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Thanks for playing! 

It is two distinct button presses... Left then Right for Destroy Newest and Right then Left for Clone Upwards.  It was hard to convey that they were not at the same time, and it has confused other players as well.  It also has to be done within a small time window (just under half a second).

Team's aren't usually that challenging.  That particular game jam was my first and everyone on the team's first.  None of us knew the tools (that was all of our first time using Unity and no one had experience with any other engine.)  All of my teams since then (6ish years) have been mostly good, and part of that is experience on how to lead a team when they need direction.  I love to work with new people and teams as much as possible and usually try to work with someone that is their first game jam.  I see a lot of developers in my local area that work with the same teams every time, and that works for them.  I like to work in the community to give new people a chance and invite them in and try to see that they have a positive and enjoyable experience.  The number one thing is communication, with trying never to be negative about ideas and thoughts.  This often means being a bit fluid with the design to accommodate whatever comes up.  Next just make sure that if someone makes an asset, try to get in in the game somewhere.  If nothing else, flatten it out, put a cube behind it, remove the colliders and call it a poster on a wall.  So... I am rambling... but what i am trying to say is teams are very valuable and important to me.

My brain might be broken.  You broke my brain!  What even is color?  This game is HARD.  I feel like this might be useful in the brain-training genre or for some type of perception therapy (I don't know, I'm not a doctor).  Good job.

I present a fictional conversation with myself about this game:

1: "It's like a walking simulator, but without walking!"  

2: "So just a simulator?"  

1: "Not at all, but also a music generator!" 

 2: "It's a radio with a story?"  

1: "Almost, but half mindful meditation.  Oh, and Pokemon Snap with no Pokemon or ratings and not on a rail!" 

 2:  "I don't get it..."  

1: "Me either, isn't it great?!"

In a way, this reminds me of the game "Populous"... which I also felt I was bad at.  I think I see where this is going and I like it even if I had to stop because I was struggling to feed 3 people.

Some of the best games are "simple, done well".  Other platformers like "Thomas Was Alone" and "Ibb & Obb" are games that inspire me.  They don't really provide any new mechanics to the genre.  Rather, they were crafted with such attention to detail that they are memorable and feel new/unique to the player.   With this game, I spent 2 hours making sure the fire light wiggled just right and the colors changed appropriately.  Was it necessary at all to even have a light source on the fire? No.  Was it necessary to make a script to make the normal light source go through a day/night cycle? Definitely not.  But when I see that campfire, the way the shadows combine on the ground, and the vibrancy that it adds to the dim nighttime it makes me proud of what I have done.

So... which game studio is going to immediately hire the person who made that music?  I liked the mix of numeric and spatial reasoning puzzles.   Definitely got near the end and briefly thought to myself, "How the heck do I add 5 to this number?"

...

You made me math so hard I forgot that I could just, you know, add 5.  

So... which game studio is going to immediately hire the person who made that music?  I liked the mix of numeric and spatial reasoning puzzles.   Definitely got near the end and briefly thought to myself, "How the heck do I add 5 to this number?"

...

You made me math so hard I forgot that I could just, you know, add 5.  

I think the narrative kinda came through anyway.  Simple, arcade-style, with fairly diverse representation.  This is a good brain-training game for observation, memory, timing, and reflexes.  With a more expansive scaling difficulty and some polish, this would be a great and wholesome (which is far too rare) mobile game.

The music was too dreamy for my current level of sleepiness.  I could totally fall asleep to that right now.  I really liked the small particles, and I always enjoy a parallax background.

For your first jam, getting anything accomplished is a feat, even if you have been making games for a while (my first was in QBasic on a Pentium 90MHz, and didn't start jamming until about 5.5 years ago).  In the end if you can make something that compiles and is more or less playable, that is good.  My first jam team had 6 people.  Me, another programmer who merged changes that broke all my code half an hour before the deadline, a person who literally did nothing, a 3d artist who made 3 different small models of asteroids, a 2d artist who made a single 2 frame animation for a 16x16 pixel character, and a writer whose content never made it into the game.  So yeah... having anything is good.

It is really difficult to innovate in the playing-card game genre. There have been a few centuries of developers before us with some good ideas after all.  It would be real interesting to see a game jam where every game was a card game just to see what diversity can still happen.

