itch.io

Finished with a total time of 3m32s! I had fun playing this!

Some feedback:

• On the second level, I had some trouble with learning to swing. It didn't feel intuitive at first. I thought maybe you could swing left and right (since the player can climb up and down), but I eventually learned a hack-y way by just jumping off to get more momentum and then hook into a swing (I later realized that was the intended mechanic.)
  • There was also a wire/rope above a pit in this level. I thought maybe I could climb on it, it was purely for decoration, even though it was the same color as the ropes with hooks on it.
• It's pretty exciting be able to shoot the wire from far away and hooking on, because initially I'm not sure if my aim was on point or not. But when I did hook it, it was such a clutch moment.
• On the third level, I realized you could hook through walls if your wire is long. Maybe that's intended, or maybe not. I also ended up soft-locking myself on the right side because I forgot to get the plug.

But given the amount of polish for a one-week game jam, this is really good! Nice work!

I played through about an hour of your game!

• Some feedback:
  • I like the experience this (visual novel?) gives. You play the role of the manager and you look at snail resumes and decide who is the best fit for each role. It gave me the perspective of a hiring manager. Sometimes there's a perfect fit for a specific job role. But most of the time, there's not, but you still have to figure out who would be the best to hire that day.
  • I liked the writing. There was a sense of mystery for what was beyond *the hole* (atleast from the MC's POV), but also that maybe there was something more out there other than human life and predators. I enjoyed managing the colony by talking to each department day-to-day. And also just simply asking Charon how their day was going was a nice option. I totally get that people need to be recognized as more than just a worker.
  • I wasn't entirely sure what the gifts did after each milestone. I did give them to the nerds at one point, but I don't think I progressed far enough to see what they actually do.
  • But at some point, I went through ~20 days, and I kind of felt like I was going through each day without any real meaning. I didn't feel a sense of progression, just looking at the end-of-the-day numbers going up (and sometimes down), and looking at resumes to determine the best fit.
  • Theme-wise: I think I understand what you're trying to do with the theme. You build connections by hiring snails, talking to the department heads, and coordinating them to increase output. But that's all it feels like. It feels like I'm just trying to increase the colony's daily output, rather than build a meaningful connection with each department head. And for the snails that are recruited that aren't the department head, they just become another faceless worker that I never get to interact with.

But those last points are a bit rough given the timeframe. And on top of that, I'm not really good at writing or describing what I feel exactly, so take everything with a grain of salt.

Considering that you got the writing and programming in within a week colors me impressed. I'd love to keep playing to the end if I had a better sense of progression and knew what I was working towards. The gameplay loop is fun, but if I have no clear end-goal in sight, then as a player I may lose interest over time. Regardless, I think you did a really good job on this!

The art is absolutely adorable and drew me into this game! I loved being able to house all these critters and seeing them make the apartment come to life.

Theme: It fits with the theme of building connections between rooms, but I wish the connections did something more other than visually connect the rooms and to let you build deeper underground. Maybe some extra bonuses, like your habitants being able to visit each other.

Gameplay: Gameplay was engaging. I found myself filling out all 99 rooms. It felt like this underground apartment was bustling with life.

Art: The art is adorable. I can't say it enough. The music and sounds accompany the gameplay and fit well.

Overall, I had enough fun that my apartment had enough gold/stone income to able to build new luxury rooms every couple seconds. Solid and polished game, given that you only had a week! Good work!

I had a lot of fun playing your game!

Some feedback:

• I almost went to skip the tutorial since it looked like it was the easiest path to the goal.
• I love your work on the UI. You had a draggable options windows, which was a nice touch.
• Music and sound effects were pleasant and accompanied the gameplay well.
• Game mechanics are easy to pick up and are enjoyable.
• It's a bit difficult to control the ball when the ball gets further away on my smaller web version screen.
• The ball can glitch out of bounds if the board is tilted enough after teleporting.
  • I suggest somehow linking the ball animation to a transform above the teleporter, so no matter the tilt, the ball will always remain above the teleporter. Easier said than done though ^^
• Theme-wise: I'm not really sure how it relates to the theme.

Overall, it was a fun game! Nice work!

Adorable little game!

