itch.io

Thank you!

Thank you for responding. I'm not sure what you mean with automatic vs manual export. Sharing export settings might help, although it is a weird issue that seams to be browser dependent. But hopefully that will just work.

Really cool atmosphere. I liked the dramatic irony of slowly crawling towards what we know is a bad place to go. But then, halfway through exploring the bunker, leaving the city for last, I found a Mech Suit, and suddenly the game was over. I couldn't even explore the game. And then I learned the game is randomised, not allowing me to go quickly back to where I was kicked out. But beside that, a good experience, and well made for only two days. There are some issues. The full screen mode does not work well, so I suggest turning off the button for full screen mode. Although I did need to use it when I accidentally dragged the top of a window outside the viewport.  And I did that, because it is possible to miss the dialogue being obscured by the dragged windows. But those should be easy enough to fix. But for the rest, it was an excellent experience, with good balance for difficulty of the puzzles to good feeling controls for both the letter input and the motion in the adventure screen.

I do need to ask if you did anything to allow your game to actually play embedded within the page. My godot game opens up on a second screen, which gets automatically maximised, breaking my UI. This is despite having "Embed in page" set. Are there any project setting or export settings you used other then default?

I quite like how elegant the concept is, as it is immediately clear what is going on. Unfortunately it seems like the time ran out when it comes to level design, but you probably already knew that. Time management comes with experience, so don't worry to much about it. I do suggest it is a mistake to have levels seemingly infinitely loop, as that leaves a worse impression then sending to a static, white text on black, thank you for playing screen. When it comes to the level design that there is, I expect you already had ideas that you weren't able to implement. The simple mechanic of growing alone can make some good straight forward puzzle platform levels. That makes the time spend on the different area effects seem misplaced. I could not figure out what the teal coloured area's effect was, as my body seemed to grow just the same. Also, since most people come from the press-longer-equals-higher-jump tradition, you can expect a player to keep space pressed, which in this game is a detriment. That is something to keep in mind. But take pride in that you did not fall in the trap of most first time developers, and actually have a way to quit your full screen game. You can't imagine how many times I had to use alt+f4. For the next time I suggest already looking before hand in how to export to HTML5. It is not that difficult, although Unity's WebGL has some unique pitfalls, but it helps immensely in the discoverability of your game. With Unity, you need to increase the viewport on itch.io such that the WebGL border is not cut off, and you need to turn off itch's own full-screen button, since it does not work with WebGL.

Very well done on your first game jam, and good luck with any future endeavours.

Very well made game. Good controls, good puzzle design, clear graphics, and good music. It could have done with some more difficult puzzles at the end. Also, I think it would fit better for the boxes to have simpler physics, rather then using some RigidBody physics, with unpredictable pushing and rotating physics. They felt very slippery, and the odd tumbling made level 12 more annoying then needed. I personally am not a fan of auto jump when holding space. With the platformer tradition of longer presses equals higher jump, I keep space pressed when jumping for all games, meaning I constantly jumped off corners just when reaching them. There were two levels I found confusing. I feel like I cheesed level 9. I only used one grow pellet, to jump around the level on the right. I could not figure out how to get up in the middle, but the jump I did was by far the most difficult one in comparison with the rest of the game. Also, in level 15, it was unclear where the end coin actually was. But overall amazing work, and good luck on any further endeavours.

PS. Two small things. If you have unity WebGL, you should disable the full screen button itch.io provides, since now there are two full-screen buttons, one of which is useless. Also, it seems currently impossible to get from the win screen back to the menu.

Fun concept, but there are some implementation details that hold it back. Quite often I was just roaming around, not encountering anything, to only see an enemy 10 times my size. Most of the time those were the only circles I found, requiring me to shoot a dozen times to gain a little bit of size. Never was I bigger then a spawning circle, so I could actually compete with the larger shapes. There is good variety in enemies, but before you have substantial mass, I cannot deal with stars, and rectangles and triangles don't help me gain size. So I never reached a position where I could actually compete with enemies. It could also be clearer when you are bigger or smaller then an enemy. Comparing circle to square sizes is not so intuitive, and it is an instant death if you are wrong. The background also behaved weirdly when hitting an enemy (circles and rectangles). With each hit the background got smaller, persisting between resets, until randomly getting larger in equal steps. 

