itch.io

Thanks! We have a fix for it ready to go (we've gotten into the habit of at least pushing out a 1.1 QoL patch for our game jam games after the jam ends). It'll be uploaded as soon as voting ends and we're free to upload fixes.

Thanks! We have a post-jam patch ready to address the first bullet point (the fall terrain softlock) as soon as we're able to upload a patch.

A tutorial would be GREAT! We were pushing bug fixes as late as 20 seconds before the deadline and didn't have time to set up a clear walkthrough of the mechanics.

On the opponents turn all the enemy discs nudge themselves in a certain direction. For the jam, we only implemented one basic enemy who moves in a random direction, though we had plans for a variety of enemies with other behaviors (aiming for the nearest player disc, aiming for the 20 hole, smartly aiming including some collisions, etc.).  Our post-jam patch adds an indicator arrow to each so you can preview where they are moving next turn and try to focus on high priority targets.

All the graphics are our original assets (either frogsy or extremelymild depending on the asset), the music is cc0 that we did not generate ourselves as our musician ended up too busy during the jam to participate.

I love the visual design on this one, and the palette selection is top notch. Kudos for all the tooltips as well, its rare to see that level of Quality of Life in a jam game! 

Oh yeah, I am the engineer of my own worst nightmare with this interpretation of unintended consequences. Great way to apply that!

Nicely done! The controls feel responsive and I appreciated how the ship followed my mouse cursor.  The death mini-game was a neat way to implement the not dead yet wildcard (the second time through the game I died on purpose just to check and see what the penalties were for going into that mode).  Congrats on your first GWJ!

This is your FIRST GAME and you've not only put in the volume controls but also the sensitivity slider, both things that are so often lacking? THANK YOU!  I love that you put in multiple endings (I had to hold off on posting this comment until I managed to get 3/3, at last I did!), and the story had me really wanting to see the next step.

It'd be nice to have a key bind to let us advance the dialog, when you're hunting for those other endings its a little frustrating waiting for the dialog to play out at its own pace again, but this is a pretty minor nitpick.  I love how you implemented the water, and making the loch ness monster relatively formless rather than heavily textured actually helps add to the creep-factor when it pops up unexpectedly!

(Minor bug - the Main Menu button on the 3/3 ending screen didn't send me back to the main menu. Wasn't a big issue for me since that was me finally getting the last one, just FYI)

Neat idea! I'd like it if the controls were more consolidated: If I need to use the mouse, the keyboard inputs need to require only one hand.  The spells were sometimes very hard to tell apart, it would be good to make both the selected and target spell take up more screen real estate when we're comparing such similar images.  Once you started to get the rhythm of it this was genuinely fun, I like to imagine a setup where all the spells stay wherever you left them last and you get a small enough table space that you just can't help but end up making a mess for yourself as the rounds go on!

The wrap-around system for a platformer is great, and really forces you to think outside your normal platformer-brain.  I got to a room with a V and III door I can't reach, a purple dotted line moon box, where it seems like neither Up nor attacking with Z allowed me to affect my environment, but pressing R just sent me back to the position of the purple moon...not really sure where to go at this point.

The sticky walls might work better if you only apply the existing level of stickiness when the player's input is pushing them into the wall (or maybe also for a short duration upon first contact with a wall regardless of inputs, if the goal is to make sequential wall-jumps easier to time), so that they can move vertically more easily.

Some of the visual effects here were absolutely outstanding, particularly in a game jam! I also chuckled that you can opt to just accept your fate instead of trying to fight you way out and get booted back to the main menu :D.  The combat was very hard to work around though, it seemed like my sword was swinging the wrong direction sometimes and had very little impact on the enemies even when I did land it.

Cool idea with slurping into host bodies and bursting out of them!

I really enjoyed the newspaper mechanic influencing the kinda lil' guy you ended up as the next day.  Could have used a little hinting on the UI on which newspaper words can go into a given slot (color code or maybe change the shape of the brackets/words?).  The art style is beautiful and the name of the game is fantastic.  I'd love to see this newspaper system fleshed out against a deeper level of gameplay!

Any time I was doing a full runthrough to test that nothing major had broken, I was always conflicted between going for FORG POND or  the yeeted fisherman jr outcome. Glad to hear you've enjoyed that outcome as much as we did.

Thank you. All credit on that goes to frogsyyy, I just hooked up the code and added some sound & particles to it.  He has a fully animated campfire version sitting in our repo to post up after the jam lockout finishes!

Oh good call! And very understandable on the projectiles, it'd be easy enough to make them spawn an object with a collision detection for the player, but then you also have to code them to aim properly (leading the target and etc.), sounds like a lot to fit into the jam!

