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(3 edits) (+1)

Wow, did you really make this all with assets, music, and gameplay in just ~two weeks?! It's quite polished! How long have you been working on GM games?!

The simple arrows plus spacebar mechanics are WONDERFUL! This is probably the game that I enjoyed the most so far in the sense of the ease of understanding how to interact with everything. Very intuitive for me. 

Haven't tried co-op, but I take it it would be much easier to  handle, because the conveyor just moves way too fast to be able to move from one side of the room to the other. It is like an action-memory game. I seriously just started throwing stuff on the ground to keep it from going out! 

I think it would work just as well without the rat and if the blueprints didn't move and were just on a separate table.  I have a hard time at the corners (i.e. standing around with an item waiting for two turns to get the blueprint out of the corner) and timing it correctly to put the item on the blueprint, but maybe that's what you want.

Otherwise, the tutorial was great! And the boss's sarcasm is super funny!

Either the game balance needs better tweaking, or if you like it this way, I'm just bad at it! Haha. Still quite fun and interesting. Is this how they really make neon signs?! If so, I learned something new!

(1 edit)

Thanks so much! It was actually all made in about 3 days, 5-8 hours per day, I didn't hear about this jam until I got an email the Thursday before the deadline. I've been using Gamemaker for nearly twenty years, since I was a little kid. Sprites were done in Aseprite with minor tweaks in the GM image editor, and music was mostly Bitwig.

I'm glad you liked it! It's clear it was way too difficult, at least in the early stages. I had this weird idea that the conveyor speed needed to be locked to tempo but I don't think it made a difference. The idea with rats is that it would cause you to sometimes drop stuff in the middle of the floor, so there would be areas that were impassible but still easily avoided until cleaned up, adding an extra little wrinkle, but it was clearly all just too much too fast. If I moved forward with this project I'd tweak that first - slow down the conveyor, give more empty spaces between parts, make rats less frequent (at least until the player shipped a certain number of signs and the difficulty bumped up - difficulty bumps now at shipping 3, 8, 14, and 20 signs but it seems right now the start difficulty is too high to notice!)

Inaccessible corners are an unfortunate byproduct of having corners at all, there's no non-awkward way of getting to them. I considered a couple solutions, making the corner bigger than the other conveyor spaces or analyzing inputs to try to guess which of the three spaces the player wanted, and in the end just went with making them inaccessible for the jam.

Blueprints though, I'd keep moving. I like that they basically have a time limit, but the player can get more time if they take a second or two away from doing something else, and that that task is the same thing they've been doing the whole time - moving items around on the conveyor belt.

Thanks again for playing! If you can play with someone else I'd recommend it, it's (in my VERY biased opinion) lots of fun and significantly easier. It becomes a game of communication between the two players, asking what parts they need or which blueprint this tube goes to. If I'm fortunate enough to win one of the prizes (doubtful, there are some fantastic entries, yours among them!) I plan to take a few months to really polish this up and release it as a Switch game, since the co-op works so well (again, IMO)

EDIT: Also, this it NOTHING like the actual process for making neon signs. For that I'd recommend another really good entry, Lam's Untitled Neon.

(2 edits) (+2)

WOW, it's definitely Switch material! I want to play it with my husband :D. It's just that our controller setup isn't really good at the moment. A co-op game is WONDERFUL. There aren't that many of them that really have this level of non-violent cooperation, so I look forward to the balance tweak! 

Wow, 20 years! I didn't even realize GM was that old! Your ability to create all that in 3 work days is astounding! I hope that I can get that good someday! I do some low-level programming for a living, but I'm new to gamemaking, so the graphics and sounds are my weakest area. Our game definitely wouldn't have been as good if it weren't BOTH my husband and me, so you doing it solo is definitely amazing!

Yeah, I can't really think of how to deal with the corners other than to make them curved looking and when you have an access to the analog stick, use that. Or speed through the corners; like it just shoots it around the corner, so nothing is ever in a corner during the "still" time (like have a accelerated tile). It could also just be left there as a strategy element, once the rest of it becomes a little more balanced.