I hope you learned a lot from you first game (like I had all those years ago), and I wish you good luck on any further endeavours.

Good work for your first project. It was hilariously mean to say "press shift to dash" right before a spike trap, killing me instantly! Good luck for any future projects

Why do you assume I took the boss on straight away? I got health and dash options, but no damage. And you can say, it had 70 health, but I attacked it 4 times per cycle for at least 15 cycles (I had a lot of health) with a dagger, a few of which I was big for, as said before. The reason I criticise the lack of enemy variety, is not to say you should have created more enemies, but that the floor is too big for the number of enemies you made. That is also the reason I wanted to see the boss, instead off face the 20 th room of samey enemies.

Amazing game. I do think the levels get too difficult too quickly. Also, not being able to push blocks all the way up feels like a bug to me.

I like the concept of the game, but there is almost no development during gameplay. The animation and sluggishness of movement at first amazingly showed off the true size of stars. I especially like how impactful it felt to catch my first star. But after that it felt like I had already experienced all the game had to offer. I caught the most point worth start already third. Maybe I was unlucky, but I reached the end of the play area with 15,000 energy, so I don't see how I am meant to reach 500,000 energy. Some things to focus on in the future, and I wish you good fortune with any future endeavours.

An amazingly clever idea. It took only a few seconds to get how it worked. Having the balance of safety vs reward works amazingly well. I stopped when I scored 1034. There is one glaring issue, and that is that when I enter my first rage, I am so big it is trivial to destroy all the balloons, and then I am waiting around for more balloons to spawn. This dead time is something where I think more risk reward for stopping your rage earlier could go. There also seems to be a noticeable spawning increase. This very quickly ends the game, and I think it could do with some more flatening so the game can go longer. But congratulations on this amazing game

Fun game with a amazing artwork. But there are a lot of balance issues. I did not get passed the first boss, because it had way to much health. I have hit it over a hundred times at least, and there was zero feedback for how far I got. The levels beforehand were quite dull. For the longest time there were only two enemies, which after a few encounters were trivial to defeat. Then came the skeleton archer, which does not shoot if you rush them. And just before the boss battle, I encountered a wisp, wish was impossible to kill, until suddenly it did take damage and die (at least, that was how it felt). The movement felt good, but it was often not clear which objects I could walk underneath. The scaling up and down felt quite useless. I only used small a handful of times, and ever found a moment that big was useful, until the boss where I could use it as a damage bonus. But despite all this, an amazing achievement for a game jam game.

I am a sucker for the pixelated graphics. Reminds me of DS games of my youth. The carpet making is unfortunately poorly explained within the game. Having the top of the description say that together with Pavius we will learn to make carpets made me expect to be able to learn from the grandpa in the game. So I spend more time trying to figure it out then usual. The further explanation in the description could also be more clear. It is generally advisable to start with what your goal is, so further explanations can be understood in how that allows the player to achieve the goal. Further to prevent confusion, the descriptions could be clearer. Right now I'm asked to press E to enter, where it only shakes, instead of communicating that I need to pick up a carpet. One small thing, after beating my first minigame, a performance panel appeared. I wish you good luck with any further endeavours!

The base game is quite fun, and I liked the theming, but there are still a lot of pain points getting in the way of the fun. The rotating and walking is very slow, making it really difficult to actually dodge the tongue attack. Whether you are hurt by the tongue attack feels inconsistent. You can only get one, maybe two hits off during half of the attacks, dealing a pitiful amount of damage.  The knock back makes thematic sense, but doesn't play that well. Since you rotate so slowly, you cannot use the large movement to get around interestingly.  When rotating, the gun snap flips to the other side, getting in the way of me hitting the boss multiple times.

I hope you don't take this to negatively. There is mostly a lot to get in the way of the fun game underneath, and I hope your next game will become even better.

