itch.io

For the record I don’t use AI to generate my production code but I did use AI to help me learn a shader technique a while ago when I got stuck and ChatGPT was really useful in suggesting ways to make it work, and by allowing me to ask questions on each section. I would use it again.

Should I avoid using that shader technique in the competition?

There are professional devs who now code with CoPilot, and some of them don’t even consider it AI code any more than artists think of the content aware fill as AI, because they’re reading and adapting or curating the AI code apparently, or whatever it is they think that separates them from machines - I really don’t know, it takes me longer to read bad code than to write bad code so I never tried copilot!

But ultimately, we are just a machine doing the toil necessary to satiate the ever growing hunger of the corporate masters doing the work of many in the pursuit of efficiency, we’re just a machine with a meat bag casing. That ain’t special, the Dinosaurs tried it before us and where are they now? Anyway, as long as there is a law demanding people wear seatbelts there will be people protesting that it takes away their freedom, but the only real freedom is to be a corporation - to be the machine that consumes the production of the machines.

Well blast, I guess I’m leaning toward a cyberpunk aberation entry…

Pretty good game. I found it very hard because I ran out of ammo as it took so many hits to kill anything, but it was cool to see tower defence mixed with fps like that and I like the graphical ambience. Good work.

But please include WASD support :)

Tanks! VROOOOOOM AND BOOOOM!

I don’t know if my head canon constructed an explanation for why the tanks (quite cool model btw) flew like daleks or not; or if I understand the level designs. I got Big Red down to 1 star and I think got shot from behind.

But the explosions are so satisfying. Oh so satisfying.

On the second level there was a pair of tiny tanks that didn’t explode. I hate those tanks, they don’t explode.

All the other tanks… Oh so satisfying. There are no flaws in this game, because the explosions are the game, and they’re great.

Kind of therapeutic to play for a while, but then you spend ages collecting data for a paper only to get rejected, twice, and you remember that this isn’t therapeutic, this is what its like being a scientist, and you scream. Grateful only that you didn’t enter the health care profession. Good game.

My favourite game so far. And you actually made me laugh with, “I’m so good at this I could only die in a cut scene”.

Brilliant entry.

The arcade shoot things game was not what I was expecting after the extensive intro, which regrettably was a bit too long. I must have lost concentration for a moment because the story suddenly talked about spiders and I was very confused for a time. In regards to the actual game I found it quite difficult to play because the screen resolution wouldn’t let me see the whole game in full screen mode (2560x1080 monitor).

Cool to see another cyberpunk themed entry, I got as far as the first boss and didn’t have anywhere near enough health left; and didn’t fancy playing back through, so died pretty unspectacularly. What you have here is pretty good, although this isn’t my kind of game I appreciate the effort you’ve put in so well done.

I have no idea what was happening, but I had fun for a short while, but I found it a bit hard and having to start over every time I died was frustrating. It’s certainly one of those “a bit out there” games and loved the aesthetic. A great effort, even if I couldn’t finish it and still don’t know what I just played.

Great little game. Would have liked the need to change tactics to defeat enemies; given the circle tactic always worked the upgrade progress then felt a bit slow. But graphically gorgeous. Great work.

Doom meets The Office: Staplers and triple barrelled shotguns, what’s not to love?

A couple of excellent expectation subversions, good ambience, I especially loved the entrance gate falling off its hinge and the leaves in the wind at the start. I was just thinking to myself that no daughter of mine deserves this much risk to be rescued; and then I saw who Sammy was and understood why the protagonist would go through that hell to rescue her.

I loved the expectation subversion. I lost my first game almost immediately because I didn’t realise what side I was on! Great idea, well executed; and lots of variety in the power up choices too. Great work.

Unfortunately if there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself and game jams doing GameOff the last 2 years it is that I will consistently try to do too much in too short a time window.

It uses the system default microphone. Sadly there’s a limitation with speech recognition in the browser which prevents from being able to select which microphone to use; that’s controlled by the browser itself.

Pro: Doom with a stapler against demonic co-workers and how I imagine middle managers look when they take off their office wear. Con: Immediately changing to Doom with a shotgun Pro: Shotgun has 3 barrels Pro: The game was inside the game

Overall Great effort, had fun. I think if the stapler was the only weapon it could maybe fire staples and still be effective.