Thanks for the feedback, I like the way you think! As it happens the specific consequence you mentioned is already in our 1.1 patch, both for the cycle you do it on as well as a small persistent change in the subsequent cycle,  we just have to wait for the voting lockout period to end so we can upload it.

Really creative idea for a game. It really needs more onboarding though, I had trouble figuring out what I was doing, and could never figure out how to properly play the cards that have a targeting 'line', they didn't seem to work on played cards nor on cards in my hand?  Definitely stays on the theme for the jam, and trying to keep the 'story' balanced by playing cards on both sides to get to a target score is a cool concept.

First stealth game I've played as I've been going through the submissions, I liked it! I liked the addition of the knockout & drag mechanic.  Controls could use a little adjustment or a settings menu to let us choose preferences, I wouldn't want walk/run on a toggle, but I *would* want dragging the body to be on a toggle (mostly just for ergonomics with the default keybinds).  The story basis is a great idea for a stealth game, I'd be interested to see where you go with this!

I've appreciated it when these jam entries have shared some particularly local element of folklore, I never knew about this ghost station.  Very cool! Game definitely succeeded on the creepy atmosphere!  A settings menu would have been nice here, but its clear the intention was there to have one.

I enjoyed all the tasks having their own little minigame to complete! It was also a nice reversal of the usual role of the player by having us just preparing things for the heroes coming home from the big quest.  I did find the player movement a bit too zippy, but that's a pretty easy thing to adjust for. Nicely done, congrats on your first GWJ game!

I enjoyed how observing the "wildlife" would add a little polaroid to the board for the next ranger, and how the accidents resulted in new workplace rules, an excellent parody of worker protections in a profit oriented environment :).  On one life I went back up the tower to see if the map had updated as a result of doing some of my tasks (best I could tell, it hadn't), and found the stairs hard to traverse going up, I'd get stuck and need to jump. Might need some fine tuning in the collision on these!

Congrats on your first game! It has core mechanics and they work, the beginnings of a metroidvania style "oh with this power I bet I could go get that item I saw earlier" style of gameplay.

The player movement felt a little jarring, particularly with the camera attached rigidly to that quick start & stop style of jumping, but since you only had a few days for this (versus the usual '2 weekends' for GWJ) it makes sense. The last section, the moving platforms wanted to slide out from under me, and some of the jumps weren't visible as to where you'd jump next.

The powers were really fun and the lil' main character was adorbs!

Great foundation to build out from! As others have pointed out, the mana seemed finite and its not clear how I'd clear the whole scenario with just punching. I'm sure you've got more you'd like to add here: turn tracker, enemy movement range previews, etc. that would improve QoL and just didn't fit into the limited time available for a jam and I can't really knock you for that, what you managed to get done in that time window is delightful. Congrats on your first GWJ!

Putting the world on a torus? Brilliant, I loved that.  The storybook was great, the narration unfolding as you act is a wonderful way to let the player feel like they're in the driver's seat for the story.

I enjoyed the mash-up of two different kinds of games, and FWIW I'd say you did accomplish the transfer takeover wildcard by swapping between the plane and the hunter.  As others have pointed out, there's some balance issues: one is much too hard, the other is much too easy, some additional mobility would help for the plane.  It wasn't totally clear to me what the two health bar numbers at the top represented, some additional conveyance (or just a tutorial splash screen on first play) might help here.

First off, the "Run fruit experience" on the embed really made me chuckle. You can believe next time I do a jam I'm going to set a custom noun for our game!  And the jester's puns REALLY got me.  Your sense of humor is delightful and the art style is cute and very easy on the eyes. And I adore how you implemented the transfer takeover wildcard!

This was a fun run around! The hitboxes/area detection on the customers was a little odd for me, it seemed like it was better to give them a lot of space until they were ready than it was to stand within the radius and wait for them to be ready?  This is a great base to start from for a serving game with even more depth...just thinking about where you could go next with this, now I'm hungry for some schnitzel and some spaetzle!

When I saw the godot placeholder in the thumbnail I was worried, but this is remarkably fun smashing and burning, and you were very creative in re-using the same placeholder image to create distinct enemy types (I particularly like the flyers!).  The squash effect is very satisfying. It took me a little bit to realize the power of the burn since I started out using it on the more durable red guys, I take it the red enemies are resistant to the burn DoT? 

This is so fun! I couldn't seem to figure out the AD spam escape sequence, I had the mouse inside the box but it wasn't clear if I was making any pig-gress (to be fair, I probably should just not get caught in the first place!).  The music was delightful, and EVERY time one of those participants knocked themselves out on the pole I couldn't help but smile.

Also, MAJOR kudos for getting an online scoreboard working, that can be quite the pain for an itch embedded game and it seems to work flawlessly.

