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I saved this and another GB Studio game for last in my testing queue so I could play them on hardware. So I was sad to see there was no download available anywhere I could find. 

Nevertheless, I liked the concept. I had some difficulty figuring out what to do, however. With no player feedback on how much strength the sword has, I wasn't sure how often I needed to replenish it. I was also completely frozen on a handful of play-throughs after trying to replenish the sword. No matter how many chosen ones I "spotted" amongst the visitors, I never reached a winning ending.

I'd love to see you keep going. I love seeing new GB games and think you're at the start of a cool idea!

I saved this and another GB Studio game for last in my testing queue so I could play them on hardware. So I was sad to see there was no download available anywhere I could find. Nevertheless, I thought this was a neat start to a metroid-like game. The pico-8 style graphics are particularly attractive. I couldn't find much to do here but jump around and explore, but I see the vision!

Bugs & other notes:

• The "you got scammed" disclaimer on startup has a typo.
• The animation / reach for the players attack could be a little bigger. You have to get mighty close to enemies to do any damage, risking damage to the player.
• I think with some of the tight platforming, some adjustments to velocity and the ability to affect the height of a jump would be useful. This is something I'll be incorporating into the next update of my game.

Great work though! I love to see new GB games!

Really pretty game. I think the concept is good, but the gameplay becomes samey pretty quickly. The biggest jolt of energy I got was accidentally discovering a spell on my own, but the player isn't exactly incentives to do this too often when attacks are coming their way.

There's a lot of potential here. The mechanics are there and they're solid, but I think there needs to be something else to break up the monotony in some way.

Great work, all around!

Great game! I really like the possession twist on tower defense. I did notice some cases where enemies are sort of stuck on the map. Not sure if those are previously possessed guys I neglected to drown / blow up or what, but it stuck out because I wasted some time trying to kill them while actual enemies were attacking a tree.

Great potential here and you're already pretty far along the way! Thumbs up!

Fantastic art. You really knocked that out of the park. I think some interaction feedback would be helpful. Some noise or sparkly thing that would capture my attention to let me know I'm doing something right or wrong. I had two pods go skullblin mode on me while blindly pressing E on the third one.

Player controls felt pretty good and you obtain upgrades pretty quickly. Would love some more lore and a tutorial if you choose to continue on the game! Good work!

One of the coolest concepts I've seen thus far, but I found it nearly impossible to decipher what the beat was I was suppose to follow—especially when the wave begins and enemies begin marching.

Is it the music? The heartbeat animation? Something else? Anytime I felt like I was close to "on beat" the feedback noises from the heart threw me off.

Again, great concept. I think clearer markers of what rhythm is supposed to be followed would be a massive step up—keeping in consideration that other noises in the game impact the player's ability to carry out the objective.

Put me in the camp of "sucked at this, but had fun anyway"! Great work on the CRT effects!

I take it back, don't rebalance anything! Coming back to it today, I focused more on the causes than the symptomsand was able to complete the game in one go.

What I think is masterful about this game is that it conveys the importance of things like sleep and social interaction in maintaining quality mental health. There's more to survival than begging and food.

Thanks so much for playing and the feedback! We did ideate on a several concepts, but landed on this one for a few reasons.

We liked the idea of flipping the prompt on its head. We anticipated a lot of titles would focus on being a weapon, doing weapon things. In our case, we're a sword who'd rather be a farming implement. This idea supported that concept better than the rest.

The idea behind two game phases came from giving the sword agency. To do so, we needed some way of giving the sword more than just a personality, hence the platformer. It's up to the sword to change its fate by collecting runes that impart disastrous effects on its wielder. We could have made these strictly additive—and the original idea for the day phase was an auto-battler that would have done so—but we found very early on in testing that this wasn't exactly any fun. Night phase you platform and day phase you watch a battle cutscene while the game just does math? We decided to continue giving the sword (and thereby the player) agency in how the battle (and warrior awareness) plays out. Win or lose!

So the two phases became distinct with different skills being necessary in both, with the connective tissue being the abilities (runes) you manage to collect and equip during the night phase.

The secondary reason is that in this game jam we wanted to expand our knowledge and tread new ground. What better way than to combine two play styles we'd never touched before! It allowed us to build a lot more game with developers dividing time across scenes / mechanics. 🙂

FWIW: Your game is one of my favorites of the jam so far!

At that time I was playing on a 13" Macbook Air (2560 × 1600), so not quite 16:9, but there's probably something that can be done to pin the scaling ratio. Looks great fullscreen on my larger 3840 × 2160 monitors!

Thanks for giving Stabotage a shot! We plan on some updates after the jam’s review period is over!

