itch.io

Thanks! Yes, I noticed while playtesting that it took a few minutes to really grasp how to steer with only left and right, but fortunately the movement seems to feel satisfying once you “get it”.

And you’re right: I had like 6 different boatless swimming controls programmed and only decided on the best one last minute, so I completely forgot to add it to the tutorial ;)

Thanks!

You’re absolutely right. For 90% of the dev time, the upgrades did indeed alternate (wave 1 = new enemy, wave 2 = upgrade, wave 3 = new enemy again, and so forth). While testing, people felt the diversity in enemies was more interesting than the upgrades at the start, which is why I changed it last-minute to introduce only new enemies in the first few waves.

Then again, I was only able to find 2 people to quickly test the game. Maybe they just happened to like seeing new animals ;)

Thanks! Yes, the idea of rocks having their powerup inside (and you have to break it out) was merely added last minute because I wanted to relate the game to theme as much as possible. When I update the game, I will surely try many different solutions, and being able to shoot a water gun (for example) is a good one!

Thanks! The original idea I had was far more experimental and more tightly linked to the most literal meaning of Inside Out, but, well, it wasn’t fun when I tested it. And so the game drifted a bit further from the theme than I planned for. (Also, I’ll fix the placement of the Treeheart in a later update!)

Thank you! Yes, it’s hard to get the balance right for such a game in such a short time. My own personal best when submitting was only wave 8 of 16, but I actually barely play tower defense games :p

Thanks! Indeed, sometimes it feels like you can’t give games the time they deserve when doing ratings, so I’m glad you decided to spend some time on mine.

Aw man, that’s unfortunate! It means the web build is incompatible with the browser/system you happen to be using. Once the game jam is over, I’ll upload a windows build that you’re hopefully able to run!

Thanks!

And yes, I keep stubbornly making local multiplayer games for jams ;) This time, fortunately, it meshed really well with the original idea.

Thanks a lot!

Thanks for playing and feedback!

Indeed, I wrote down a few rules to modify seed drop time (such as making their timer faster when inside), but ran out of time before implementing them! I will surely add those once the jam is over.

Thanks for playing! Yes, I struggled to find a first wave that would be welcoming to new players, but not annoyingly slow on repeat plays.

(In hindsight, I should’ve probably just kept a counter NUM_PLAYS and made the first wave easier if that counter was 0. Something for a later update!)

Great! I’ve submitted both games and hope they don’t fall apart. Thanks for hosting the jam!

I had two ideas for this jam, and I couldn’t decide which was better, so I just developed them in parallel. It seemed a good approach at the time.

I was wrong. Now I have two little games and I still don’t know which one to submit :p

Am I allowed to submit both? Is this frowned upon? I’m completely fine with just picking one if you want, no worries, I was just curious.

Pandaqi

Thanks a lot for playing and for the feedback!

Thanks!

Haha I used to play with four people on the same keyboard in high school/university. It’s really fun … if everyone doesn’t take the game too seriously and is okay with their hand being pushed away :p

But yeah, 3+ players usually means you better grab one or two controllers instead!

Thanks for playing!

And yes, that issue was the one major thing I just couldn’t solve before the deadline. (The issue of “I’m really sure I’m in the right spot, but somehow I keep missing it”, and it kept happening even when I made the overlap range really big!)

Then today I woke up and suddenly realized why this happened. Turns out there was a slight bug in the goggle reporting when really close to an object :/ Slight enough to mostly go unnoticed, but not always. Will be fixed in a later update, of course!

Thanks for playing! Yes, customization is a great idea, perhaps also map selection or something. I was honestly a bit sad that the deadline came so soon, because I too think the idea has much more potential!

Thanks! Yes, I was tweaking the numbers on glasses right until the moment I had to stop and submit ;)

I honestly never even considered having the mouse rotate your flashlight (to see up/down better)! That should work well, I think.

(In fact, I forgot that the mouse existed the entire weekend. I only added the possibility to switch by clicking very late in development.)

Thanks!

And yes, I agree, that situation was a compromise. To make the tutorial as light as possible, you only get garbage bins in a later level. Until then, you can only lose your inventory by simply visiting a cart with the wrong thing—but that’s probably a tiny rule that many miss at first glance.