"Your game plays in the webpage window for me! Looks great!" ???? Why? It doesn't for me. Kinda makes me more annoyed. But thank you for answering.

Very fun game. The speed felt incredible, the controls were easy to understand. Unfortunately you didn't have much level after the tutorial. We all have been there when it comes to pacing in a game jam.

I had a question. Your godot game actually plays within the webpage. For me, and seemingly for many others, it automatically opens a second window and forces it to be maximised. This broke my UI, which I didn't have the time to fix. Did you do anything specific, or follow a specific tutorial on how to to export a project to html5? (P.S. I have Embed in Page selected)

Very good sense of humour. Very nice escalation of insanity, as well as good switching between different sizes. I did often get stuck (very good idea to put the walkthrough in the description!) The main reason I got stuck is I often did not realise a background object was actually an item I could pick up. I'm not sure how that could have been made clearer, without ruining the surprise of what you use. But on the other hand right now I got spoiled by the walkthrough, so it couldn't hurt. Some specific animations were amazing, but the world layout did leave something to desire. The regular sized world seemed too large, making it feel empty. Those are some points you can focus on!

I found the controls more frustrating then fun. Personally, I didn't care much for the time limit, since it mostly meant dying because I didn't immediately understand the ins and outs of the system. Maybe introduce it a bit later, when the player is more familiar with the controls.

A nice fun concept. The platforming was quite basic, but functional for what you need it to do. I really liked the simple ingenuity of simply taking a photo of a post-it note. The manipulating of the bar charts was quite interesting, but the interface was a bit wacky.   At one point a bar began switching between two modes, eventually pushing me off. Also, removing people with a right click was unexplained, and seemed inconsistent. Celeberty_B could not be reduced to zero people, whist Celeberty_A could. That felt inconsistent. I wish you good luck with any future endeavours.

I really liked the style. The effects overtop the crt-tv really added a lot. I did find the feedback on the questions lacking. I have no idea if I had answered correctly or wrongly. Except for at one later point referring to weight of a black hole in number of ducks, I did not notice much of changing scales, since I was loosing interest in the questions, coming from not receiving any feedback. At one point there were only three possible answers for a time. And then there was the open ended question. Getting the unrelated "With that GUY?" reaction for every answer I gave was a bit disappointing, and I'm not sure if it is possible to guess what the answer would be. Hope you found my feedback useful, and good luck with any future endeavours

It looks and sounds amazing, but I think more attention could have gone to QA. The controls are very finicky, making controlling the puzzle elements frustrating. The mechanics also feel inconsistent, especially that it is possible to move the top right brown glob further off the wall by extending, retracting and then extending. That is either a bug, or the game works inconsistently, since the red guy the level prior did not have that behaviour. Also, I feel like there are to many levels. The difficulty curve is way off, and if there are some interesting puzzles in the later parts, then I won't get to it because of how many puzzles there are (for a game jam game where I also want to play other games.) But, overall, it is a nicely made game, with good juice and not missing anything, so I hope you keep on making game jam games in the future.

Very fun game, but really needed some text explaining you need to match the number of bones above the enemies. Also, the game is too punishing, were it not for the many safe points. But I was still frustrated by attacks with no tells, instant deaths and dodge with start up frames. I then quit after the (felt like) fifth area with a 3-bones guy, since there was little more to keep me engaged. Those are some points for your next game. Also I found the base volume way to high. The graphics and effects do look amazing, so kudos on that!

Hello, congrats on your first game jam game. You've made something quite good. You might not believe it, but behind the graphics mistakes that you will learn to improve with more experience, you show good understanding of more fundamental game design. You have an excellent wordless tutorial, and a good difficulty curve. You also made creative expansions upon the initial gameplay. The blocks falling at different speeds, and falling on top of each other, actually develop the skills of the player horizontally. For the first you need to pay attention to a new property, and for the second one get the rhythm. What one usually sees is that there is only vertical progression, where the speed/rate of block spawning increases. So that is something to be proud of. Something I do have to warn about is the background music. Repetitive music can easily irritate the player, especially one with such a strong base line that does not deviate. It really sounds like you took the intro of a song, and made that loop, especially with the last note before the loop being different. For some practical advise, don't use itch.io full screen mode for Unity WebGL games, since they don't work together. Also, you need to take the Unity WebGL border in mind well filling in the game window pixel sizes. For better discoverability, it really helps to add a thumbnail. That is something you are allowed to do after the game jam deadline, since you can change the game page and metadata. Just not the game files. Hopefully you had a lot of fun making this, and I wish you good luck on any future project.

