itch.io

I think you might have an "=" when you mean to have a "+=" or something, since buying a wrench actually sets the click power to 5 rather than adding 5 to it. The rest of the options add, so I'm assuming that's a bug.

Oh, lol. I must have been tired when I did that level. I spent so long trying to figure out how to get a gravity block through that barrier that I didn't even recognize the Microban level 1 sitting right there in the "end game" (I'd forgotten Microban, but I've seen that as "level one" in almost every variation...)

I did appreciate the Sound Of Silence parody though. That was well done.

Lines 3-6 take on so much more meaning now too, that I realize I have to rediscover the solution to it every. single. time. 😅

Yeah, this one took me a bit as well - just solved it though.

That being said, obviously some spoilers follow.

So if you're reading this and still want to solve it by yourself you want to stop reading now.

Really... I mean it..

Alright, that's enough warnings...

In that screenshot you're exactly where you need to be. Push the left block up one, push the right block around to bring the right block up one space. Then it's basically solved.

I'm going to chime in here on the controls as well. I agree the arrow keys should have been an option, but there's a more subtle issue with the controls. The hand/hands (depending on how you play it) have mixed "responsibilities" that make it more awkward than it should be to coordinate. With the WASD/E/Space controls you're either using one hand, where that one hand is doing _everything_, or you're using two hands where one hand is handling movement and switch, and the other hand is managing (optionally) jump and place. I'd have to go read the research in more detail, but I believe this adds cognitive overhead to the control scheme. Also, by doing this it means the "movement" hand has to keep moving off the movement keys (occasionally needing to reach the "switch" key). There's not a lot of inputs required for this game, so it would be easier to be able to leave one hand on "movement" and one hand on "actions". Less travel, and less effort trying to make one hand manage different types of actions.

But other than getting me tripping over my own fingers trying to coordinate the place/switch/jump chains (and often failing by hitting the wrong button at the wrong time), so far so good!

I just came back after giving it a break for the weekend to see if I could shave a few more seconds off... I'm out lol.

21:28? My best for even getting out of the first stage is a hair over 6 seconds. And someone else shaved my whole stage 1 (and a bit more) off your best time?

There seems to be some timing with the dash that builds up extra speed, I'm guessing you and the current leader figured out some timing I just can't hit that gives MASSIVE speed boosts/longer dashes.

We are well outside my limited speedrunning abilities now 😆 

Oh, it's on now - not because I need to be first, but because I really really want to figure out how you managed to shave nearly 7 seconds off my best time. It doesn't even seem possible. I figured I was maybe off the best possible time by a couple seconds given how smooth that run was.

Possibly me, but when I went to check the leaderboard it came up first as no names, with 99:99:99 times in the top 5. Then when I refreshed, it came up as empty. I hope I didn't break the leaderboard somehow. It doesn't load on two different computers now. (it was fine before I hit my 59:64 time)

Edit: Seems to be fixed now, not sure what happened to it before. I'll keep the broken screenshot here anyway, just in case the bug report is useful.

I'll confirm this. I haven't beaten the game yet, but I have all of the blackjack upgrades purchased up to and including the last extra deck removal and the spy (I forget which one came first). But I'm down to one deck, spying on the dealer, counting cards, and have one or two (I forget) winnings upgrades...

Win rate is sitting at 43%. Tracking 100 games manually I see a win rate of around 46%, so 43% overall win rate seems feasible. Blackjack returns - almost stable, but that "almost" is definitely a loss. I very briefly made money off it at some point, and it quickly went back down into the negatives and just keeps on going

It's fun and relaxing until it crashes. And so far in my experience, it always crashes. After a little while of playing, it just inevitably freezes.

If it helps, the partial console log when it freezes is:

Uncaught RuntimeError: null function or function signature mismatch    Pixel Game Jam 2024 (Aqua Theme).js:84

    at 0883753a:0x336099
    at 0883753a:0x251d71
    at 0883753a:0x33d8cf
    at 0883753a:0x3395d1
    at 0883753a:0x336099
    at 0883753a:0x251d71
    at 0883753a:0x33d8cf
    at 0883753a:0x1f90d0
    at 0883753a:0x9cd977
    at 0883753a:0x1089d93

I can get the full log if necessary, but at a glance the stack mostly looks like a recursive animation frame/main-loop scheduler call chain.

I've enjoyed most of these games (I think the one with the undo mechanic is the only one I haven't beaten yet), and as a programmer, the idea of this one appeals to me. I am struggling to work out some of the controls though, and part it it might be what I think is a right-click-and-drag? That's a simple sounding interaction that's surprisingly awkward to perform on some laptops.

