isn't enough structure to build the initial mental model you need to start working out the details. For me I think there are too many card types, but that's something that will vary between players.

This is definitely the sort of game I think of when I think of SBIG Jam. It's a bizarre mashup of genres with a weird premise, a heap of jank, horrible graphics and bizarre audio design.

I couldn't get past the bear encounter though.

I don't know if it's because of the colours, the fact that the game screen is in the background, the font or something else about the design, but I found the instructions really hard to read, and this extended to the ingame help.

The premise itself is really interesting, with lots of potential for creativity that I didn't leverage, but the gameplay itself is a disappointment. Spam click enemies until they fall (I still have no idea where exactly the hit zone of my weapon is), jump the extremely unforgiving gaps, then hope you can kill the boss before he kills you (because its attack cannot feasibly be dodged). I really wish the gameplay was tightened up because it falls on the side of bad jank for me. 

Quintessentially SBIG, with loud visual style, weird audio design, and slightly questionable design choices.

I think the only thing I'd consider bad jank rather than good jank is the control scheme. There's no reason for attack to be on the mouse; it's unintuitive enough that I didn't even realize you could attack on my first run, and it means that even though the arrow keys are mapped for movement, you're stuck with a/d unless you have three hands.

I made it to the third level, I am not good at platformers.

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Admittedly, most of them are references to my own entries. I do plan on adding shout-outs to various jam legends, but not until after the voting period ends.

I really liked battleship with the twist of different ships you could buy. It's probably not the first to do it, but it's the first I've actually played.

Only thing I wish it had was a sound effect when your own ship gets hit.

It's an interesting concept, but between the confusing, hard to read instructions, obtuse UI, and extreme bugginess I wasn't able to get anywhere.

It took me a few tries, but the game was short enough that it wasn't too big a deal to restart. I don't know how SBIG it is, the game is quirky but doesn't feel all that janky and is genuinely interesting on several levels.

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I do plan on finishing this in some form or another, but it could be a while.

It's a very specific flavour of weird and janky, and I'm all for it. I don't know if I ran into a bug or just missed something, but there didn't seem to be any new packages to deliver after the woman and the crocodile.

That was truly bizarre. It's a little slow at first, but I think the overall length is just about right- I'd effectively won (got both upgrades) before the joke became stale. Simple, but oh so strange.

The crops are slow to grow and I almost gave up waiting for something to happen. I'm glad I didn't, though; I was blindsided (in a good way!) by what I got when my plants were ready to pick. Definitely fits the "looks normal at first but isn't" SBIG paradigm. Some old flash game vibes too.

I'll admit I did kind of skim it, but I don't recall anything saying how to break out of the loop, just how the loop mechanic worked.

An underrated gem. It's almost an epic fantasy adventure, except it's batshit insane at every turn and looks like it was drawn in MSPaint. 

I wish the Radiance Knight got an ending slide, that living flashbang was my favourite character despite her limited screen time. All of the characters had a lot personality, though, and the story was hilarious.

I did find the timing-based minigames pretty frustrating. It could be my machine, but there was always just enough lag to throw me off. Maybe these should be slowed down a bit.

This is definitely the strangest game in the jam I've played so far. I have no idea what the hell happened, though I am no Biblical scholar.

The art style is very unique, and I loved some of the weird details like the censored feet.

The music was interesting at first but did start get annoying after a while.

I still have no idea what I just experienced.

This one was hyped up quite a bit, and I was not disappointed.

It's an Enygmatic shooter through and through. That's basically a developed subgenre now. There's a distinct visual identity, a certain feel, gameplay elements and map designs that come up every time. And they always make for very interesting SBIG Jam entries.

Is it the magnum opus, the culmination of nearly a decade of stepping stones? I don't know, maybe. What I can say is that it does feel like a celebration of all of its predecessors, not just the original and reboot Out Of Order but everything in between.