Fun idea, but the game is way to difficult. You have very little time to built a road before the car has reached you. So you quickly start panicking. It is also difficult to plan ahead, because there seem to be too many different kinds of pieces. Classic Tetris gets away with a single piece preview, because you can leave space for possible pieces, since there are only 7. But there are way to many to have spots for things, as well as little time to waste dumping unneeded roads to dig for a piece you need.

Generally speaking, as a game designer you are way better at your game then anyone else. So if something is a challenge for you, then it is too hard for your players. Especially with a game jam game, where people only want to spend some five minutes playing your game, before moving onto the next one.

Hopefully you had a lot of fun making this, and good luck on any future projects.

The concept is fine, and the music is well suited, but there are a lot of bugs. But you probably already knew that, so there is no use in telling you to focus on them first. But after that, I would think about some issues regarding the interface. For some text you have used a texture, instead of a label, making it render stretched and pixelated. Also the level select is not user friendly. I think everyone who played will accidentally select the bottom right level, whilst the hardest to reach is clearly the tutorial level. That shouldn't be the case. Also, I would look into a music manager. For most game engines there are free scripts/plugins that allow you to easily manage your music, and then it doesn't need to restart on every scene transition.

I hope you had a lot of fun making this, and wish you good luck on any future project!

It's an elegant concept, but the movement could have done with some tweaking. Right now it feels sluggish to turn the ship. While it does make it more difficult, I suspect it is more fun to lose because there are too many ships, rather then lose because the ship cannot turn away fast enough. There also seems something weird going on with the screen warp, where then entry and exit point are mirrored. Maybe that was intentional, but it will be confusing to most players. Lastly I suggest being careful with sharp (high and lound) noises. They can be very uncomfortable, especially with no background music for the nodes to play off of. Hopefully you had a lot of fun making it, and good luck on any further projects.

It's a cute little game, and I hope you had fun making it. One thing to keep in mind is that right now there is a long wait time between solving the puzzle and seeing the solution play out. That could frustrate players if it happens for each level. Also there is a bug where you can place multiple tiles on the same square. Also, I can't see what the square at the bottom right is of use for

Starting with a comparison to monkey island is risky, since it gives very specific expectations, that I don't think you've met. Besides the final line, the dialogue does not have the jokes or whimsy the series is known for. But in general it is a neat little game. The change to platformer was surprising, and the controls did not feel precise enough to make the jumps comfortable. (A useful resource for platformer specifics https://gmtk.itch.io/platformer-toolkit) A small issue with the movement is that diagonals are faster then moving straight. This can be fixed by normalizing the final movement vector before multiplying (or when moving diagonal divide speed by 0.7)

Hope you have fun with any future projects.

I hope you have had a lot of fun making this. But it looks like you over scoped quite a lot. I see a lot of time spend in making the environments. Look at how big the city level is. And there is nothing to do. But you probably already knew that. For next time, I suggest scoping the game way down, and focus on your primary game play loop first. For example, what does the dialogue actually add? I know it is the easiest way to get your story across, but what does that story add? Those are the tough questions you need to ask when it comes to game jam games, because otherwise, you will run out of time. I wish you good luck with any future projects!

Neat game, but I don't think there is enough variety to keep the simple gameplay engaging for 15 rounds. The fact that the categories could change right before an item falls into it feels really unfair to the player. Also, I didn't seem to get more then four crosses, and never died. I hope you had fun making it!

