itch.io

Thanks for the detailed review! Re: the super jump sending you higher, that’s an intended mechanic based on your falling speed, which wasn’t explained anywhere. I added a sentence to the game description to include it.

I’ve played a lot of 2048 lol

Really cool! Dig the idea here and found the combination of dodging and trying to keep your mouse on the outer windows a lot of fun. No real complaints, only feedback is that the reflection laser mechanic isn’t super clear initially.

Really dig the art. Agree with everyone else that the spiders could be more forgiving - some things that might help (individually or together): decreasing hitboxes (both theirs and the player’s), decreasing their speed, giving people a checkpoint right before the spider section.

The “run” jump scare got me good, though.

Really cute alchemist game! Liked the item descriptions (big fan of the one for broken iron tool). I also liked the interpretation of the limitation as the goal of the game. Only real complaint is that I would have liked to see more of a unique spin on the mechanics.

Nicely polished 2048 clone - looks and sounds good. The animations were a nice touch, although I would have liked to be able to turn them off in order to play faster. I’m also not sure how the game really relates to the theme or limitation.

My high score:

Pretty good! Reminds me of some of the old Flash-based puzzle games.

The box was kind of janky: sometimes it would get stuck in the middle, and in the first puzzle it can get stuck on the right player’s head. Maybe for the first issue you could make the beam in the middle push the box out when the box crosses it, and for the second issue you could add platforms the player can walk into to push the box off.

I would have liked to see the window mechanic used more, to fit the limitation better.

Nice, had fun with this! The risk/reward calculation of getting close to bullets in order to reflect them back on enemies is good design, and killing the invaders is satisfying, making for an enjoyable core loop. My only major complaint was that the window limitation felt kind of tacked on.

Minor feedback (mostly just opinions, really) in no particular order:

• the cooldown on the swing is mildly annoying. imo, it would feel better if either you could swing as soon as the previous swing animation finishes, or if the cooldown was indicated somehow (maybe a meter, or a ding when the cooldown was done)
• it took me a while to figure out that bullets always travel in the direction of the mouse pointer. I think that’s because the swing animation looks kind of like a baseball swing, which made me think the reflection direction would depend on what part of the sword hit the bullet. making the swing animation faster might help with that
• unsure if this was a bug or a conscious design decision, but when reflecting bullets, they go faster the farther away from the character the pointer is. I’m not a huge fan of that - having your pointer close to the character already makes reflections less accurate, so it doesn’t need the extra nerf. suggest normalizing the direction vector for reflections and multiplying that by a constant speed
• the high score screen stayed up a lot longer than I wanted to look at it. would have preferred a restart button or a “press any key to continue” prompt over the timer

Thank you!

Thank you! The AI part was a lot of fun, might do that more in future jams (although working with people is definitely more fun)

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback! Glad you liked the story bits. I did consider the corner-scrunching strategy, but I didn’t think it would be too much of an issue because you can only do it so many times before every corner is occupied for the entire 10 second loop.

Thank you!

So I actually recorded a buffer containing enough recent positions of the head to pass backward to the body segments. That’s because I originally intended to let you jump around in time, and the game would have needed to know where the body segments were in the past to properly recreate the player’s position. I didn’t have enough actual time to implement that, though, and for this version of the game I probably could have just recorded the inputs.

That’s an interesting point re:twists and limitations. This is my first mini jam so I don’t have a lot of context for other mini jam entries, but I think I came into it with the view where the limitation is more of a way of focusing ideas based on the theme. But your point is well taken, and I’ll definitely consider it for future jams.

(Also in my defense, my original idea involved a third button that you’d use to control time. But real life time constraints got in the way 😭)

Thank you!

This is fantastic! Love the little mouse guy, love the level design, and for the most part, everything is very fair. The checkpoints being able to reset is a little mean, but it made finally beating the game feel sweeter as a result, so I’d call it a wash. Boss fight was also very fun.

My only complaint is that the roll has a little too much start up lag for my taste. I also got stuck in the settings menu for a while because I couldn’t figure out that Z was the third button lol (but that’s on me)

I just pushed an update increasing the resolution by 1.5x and fixing some small errors that would pop up in the Unity console. Gameplay is still the same. The previous version is also still available for download

Fun bite-sized hacker game. I agree with the other commentator that it helps that I have some shell experience. I completely missed the fact that Estrella was your boss until I tried their password, because they’re listed after Lagrange in the chat window but after Lagrange in the password list, but that’s on me. Enjoyed the music and the fact that it came out of a physical boombox, that was a nice touch

This game is very enjoyably strange, and surprisingly large for a game jam. You did a really good job tutorializing stuff that normally would take paragraphs to explain just by letting the player experiment. My only complaint is that I think the limitation could have been used a little better.

At first I was kind of frustrated by the fact that failing once was instant game over, but the more I played and got a sense for the possible options, the more I vibed with it. Overall, super endearing and a very pleasant time.

I really like the idea - Necrodancer and Battle Network are some of my favorite games of all time, and this is a great way to combine the two. The art looks great and the music is a bop, too.