There's a fair bit of jank around the edges- enemies stuck in one spot, hotkeys that reset on level load, a hard to drive car, weird animations and cutscenes with extra appendages. I don't think any of it really takes away from the game, not in this jam. The core shooting mechanics are solid. There's a fair few things I can think of that would be nice-to-haves, but not much gameplay- or presentation-wise that really takes away from the experience (hold that thought, I'm being very specific with that wording).

The difficulty is kind of all over the place, though. Enemies with near-perfect aim and great use of cover are hard in general, but the shotgun and spec ops guys are absolutely brutal, especially before you get the dynamic nullifier. The final boss, by contrast, felt anticlimactic. I already had rockets saved from the first encounter, and that took me 70% of the way. I was actually kind of surprised when the closing narrations

I think the worst part is that it's a pretty long, quite involved game that feels like it's about to fall apart at any moment with no way to recover. There's no save system, checkpoints, or chapter select as far as I can tell, so a softlock means potentially starting all over again. The occasional load stutter and framerate dip did not help the feeling, either.

I was not expecting to see so many shout-outs to my own games, and definitely not such a long and heartfelt message at the end. I've looked forward to your entries every year, always find your postmortems interesting, and though I'm retiring from jamming I do plan to poke my head in the door and see what people have come up with next year.

The art is very cute, and I was happy to see a chill, story-driven entry. The timeskip isn't super clear; our protagonist seems to go home and then wake up 3 months later in another city. There's also a bug that caused the train background to keep playing for half the game.

I did feel kinda railroaded toward the ending. Not sure if there's only one ending, or I just happened to get that one. I'm glad the pairing worked out, because I didn't feel they were a good fit for each other and was hoping for a third option. 

I think the pacing could be faster and the length is just on the edge of being long enough versus too long.

I'm really nitpicking now and I think I'm beating around the bush a bit. The elephant in the room (to mix metaphors a bit) is that this really didn't feel like an SBIG game at all. The premise isn't that out there, there's no super weird twist mixed in, and it doesn't have a bizarre style or janky gameplay. It feels like a game made in earnest for a more normal jam.

Very strange, yet weirdly satisfying. A bit too finicky for me, but one of the most unique and unusual ideas I've seen in the jam!

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I was going to fix the level up after the jam for the full release (the street layout is still going to remain simplified), but honestly I think I might leave a lot of it as-is, only replacing buildings that need interiors.

Track10 is extra special. It could be hitting some edge case in the script, but it's also possible it's stalling or crashing out trying to load the credits video. Incorrect path or codec issue, maybe. The Linux build is labelled experimental because I've never tested it, sorry!

I wish I'd gotten further along and the singing was a little better, but I... don't hate it.

If there's a time to go through the backlog and add some callbacks, it's definitely the tenth anniversary jam!

Sadly, your effort to get Giralt's full title right was somewhat for naught, as it's inconsistent throughout the series. It's been Riverwood, Riviera, and Rivia depending on which joke I wanted to make and how much I was willing to push it. Jennifer has always been of Vandenberg though.

Honestly, the lack of a 3D map _almost_ works for SBIG Jam. There's some frustration to it, but it was also kind of funny when it came up.

It has a horrendous control scheme* and painful collision detection, which could work, but I personally found it more frustrating than fun. There's potential in the premise, too, but there doesn't really seem to be any twist or quirk to it that might kick it up a level.

* It's probably more tolerable on a phone, but I'm not playing it on a phone, and there's nothing that says that the game intended as mobile-only.

It's pretty minimal and very janky, but has an almost surreal feel to it.

I got two out of three endings- the bad ones. I tried to get the Ending 1 as well, but I wasn't sure if I was actually shipping any of the items because of the lack of feedback and I had no idea how far away I was from hitting the goal, so after a while I gave up.

Despite having little in common with the characters, this game felt oddly relatable. Maybe I know a Lucy, and Luna, and a Lilith. I thought the character was called Lung for a moment because of the text though.

