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ephemerald

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A member registered Nov 14, 2017 · View creator page →

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Super appreciate it! :) Yeah, I’m going to rework like… all of the second level. The first level doesn’t havee any camera changes in it so there shouldn’t be stuttering, but I’m doing some wacky shenanigans to get it to move smoothly and frame the player how I’d like, so there’s plenty of ways for it to mess up that I’m unaware of I bet :P

The gems are meant to be slightly on the difficult side, especially the third one in the first level which even I can only get every few tries.

I’m hoping to have a pretty big update ready in a few days that if you are planning to check it out again you might as well wait for :)

Looks pretty good, but the physics don’t feel very good at all in terms of gravity and stuff being very floaty and almost hard to control because of it. Cute idea though, it’s a really great start :)

appreciate it :) definitely some sections I will change for an update!

thanks so much!

Yeah I’m noticing some weird lag that I don’t understand where it’s coming from. Maybe windows build would help. Thanks for checking it out!

Thank you!

Thanks so much! I appreciate it :)

Nice and polished and simple, I think dying instantly isn’t that much fun but it’s a nice clean little start to something for sure :)

I think it’s a cool start to something but the pacing is all off. The only reason Vampire Survivors works is it floods you with choices and upgrades. Simply giving the player one per wave instead of one per room would do a lot I think, each room takes several minutes and to be offered a choice of “+1 health at end of room” or “+movement speed”, for instance, does nothing to help speed that up so it just straight up feels bad. I’m sure it’s definitely only a few tweaks away from being pretty compelling though! Hard to get that balance just right in a jam. Good work overall :)

I seemed to kill everything in chapter 2 but it wouldn’t advance to the next one, perhaps showing in a form of ludonarrative consonance the futility of imperialism. Sounds like chapter 3 had some cool mechanics based on the actual story of the guy. Gameplay wise it felt very old and nostalgic in a good way, though I couldn’t find a way to actually make use of the fact that I could shoot through the holes in the walls. Creative mechanics overall!

Great work overall! I think it’s a little hard to figure out at first but once going it makes sense and is pretty fun. Hitboxes and control felt a little weird to me, I think the game would’ve benefitted a lot by being less 3d? Like, having to run over the little pickups perfectly was not very fun, and it’s easy to think you’re going to hit something with a spell and then not, or move a way your character doesn’t like. Enemies are really slow to respond to being hit, also, which makes the whole thing feel a bit unresponsive.

But those are all real easy things to tweak!

Really great work! It was a little confusing figuring out what each tower did, I feel like if I had played PvZ more recently than… 2009??? lol that maybe it would have been more intuitive. Great game overall, it definitely makes you feel smart if you can greed out the opening just right to sail through a level. Really cute art overall, though I think the Spring tileset felt a little busy, mainly the pink bits/cherry blossoms? that look pretty but visually command a little too much attention. I really disliked the sound of the enemies getting hit, sounded too much like clipped audio/noise, and found the money gaining sound to be a little harsh. Also noticed it was cutting out a bit at times? Maybe polyphony settings were low on one of the audiostreamplayers? one thing that could go a long way is throwing the sounds onto an AudioStreamRandomizer instead of just AudioStream - even if you have just one sound, you can set the pitch variation to like 1.05 and that way every time a sound effect plays it sounds a little bit different. :)

Thanks for checking it out! Sorry about the difficulty! Part of it is it’s tuned to be like three levels taken from the beginning/middle/end of a longer game, not the first three levels of a game. I think the second level in particular is very poorly tuned still, one of those “I playtested this too much and lost track of the difficulty” things. After a break and coming back to it the section right after the checkpoint where you have to drop by the bouncing mushrooms is, uh, annoying at best D: I’d be curious to hear what specific areas you struggled with - particularly if the first level was a problem, which in my mind feels about right, though the last gem is pretty difficult. Especially would love to know where the camera was stuttering, since that’s not by design, though there’s some camera transitions in the second two levels that maybe are a little awkward. No worries if you don’t remember and/or don’t have time to get back to it though :)

Character is really cool and the movement is fun once you get used to it. Do the throwing star things do anything? I didn’t see anything that reacted to them. Seems like it’d be real fun to see speed runs of, great work!

I ended up calling it at this checkpoint, I dunno how close to the end I was but presumably fairly close?

I like the lil guy and really wanted to get him to see his first sunset :( Definitely agree the controls are floaty and the momentum stuff is just too hard to manage like jumping back and forth between single blocks. I did notice there were some wild speeds you could get with crouching, dashing, and then jumping, but never felt like there was a place to use it. I think increasing the ambient lighting may have helped a little bit because it often was unclear where to go.

One other thing that felt unfair to the player is the hitbox of both the character and the coral. I think it’s pretty universal to always undersize your character and threats to them so the player can feel like a cool genius for barely missing an obstacle that got so close it almost hit them! A lot of deaths I felt like I was just sorta in the vicinity of coral and then died which wasn’t great.