• Sounds:
  • The music and sounds were perfect to create a cozy vibe.
• Theme:
  • I think the game fits the theme. You help a dog build physical connections to other islands. In the end, we built a connection by helping the dog out. I just wish we could've pet the dogs.
• Gameplay:
  • I was slightly confused how many times I could chop/mine a tree or rock. I realized that some resources only give 1-2 of that item. Maybe having them disappear would make that more clearer to me as a player?
• Visual bugs:
  • I noticed that the cutscene bars do not scale across the whole top/bottom of the screen. If you're using Unity, make sure that your UI element scales horizontally, so that people with bigger/smaller screen sizes will see the same thing. I was on a 2560x1440p screen.

Otherwise, not a bad game! Nice job!

Also, looks like we had a similar idea in our game titles :)

Creative game! I really liked playing with the web mechanic! It was fun and intuitive to build them throughout the level.

Swinging: The only thing I didn't realize until after finishing was how to swing effectively. I kind of didn't expect spiders to be swinging like that, since I never really picked up how to control the swing. So for the long spiked hallway, I tried repeatedly, death-after-death, to spam-click creating a new web so I could get further into the spiked hallway. Oof.

Level: I did feel like there was a bit too much backtracking in the level, (at least for me, because I couldn't swing effectively :[ ).

Art: The little spider art is cute, and it's easy to tell where my player is against the level's colors.

Theme: Theme-wise, I think the game fits the theme well. The player builds web connections to progress forward. Makes sense to me.

Overall, although I had my frustrations with the way I didn't know how to swing effectively, it was still quite an enjoyable game experience. Good work!

Nice game, good work!

Some feedback:

• UI was a bit glitchy. I pressed settings and then restarted the game, but the settings menu was on the screen still. Not a big deal.
• It's difficult for me to tell where the player light starts/ends and where the environment light starts/ends, so it's hard for me to tell how which light source/direction I'm being damaged from, so I don't know which direction to move away from the light.
• There was a weird dark black goop on the ground occasionally. I wasn't sure what that was or what I could do with it. I don't think any of the tutorials mentioned it to me.
• Level 2 - There's some invisible colliders near some of the lights near the top-room's bottom-right corner?
  
• Level 3 - Invisible colliders in another light near the top room's bottom-right corner.
• I got stuck on level 3, since I couldn't find the last thing to open the door :(
• Levers are the same color as the ground, so sometimes it can be hard to tell where they are in the dark. It's easy for me to miss the shininess of items since I'm moving around often.
• Having some kind of indicator to help the player know how many pressure plates/levers they need to open the door would help, so I know that there's still something left in the room.

Regardless, I had fun playing and exploring around the dark rooms. I like the light effects, but I think it could use some more work to make it more visually accurate where light starts/ends. Good work!

Good work!

Some feedback:

• Good UI aesthetics and design
• Cute monster and characters
• I like how the audio helps indicate that there's something new in the room (ghosts) and lets me know to watch out for them.
• Camera can be a bit finicky when transitioning between two rooms (the ghost room and the room above it)
• Another keybind like press R to reset the level also. When I lose often, I don't like that I have to lift my hand off the keyboard to click Retry. It'd be nice to also press "R" to retry on that screen.
• Input feels a bit stiff? But doesn't hinder gameplay that much.
• I couldn't figure out how to get past the wall. There's apparently a button somewhere according to comments, but I couldn't find it. I think the game was a little too dark for me.

But I still had fun playing your game, good work :)

Charming bright visuals, lovely hand-drawn backgrounds, and an up-tune beach music to complete the aesthetics! I like the vibe the game gives off, and is a good take on the game jam theme!

The creating ice cubes to use as platforms was a creative idea, I like that!

I did have some troubles with the gameplay though:

• It's a bit confusing which items I can jump on, or which are just part of the background.
• Getting reset to the very beginning is a bit frustrating.
• Cuby gets stuck on collidable objects often when colliding with them from the side, leading to the ice I created melting too early before I can touch the ground.
• In the tutorial, it was a bit confusing how I should've stacked the 3 cubes. If I clicked 3 times and stacked it 3-cubes-tall, then my character couldn't jump over it. Instead I settled by having to slightly think outside the box and create a triangle to jump up.

I enjoyed playing through your game though, and the visuals honestly made my day :)

Great game! Great work on this!