Yup, that worked. But like XxxDemon_hunterXxx, I don't think I would have gotten that ever without the hint. The door code being six digits long makes it look like the answer could potentially be six digits, which obscures the solution. Even if the door code were only three digits (i.e. without the extraneous leading zeroes), I'm not sure it would have been obvious. It didn't occur to me to try counting the statues in groups of hundreds-tens-ones. I wasn't even sure if those were the statues I should be working with since I couldn't even interact with them, meanwhile there were a few "lifelike" statues I could interact with that seemed like they might be important (the only clue they might not matter here was the broken bust tablet).

I'm not sure what you can do to make it more obvious, but I'll be curious how many people get it before they read the hint.

Not bad. The concept works. The puzzles are relatively straightforward so it does feel a bit more like a race than a puzzle - but you realized that and noted it in the description.

One small problem is with the controls as the pace picks up. On a laptop trying to do fast and precise mouse movement on a trackpad is tricky. It gets a little bit harder with the sole use of WASD for movement instead of arrow keys, because some laptops temporarily disable the touchpad when most keys are pressed to prevent accidentally moving the cursor while typing. My laptop for example has a nearly one second delay between pressing any letter/number/space and being able to move or click the trackpad.

Not too bad - the jerky camera motion though made it very difficult to control sometimes, and hard to look at.

And speaking of hard to look at - that seizure warning, yeah, that's necessary. But the reason for it - completely unnecessary. All that flashing didn't add anything to the game in my opinion except additional eye strain.

That one took me several tries to figure out. There's a single full row that you can make that involves only pushable blocks (no walls). Once you've done that, the rest basically falls into place.

Gave it a quick play - beat the main quest, haven't beaten the bonus dungeon yet. I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes. I see potential, if it's the kind of game I think it is. But since you asked for feedback (yes it looks long, but only because I'm trying to be thorough why I think a couple things were issues, in the hope it's more useful than merely pointing out the issues):

The puzzles don't seem very difficult. This isn't necessarily a problem, in part it depends on what the gameplay is meant to be. I definitely get some "Zelda" hints from this (especially with the pixel art - has a nice retro feel to it), so focusing on exploration over hard puzzles isn't a bad thing. (also, having grown up on games like Zelda, Secret of Mana, etc my idea of what is a hard puzzle in such a game might be skewed). So I don't think it would hurt to be more challenging, but I also don't know that it needs to be.

I got a little lost at first going through the the first dungeon. In the end it was just because I didn't notice the water rise to let me make the crate bridge. I don't know if it just wasn't obvious to me though, or if I stumbled across a bug, since when I came back later and tried again I noticed it right away.

The main issues I had were the controls. I'll toss arrow keys out as just a personal preference when controlling games like this, so WASD + JK/etc feels a bit weird to me - but again, preference. At least you didn't use the mouse for attacking, so thank you for that. But I did find it to be awkward switching weapons/tools. K wouldn't always switch (I believe it was when I was in pushing distance of a block, the ready-to-push overrides the equipment switch, so when I wanted to change to the torch near some crates for example, I had to realize I needed to step back first). Also found myself accidentally changing the tool by hitting K in the middle of encounters, so don't think I'm sold on the "tool switch" interface. (I have a few other thoughts on inputs as well - although it starts to wander into HCI theory, and the comment section might not be where I want to write a UI dissertation right now 😅)

When I first picked up the torch and it asked if I wanted to equip it, I found that a bit annoying, and I didn't want to use it right then, so I said no - only to find out later that I needed to equip it in order to be able to switch to it. Later, when I got the umbrella I said "yes" to equipping it so I wouldn't have to later... only to find that unequipped my weapon because there's only 4 equip slots. This feels a little awkward, since there's kind of two levels of inventory management - one to decide which items are "usable" and one to decide which of the usable items you're using. I don't know how else the inventory is used, but I don't think I'm sold on that part of it at least. But I'm not sure I have a suggestion - depends on how much tool switching is necessary, and what else the inventory does what UI will make that cleaner.

I quite enjoyed how so many random pieces of the environment could be played with - lights, fans, ovens, etc turned on and off - it's not really necessary, but it's a kind of cute little bit of "flavour", but I did find having to interact with doors and ladders to use them a little bit awkward - in part because I'm not sure I remember playing too many games where you had to interact with ladders, but also because since you've got an interaction "target" you sometimes have to move around a bit before it targets the ladder or door. You might want to make "use" preferentially target things that can actually be interacted with in front of you, even if they're a little bit "outside" the default target zone (then you might not even need the visible target marker).