Hey @Starry,
Since you asked me to play your game, I recorded myself playing. But there were a lot of issues. I recorded my immediate reaction here, but I think you already know most of the things you would want to improve next time. Good luck on any future endeavours.

If there are more specific game design questions you have, feel free to ask.

Most people have it easier to see words as single blocks of information, making it easier to do these kinds of comparisons (this is called 'chunking'). So I suspect it would make it easier to comprehend.

Yeah, there is an unfortunate bug with mouse capturing after exporting to html5. In my case pressing escape will fix the issue.

I quite like the game. A few pointers. Having every enemy be killed in one hit makes the game play quite dull. You can press space and survive until the second to last wave. The difficulty is not the problem, but the simplicity in 'solving' the gameplay. One way could be to increase both your health and the enemy ship health. Then you have to react to your enemies, you are forced to doge and weave. These kinds of things is what make a game like this more fun.

The final boss is a good example. Its pattern forces you to move carefully if you want to hit it, but allows for safer play, but you win by reaching the end instead of destroying the boss. More interesting without per se more difficult. Unfortunately the game did begin to lag during the boss (do you make sure the bullets are destroyed when off screen so they don't take any more resources?)

Overall, a well made game. Good luck with any future project.

I really liked the spell drawing mechanic. Right now it does feel quite random, as it I feel little connection between the symbol I draw, and the effect created. Some of the effects, especially the ones where the fireball hangs in the air seem a bit weird. You  advise testing some patterns out in the beginning. If you want players to test things out, I would speed up the mana regen in the test room, so you don't have to wait between every attack you want to test out. The boss is quite lacklustre. Only a damage sponge that only walked around, and nothing else. It seemed also possible to kill it without it agroing onto you. One issue is that the game did not take into account different screen sizes. On my higher resolution screen, the game was placed in the corner. Try seeing if you can zoom it it, or have it at least centred. Good luck with your future endeavours.

Thank you for the suggestion. I had been thinking about using some indicators, similar to directional indicators in COD games, but I focused on other things (like lighting differences between the debug and exported gameplay (You could not see a difference between white and pink without shadows in html5!))

Unfortunately, it is mostly overwhelming. I think it is similar to Paper's Please where you need to match up incoming data with outgoing data. But there is way to little explained to understand what you need to do. Having time pressure on long number comparison is just not that fun. The lack of feedback if you do good or bad is also really hurting the game.

I hope you have had a fun time this game jam, and wish you good luck on further projects.

It is a good idea, but the execution does hamper it a lot. The movement is really slow, making the short distances you need to travel take to long. The camera itself is not bad, but often you need to backtrack and rescan your island to find you have missed a plank which was completely hidden and impossible to see because of the camera. It was also a bit dull. The gameplay option Thank god there was a respawn option, since there was a gab around the last collectible. BTW Esc is not a good menu button, since the input gets eaten by unity when in full-screen. Overall, it was a fine game, and best wishes for further projects.

It is a well made game, but there are a design hiccups. Because you have to click to both look around and to find a hidden item, half of my find results were unintentional. This issue is made more likely with the weird choice to have such large hitboxes for finding the objects. If a single branch of a tree is wrong, then only that branch should be a valid click, and not the entire tree.
I hope you had a lot of fun with your first game jam!

Like others have already said, this game is way to difficult. A good rule of thumb is that if a difficulty feels good for you as a designer, that should be a (very) hard mode. During the making of the game you have already had hours getting good at the game as you are making it. Meanwhile your players will jump in with zero knowledge. Then on top this is a game jam, so people playing only want to spend a few minutes on a game, and move on to the next quite quickly. That means your game should be even more approachable then usual. For example, I doubt no one got to enjoy your upgrades, since everyone died and quit before they got there.

Secondly, it seemed like you over scoped your game. A lot of things, from the enemy spawns, to the movement speed to the fire-rate of enemies, feel like a one and done type deal. I, too, am guilty of thinking, "I'll tune that later", and then ending up with an arbitrary integer for my movement speed. But here it really bit you in the but, since that is what prevents players for reaching.

I hope you continue on your game development journey, and whish you the best of luck.