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Just gave it a shot via Tabletop Simulator! At first it felt pretty punitive starting with no Appeal cards, and some turns I was completely at the whims of the dice because I had used all my Appeals. However, as I kept going I felt like that kinda works in service of the light "conflict resolution" narrative. It's a neat bit of texture c:

I would have instantly lost on turn 1 if not for the grace rule! After a bumpy start, I think I got pretty lucky because every diamond Challenge I overcame happened to be right before a Charm space. I never had more than 2 Charms the whole game! I can't quite remember, but I believe I failed maybe 4 Challenges out of the 16 I encountered. Here are the Challenges I faced (in order of left->right, top->bottom):

Since I only ever had 2 Charms, the spade Appeal effect was very strong for most Challenges since it guaranteed a win for diamond/club Challenges, and pretty high odds of a winning heart/spade ones. I also definitely made use of the rule that lets me draw an Appeal even if I move backwards into a light space. I think that's another interesting way you get some of that conflict resolution narrative in there (learning more about someone/their views through a conversation with them gone poorly).

I played this solo, so I'm curious how it might feel different with more players all working on the same Challenges. For as relatively simple as the rules are there's a lot of variety to how it feels as a game, and nuance to how the narrative can come through. Maybe I'm reading too much into the narrative aspect though (or maybe I'm not reading into it enough? :p)

It very much feels like a game that could have been cobbled together by families/a community over generations (positive!). I'm assuming it is in fact a fictional thing though? Either way, cool! Nice work! I had a good time c:

Cool!! Just read through the rules, and you came up with some interesting uses for these familiar components. Each player having their own slice of the board is particularly neat thing. Looking forward to trying it out when I get a chance!

Very cool, thank you!

10/10 would enjoy a teeny tiny yuri fairy smooch again

this rules. gripping all throughout, and has me extremely interested to find out where the other games take this.

Great work! Such a lovely atmosphere with the music, color choices, and map design. It feels like we're getting such a small glimpse into what feels like a big, fleshed-out world! I wonder what else these characters are up to...

Immediately gripping and visceral, brilliant in its simplicity. One of those games where you don't realize you've been holding your breath and slowly leaning closer and closer to the screen until you suddenly hit game over. Real good!!

Hoo boy that's some of the realest horror I've read. Nicely done!

I do see the issue even in the sample project, on the 3 "iterating downwards" lines. Strange that you don't see it though. Must be something funky on my end, though I'm not sure what. Oh well :p Thanks again for the cool engine though!!

I don't think I was doing anything non-standard, though maybe I was without realizing it. My little fix works fine for me, but here's what I was seeing FWIW:

With no changes to the code: 

If I remove the filter line:

With my fix:

Maybe Firefox just doesn't like that particular filter?

Learned about this tool a while ago, and have been itching to use it for a long time. Just released a tiny thing using it. Had a lovely time c:

FYI, I ran into an issue where text was rendering weird on Firefox -- sometimes totally unreadable. I narrowed it down to the bottom of drawText(). Something about the combo of "globalAlpha = 0.8" and "filter = 'url(#remove-alpha)'" was causing it. I basically just did this to get around it:

if (navigator.userAgent.search("Firefox")) {
    console.log("firefox detected, failsafe to make sure text is readable");
    ctx1.globalAlpha = 1.0;
}
else {
    ctx1.globalAlpha = 0.8;
}

Everything else is the same. No clue how robust this is, but hey it works fine enough for my purposes. It does make some letters weirdly bolded, but it's better than the alternative.

Really striking atmosphere and visuals! Sorry to hear about the dev struggles, but I think this is still a cool addition to your catalog! I'm curious what you had planned for the story 👀

Can't believe I never rated or commented on this back when I played it!

This blew me away. I loved the anime, so I was bracing myself to make a >:T face at your memeing of it... but it was actually incredibly cute and emotional and touching! You basically nailed the character personalities, too.

Beyond being just a lovely story, this project opened my eyes and mind to new ways stories could be told -- ways that don't have to be super feature-rich and technically-complex. It made the idea of making a visual novel feel realistically achievable! I actually starting porting an older project into this little engine. It's on hold for now, but I fully intend to finish it up in the near future!

Thanks for making this!!

An utter delight! Bump combat revival!!!

Of the caves I found I think there were only 2 I wasn't sure what to do with... Pretty sure they would've gotten me the secret sword and shield, so I wound up fighting the final boss without them. It was hard! I had to spend time analyzing and practicing the attacks/sequences. I never fully figured out the logic behind what attacks are chosen, but I definitely gradually got more confident. After a break, I managed beat it by the skin of my teeth and my heart was POUNDING! Incredible. Just perfect.