I liked the song, but wished for sound effects dearly. I think there’s a lot of good stuff going on here, great work :)

Took me forever to find the path to keep moving after the first gates because I couldn’t tell there was an opening there and had bounced off spots right next to it, so it read like a solid wall to me. I think the visual effects are cool but the ground is really noisy in spots where it matters. I actually think having more light would make the game feel more challenging in the dark sections, since right now you basically can’t see anything and know there’s no danger so you might as well just blindly bump your way out of it.

I gave up at the section that was just a bunch of red boxes in a slightly offset grid. I am absolutely terrible at any sort of projectile/trajectory based games so it was always going to be an uphill battle for me to enjoy the gameplay. I’m not sure I could get past that section without the gravity constantly pulling down, with it I actually think it is literally impossible for me. So some kind of gravity-free easy mode, and/or an accessibility mode would be cool.

It was kinda annoying to not have a full screen option as I kept clicking out of the window, but I did get used to that.

Song is bumping, great work there. Even if it’s not to my personal taste, this is a really solid and well made game. Great work :)

I love card games and I love platformers so I was pretty excited about this one, but it didn’t come together for me. I think there could be something to this idea but the pacing is just really awkward. On average I think you win ~20 seconds per blackjack game, and they seem to take a minimum of 30 seconds each (I timed). And blackjack isn’t very compelling with only one player vs a dealer, in fact I feel like it’s barely a game in the amount of decision making you get to do. So effectively it felt as if you told me “the twist to this game is that you roll a die, on a 1-2-3 you get to play for 15 seconds, a 4-5 you play for 30 seconds, and a 6 you play for 45 seconds, and then you wait 30 seconds before rolling again.”

As others suggested speeding up the blackjack game would help immensely. Alternatively a different card game, a twist on blackjack, something could really make that part stand on its own better. It’d also be cool if the two gameplay loops influenced each other more directly, like collecting energy in the platformer that can be used to cheat in the blackjack game, or maybe scattered around the level are clock pickups that give you time to actually do some betting with. Maybe the more total cards you play in a given game of blackjack improves your platforming character’s jump height and movespeed, so you’re simultaneously encouraged to play it safe to win more time, and push to the limit to get more speed instead. But all the ways I can think to spice this up are beyond the scope of a jam game, especially with only two days!

The art is really good, especially love the angel at the end and the black and gold… tail? spades? suit. Platforming character definitely reads like the pokemon Kabuto to me, but maybe the brown is hair? cute either way. The platforming itself was a little tough to control around the ladders, but was otherwise decent. I appreciated the generous checkpoints.

I’m sure there’s a way to refine this into something really awesome, even if it’s not quite there yet. I think this idea was really ambitious and to pull off all this art and have two completely separate functional games with just two days is a pretty big achievement and something to be proud of for sure!

Could really use more sound and music, but it’s okay - the punch being able to be retriggered as often as you click really makes it feel “video gamey” which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I think it maybe is for what it seems like you’re going for. I actually found it pretty easy and straightforward once I realized I could just hold space to swim. Any time a game has me holding a button down constantly it always makes me ask - why not just do the thing automatically? Not saying constantly swimming forward is the right choice for the game, but I think that’s something worth considering game design wise.

Cool idea and good work in getting it together :)

This was really cute! I found the jumping to not feel very responsive, i think there’s no jump buffer perhaps? The grappling hook didn’t really make a lot of sense to me, but it was a neat other option for movement. Art was great, though differentiating between skull platforms and spikes in the first area is a little difficult just at a glance.

Solid game, good work!

Really good. Appreciated the secret level though didn’t have the patience for actually beating it. My biggest complaint is that your time converts to points somehow but you don’t actually get told how many points you get after a stage, just your time. Now that I see the screenshot of how it converts it makes sense I guess, but with a full leaderboard you get like 14 seconds and see scores like 638 and have no idea how those things relate. I’m sure that’s just a jam limitation though, everything else is just polished and clean and great. Awesome job!

having control over jump height and being able to readjust yourself is a big improvement over others i’ve played like this, but I still mostly have no patience or love for this type of game. Aesthetically it is cool, but the sounds could probably use some work. Good job overall though!

Really fun movement, confused about the X / 7 is on the leaderboards though. Seemed like a lot of extra paths or something I didn’t explore on my way out, would definitely be super awesome with sounds and stuff!

Love the idea, it was very silly and fun. Surprised how good the movement felt though I did get stuck on things often. It very much is just “look for the new area that opened up” for each level, but I had a good time doing that nonetheless. Some sounds and stuff would’ve been, but really a great starting point!

Danse Macabre might be public domain, but recordings aren’t necessarily, was hoping to see in the credits which one did you use? Professional bassoonist here and found myself distracted by listening to it at times lol. I got stuck in the clouds part, tried to figure out what the accessibility settings are or if they even help, then couldn’t get back up there. Appreciate them being in there cause I’m terrible, but I felt like the first one was useful if someone was having mouse sensitivity issues, the second didn’t make a noticeable difference to me in how the game plays… like maybe you have a fraction of a second longer before falling after a jump? The aiming line looked like just the Godot basic slider? Which is totally fine for a jam game but that kinda distracted from the otherwise quality visuals.