• Boss fight was tough, but got through it (really well designed!)
  • Players can choose how they want to approach, learned with each death where I could go, what places I shouldn't be, how the horizontal swords and vertical falling swords affect my character palcement at all times (I realized I was always losing to the horizontal swords messing up my jumps)
  • The timing of the day/night cycle is tense, but makes me try to maximize how many swords I can get during that time.
  • I didn't use bat as much, since the beginning started me off with the vampire, so I didn't end up flying much, or even realized at the beginning that I needed to fly at some point to get the horizontal swords. Never had to fly up to the very top platforms either, not
    • Never flew up to the very top platforms since the swords were there, also maybe they were just there to stop me as a bat from flying too high.
• Really good level design. Easy to understand, some parts were challenging, but I was able to get through and learn with a couple deaths.
  • Thank you for the occasional checkpoints here and there, it made me less frustrated that I didn't have to reset my progress entirely.
• Took me some time to realize the vampire has an umbrella. Really cute addition to the character lol
• I didn't find many pain points, it was an extremely enjoyable experience overall!

Wow! It looks like you have a lot of systems going on at once here! I'm impressed! I can spot a top-down shooter, text, cutscenes, flashlight mechanics, charming sprite artwork, sprinkled on top with a bit of horror and story. I was already immersed into the game story with the intro sequence.

Some feedback:

• Audio was mostly spot on.
  • Ambience was good for setting the mood.
  • Directional monster noises was good for letting me know where the monsters were coming from (but I did need a pair of earbuds to be able to hear which direction)
  •  But for footsteps, you could randomize footstep pitches slightly or choose from multiple footstep sounds to have a more varied experience.
• Shooting was pretty nice. I like all the elements at play like the screenshake, the bullet trail, the camera movement, and the audio for the gun click when I was out of ammo.
• It felt like vision was too small with no flashlight, so I often resorted to just keeping the flashlight on.
• It would be nice if reloading could be canceled, in case I need to shoot an incoming monster.
• I couldn't tell which doors could be entered towards the end. I remember seeing boarded-off doors in the first "level," but didn't see them towards the end of the game and made me slightly confused whether I was supposed to try to walk in those buildings or not.
• I could just keep my flashlight on and outrun the monsters sometimes, so I didn't feel like the game really challenged me.

I was amazed with what you were able to implement during the span of the game jam, and had a lot of fun getting immersed with the audio and the story!

Cute main character. I like how you reversed the ghost in the house idea, where you're instead playing as the ghost trying to avoid the flashlight of someone in the house. The game mechanics are a bit simple, where I can just spam Interact on every item in the house until I find the keys, but I did have to backtrack since I didn't realize some items were interactable. Had fun playing it! 

This is a peaceful puzzle game.

Some feedback:

• Some indicators of when I was in light and getting damaged would help. I always ended up having to keep a watchful eye on my health instead of on the player/level.
• Cute, simple, easy to understand artwork, gives the game a certain charm to it.
• I often had to backtrack through the levels, it felt a little annoying having to go back and forth and losing health on the same parts.
• Puzzles are thought out pretty well and were fun to solve/play through.

Good work! Although I only got up to around the 6th level, I still enjoyed playing it!

Really fun mechanics, reminded me a bit of jump king but you can float/stick on the walls.

Some feedback:

• Dragging jumps with the mouse feels fun.
  • But sometimes I don't have enough distance on my screen to get the right amount of power into my jump, so I get frustrated a bit by that.
  • Sometimes I can't get to drag on my player in time and end up going into alert mode. It would be nice if a click or something else instantly triggered a directional move, instead of having to accurately click on the player's hitbox directly.
• Getting over corners is a bit tricky, but I was able to learn with some practice. Still feels clunky to me imo.
  
  • I would try to jump to opposite walls, but sometimes the character wouldn't stick to the wall and just fall suddenly.
• I like how there's multiple choices to navigate a level (or at least thats what I saw). If I had too much trouble on one path, then I could just try going another path.
• Alert mode seems a bit too difficult for me (im not that good at platformers/talent-based games anyways lol)
  • It would be nice if there was an easier mode where the light level can recover downwards again?
• In the third level (?), I ended up getting stuck in an infinite jumping/rolling animation in a corner:
  • 

Overall, had a lot of fun playing it. Good audio, easy to grasp gameplay, nice art/game aesthetic!