I really enjoyed the design notes too. Some really interesting thoughts in there. It definitely made me think about my own project in some different ways. It's great to hear about design done in a more intuition-based/vibes-based/"because i thought it was cute" way, as opposed to the extremely common (and frankly exhausting) rules/mechanics/Game Design way. Your mindset here is something all us gamedevs should embrace more. Thanks for writing that doc!

I will be shouting about this game for a long time!

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Yeah, choosing coffee will always give the stuff I wrote from my perspective about the location, and the hot chocolate is Alix's. There's no branching or anything like that :)

Loved this. Perfectly paced, cute and exciting visuals, and super satisfying to finish a stage. I was dumb and actually didn’t realize you could change momentum left/right (despite reading the controls…) so I thought it was designed specifically to where you just keep bouncing around the screen and can only flap lmao. It was actually pretty interesting playing it that way. Anyways, great work!

Wow this is extremely cool and cute! You explore a lot of different ideas with the mechanic, and those ideas are all super varied. The whole thing is this nice little arc of tension and difficulty, complete with a tense set piece boss fight. Extremely cool!

I love this so much. It made me laugh out loud several times. Many social and personal aspects it paints are deeply relatable to me, some stuff I thought I'd never see portrayed in media. The music selections are delightful and gave me warm feelings each morning I booted it up for a ~30 minute session. The art is incredible, too. So much personality and mood conveyed in such a small and funky palette. The scene direction is so strong, conveying humor and intimacy and creepy moments all with equal potency. My screenshot folder is bursting at the seams!!

Amazing work!

This is great. Love the tile work. Love how the text gives extra character to the world and things you consume.

I'd give this game 6 stars but I'm a little offended that you're forced to eat a box of board games so I'm knocking it down to 5 stars. Sorry.

This was just so nice, through and through.

There's fun text packed into every inch of this game. Every map is lovingly crafted, dense with decoration and personality. Character portraits, animations, and sound effects are used to incredible effect. There's more unique creative voice in here than I thought was possible with RPG Maker. The "normal life, except fantasy" setting is a joy. And of course, all the Facets (and even Wayward) references made me very happy! Everything about this game made me want to keep playing to see what silly, fun, and/or cute thing would happen next.

(*person who just finished playing Ys VI voice*): The difficulty gave me an Ys vibe.  ...both in that levelling up once or twice made a huge difference, and in that exploring could yield extremely cool items. To answer your in-game representation: no you definitely did not make it too hard! The variety of healing options and the high escape rate made it all feel quite generous.

I enjoyed the texture of the battles, too. Boss fights had me using pretty much every battle command, keeping it fresh throughout. While I didn't really ever use any of the low rank spells, I liked having a variety of options. Daisy was a lot more effective with melee attacks than I expected! I really liked how using certain Specials on certain enemies triggered special dialogue. Makes me wonder what other things like that I may have missed...

This game just rules. I aspire to make an RM game that gets its hooks into folks as much as Daisy Goes to Slime Castle for Tea does. What a delight. I can't wait to see what else you make!!

Gosh, thank you for digging into all this! It truly means so much.

The anxiety read makes a lot of sense given the aggressiveness of the visuals and actions. Similar to Far Away Times' comment below, I think my reading and the anxiety one are not necessarily unrelated!

An hour is so long to be in this game! Thank you for engaging with it so deeply though, and I'm sorry the secrets are so obscure! I'll give some hints here: they're both at the top of the screen, and one of them won't be visible if you're by yourself.

Really neat interpretation of the train station. I definitely didn't consciously think of anything like that for it, but it makes a lot of sense. I suppose your initial assumption isn't far off either, actually. It could easily represent the subway stations in Boston or New York City that I used to frequent with friends. I was in a pretty heightened state of creative excitement back then, and those subway stations exist in my memories as a sort of magical liminal space where I contemplated that excitement between destinations.

Thank you so much for the well wishes and the kind words!!!

I finally found my way back to this after many months of meaning to play through. I did it! Got to the 13th island, and that little gem spree was really nice and fun  :D

This was delightful. It's just pure, simple video game packed with small joys and moments of surprising nuance. Took me a bit to realize how small my hitbox really was. I feel like my recent foray into Touhou gave me some training for Jellyfish Archipelago, and not just for the more obviously bullethell-like levels!

The level with the jellyfish walls (11 I think?) was the toughest for me. That's when I made the hitbox realization. I also found it was easiest if I took a path that required the least amount of stopping, which started by going left, and took a pretty twisty path through the middle and back again... How intentional was that? It was brilliant regardless! Very cool use of the jellyfish as insta-kill walls that don't block other jellyfish, too.

Oh and this level is extremely John: 

I did it! What a lovely game! Here are my partner's and my favorite outfits:

This was a really nice surprise! I loved the vibe of your screenshots on twitter, and the game lives up to that and more - with a great atmosphere and really satisfying progression. Amazing work, especially for just 14 days!