I adore games like this! I’ll try to explain why (also to myself).

• Slime mechanic fits theme, is unique, and well-explained
• Slime mechanic is also just a good mechanic: it forces you to bring your spaceship close to bullets, adding a high risk/high reward idea
• Slime mechanic becomes even better once you realize they are a shield against bullets as well.
• The crew members being thrown around inside the spaceship like it’s nothing is funny

Very easy to learn and play. Sometimes a bit janky to control with the very bouncy walls. Could use better visuals and feedback, but that’s alright for a jam game. (I only realized very late that spikes removed a crew member. I’d just avoided them entirely on the assumption they’d insta-kill me.)

Well done!

I understand what you’re going for (the idea of “fewer moves is better”), but I feel the way it’s explained and the difficulty of level 1 is just way too high.

Took me a long while to understand the controls. I still never got past level 1 :p

Here are some friendly suggestions.

• Instead of a separate tutorial screen, make the tutorial interactive: the first few levels are very basic and simply teach one new button each time.
• And then the first level could be the same as it is now, but upside down: you simply have to “fall into” that box. It still requires some steering and understanding controls, but at least I would have been able to play past it.

A very simple core gameplay loop, but it works well :) The easiest ideas are often also the easiest to screw up, but I feel you dodged that bullet. The speed, the snappy controls, the spacing of checkpoints, it’s all nicely balanced.

As others stated, with more polish and content, it could turn into something great. And the soundtrack does make it feel almost like a rhythm game.

Also, congratulations on your first jam entry!

Very polished, feels like an app you could download right now in the Play Store. Also love how well (and quickly) the game is taught.

The “randomness” (or chaotic nature) of the puzzles feels near the right balance between “oh god why don’t the leaves ever do what I want” and “yeah, I feel in control”. Sometimes frustrating, but never too much.

(As others stated, level 6 blew up in my face with leaves appearing and disappearing randomly :p)

A very pretty game, both the content and the general presentation (icon, logo, etc)! Certainly did not feel like a rough jam game. The application of the theme/story is also nice.

The core gameplay is okay (cleaning an area is always satisfying!), but did not really interest me. Maybe it was the repetitiveness (and I wanted extra twists or ideas earlier on). Maybe the beautiful art gave me unreasonably high expectations.

Nevertheless, well done!

Wow, that’s a lot of content for a jam game! (Or maybe I’m just very bad at clicking a dot at the right time, which is why it took me a while to finish.)

Explaining the game while playing is always great. The overall theme/design/mood feel polished, unique and well-done. The sound effects really helped here!

I’m not sold on the minigame: at first, it seemed smart and fun, but then it gets repetitive. (Maybe one or two extra “twists” to it, near the end, would’ve been nice?)

Thanks! Yes, I used a simple Area2D that checks if it overlaps the customer body. But that body is quite a bit smaller than their actual sprite (to make the fake perspective/sprite sorting work). In the future, I should probably just use an Area on Area check (with a much larger area for enemies, or customers in this case).

Haha, thanks! It’s always very hard to gauge how difficult your own game is, after playing it yourself for hours. When I submitted it, I thought “isn’t this game too simple!?” Judging by everyone’s comments, it’s far from simple :p

Haha I actually asked another to playtest the game before submitting, and they also sometimes thought the UI dash icon was a real one. Completely forgot to fix that before submitting!

(Although I’m not sure how to fix it. Maybe move it so the UI icon is never inside the store bounds? Or animate it in a completely different way?)

Thanks a lot!

Yes, I had doubts about that rule until the moment I submitted the game. My first implementation actually was “it takes 3 dash to remove a tile”. But the UI never shows you exactly how many dash you have, and I thought no player would actually count this in their head, and so decided it would become too complicated :p

Interesting, I will try to play and review your game sometime the coming days!

Thanks! Yeah, as I developed the game, I kept shortening the duration of the first stage, because I knew the game got more interesting with later stages. (It’s 15 seconds now, but used to be 45.)

Thanks!

Hmm, what a bummer :/ Others have also reported performance issues. It seems to happen to, well, some people but not all.