This was cute! You clearly spent a lot of time in the writing and level design, there's quite a bit of game duration here! I can't seem to un-toggle Deaf Mode and it was enabled by default; it definitely turned off any sounds but I didn't see any Deaf Mode sound indicators on screen (but I don't know where sounds might have happened so its hard to tell if its working as intended and I just didn't get near any sound sources while I was playing). Congrats on your first game jam game!

This was really cute and I highly appreciate making the game about folklore as the concept.  I was really curious to see how the jokes would affect the following loops, I'd be curious to see what you'd add there if you had time (maybe the goat gets a long beard?).  It wasn't until my second loop that I fully understood the whistling mechanics, I got the description from the dialog so I just skipped right through the pillar talking about it, I completely missed the function of the two kinds of whistles! (My first playthrough was extra challenging since I kept spamming the whistle thinking I was helping to keep it on track when really I was telling it to stop and start all the time oops!).  And that 'gentle' setting down of the goat cracked me up every time!

I adore the hint button, some of these were proverbs I was unfamiliar with (despite being a native speaker) and it allowed me to hit the ground running. And kudos for letting us toggle between unlearned proverbs and all proverbs in the settings!  I think old proverbs are a fine interpretation of folklore, its a very broad concept and I haven't seen any other games go down this route with the theme.  Maybe add a little bit of spice to the mechanics in how you interact with each proverb after its been typed, like a demonstration of the meaning of the proverb or something like that? And it plays out when you finish the proverb?

That's actually just a bug in the labels not getting updated, it does clear out the conflicts it just doesn't update the label on the conflicted button to show its no longer bound to that. Internally its a 'bind as many as you want, we'll remove old conflicts' system rather than a 'finite slots' system so that you can, say, bind QWEASDZXC as left and UIOJKLM<> as right if you have difficulty pressing a specific key and want to make whole regions of your keyboard be left / right / jump.   You can just refresh the page if you bound a whole bunch of buttons unintentionally.

Yes, the physics took a hard right turn halfway through development and we didn't get them polished to what we wanted in time for the deadline. There's a post-jam patch ready to go that addresses the slippery movement, hard landings and the all-or-nothing jumps. (Similarly, hitting ui_back to exit a level or exit the campfire scene early just didn't make the deadline, its in our 1.1 patch)

Yeah, the game was originally a purely narrative experience a la Little Misfortune, and we didn't have time to dial the player physics back in when it morphed into a combination narrative / platformer and player movement needed to become critically precise.  We've got a fix for that ready to upload after the jam lockout ends.

Shout out to frogsye on that campfire scene! We have a punched up version of that scene ready to go after the jam lock out period ends as well (and rocket-ox fans will appreciate some of these changes!).

I'm sure you'll come up with something. Maybe there's a certain color, or jagged lines, or something that'll stand out to players as non-traversible. Could also have a mostly safe 'starting area' with mixtures of the two types of boundaries before you get to the water where players can learn what is and isn't a crossable line before they get to the waters edge. Either way its a very minor issue and something that the classic vector games struggled with anyways.

HUGE shoutout to the artists, BogdanS and zho knocked it out of the park its such a cute game! Always a good sign for a game jam game when I find myself playing 'just one more'.  It wasn't clear to me if it was worth saving up a big jump versus some quick little jumps, and it'd be nice if the water and lily pads affected enemy pathing and valid player positioning (all stuff I'm sure you have on your to-do list that just didn't make it into the deadline). Great sound effects as well!

P.S. yes to more forgs in games

I LOVE the art style, really sent me back in the day playing vector games like Star Wars and Tempest.  It was a little unclear what was traversable terrain (a natural challenge to convey when using this art style, but one I feel is worth overcoming to keep this art style intact!).

And don't sweat the halfway marker thing, we all forgot one or more things we accidentally left on for testing when we upload it and that's hardly a game breaking bug, just helps out those of us who couldn't finish the first half on our first try!

P.S. FORG HYPE FORGS FORG FORGS

The wall jump is a little finicky, and the difficulty pretty quickly ramps up to "I want to use my controller" levels of precision required. Outside of those, the movement is smooth, the dash is satisfying, and the SFX are on point! The art style was great and consistent throughout!

Photographing all the creatures was fun and the UI does a great job of communicating to the player what you can photograph. It was a little unintuitive how to interact with the mail (reading the itch page brought me up to speed!), I thought I needed to drop off the mail or sleep or something, but nope...just needed to wait. Cute lil' forest stroll!  It'd be a nice bonus to have a photo album you can deposit photos you want to keep arranged all neatly versus the loose ones in your inventory.

Congrats on your first jam! I've never heard of this area of folklore, it was a fun excuse to go digging about the lore behind it.  I like the 2.5D graphical approach, though its a little hard to tell if I'm close enough to actually hit an enemy.  Movement was really fluid, which is easy to get wrong in a 3D game, well done! How do I dodge the archers?