The art style is objectively horrendous, the narrative meanders back and forth across the fourth wall, and the audio design is... interesting. For SBIG Jam, though, it hit the right notes. I think my one complaint is that the minigames do overstay their welcome a bit- each feels about 1.5x longer than it needs to be, and the bypasses feel like a band-aid solution.

At first I didn't realize you had to shoot with the space bar and thought the game was broken. Once I figured that out I got into the rhythm of it pretty quickly.

I felt kinda bad for shooting the little guys though.

It's very simplistic, but also weirdly satisfying.

The game is kinda over once you get the auto upgrades, though.

It's janky and weird looking, and that's certainly on point for SBIG Jam. But it feels like it's missing something, like there should be a twist or a gimmick to it that's just not there.

It's exactly what's described, and it's pretty short, but it's cute and fun.

Okay, I was not expecting that- not spoiling it for those who haven't played it yet. Loved the twist, though! I didn't get very far, but the style and execution is quintessential SBIG.

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It felt right to bring out the old characters and work them into what is really more a celebratory look back than an actual game. I wanted to put in some of the recurring characters like Kevin34, Frank Malone, and the Tortoise, but I just didn't have time to go beyond my own creations (and even then some are missing). The ending is 100% a meta narration aimed straight at the player, and at the old hands especially.

I threw the car in at the last minute, I'd already built it for a project that will never see the light of day, so I figured "what the hell, if it works I'll ship it." 

I'm not quite done with this yet- the part in the ending narration about finishing the game and making it a proper sendoff is real. But I'll talk about that more after the jam.

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Thanks for playing!

I'm happy to report that the arm is already quite a bit better.

I played this prior to the jam. Lots of fun, great tutorial and I loved the references to past SBIG games. I didn't realize there were multiple layers of buildings, though, and surprised myself with a crazy difficult route on the second day.

Honestly, it's not good, but considering the constraints it was made under, impressive nonetheless.

Insert "is this a trans allegory?" meme here.

It's never actually explained (as far as I can tell) that you can only shoot three times, and it's hard to tell if you're moving from the parallax background alone, but honestly, neither really break the game and both add to the janky feel. The pacing is just about perfect, it's long enough to get into but not so long that it drags on.

It's very weird and very buggy. I got murdered by the fish guy, softlocked in some kind of meeting with flatland-looking people, still haven't figured out the boss. Though I wish it had slightly better signposting it is very SBIG as is.

I think I'm just not the target audience. I haven't played DELTARUNE or OVERSTORY, and I never finished UNDERTALE. I also hated the combat in the latter, and found the humour hit and miss. So pretty much everything here is going over my head unfortunately.

The wheel mechanic is kinda neat. Having to click instead of hitting a key is awkward. And that's kind of all I have to say.

I tried to negotiate with the minions, died before I even got a turn, but eventually just avoided them, negotiated with a different NPC and got an ending of sorts.

That was about the experience I expected, mind, but far from what the page and what little I skimmed of the GDD promised.

I have no idea if this is genuinely an overly ambitious idea that had to be pared way down in the execution phase, or a parody of overly ambitious ideas that suffered massive requirements scrubbing to meet a deadline. Honestly, I'm still kinda at a loss on how to evaluate this one.

I see what you're going for with the description on the page, especially the "I remember how it used to be" section, but I feel it would have hit better in 2022.

I got... 1%.

I love the style, I love the concept, I still have no idea what a kerfzel is, but I just found the gameplay way too frustrating to be enjoyable. I never got a handle on the arm controls and I think the game kinda hinges on that. It took me two attempts and several minutes to get logged in, and I was never able to clear all of the popups when those came up. I tried mashing quickly, I tried being precise, but no matter what they kept spawning.

I made it to the second day but didn't bother continuing when it threw the same puzzles at me right out of the gate.