I think I narrowed it down to the way the terrain is painted when an egg splatters on it. It’s the first time I’ve ever done something like this, so I see now that there could be some issues with my approach …

I’ll try to publish a patch after the jam ends, and you can enjoy it even more :)

I’m sorry you couldn’t play :( There’s something weird going on somewhere that sometimes causes the game to run really slowly. (Happens perhaps 1 in 50 times on my PC.)

When the jam is over, I’ll probably improve the game and try to find the source of this. Hopefully you can play then!

Amazing graphics! Short but sweet. Loved the insects showing up in the background. Once I realized they just eat you at the slightest touch, I legit got scared when I saw a wasp flying through the background :p

A bit more leeway on the climbing and jumping would be nice. But otherwise, great work!

Also, would you mind sharing how you created the graphics? Vector art? Handdrawn? Painted? It’s a really cool style that I haven’t seen before.

Surprisingly challenging for such a simple concept! I agree that it would work well on mobile.

And the AI … man, started to really hate them after a while. Would you mind sharing (just a general summary) how you programmed the AI?

Also, at first I was puzzled how this would relate to the “new horizons” theme … until I read the description. Interesting take on the theme.

Had quite some fun with this game, good job!

This concept is amazing! The idea of bugging faraway people or places, so you can hear what they say, or see what happens there, could be an amazing full-blown game.

The animations are really fluid and the sound effects on point.

The physics feel a bit off, though. The jump felt quite inconsistent and I mostly spent time trying to get to a higher platform but failing numerous times. I feel the game might be better with a quicker jump (with less height variation) and more leeway on the platforms. Focus more on the bugging, less on the jumping.

Is there a reason you can only bug horizontally, instead of giving free aim? Would be interested to know.

Also, I was never sure when a guard could see me or not. Again, it feels like they should be able to see anything in a straight line. Otherwise show their sight radius? (Or only show their view distance once you’ve bugged them.)

Lastly, whenever I got into a new room, I just started throwing around bugs literally everywhere, to clear the fog and see stuff. This kinda defeats the purpose, so maybe limit the number of bugs a player has? Maybe they have to retrieve them as well?

If any of these things are done/changed in later levels, I apologize. I just wasn’t able to get very far, due to failing the simplest of jumps time and time again :/ In the new year, when I have more time, I want to come back and try to get the full experience.

Many points for innovation and theme application!

Thanks a lot for playing and the detailed feedback!

You actually mentioned one of the reasons for jumping yourself :) Doing so will create new lines around your base, so you can walk around without dropping off your points at the home base. (The other reason is just because it’s sometimes faster or the only way to get somewhere/flee from danger.)

But I agree with you: I think this concept is very interesting, but could be executed better with some more time and playtesting. The one test session I was able to get (before the jam deadline) revealed that ~50% of the players don’t use the jump at all, so I’ll need to find something for that.

As for the menu: what you encountered is indeed a glitch and not supposed to happen! But even then your suggestion is a good one. (I learned this the hard way with another recent game too :/ The lesson: just never make menu options activate automatically, it always leads to confusion among players :p Show a button prompt.)

Thanks again, your feedback will help improve the game!

Love the graphics! Also surprisingly challenging for such a simple concept. I agree with you that this could work great as a mobile game.

Possible points of improvement:

• A little more instruction at the start would’ve been nice, but I was able to figure it out soon enough.
• The recipes are quite small and in the far corner of the screen, which means I was constantly looking away from the action and didn’t see what was happening. Then again, that’s part of the challenge. Should be less of an issue on smaller (mobile) screens!

Nice job!

Haha, thanks for playing and great to hear you’re having fun :)

Hmm, sorry to hear that! I guess I could turn down some of the brightness just to be sure.

Did you start with the training level? (The first egg you walk into, on the stone?) When coming near, it explains what to do. And when you start it, it says “solo mode” and that yes, you control both of them! (If you want, not required of course :p)

Perhaps I could include some barrier to ensure players start with this first level, and get a few seconds to read the tutorial image that pops up.

I’ll try to push an update within the next 24 hours, hopefully it fixes these issues for you :)

Thanks! Obviously, I recommend giving it a try :)

If you do, be sure to let me know, and any feedback is always welcome.