MAXIMUM LUNINANCE
Chowbacca
Creator of
Recent community posts
Thanks for playing! If you're interested in other plant games there's also this one: https://itch.io/jam/acerola-jam-0/rate/2583332, although Mr. Rola already highlighted it so you may have already seen it ;)
This had nice aesthetics and the gameplay got pretty intuitive. The buttons shrinking the more you press them weren't intentional judging from the last comment, right? I genuinely thought that was a feature haha. Which would actually be cool to experiment with more in its own right! Anyways, visuals are nice and it's an interesting concept!
Cool concept, I find the visuals really suit it. Is there anything after wave 1? It may have actually said somewhere but I don't think anything happens after wave 1 ends and I still had 2 health. I see a lot of potential for iteration, variety, and increased complexity just with the set of rules you have here. Nice job!
The graphics look quite good. I like the effort that was put into showing reflections and the character body when you look down.
I'm not entirely sure if it's a browser issue on my end but the movement is super wonky. I kept getting stuck on walls and corners, and I accelerated really fast and could not seem to change the direction I was moving in. That made it incredibly difficult to move through doorways (which there is lots of) and fight enemies.
Otherwise cool stuff!
This is pretty unique simulation experiment, awesome how performant it is! I really like how meaty it all looks as well. Cool that there's an indication of different sections of the body.
Collision handling makes the movement a little janky, making it too easy to get separated from my other cell masses and too challenging for the Neutrofils to pose a significant threat in large crowds.. I was expecting the physics to run a little more like a fluid simulation. Gameplay also mostly feels like it's just rubbing up against other cells until I absorb them or they kill me. This is, however, a lot of work for a 2-week jam... definitely something to be proud of :)
Best part has to be the song, although I wish there was some more music after it. Cool direction to take the theme in!
This game looks distinctly neat and the platforming mechanics are pretty fun. I'm also a fan of the ridiculously cheesy dialogue.
I would like if I was more incentivized to use the other combat options, but they didn't feel effective or worth using compared to just aggressively petting the animals and getting bit two or three times.
Overall it's a pretty neat experience!
This game has an aesthetics very strongly evocative of Stalker, from the player character's fatigues to the ambience, the old-school graphics techniques, and the drab colour pallette enhanced with dithering. Nice job on that.
The enemies are pretty interesting but I kept getting into spots where I was quite helpless. The entities appeared to move when I used the scanner but I managed to hack around that by rapidly tappping the right mouse button. I think if that was a little more strict the entities would have been much more challenging.
Otherwise, I personally find the entities really intruiging.
Having the text cover some narative at the start tutorial, between levels, and at the end made sense, but I felt like they interrupted the tension sometimes during the gameplay. Level 2 would be a good example... you introduce the entity through its unnatural noises, and then you see it on a cliff. When you try scanning it, it starts moving towards you. Super cool, but I found that the text popping in and explaining what I was already about to uncover really impeded the uneasy sense of discovery I was feeling. It felt like you were telling before showing, and I would have liked it more if I wasn't told... just left to figure it out and be surprised at how it behaves :)
With the shader effect you do with the scanner I can't quite tell whether it is from the camera perspective or the character perspective and it threw me off occasionally, but it looks frigging cool and I like the mechanic.
This is a really neat concept overall, I'm glad I saw you sharing it in the discord server.
Fun use of a glitch to facilitate a gameplay mechanic! You took turning bugs into features to the right place.
Like a few other commentors have noted, controls are a tad touchy, and I felt like I was sliding around too much... often into things that hurt me. The last house I was at didn't have tables like this.
Really impressive that you designed so much of this from scratch!
The aesthetic and sounds are really nice. The overall atmosphere felt very cohesive.
I feel like teleportation as a mechanic is a neat idea to work with. Some of the ideas you incorporate make for good depth and complexity as the player progresses.
The clunky controls and the lack of feedback/sound really hurt the experience, however. The teleporation mechanic feels chaotic and I'm not really sure what its limitations are. The visuals are kinda jarring and the player blends into the background on my monitor a little.
I might be repeating some of the other comments in here when I say the potential for a really interesting teleportation puzzle game is at your fingertips, but it still feels like a prototype.
I think I just played a crab eugenics game. I also had fun, which might be even more concerning.
The "losing to progress" aspect is pretty interesting in regards to upgrades. I also really like where you took inspiration from. It's funny and weird and great when thrown into a short game.
Some sounds + beach ambience would really improve the experience. There's a bit of an "Oh, come on" zone right next to the crab where I felt like it could have moved its arm back just a little bit to catch a mutated crab that I didn't want going through. I think my crab has a mindset problem. it just needs to believe in itself a little more.
Visuals are cute, I like them especially on the baby crabs.
Biggest question I currently have is how on earth do those toilets fit through such narrow pipes? Why is nobody else wondering this? Are those how speak up and question the wonders of the assmbly line getting silenced? What shadowy deals with the devil are these bigwigs making behind closed doors!? There must be something aberrant afoot... Open your third eye sheeple! /s
This game is pretty fun. I like that the complexity of your job ramps up and more random crap gets thrown in your way of making money... what sick prick in the assembly line thought it was funny to start sending me ducks and bombs! Felt like there were unusually hard days and then unusually easy days.
