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A jam submission

TantalusView game page

Stand the test of time
Submitted by cornfab (@cornfab) — 5 days, 1 hour before the deadline
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Tantalus's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Technical Implementation#133.8753.875
Graphics/Animation#284.2194.219
Fun/Design#423.7503.750
Overall#463.6313.631
Music/Sound#973.2813.281
Theme/Limitation#1403.0313.031

Ranked from 32 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game apply the limitation (and optionally, the theme)?
Entire game is one boss fight

Team Size

Solo (1)

What main engine/tool/language did you use to construct the game?
Unity/C#

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Comments

Viewing comments 20 to 1 of 23 · Previous page · First page
Submitted(+1)

Great game, very charming, played the whole thing. Extremely polished and impressive for a game made only in 5 days! (SPOILERS) Although I chuckled at the twist, I was a bit burned by the fact that there was no boss fight after all, I would have enjoyed a final mini game to play as a reward for getting through the 10 years. Overall a really solid submission, great job!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing and leaving feedback!

(spoilers) Darn that's unfortunate :( I definitely went the lazy route trying to make the joke that the boss just dies of old age. The original plan was to have 2 enemies in the first hallway to teach you combat, and then that would make the actual gameplay even more of a slap in the face, then at the very end when you approach the boss and it's another minigame prompt, and you have to beat him in the minigame world. I dropped it because I figured nobody would care, haha, oops

Submitted

I still had a really great time!! I think the comedic aspect to the game definitely made up for the slight disappointment at the end :)

Submitted(+1)

Dude that was so nice.
It was a nice mix between an idle game and a puzzle game.

Submitted(+1)

This was suuuper cool - really enjoyed one of the most unique takes on a dungeon boss. At no point did i ever feel confused as to what I had to do next, even though there was minimal instruction, all the minigames and the upgrade system were so intuitive - really great implementation! Lovely art too and loved the touch of the apples in the dialogue 

Submitted(+1)

this was such a good take on the theme!! i loved the mystery of what new time-passing element was going to be introduced next, and i appreciated that the minigames were all very different from each other. the art and music were very charming and also stylish!

one suggestion is that at the end the time acceleration happened too fast for me to notice/appreciate. i thought i had 9 years to go and suddenly it said 0, 0, 0! if there was a way to make that a little more gradual just so players could appreciate all the work they'd been doing, i think that would make for a much more satisfying payoff!

Developer

Thanks for playing and leaving feedback! I definitely had trouble balancing the upgrades and scaling system. In the end I settled on this extremely quick curve because I figured I was already pushing the limit of what people will play in a jam, so it's helpful to get feedback on one of the open questions I had on release

Submitted

Cute game, that apple theme dungeon was an original idea.

Submitted(+1)

Wow there is a lot to this game, well done! I like all of the details and the overall concept. For some of the minigames, I didn't immediately know what I was supposed to do, so maybe a small description for each? Other than that it was lovely!!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing and leaving feedback :)

Submitted(+1)

During a game jam, I think most users are looking for quick hit experiences, because you want to play as many games as you can and share feedback with other jammers. I have to tell you, though, I spent more time on this game than any other in the jam so far by a wide margin, and I think I’ve played like 20+. I just had to see what the endgame was. You hooked me in with a really polished jam game. the art is all cohesive, adorable and a very quick read. I love the squash and stretch on the little knight character.

Love the extra touches in the dialogue. The apples for Os was cute. The portraits accompanying the text is nice. I think the box didn’t need to be as large, though.

The bottom wall appearing and disappearing .. so nice. And to think ahead about how people would play in browser, to add the spinning apple gif in the banner is genius.

For the mini games, I think a couple small touches could help. For the spiders, some type of multiple pickup, so say after the wave of two in a row, there would be an 2x booster on your items gained would make the moment-to-moment play in the mini games more interesting. Same thing for flappy knight. And maybe it was actually taking place behind the scenes in the code, but having a visual representation and sfx when you hit a multiplier would feel great.

I’ve played a few jam games that are mini-game compilations and this has to be the most clever take on it that I’ve seen. Really well done.

Not sure if I hit a bug though. I couldn’t interact with my bed at all, and my statue was stuck on 3. Without being able to interact.


I wanted to see the end so badly I even restarted, but ended up with the same issue. Even got all my supplies up over 200:

I know from the screenshots something happens with the crack in the wall where the water is, I just can't seem to trigger whatever should come next.

Great game. Great idea. I'd have loved to finish it. Please let me know if it's just me missing something obvious.

Developer

Hey thank you so so much for the really detailed breakdown and feedback. I really appreciate how thorough you were with your feedback and reasons for it, and it makes me happy to hear you had fun.

For the spiders, some type of multiple pickup, so say after the wave of two in a row, there would be an 2x booster on your items gained would make the moment-to-moment play in the mini games more interesting.

There is actually a bonus that gets applied after each 20-30 seconds for the spider and wood minigames, but there's no feedback for the player. That's a great idea to make it more juicy and actually show you what's happening behind the scenes, and also a good idea to make you have to collect it rather than applying it automatically

Not sure if I hit a bug though. I couldn’t interact with my bed at all, and my statue was stuck on 3. Without being able to interact.