Looking forward to seeing the boss in the beta build!

It's not just the double-jump that's inconsistent - the normal jump was too in my experience. I found the maximum jump height seemed different every time I held down the space bar.

There seems to be a few bugs:

• When I bought the bag, I didn't get larger ore capacity (still topped out at 40)
• When I bought the teleport upgrade, it didn't reduce the cost of the teleporter (still cost 20).
• Game frequently crashes (well, freezes, but never recovers) when entering the mines.

Yeah, I get that - if you're right handed, and using the mouse, WASD is absolutely natural for movement - it's where the other hand naturally sits. But, the primary reason for that is actually because the mouse is natural to use with the dominant hand because he mouse is used for precision work, so you want the most control. But when you're not doing that, you've got options.

I'll reveal myself to be an old fogey here, and mention that a lot of video games on computers historically used the arrow keys for moving - even predecessors to today's 3D games (Doom and Wolfenstein 3D being two of the major titles I remember from when I was a kid) used the arrows to move. Part of that I imagine being intuition (with minimal video game history to pull from, arrow keys meaning "move" were probably more intuitive, and I'd guess the other part being that the majority of gamers would be then handling the most intricate controls with their dominant hand (mouse aim wasn't a thing - in fact "aim" wasn't a thing beyond left/right 🤣).

Now, there's decades of games that use WASD + mouse "look" for movement, so I expect that's why people find it natural to go for WASD, and then "mouse attack" just feels like the obvious pairing. But they're a different style of game. As someone who uses a laptop, grew up on games that didn't use a mouse, and spends too much time thinking about Human Computer Interaction (and never believed my HCI professor when he tried to evangelize the superiority of the mouse for ALL interactions), I tend to notice these things, and spend (obviously) too much time thinking about why they do or don't work.

That all being said, yeah, control customization is a pretty typical way to deal with "there's lots of controls, and no two people are the same".

For a game like this, personally, I'd probably be looking at arrow keys for movement, and some combination of the lower left characters and/or spacebar for actions and jumps.

The fact that there are two different attacks, plus run, jump, and "minion" does make it a bit awkward to find a set of controls that handle everything cleanly, I'll admit.

Playing around with it a bit to try to get a feeling for what keys feel "intuitive" to me in this specific case, I kind of have a feeling for arrow keys move, left shift runs, Z jumps (which would make it easy to run and jump - although I notice that jumping doesn't maintain run velocity - that might be a bug). X and C would be the two attacks, although I'm not sure offhand which is which, X "feels" more like the projectile, but also feels like "primary attack", which you may not want to be the projectile since it costs health. "Minion"... I'm not entirely sure. It's the least used, doesn't really need to be reached quickly. Could be V, or F. Left Ctrl could be an option too. (I'd suggest D as being easy to reach from the ZXC position - but obviously that would break WASD as a movement option).

Alternatively, up arrow for jump rather Z in that control scheme could work as well - effectively all movement is on arrow keys, and all "actions" are on the left hand. That approach can also be flipped for people who use the other hand - WASD for movement and jumping, with something in the i, o, p, j, k, l, etc section of the keyboard being actions - although that way around is harder to squeeze in a run modifier.

But without being able to test some of these assumptions in context, they're just best guesses right now on what could work in this case.

Please don't use left/right mouse click for undirected attacks. It makes it unnecessarily difficult to control on touchpad laptops, and using the mouse suggests that projectile attacks can be aimed, since positional interaction on the screen is the control that the mouse is intended for. If you're not using a mouse for what a mouse does, but just as a button, it's probably the wrong input device.

I'm not sure if this game is buggy, or trolling the player, but that whole "lose all the pages when you die" thing basically means the game must be played all the way through without dying. Because if you do die, you have to go all the way back to the beginning to get the pages.

Okay, that could be worse, you're basically playing it through without the bosses. Except...

You need to then wait until you're ready to fight the final boss to get any of the ability upgrades because they don't properly reset when you respawn (so, better beat the final boss on the first try), but it's doable. Except...

The first progress-blocking chicken-wall respawns when you do, and if you respawn past it, you might not be able to destroy it in order to go back and get the early game pages.

I've tried a few times to get the "good" ending, and I'm giving up because it's just unplayable if you're going for 100%.