We all start somewhere! We all make mistakes, so just remember to read the jam guidelines more carefully in the future :)

 Some suggestions:

• The web version and windows version seem to play differently.
  • Web version - can shoot apples.
  • Windows - cannot shoot apples.
• The scores don't follow the player around the screen and just stay in the center.
• Weight can be a sensitive topic for people, so take caution in the future when it comes to game art and game design.

 Overall, you still made something work, and I can respect that!

Nice work! I enjoyed playing this!

Some feedback:

• I like how the umbrella makes you float a little more, reminds me of Princess Peach from the Mario games.
• Cute artwork, it's a good change of pace from a lot of the darker games. Creative!
• A bit hard to hit enemies that are on a slope below you

Great work!

I had some spooky moments here and there, having to creep around the place or find another pathway since it was blocked.

Some feedback:

• Some footsteps would help the audio and make me feel like I have a "presence" in the game world.
• It would be nice to know which keys I have on me.
  
• (spoilers) Not enough reaction time to read text on the last sequence, feels like an almost guaranteed gameover. (plus you have to hit the walk forward key again) I ended up looking behind me because I was still curious what I light was lol.
• Some reactions from the monsters if they're chasing you or notice you. It was just a silent chase, and it felt like I always had to look behind me to see if the monster was still chasing me or not.

I enjoyed playing this!

There were tense moments waiting for guards to move, hoping you wouldn't get caught on the square you chose.

It was trial and error sometimes, I didn't think I'd make it if I was a tile away from a guard

A bit of trouble on the third level, had trouble timing the first guard and getting caught repeatedly but I eventually got it.

Sometimes got caught through the wall (third level, tried to hide inside the first hallway, but I ended up being too close to the exit hole of the hallway, I so I just backed up and waiting behind cover).

As a player, it feels like theres not a big margin of error when it comes to the correct path, or that there's not many choices I can make on where to move.

Nevertheless, great work!

Nice game.

Big fan of the mirror's edge wall running (follow the red, Edge :) It was a bit difficult to get at first and kept falling, but I understood after a few tries.

I like Level 7's optional skip, or just go around it if you can't time it, good accessibility

I didn't realize level 7 had 3 levers stacked on top of each other, not sure if that was intended

Got stuck on level 7 :( (er, level 5? I reset the game and it actually was level 5? Not sure what happened between my playthroughts.)

I appreciate any suggestions, comments, frustrations that you encountered while playing. Just comment them down below! 

And if you don't mind, I'd also appreciate if you gave it an honest rating for the game jam! Thanks much :)

Completed with a whopping 285 deaths!

Solid game, had a lot of frustration at some points, but still had a lot of fun with the mechanics. Easy to understand, easy to pick up, extremely hard to master.

Some frustrations:

Sometimes bodies block your vision of where your character is, leading to some frustrating deaths.

Would be nice for a split second of invincibility on respawn, sometimes I felt frustrated when I respawned died again, since that death was out of my control.

Would appreciate an assist mode for people (like me) who need a little more help with games like these! Maybe more checkpoints enabled in the middle of the game.

Some clearer direction towards the end of the last room/level. It felt like I could go to certain "targets" in the corner of the room, but I kept dying and was supposed to go to a different "target."

Regardless, it's a great game, and even for using primitive shapes like you said, it still looks more aesthetically pleasing (at least more than mine :). High ratings.

Agh! Lots of things still went wrong, even after meticulous checking! The lighting didn't work as well as I thought on the web browser version, which also made me forget to change the lighting settings back for when I built the Windows version, which made the game visuals too contrast-heavy! It's not supposed to be this hard on the eyes, sorry :( Guess this is just what happens when it's late night and extremely vulnerable to mistakes like that. 

But anyways, I do hope you can still appreciate the other things like the puzzle gameplay and the hunt for level secrets (there's a special little something if you can find them all in one run!).

Have fun! Thanks for playing, and please consider leaving an honest rating and/or comment! I appreciate every single one of them!

May consider tweaking the lighting after the game jam is over, so consider adding it to one of your collections so you can revisit it in the future!

I enjoyed playing through this, although being a bit frustrating at first to get a hang of the dice movement and getting the face to be correct on the goal. I had a lot of moments where I was just about to fall off (especially on level 6) but saved the run with some lucky rolls and enough force to keep the dice from falling. By the last level, I just getting the hang of getting the face to be on the correct side for the goal. Overall, not bad, and I enjoyed frantically flinging the dice and hoping that RNG lets my dice stay on the platform :)