I consider this a failure on my part in designing the UX. You can only sleep on the bed at night, and in these screenshots its daytime (as indicated in the top right). From feedback it seems that this has made the bed largely inferior to the chair even though it's faster when usable.

The statue is not an interactable but rather a 30 second buff that stacks with things like sitting in the chair or sleeping. After that 30 seconds you can do it again, endlessly.

SPOILER: At 4 or so? months in the wall breaks and there are more unlocks. The hurdle/puzzle is getting to that point though. It seems like the best way to do that is to sit on an upgraded chair with the statue buff active. Once there's flowing water you can gather power from the water wheel and do more things to make the remaining 9 years go by fast.

Again, thanks for playing and laying all this out. I need to think about how to make this more apparent in-game. Part of me wanted to troll people by making them think they actually had to wait 10 years but with how far you got there should be a lot less confusion

Submitted(+1)

Amazing game, not what I expected from a boss themed jam.

Are we the bad guys?

Submitted(+1)

The artwork is great and animations are very smooth! No crashes for me. Battle mechanics were so unique and interesting. A minor detail I loved was the see through walls when you collide with the bottom part of the screen. Just amazing!

Submitted (1 edit)

The graphics are lovely, and I found the concept interesting and intriguing. However, for some reason I couldn't hear any audio in Safari (macOS). I tried toggling sound/music, to no avail!

Developer

Sorry about that, no idea how to debug it, and I didn't upload a macOS build for the jam either :(

Submitted

It is a fun game :) that is essentially all you need to know.

Unfortunately, it crashed on me (web version in latest Chrome), but I'm looking forward to go back to it. Sort of, if The Longing was a wee more dynamic :)

Great result for just 10 days of work!

Developer

Thanks for the feedback, I'm sorry it crashed on you. I had considered making an autosave mechanic and it's unfortunate that you lost your progress. The Longing was a definite inspiration for this

Submitted(+1)

Yes, perhaps the autosave would do. Something like game saves when every other feature (mini-game) gets introducing. Or at any reasonable time increment, i.e. hour or day.

Submitted(+1)

Probably my favourite game so far. I adore the presentation so much. Increadibley jealous of your work. The pixel art beautiful, along with the aspect ratio. Gameplay wise the combination of clicker/Idle games with undertale style mini games is genius. I hope you place near the top of the jam.

Developer

Hey thanks for playing and the kind words, that's really high praise. I went to bed last night kind of accepting people wouldn't bother to get to the minigames so waking up to this and other comments made my day.

Submitted(+1)

Yeah I really know that feel haha. But youve created a genuine piece of art man. Blown away. You should be proud. 

Developer(+1)

Submitted(+1)

Well, our hero is a stubborn one.

I love the concept and the implementation of this game. I had so much fun playing it!  Loved the ending and the "in memoriam" is very funny. Great job.

Developer

Thanks for playing and thanks for sticking through to the end! I'm glad the credits section landed for you :)

Submitted(+1)

I was promised apple sauce... 10 years I waited ! Where is my apple sauce ?

Neat little game ! liked the ambiance a lot :)

Submitted(+1)

Pretty interesting idea but I don't think I'll be finishing it as I bugged the game by re-opening a minigame too fast. The minigames are pretty fun to play but the rock one is kinda annoying. It's so erratic that I just cannot time it at all. Music also seems to fluctuate in volume. I don't know if that's intentional or not, but I'm assuming not? Some parts are real quite while others just have to make their presence known. It's good music, it's just inconsistent. I might come back to this later as I think I was coming up on the endgame as I just unlocked electricity

Developer

Hey I really appreciate the feedback, thanks for playing so long because this is all very valuable. Once you start using the electricity it's a sprint to the end so I don't blame you at all for not wanting to start over.

Re: the bug, I thought I fixed that but I guess not :( Maybe the fix was using escape to exit it when it gets in that state, but looking back that's not obvious at all. Will take the music and other points into consideration for sure, thanks again

(+1)

Wonderful game! Such a cute little concept. I really liked the electric game near the end, and I can't believe how much time I spent play flappy bird in 2021. Great fun overall. I honestly was hoping there would be more, but as soon as time started zipping by with max upgraded TV I knew my fun was at an end. I will say the bed felt useless, but everything was super nice. 

Developer

Thanks for playing! I totally agree I had no clue how to balance the bed and I'm not satisfied with how it turned out. The time scaling kind of limited how many minigames/upgrades to add and I think I'm already pushing peoples' patience with this one :)

Submitted

Amazing game!

Submitted

Seems like an interesting idle game, but once I saw 9 years I knew I had no chance of seeing what happens at the end.

(+1)

So it's actually not an idle game! If you walk around you can do tasks, that let you craft things. It only takes about 20 minutes.

Submitted(+1)

really creative progression system, the minigames were fun, specially the spider one. 

Submitted

Hi! It looks great, but I haven't gotten past through the second scene, the one with the door closed. How do I do it? I haven't rated your game yet, I will give it a second chance!

It looks great, though!

Developer

Sorry, do you mean the room with the apple boss or before it? If it's before, you need to use E/space to interact with objects (to use the key on the door)

Viewing comments 20 to 1 of 23 · Previous page · First page