One of the more polished games I've played so far in this Jam. Beautiful color palette and the CRT effects are a nice touch. Level design is thoughtful, although I did have some difficulty here and there with what seemed like bugs. I'll list those below. Otherwise, a genuinely lovely game that I enjoyed to completion. Great work! 

Bugs/Notes:

• The the first level that had a elevator platform. The second barrel kept getting stuck on the opposite ledge, requiring many restarts.
• The level following that frequently saw the fire pot falling through the unmoving platform while the player rolled on to it just fine.
• The level with a small elevator just above a wider one can be complete with just one bomb.

Love the idea. The sword design is sick and the pup adds a lot of character. I had some difficulty with the platforming, but I'm on my laptop this evening. Might feel easier with a mouse than the trackpad. Great work!

I like the idea of honing your skills as time goes on. That would be a great marker of progress!

Figuring out that I could move helped, but having to do that and then also move my mouse to click and focus on the text box made this feel extra difficult. The player already has one hand to keys for movement and one on the mouse to turn the gun and fire. I like the added difficulty of doing quick math and typing the answers to get more ammo, but having to completely stop to click on the text input box means I have to stop moving for too long and the game is over before it really begins.

Tldr; Allowing the game to capture these answers at any point would make the gameplay a lot less frustrating.

I was thinking after playing this that maybe it would feel better if bullets didn't stop at the first target and rather kept traveling through several. Then I saw in the comments that a shotgun is unlocked at some point, so that's probably a void consideration.

It's definitely not a bad game and I hope my initial comment was not discouraging. It just came across to me as similar to some other rage-inducing titles that are designed to get blood pumping with multiple things to manage and I don't typically fare well at those.  🙃

This game made me so mad and I can only assume that's the idea! 😅

Killer demo! It took me a few tries to realize I could move while hiding, but after I did it was smooth sailing! 

I liked the attention to detail in that hiding while in the small vent didn't allow your timer to decrease and that there was an extra purpose for the skill in seeping through the grate in the floor. Well done!

Fair enough! For what it's worth, I'm playing on a 13-inch MacBook Air (2560 × 1600).

Fantastic concept and design! We too went for a weapon-of-war-turned-farmer idea for our game too, but our players don't get to actually plant seeds!

I read in the comments below that the clunkiness in controls was intended. I get that from a character standpoint, but think refining the controls and making the robot's farming actions more precise would greatly increase playability. I felt unsatisfied every time my lasers fired, especially when I burnt the stuff that took me several tries to plant to a crisp. 

I still think the idea is solid enough that you should continue with it post-jam!

This was surprisingly tough!  I had fun experimenting with the different weapons and choreographing the enemies to kill them in groups faster! Nice work!

Fun idea, but I think there must be an issue with text scaling on screens with higher resolutions. The text is tiny!

Great scene composition on the intro! I loved the concept very funny idea and character design.

First time I played,  before I possessed the sword, I quickly found myself dropping below the parallax zone for the backgrounds. Some ground pinning might be a good idea.

Controls take some getting used to, but aren't unintuitive. I do wonder if maybe controlling the direction of the sword is enough to "lead" the character the same way? Rather than having to swiping the sword in the air to change direction after landing a tight jump?

Great work!

Loved the lightbloom effects throughout this game. The various bits of commentary in hidden sections of the map was also great. Not sure where the end of this game is exactly, but I enjoyed the duality of the playable character and the division of responsibilities between its forms.

There's a lot of potential here for story-telling!

A few minor notes:

• It's possible to get stuck in the first pit. If you breach the trigger for the ceiling to close, but don't hold your ascension to make it out entirely and drop back down to the starting position, you get closed up inside and have to restart.
• When falling quickly out of the viewport, I found myself temporarily stuck inside a wall once the camera caught up.
• I tried putting myself in the kings hand a number of times and in different ways and expected something to happen.

I really liked the concept of this game, but have a few pieces of feedback:

• The description says we're working to infect an entire floor, but every level is a new floor. Maybe change the goal to conquering an entire office building?
• It's not clear from the jump that you can only choose one skill tree to level up. I would expect to have to level up multiple types of skills to progress.
• I can level up the entire tree I select within the first three levels. This is probably too fast.
• The reason I can level up entirely is because the anti-virus is always working on one computer, there's no possible way (that I can find) to infect all computers at the same time. Without an anti-virus cooldown, there will always be one partially disinfected computer.
• It's unclear how a computer virus can "stop" the employee from helping the anti-virus. And I don't exactly want it to. I want the anti-virus to take longer to give me time to infect the other computers. The employee helping it go faster is actually helping my cause.
• I don't think some of the skill tree effects are working. For instance, I'm supposed to be able to randomly infect one other computer, but that doesn't happen.