I found it kind of hard to tell if I was actually playing on beat. I think it would help if you game could tell you where it thought you hit within the beat, and latency calibration would also be nice. Both of those probably take too long to implement for a game jam, though, so I understand why they aren’t in the game.

The scroll wheel was definitely a bit of a slog, and I get the frustration because I’ve worked on games with scroll wheel mechanics and mice never seem to line up on different setups. I got around that by taking the friction off my mouse wheel, though, since I have a button for it.

My other issue was with the screen area, and relatedly, the mouse-based panning. I think variable zoom would have helped there. I didn’t love the feel of the mouse pan either, but I don’t have any concrete feedback there (I haven’t worked with them before so I don’t know what knobs are available to tweak).

Thanks! Glad you liked the music, I had a good time writing it

Nice score! Glad you liked it.

Thank you for the feedback! The accelerating speed was a last minute addition, but I’m glad that people are responding positively to it.

I definitely should have a tutorial, I never end up finding the time for those lol. And I’ll probably push an update increasing the resolution later tonight, that’s a good call.

Thanks! Originally there was going to be full-on time control, which would have made the echo mechanic a little more obvious, but I think it ended up working out fine

Thank you!

Super relatable game lol, had a blast racking up time, and I love how you implemented the end of the day as ascending to heaven.

I had some issues with the button configuration, but I think the problem was that I initially used my left hand to press all 3 buttons, instead of using right shift and right control. Also the timing of the boss arriving felt kind of repetitive by the end - some variation would help. Overall these are minor complaints, though

I really like the core concept here of a physics puzzler where you rewind time, but I think there are a lot of issues with the way that the limitation was implemented, resulting in a kind of frustrating user experience. The time rewind was implemented really well, though, so major props - that’s not easy to execute, and it works seamlessly here.

Super creative mechanic and great use of the theme and limitation. I found it really fun to manage where the hands were in order to maximize my angles - smart idea to have them move at different rates.

The hands did feel hard to control, though. I think some acceleration up to the max speed, or requiring that you hold down the direction you rotate, might have helped. Also the block spawn mechanic could use some tuning - it doesn’t feel great when I was blocked from shooting the very first enemy of a game. I think it’s a great idea, but it might have worked better as a later-game difficulty scaling thing. I also really liked the music (although I had to turn it down a bit, just a volume thing).

Addicting the same way that something like Jump King is. Does a great job of balancing frustration (in a good sense) and feeling fair.

The shoot button didn’t always seem to work for me, unless I’m misunderstanding the mechanic. I didn’t love the layout of the controls, either; A and D have a natural “left” and “right” feeling to them that gets upended here. Maybe something like X and Z would have worked better?

Space is definitely the right button to use for jumping, though, and it felt great.

I snuck in some changes to the movement code 1 minute after the jam submission deadline. The original version is available as a download named “holeworm v1.zip”

WitchOS Version 1.1 Beauteous Brew

The first post-jam update! As always, feedback is very much appreciated.

This includes two big-ticket items - the magic menu and an improved difficulty curve. Additionally, there's been a lot of work on clearing out the technical debt from the game jam to make it easier to work on in the long term.

Magic Menu
Before, you were on a tight 5-minute timer to do everything - get settled in for the day, read your emails, cast your spells - but now you can take care of all the slow-paced stuff outside of the timer. Once you're ready to cast spells, you can start the timer whenever you want, but spells only work while the timer is active.

Difficulty
Admittedly, the difficulty curve in the jam version was pretty much a flat line. Now it starts out a lot easier and gets harder as you get better at clearing out your inbox.

Feedback

I didn't really specify what I was looking for before, so I figured I should probably do that here.

I absolutely appreciate any feedback you might have about the game, so even if it doesn't fit with the stuff I talk about below, please do post it!

Here are some specific things I would like to hear about:

1) hook factor - anything I can improve on such as name or elevator pitch to make the game more appealing to click on?
2) core gameplay - how easy is it to follow the spell instructions? is it satisfying to finish spells?
3) tutorialization - is the README enough to get you started? could I maybe get away with less explanation?

For the cursor thing, have you tried https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Cursor-lockState.html ? That might be helpful

https://crass-sandwich.itch.io/witchos

Made this for last week's weekly game jam and would love any feedback on it.

I was going for a kind of "cooking" game without any cooking - you complete orders by following recipes and keeping your workstation in order. That, and the idea of using a retro computer to cast curses on people.

Hey thanks for playing and for the feedback! I just uploaded a new version that fixes that bug and rebalances the game making phase, should address the things you mentioned :)

Your deck is a poem, and you play cards by typing them out. It's the English language, gamified, and you use it to fight a demon, which is pretty sick if you ask me.

Check it out here - https://crass-sandwich.itch.io/pentameter - and take a look at my other games too while you're at it (https://crass-sandwich.itch.io)

Saw this on the front page and can't say how hyped I am to try this later tonight. Battle Network combat is the bomb