I would recommend putting a web version up to get more ratings. Jam players are often loathe to download.

Thanks, by itself no but in addition to the other feedback it definitely does. It can only be 1 of 2 things, either it didn’t understand you or it shut off listening. I think it may be the latter.

It’s in dev freeze for voting now (and tbh framerate is a bigger issue) but if you are keen to play it and see the whole game you can reset the mic by walking away from the NPC you are talking to and returning, you don’t need to go far - just far enough for the on screen options to disappear.

I believe that Chrome is shutting off listening if it doesn’t hear any clear words for a period of time, which is a nice undocumented feature to find out after the coding window :)

The browser microphone indicator in the address bar should switch off if this theory is right, I suppose the game ought to show this on screen clearly somewhere but it doesn’t because: I didn’t know; and because its a 1 month jam and there’s lots of things I didn’t do that I would have liked to! (I had planned a final encounter with a pregnant Johnny Silverhand where you had to take him down without hurting the baby so V could get her - now pregnant - body back…), but I only got as far as making the displacement map for V’s tummy.

Thank you for trying it out. Can I check what browser you used, I have noticed Microsoft Edge’s speech recognition is really cumbersome and unreliable, it works much better in Google Chrome (and does not work at all in Firefox). Also, where in the world is your accent from?

tbh I got a little bored, but before I did I never really felt I was in control over whether the code was being reviewed or not. It wasn’t easy to reconcile the developers actions with their active task, and honestly outside of this game and in the real world most of this happens according to process and doesn’t require such a hands on process of a PM moving each ticket through each stage about and re-allocating them.

I thought the game idea was really quite innovative and I gave it 5* in that category but I didn’t feel like I was actually building software. Perhaps the tickets could have been more than just a number but could have told a story in themselves (maybe even some ironic ticket titles showing how design by committee results in everything we build being blue + grey!)

Nice idea, and hey - and the only “bug” I found may have been a feature ( accidentally moved a bug ticket to done and couldn’t move it back… )

The highscore being broken is something I am aware of, the high score was one of the last things I did before submitting the game and it didn’t work properly. I’ll be fixing it when the voting code freeze is over. Everything else you’ve said has been said by others and I do agree.

For me the frustrating one is the controls and I think it stems from me not having time to do a tutorial. (I entered the jam at the halfway point so only had two weeks), and I pivoted the game from an RTS 2 days before the end, meaning the last 2 days were new gameplay features (such as the cockpit view, ant logic (which also has a bug I’ll fix post jam) and the highscore system). I simply didn’t leave myself enough time to do a tutorial.

The controls are still allowing for some un-needed RTS features like the split screen and ability to autopilot, and fire weapons with the mouse, that necessitated holding the right mouse down to turn the turret which I think a lot of players are missing. Otherwise I think the control scheme is the most obvious choice: It’s standard WASD, and the 5 weapon mounts are attached to the five surrounding keys in the most logical place.

I guess the thing to try is to remove the autopilot, split screen, and mouse activation of weapons and instead have the turret rotation just track the mouse.

Lovingly put together, a short and cute game filled with bee puns. Gameplay is aimed at the younger audience (which through no fault of my own - I am not!). There’s definitely an emphasis on quality in the way this entry has been put together and the attention to detail and care with which its been written really shows through.

Good work.

Like others have said you can’t aim in time to actually shoot at the bugs. And if I did the turbo spin thing then Windows asked if I wanted to turn on sticky keys because that was on the shift key. This game defeated me.

The key control for each laser is shown next to the weapon entry in the bottom right of view. Each key is bound to a weapon mount and each weapon mount has it’s own traverse limitations. The starting mech has laser on left arm (Q key) and minigun on right arm (E key). The canon is top mounted (2 key) and does not traverse down. The canon is good for long range and the minigun for short range. The laser is admittedly hard to use, I should probably have removed it.

Later you get mechs with shoulder weapons (1 and 3 keys) which have very narrow horizontal traversal but are good for medium and long range shots.

This game is wonderful.

Like others I did initially get confused until I understood the attack meter, but once I got going it was a simple yet fun little game. Could use a little more animation in places but a great effort that generated lots of interesting gameplay challenges.

A nicely polished quick to pick up game, well done.

I do love the odd retro remake, and there’s few games more retro than PacMan. Great job on putting it all together.