I'll also echo the spotty grab mechanics. There were a couple times that made the sound like I grabbed it and then it stayed in place.
I also felt like I kind of optimized the fun out of the game after I found out you can duplicate the bombs in the repair machine and quickly throw it in the trash for cash. I ended up packaging no toilets for days straight after I figured that out. Felt like I was cheating the system... which felt kinda good. Screw those corporate fat cats! I'll make my living entirely off of bonuses instead of packaging toilets. That'll show em.
Generic elevator music for ambience in the menus + silence in-game where only the sound of drudgery and toil can be heard worked nicely I thought.
This game has a pretty neat atmosphere and aesthetic. Everything about it has a bit of haunting feeling to it.
I had a bit of a hard time with the movement, I'm not a huge fan of the inability to strafe in diagional directions. I got into a few spots where I felt like that would have been handy.
The fact that you are always moving makes some spots challenging but still feels fair.
Cannons also felt reasonably responsive... it still took some time to adjust to how the rotating works. I might have liked it more if it was tied to horizontal mouse motion, but I'm also aware that I have some weird preferences for controls sometimes.
I've had a couple good suggestions on how to improve player agency. I think giving the ability to weigh genetic traits and introducing some kind of biomass currency like in your game might help offer more control while reducing button-spamming (I think in your game the ability to weigh genes might work against the experimental feeling you get in the early stages though).
The levels are also procedurally generated, which isn't bad necessarily, but I think my levels just need more diversity and content, especially for worldbuilding purposes.
Thanks for giving it a try!
This was a cool idea... Communist Crackhead tetris is wild.
I second the previous comment, I randomly died occasionally or would get in ruts where all my blocks get wiped out every 30 seconds, and it felt a bit frustrating.
The puzzles are really fun to solve and I love how the spin mechanic + the falling blocks and different map shapes spin things up.
The procedural generation looks pretty cool. It looks like there's a few variations I ended up not getting in my playthrough. Super cool how big you can make the plant.
Doesn't really seem like there's much to the gameplay, however. It's also a bit of a bother that certain things like the sun turn off every time the simulation menu reopens.
Cool stuff!
Hey another jam submission that does stuff with plant mutations!
Once I got a hang of how the mechanics work, it started to feel more like a comfy idle sim. The Aesthetics suit it quite well.
I wouldn't mind having somewhere to dispose of seeds I don't want anymore. I had a bit of a hard time navigating with the camera angle. I also was not able to select individual plants very easily, only one or two to the right side of the dome. Double-clicking selected all... sometimes. That didn't work too great for me either, but it was the best way to actually do stuff with my plants.
I enjoyed selectively breeding the plants I wanted, and emphasizing different traits over others. I think it's nice how the traits you have control over are all shown visually.
Overall a neat game idea!
Letting you hold the left-mouse button and drag to select a region and control everything from one panel would be worth exploring and really help avoid people from feeling like they're spamming the clone button. Lack of tutorial is easily one of the biggest hurdles to this game's enjoyment.
Thanks for playing and providing feedback!
This is such a cool concept... The tutorial was very appreciated as I was quite lost at first, but got pretty blown away when I understood how the mechanics work. Atmosphere fits quite nicely.
Dash is broken in my browser (could be the doing of the omnipotent shared array buffer), although I don't think that really hurts the experience too much. Not a lot of places where I felt like I needed to dash.
The switching bullets for different enemies was good and made things a little more complex. I do however hope you develop this idea further after the jam into a bigger experience and narrative. I'd be interested in seeing where you're able to take this!
Super neat way of playing around with the distortion of colours. That last puzzle took me a good minute.
The ambience was a bit hard to listen to.
Cheese doesn't quite line up with the tiles on the y-axis however... made it a little confusing when I thought I solved the puzzle and then my little crank mouse turn away just before the cheese.
Super cool game!
Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it so much :)
I got the music from pixabay under their content license... The artist's name is Roman Belov, their songs were sweet and really fit the ambience I was going for: https://pixabay.com/users/romanbelov-25347333/
Cheers!
Nice job on the narrative, I found it quite engaging. The dialect is fun and I appreciate the world-building that went into this game.
The gameplay has a couple kinks to it... crowd avoidance could be better as close-ranged characters sometimes got stuck behind my ranged characters.
I find with the archer character she is able to snipe enemies very easily from a distance. Makes the basic enemies a little too easy to clear out.
I mentioned in the comments here elsewhere that I figured out a way to get 360 vision. Nice that there is the consequence of those looking away from the direction they are moving slowing me down. I found doing this resulted in a slightly slower pace, but it was a good strat for going through unexplored hallways with branching off rooms. I think mciromanaging your enemies was kind of what was intended here, so it worked quite nicely into the rest of the intended strategy.
It was enjoyable running into, interacting with, and recruiting friendly beings in the world. Not Marcis though, Marcis is a prick.