Hint: When the game starts it tells you how to move, by starting “Warm yourself by the campfire.”  The rest of the controls get explained as you unlock them (and are disabled until you unlock them).  In a “real” version of this game I would have liked to put in an overlay when you pause the game to display the controls you have unlocked along with a log of important text for each of the events. 

Thanks for the thorough comment. As for the thing you are missing, it might be that you can also go left from the start location (after learning to Sneak, there is something you need just to the left of the campfire). I tried to indicate this with background art, but in retrospect I should have swapped started the player in the center with the fire and bunny on each side to give more of an indication that you can go both ways. Maybe also an arrow shaped bg art asset. I do also that my design as is can create frustration, and if given nore time would have found some way to keep the UI minimal, but indicate taht you are performing the correct action (perhaps with a particle effect creating a growing “glow” around the target.  But the is the difference between game jams...  sometimes you just dont realize if something is going to work or not until you are in the middle of the project and you don’t always have the time to fix it and still meet your scope.  

...and thanks for reading the post mortem. I felt like I would need it to remember my feelings on  this project in the future.  I’m glad someone else enjoyed it. 

Figuring it out was the point of the game.   I'm glad the puzzles took you a bit of time.  Thanks for playing!

The stamina system was purposely vague.  Different actions take different stamina, which slowly refills when you are standing still or bowing.  

I specifically added the bear auto-killing the player if you attack it more than necessary.  You attack once, and learn Mercy... any more violence beyond that is just asking for trouble.

Thanks!  It was actually a Koto midi instrument.  I wanted to make the sounds as close as possible to the earliest of music instruments, as if it were something from 20k years ago.  Hint (Solution to Rabbit:  Bow when close to it for 4ish seconds,)

Good audio.  Works well.  Interesting once or twice on its own, but not too fun. Very much guessing and gambling rather than strategy.  A human opponent might give a few Yomi layers.  Would make an interesting mini game or RGP combat/resolution mechanic.

This is a good game, with a good design.  Some minor improvements to collisions could be made, if I wanted to be extremely nitpicky, but this is an A+ game for a jam.  It fits the theme well and in an unexpected way.

I will never not enjoy this style of game.  Why do I want to make fish eat so much?  Good use of theme.

I like the concept.  Good job!

I like the greyscale and the character animation.  Could use a bit more... well more.

A pretty good puzzle game with a minimal design aesthetic.

Sorry about that. We didnt have the issue until late in development and didnt have time to fix the terrain mesh. We haven’t done a lot before with 3d environments, and we definitely learned what not to do next time. 

Great feedback. We had planned to swap textures on things as they burned for more clarity and have a “Smokey the bear” enemy trying to put out the fires, but we had some issues taht cut into our jam time, so we had to make some feature cuts.

I love the screen rotation.  It made the game harder until my brain adjusted, but provided a great effect that I think actually helped keeping me engaged.

For your first game jam, this is quite the well made game.  Great job.

Thanks so much.  I'm glad at least someone likes the song, that's the part I was most worried about since it's the first time I have ever recorded vocals.

The third referenced comic was intended to be https://www.xkcd.com/378/ (157 + 221)

The only real clue was the main hover text saying something like with “A real XKCD fan would use math to figure out why this text is relevant”. It isn’t a very good mystery, but I thought it was clever enough. 

Thanks for playing. There are numerous problems with the experience. I created it all in under 2 hours due to just having so little time that weekend, so very little thought was put into the finer details. Still, this is good feedback on what I presented. 

I’m sorry to hear that the title was cut off.  Rather thank adjusting things dynamically, I tried to lock the experience to certain working resolutions, which I knew wouldn’t work for some people depending on their default resolution. This means you may also have been cut off from using the button to turn off the sound and/or the exit button, as well as some of the hover zones not being quite in the right place.  

Probably the first ever bullet hell space shooter to make me hungry.  +1

Great job!  I love the idea behind the game and it is well implemented.

Thanks for the tip Eltea.  New zip is uploaded with folder included.  If it still doesn't work, let me know.

Exe should now be contained within the zip and source code should be gone.  Game is now playable with a gamepad.  Menus are mouse only and Esc key brings you from game back to main menu.

Correct, there is no executable.  We did not build because we introduced a game breaking bug that broke all of our menus.  The zip contains the source and it is (mostly) playable through the Unity editor, but cannot be played elsewhere until I find the energy and time to address the issue.