The sound was nostalgic but also quite jarring so I had to play muted.

The screen glitch effect killed me, the bugs killed me even when I sprayed them, and I wasn’t sure if the lighter were just meant to be cherries or if I was meant to ignite the spray can.

But it was a few moments of nostalgia none-the-less, and a bitter reminder that I’m old enough to remember the original coming out! :D

What a great little game very much in the vein of the first GTA. Brilliant work!

I could not find all the Neos in time so it would’ve been nice to be able to fix some of the matrix glitches in order to get more time, maybe by moving over them or something, but I guess that’s on me for being old and slow! :)

Kept wondering if I should find a phone booth, both because Matrix, and GTA1…

wonderful 5 stars! Thoroughly loved it.

Ran a little janky at times though, especially in the arena.

A nice experience if a little sedate as there didn’t seem to be any form of threat or challenge for the player other than their own patience for the collect quest.

Lovely aesthetic and honestly you’ve tackled a tricky genre to do well and this is a reasonably good stab at it. The mechanics of turning your bug mobile are a bit jarring and the speed of play a little on the sedate side. I found it difficult to overtake other bugs because of the mechanic of collisions causing the player to stop rather than bounce so the only way for me to win was to hold the lead from the start.

I struggled a little with working out what to do and with the speed the screen moved, but you’ve created a very innovative little game.

I just wasn’t good enough to get very far!

As FPS’ go it was polished and very well put together and much higher quality than a lot of jam games. There just isn’t very much game here, it’s like doing the dirty for the first time - it was all over before I got started!

Completing games isn’t easy. Kudos to you for a good effort at a difficult game genre.

Every time I thought I had figured out what this game is, it changed its mind in the most mind melting way possible. This is brilliantly innovative and in a jam full of meta jokes about bugs out does them all with narrative cunning in the most WTF way possible.

A great game that is merely pretending not to be with it’s weirdly simple 2D pirate platformer start and simple graphics.

I just wish it was longer.

Ran in to some controller issues (Win/Chrome). First after going fullscreen the keyboard no longer worked. Then after refreshing I collected all the flowers I could find and tried to visit another hive to dance off with them, but then I lost controller input again. So I wasn’t able to experience the game.

This is lovingly created and clearly a lot of work. You’ve put a lot of effort and skill in and the result shows.

I thought the flower stem grabbing words rather than items in the environment was a lost opportunity tbh, but even still the words appeared in a nice way, although the waving made them harder to read at times.

Regrettably I ran in to a bug fairly early on… After the tutorial when you jump across the swinging lift/bridges I appeared to go right off the end of the screen. I found a frog talking after that on the ground to the left; but my character was somewhere offscreen or invisible.

I also had some difficulty with the mouse bounds, I have a dual screen setup and was playing on an ultra wide screen. Because the mouse was hidden but never repositioned I couldn’t see my cursor but could regularly go offscreen edges making some words hard to grab without first using my second monitor to position my mouse right in the corner/edge and then having enough movement across the screen to reach the word.

Really awesome art, but I ran in to some bugs that made it impossible to play. Name entry was broken - I tried the light up game thing a couple of times but the game slowed down and my controls didn’t seem to work, and so I tried the cocktail mixing thing and I got stuck with a drink glass I couldn’t seem to do anything with.

I tried a different browser, and maybe its me not knowing what’s going on, I really wanted to explore the game as the art style alone meant this deserved a play. But alas, the wrong kind of bugs prevented this.

Simple but fun little game, good effort. Completed all the missions but couldn’t do Furball!

I am glad you had a mostly positive experience of it. The loading times sadly where a dev time compromise. The quick thing to do was to just refresh the page, the proper thing to do would have been to store & restore the scene; but that just wasn’t something I was ever going to fit in to the time I had available.

I think I can improve the controls, but I made life hard for myself by only deciding to enter the jam at the half way point and then pivoting from an RTS in the last couple of days when I found stomping around in the mechs directly was more fun than giving them orders.

But then I ran out of energy, I actually had a migraine once the game was up and had to walk away from the computer for a day! So I just didn’t leave myself enough time to perfect it.

I’ve been playing with a fresh project since the jam and have made a mech builder that even makes tanks and defence towers and space ships all from the same parts (I may have taken it much too far) so you never know - maybe there will be a better sequel…