But other than that (and the somewhat awkward control choice of ZXCD with D being dash - which I find makes for awkward use of jump, attack and dash in combos), a decent mini metroidvania.

Interesting idea, animation is pretty smooth. Definitely has potential. But it's practically unplayable on a laptop because of that left click/right click interface. It doesn't look like the mouse is being used for any purpose other than for two buttons, so please forget about the mouse and focus on good keyboard inputs. Not only will that make the game playable on more systems, but it's a more proper input since the mouse implies other interactions that I'm guessing the game doesn't use (although I could be wrong since I only played long enough to realize I wasn't going to be able to play it on my laptop - so maybe there's something later)

Please don't use the mouse button for attack if you don't actually need the mouse. Not only is is a bad experience on laptops, especially with touchpads, but the use of a mouse implies the ability to aim the weapon, since that's part of what a mouse affords, which makes the mouse the wrong input device.

So... just to confirm.... even though the mouse is being used to attack, the direction in which you attack is not related in any way to where your mouse cursor is?

If that's the case then please DON'T USE THE MOUSE TO ATTACK! It's an unnecessarily confusing input method that makes it feel like the controls should be different than they are. A keyboard key would make it both a more intuitive interface because it wouldn't provide the wrong "affordance" that the mouse provides by suggesting you can aim! It also is a bad experience on a laptop with a touchpad to require lots of clicking (for various reasons).

I've only played for a few minutes, so i might be missing a later mechanic that requires it, but if not... for the love of gaming NO! JUST! NO! Enough with game developers using the mouse as just a substitute button for game mechanics that don't require aiming. If a game could be designed to work perfectly well with a NINTENDO gamepad (not even a SNES gamepad) there's absolutely no reason it should ever use the mouse. Not only is it the wrong interface, because a mouse has a particular interaction paradigm - screen navigation/interaction - but it's also an absolutely awful way to interact on a laptop that has a touchpad, making it not only the wrong choice but one that reduces accessibility. This specific UX choice has become a blight on itch in particular. I don't know what started it, but please please please help end it, I'm begging you.

Other than that I will say, good work on the animation and movement, everything at least feels smooth. If there's any indication of where you respawn when you switch characters, I didn't see it. I assumed at first it might be at the globes - but that doesn't seem to be the case, so as a result I managed to get myself stuck where the two characters were respawning at different locations that neither could move on or back from. So, I think there might be some bugs to iron out, but it's got potential.

It might just be me, but the game appears unplayable using the arrow keys. While the keys do work for moving, the up-dash doesn't seem to work, which is a critical move for level 1. (WASD does work though)

I will second bigjus' comment (and thank you bigjus - I was starting to think I was alone in calling out games for that control decision). I played the game for the 3 seconds required to confirm that there wasn't an undocumented attack key, and came straight down here to make that comment.

I feel like I should comment anyway, to provide feedback from another perspective (general UX rather than just specifically the laptop limitation):

A mouse isn't just a substitute for a button, it allows an entirely different style of interaction than a keyboard or gamepad. If the additional gameplay mechanics you mention include things that require pointing/dragging/scrollwheel/etc, then obviously the mouse is the way to go. But if no such interactions are involved, the mouse isn't a particularly intuitive "button" because that's not what a mouse is. And if the concern is that the additional mechanics will need more buttons, I'd be even more concerned about using a mouse as just a button, because then you're limited to two or three buttons - but you could do more with both hands on the keyboard. (and if you are planning anything that might use left and right click at the same time, I'll mention that's not even possible on a trackpad, so the controls move from awkward to impossible at that point).

If the game really does need the mouse, then using the mouse button for attack might well make sense, since you really don't want the player to have to keep switching between mouse and keyboard. But without aimed attacks, it's difficult (for me at least) to imagine a 2D platformer game that would actually benefit from using the mouse.

Animations look pretty cute, at least the animals on level one. I can't go any further than that on my laptop because, if I understand right "right click" rotates an animal while you drag it? If so, that's not possible on a trackpad since you can't both hold a left click and hit a right click at the same time

Thanks. Gave it another shot. Not bad, the bosses have a little bit of that "Nintendo hard" flavour to them, which I assume is what you were going for. Haven't beaten the third boss yet.

First boss had a couple issues, I think - one that made it maybe unintentionally challenging, and one that made it "cheesable", which I'm not sure if that was intended. The cheesing - could walk right up, and keep kicking until it telegraphed the hammer swing, had just enough time to walk out of the way, then turn around and repeat. I assume that's intentional given how tight the timing was, but I was able to pretty much repeat that indefinitely until I won. Maybe the attacks didn't randomize as much as intended?

