My favourite game from the jam by far! Got me really hyped as I discovered new mechanics (the lightning got me bamboozled). Art style is very novel and true-pixel art is a nice touch. UI is very clear and intuitive. Pacing is very good, gameplay did not get boring for even one second. SFX's are on point. Only improvement I can think of is an alternative to throw mechanic that is more unique and satisfying but in terms of execution this is strong on all fronts.
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I'm thrilled that you found so much to appreciate here! Yes I am proud of it myself too. I can now say I feel this has gone better than I thought it would. I have also learned how to make this web-playable.. I just hadn't looked into it prior, and that's because I assumed it would be too much to learn in a short span of time, and figured that the downloadable version was sufficient. And mostly that's true... I mean, I focused my attention on making the game, and there were a lot of things to do to get it to this point. The python tool pygbag is mainly how it's converted to be a web game, if anyone is interested to know how to make a Python build web playable. pygbag is a work in progress, so it doesn't know how to compile some stuff into web assembly, but, that is what it is doing. So, what this means is, my next game jam, I'll definitely be planning for it to be web playable. It really isn't a difficult extra step... if you look at my Frogger game page, I already have made that one web playable. Altering the code is required.. there is a python asyncio library you have to utilize, and then, the game engine has to fit with an asynchronous main loop, which means that program flow has to come back to this main loop regularly in order to update the screen.
The main example is, like, when one implements an upgrades screen,
before, you would perhaps have a while loop that waits until you are done on that upgrades screen, but that keeps the flow inside a smaller loop, and prevents it from returning to the main loop until you close that screen.
to work in the browser, though, I had to flatten the flow per-se, and make it so the upgrades screen does its thing while the program flow still does the things in the main loop as well. So that isn't difficult to do, but it's just like ironing out wrinkles in a shirt. sometimes,... pressing on one wrinkle reveals more wrinkles. And things kinda broke at first that I had to un-break. Not that that is relevant to the game that exists at the moment, but, the modified game which runs in the browser has no noticeable difference, and to me that is really fantastic. There Is a performance hit, between browser and downloadable, but it's not enough to affect it on my end, and that is very encouraging. (This browser version only exists on my computer at the moment, waiting until the jam judge rating period ends)
if, down the road, something does require too much power to run in a browser, then I still think a reduced version to be web playable would be good. I feel like scalability is pretty good... even if a game is fully released, because, some people play the game on a potato, and the question is, can this work with simplified graphics etc?