Like I said, I really like the idea. I could see myself playing a clicker like this for a while, but it needs a little more work to get there!

Really struggled with the controls of this one. Didn't get more than a few feet off the ground. Maybe some sort of tutorial would be helpful? I liked the design of Bob and like the concept, but didn't get a lot of playtime out of it before giving up.

I've played a few games with this type of movement mechanic and failed pretty miserably at all of them. I'm chalking that up to a skill issue.  😅

Despite not being able to get onto the first platform without 🧀, I thought the color palette and music was very nice!

The balance of stats seems well calibrated, but perhaps on the edge of unforgiving. I restarted a few times and had difficulty getting too deep into the game. I think if the stress began at a slightly lower level, I'd have given it a few more tries.

Otherwise, this was a very nice and well-designed p+c adventure with a valuable lesson in hardship. I really liked it and will likely revisit!

Minor bug: the help overlay is really good, but becomes misaligned when played in full-screen on my laptop.

Very polished game with a simple and highly-replayable mechanic. Big fan of the sprite and letter-work throughout. 

I second the previously given feedback vis a vis reset following death by spikes, but otherwise really enjoyed my time playing this one. Well done to all involved!

Thanks so much for playing! We got a lot more done than we set out to and learned a lot in the process. The feedback has been great and we're already scheduling out another sprint's-worth of improvements and updates post-jam!

A tutorial would be great! Even a modal with a brief text description giving some guidance would be helpful.

But all around, it’s one of my favorites from the jam so far! “Words as weapons” popped into my head during the ideation phase, but I couldn’t think of a way to leverage it. You did!

Oh boy, this is tough. 😅 I'm historically pretty bad at these types of games, but that doesn't mean it's not fun! 

Great level design!

No worries. Not that big of a deal after you realize what's happening. It's reversible by scrolling too (up to the point you'd already played, I believe. You've inspired me to give Ren'py a go!

I enjoyed the artwork and concept of the game, but there doesn't seem to be any sort of indication that I'm playing it correctly. I can get under the foot okay, but how do I know I've done the thing? The detector doesn't really make sense in the universe of a brick on the floor and what is the breath holding for?

I think there's a kernel of a great idea here, but not much player satisfaction.  Needs more player feedback or guidance.

Thanks so much for playing and sorry about that, the player should be locked in position while talking to the hooded figure. Alas, our final submission build allows you to walk away, making it unclear in some cases that there's more dialogue to receive before being allowed to exit to the next phase. We've identified the problem and will push that fix once the jam's review period is over!

We love an anthropomorphized sword! Fun game! I counted 539 bricks! JK, this was really nice. A few typos here and there, but fun dialogue choices. I love that folks still make games like this when the more "eventful" varieties have become so much easier to make. Narrative is fun too!

I noticed that scrolling on my mouse would rewind the screens. Maybe that's intended in Ren'py but until I figured it out, I inadvertently replayed a few sections of dialogue one at a time.

Great work!

I love a visual novel and I think you're onto a good concept here. Great animation, music, and dialogue. If I were to give any critiques, it would be to move the dialogue closer to the action. I noticed I was missing some things on screen as I read the text way down in the far left corner on  my big monitor. Otherwise, please make more!

Question: What font are you using? It's really nice.

Totally get it. We ran into similar dilemmas due to time. Cheers!

The selection of words to type was a little too repetitive and I'm not clear on how the skills play a part, but I really enjoyed the narrative and environment of this game. Great art!

There were occasional bugs with the response selections rendering. Grabbing the scroll bar would make them appear as expected.

I loved this! Great sense of humor, nice graphics, and just enough resource gathering to scratch the itch. Just when I was starting to feel bad about deforestation, I noticed the trees grow back. Nice touch!

The shop UI should probably be navigable with keys, since the rest of the game and menus are too. But you noted that in your description. My only other quibble is the speed of the water animation. Makes me a little dizzy, but I'm particularly susceptible to that. 

Keep going! I love the characters and, with some more interesting geography and tasks, I'd be compelled to play further chapters!

This took a few rounds to fully understand, but once I did, I couldn't stop playing. A genuinely fun and clever generative puzzle!

One misconception I had was that the thought bubbles with arrows indicated direction, which might influence a room movement on my part. Then I realized the arrows were always pointing right. One small improvement might be move-hinting for the Meeps like the piece preview in Tetris!

So far, an early favorite in this jam's submissions. Awesome work!