I only collected like 3 or 4 items, so I'm looking forward to playing through the whole thing when I have more time :)

I don't know a dang thing about Linux, nor do I have a way to test, BUT I just uploaded a Linux build. Please let me know if it does/doesn't work!

This rules!!

This rules!!

This is lovely - nice work! :)

Absolutely adored this. It totally stands on its own as a compelling story, but being paired with Facets just so highly elevates both works! For anyone reading who hasn’t read/played yet, I recommend playing Facets first. It gives Wayward such a special and potent framing. Super fun to see aspects of the game represented in a different format too!

Of course I'm biased, but I love this zine! I think it's a fun way to record a snapshot of our lives through what we liked to eat at the time. Also just a good way to reference the recipes when I inevitably forget certain steps!

Thanks for playing!

I've been wanting to get less precious with my games and approach game dev with more of a fast and loose mindset. I found out about Bitsy somewhat recently and it seemed like a fun format, so I just kinda threw this together in a few hours yesterday :)

This reflection is a little bittersweet, yeah, but these days it feels more like just a nice memory I can think back to. Sorry that last paragraph came across as depressing! It was meant to be silly, haha. The neighbors around there were incredibly passive-aggressive towards us (probably because we were a bunch of 20-somethings invading their neighborhood of typical middle-class nuclear families), and were the types of people that would over-react to a totally benign thing if it was different from what they expected. In all reality, I probably could get away with walking through that marsh. Pretty sure it was public land :P

<3

Thanks so much! I’m happy to hear this :)

This is fascinating! I'm particularly excited by the implicit narrative potential. You allude to NPCs appearing potentially only once, by chance, and never again after that.....but if you do happen to come across them again, that could be a pretty powerfully memorable moment. Kinda like hitting it off with a stranger at a local event, then ending up in line with them at the grocery store months later, or something.

Oh this is incredibly helpful. I'd definitely love to hear your findings on macOS stuff too. Thank you! What Godot version(s) have you used for recent jams?

Far from a disaster! An excellent proof-of-concept for a very interesting idea :)

Regarding the presentation of keys/notes, perhaps give the icons some sort of arrow shape? Also FWIW, I think most rhythm games  (or at least DDR and Pump It Up, off the top of my head) present directions in the order of left, down, up, right.

Totally reasonable to stay focused on Ao. Hope that's going well!

The Mac stuff is annoying... I've definitely had issues with Godot builds. I've yet to get a web export working, so I'm curious how you've been doing it. TBF, I haven't dug into it too much yet though :P

I love this!

FYI, when I try to run the Mac version, it says it's "damaged and can't be opened". I'm on Monterey 12.3.1, with Apple M1 chip. I had to use the web version for now, which did indeed have some lag as you mentioned, but there's only so much that can be done to help that, especially in a rhythm game and especially especially in a game jam. I know first-hand how tough that can be, so great job! What engine did you use?

Anyways, lots of cool concepts in this. I especially like how well-integrated the debate theme is with the mechanics. You literally have to read the audience to know what's worth your effort, but you also can't just mindlessly hammer on the same points over and over again. So cool! I enjoy the flow of players taking turns too.

The visuals are lovely. I'm really surprised how polished and cohesive it all looks, considering it was a game jam! The sfx and crowd chanting in-rhythm when things heat up is super super good too.

So far I'v only played this by myself (handling input for both players), so take these next points with a grain of salt.

• It was tricky to mentally associate the "note" color/shape with the keyboard keys, but it did eventually stick.
• There's a lot to keep track of in general, so I had a tough time remembering to go for specific combos. To be clear, I don't think this is a bad thing, just something to get used to!
• I think I only unlocked an item once, and I wasn't sure when I was supposed to use it. There isn't much time/space to experiment to learn.
• It was tough to understand what the impact of certain combos/items was on my score.

I imagine all of the above could be dealt with through some sort of tutorialization/practice area/etc, which of course isn't much of a priority for a game jam.

This is possibly my favorite jam game I've played from you/Marte. It's really, really good! I personally think it would be very cool to see it polished up and given a full release at some point. :)

The *SMOOCH* was so good. I love this!

(I'm exploring your games and such after reading your "How To Make Good Small Games" article!)

Thank you for such an insightful response! I suppose every game probably goes through a shifting of focus/identity throughout development, but I find it particularly interesting to hear how it has happened with Analgesic's games, which I've always felt present such a clear picture of what they are.

Excited for more Game 5 devlogs!

Really enjoying these devlogs, and very much looking forward to Game 5!

I'm curious how you two go about honing in on the focus of your games. It feels like there are countless possible directions to take things when designing, especially in the beginning, but even in later stages.

How do you decide what to focus on and what to strip away? How do you avoid spending a bunch of time developing foundational things (mechanics, story ideas, level design philosophy, etc) that end up getting scrapped? How do you know/evaluate the appropriateness of such things?