The challenge with the first boss is that when it's bouncing around, it's not obvious when it's coming back in for a landing, so you can think you're walking under its bounce, and then it just ends the bounce midair and reappears on top of you.

Second boss was solid, good telegraphing of attacks - pretty sure all my issues with that on were just my own skill and getting my fingers tangled around the controls.

I played it until I found out that punch and kick were bound to mouse buttons (so, not very long). This control decision makes the game nearly or completely unplayable on a laptop with a trackpad depending on that trackpad's behaviour, and doesn't provide any benefits over a fully-keyboard control scheme.

The mouse has a particular use - cursor control (ideal for interacting with objects on screen, aiming, etc), not simply a stand-in for the button part of a gamepad, and using it just as a trigger not only is an inappropriate control choice, but one that hurts the playability of a game that doesn't inherently require the control a mouse provides.

Please don't use left-click for attack when there's no aiming involved. Everyone seems to be doing this now for some reason, and it's a terrible UX. The mouse only makes sense to use when cursor positioning is involved (including aiming weapons, etc). Using it only because it has a button on it is... inappropriate. I wish I knew what's driving this recent trend so I could cut it off at the source.

There are several traditional keyboard keys that work perfectly fine and make a game more portable to laptops that may not have a mouse connected and can have terrible experiences with trying to use trackpads simultaneously with keyboard.

As far as I've been able to tell, there's really nothing to explain. 

The entirety of the gameplay is basically just a long-running pile of random number generators. Buy characters and wait until you have enough "power" to enter the next area. There's an extra RNG tossed in to inject delays into the power increase to make it feel like more of a game than a "while true x = x + 1" loop with pretty graphics.

Inventory items increase "Qi" and something unexplained called cultivation - but it seems like they're just there to reduce the time between the aforementioned artificial delays.

And discovering items, maps and characters is all up to randomness (with your "dice rolls" being limited by "Essence Stones."

So, nothing is explained because there's nothing here - it's a continuous dice roll loop (the resource gathering - which almost doesn't have any effect except in reaching that 100% completion target), combined with a couple manual dice roll loops (buying characters, which are entirely interchangeable except in reaching 100%, and "breakthroughs"), and an occasional "click next area".

If there's anything more to it than that, I never discovered it.

Added a "witty narrator" that we're expected to listen to to help figure out how to edit the headline? Would that be the narrator that seems to be mumbling under the "background" music, and so can't really be heard?

I ignored the narrator the first time because it just seemed like background noise. Realized it might be important when it took FOREVER to skip the text the second time - until the narrator stopped talking. Quit the game at that point because I can't be bothered wasting my time to strain to listen to something I can't make out in order to figure out the specific magnetic fridge poetry the dev had in mind.

Maxed out everything except the star multiplier (that gets pretty insanely expensive at higher levels - but it doesn't really matter since by the time you're close to even trying to max it out you've already bought all the star upgrades anyway).

Never figured out what the "pressure energy" was supposed to be. I got the impression from the slowly growing number on (what I assume is) the pressure power indicator that it provides a multiplier on the pressure power, but the number of cubes/second processed was always just equal to the purchased pressure power, not the number displayed in the factory UI. A bug in which number is used in the cube-subtraction loop? Or am I unclear on what the grey number under the Ready/cube counter is and what the pressure energy does?

The compass had me confused at first too. You're actually following it backwards. Either the dev was trying to leave a hint that ended up too obvious, or tried to stylize the compass and accidentally made it a bit misleading.

The indicators on the compass look like they're arrows pointing toward the center, and you're following the "arrows" I assume? That's certainly what I thought and did. You actually want to ignore that arrow shape, and follow the compass in the direction that would be obvious without the "arrows" pointing opposite.

What you've found is the "secondary" use of the compass that you'll need later.

Well, when the dev says "dark [...] platformer", I guess it doesn't get much darker than pitch black 🤣

Seriously though, same problem on a Lenovo laptop, with integrated Intel graphics running on Chrome on Windows 11, except that I actually see what I think might be a health bar, or a battery bar or something in the bottom left corner in mine that isn't in your screenshot. Otherwise, just a black screen.

A hint in the room with the rocket launcher seems to suggest that rockets can destroy some walls - but I've never been able to gets the rockets to follow me well enough to guide them to any walls, so I can't confirm that.