Definitely not my style of game but it seems decently well done and the sounds are good, bug free to my knowledge, wind effects were a cool twist on the mechanic, definitely really solid stuff here :)

Aw the lil guy is so cute! Sucker for them. Seemed like interesting gameplay, but it does seem that cloud part is impossible atm? I was enjoying getting into it though!

I really didn’t quite understand what was going on, especially when I got to the first free first person section and there was a cube that turned green? and some red things that not only no longer hurt me like every other red thing in the game but also sometimes threw me up in the air, impossible to tell which was which. at one point i fell allll the way down and saw a big bird and died to a tiny bird, there was something existential fever dreamy about it that was cool. W and S being left and right in a 2d platformer is really uncomfortable to play lol, so I really struggled to figure out the start. Seems to be two really big long dead ends right at the start too which didn’t feel super fair? Music felt like Orinoco Flow - Epic Edition which was really funny to me.

I’m so curious what the intented path is, or if there is an intended path, or what a playthrough looks like. I think there’s a really neat idea here but I struggled to parse it at all!

dang, I wonder why that is? D: I did lock the game behind the lootlocker servers working, I guess, which was definitely not a smart decision lol

Fun movement but I found the difficulty a little much, don’t think the life system was necessary for the level of challenge here. I did make it to the second checkpoint, once! And then promptly reset and that kinda demotivated me. Music panning with the camera was a little jarring, better to use an audiostreamplayer and not audiostreamplayer2d for it imo :)

I liked the art and I really do like the feel of the platforming and see a lot of potential for fun speed with it, but I wish there were a couple levels with more training wheels first. Great work overall!

Thanks so much! I don’t know if the map was worth the time because I spent quite a while on getting it to work right instead of, say, balancing the levels, but as soon as I got the idea on like day 3 I couldn’t stop myself :p

Love the lil slime, though he could be even squashier and stretchier. I got stuck on the third? fourth? level, the (first?) one with a blue teleporter thing and threw in the towel after quite some attempts. Training myself to jump before inputting the direction I wanted from the wall was really confusing, I find sticky wall jumps in general feel like a lack of control but getting the right height for that first jump on that level without accidentally sticking to the very top of the platform was rather difficult, sometimes would literally get stuck in place on top of the middle of it which I didn’t understand. And then clearing out all those blocks is tedious because you have to back up before being allowed to use the left click dash.

so I don’t know how much I missed, but I was enjoying it well enough despite feeling like I was fighting for control of my character. Music was good but got a little repetitive. All in all a really solid game though, just on the hard side for a jam. Great work though :)

Thanks! Agreed on your points, I will make both those changes when I can update this :)

Song’s an absolute banger, great job! Really very board game feely which I mean in the best way possible. I think the multiples of the same kind tiles were way harder than the others in a way that felt kinda annoying, but not a big deal.

Awesome work all around :)

Thank you, I appreciate the feedback! I didn’t notice stars got lost on dying, that wasn’t intentional. They’re also not necessary for 100%ing a level, which maybe should’ve been clearer… that whole part is a little underbaked, they should respawn too. 10 gets you an extra life at least :P

Really nice! It’s very much not my style of game but it seemed fun and well made. I feel like the section in the third screenshot with a time of 29:29 was pretty confusing to figure out navigationally, but I guess that’s not a problem once you know what you’re doing. Are there multiple paths? The ending felt a little abrupt maybe. Aesthetics were cool and nostalgic. Great job :)

I wish I had seen the lil froggy int he screenshot, I feel like I managed to win multiple ways? Like I raised the beanstalk up way way high and then also got the second bouncy mushroom, was really surprised to find the game had ended when I jumped on it… what was all that extra height for? Very impressed with how smooth the movement was.

Personally I think you do yourself a disservice with the pixilation filter, but that’s a matter of taste I suppose. Looks great either way :) Personally would’ve really loved an FOV option but it wasn’t too bad for me. Really a nice entry though I’m curious how speedrunning it actually would go - is it possible to keep track of where the “water” spot is and just toss the buckets down from up above? I think it may have been more fun (and intuitive) if, as long as you got somewhere near the base of the beanstalk with the water it would grow. Can definitely respect the decision not to.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been camping, realized I forgot my eggs, and pogo’d to the top of the tree to get some using my pan. Glad finally someone has captured my experience in video game form!

It’s really satisfying to get the timings right especially multiple hits in a row going upwards, and I can see that with practice people can probably get some reallly low times, which is awesome. The section after the “why does it seem like there are less leaves” sign (or w/e it actually says) feels a bit rough, something about the spacing, felt noticeably harder than what comes after it.

I was gonna comment on the lack of music but saw you used FL Studio, cranked my volume, and only then heard the drums. Could’ve been way louder I think. As I’m typing this I can’t help but notice the bird pixel art gif staring at me on the left and how odd the one light pixel above the eye is on the wings-up frame and felt compelled to comment even though I didn’t notice it in game lol. Art was generally nice but imo the color palette ended up on the garish side for my taste, but that’s just a taste thing.

Anyway, nitpicks aside it’s a really great entry, awesome job :D

Fun! The teleport ability is a little abrupt and doesn’t seem to work too well, the destroy one seemed kinda useless? I don’t have a ton of specific feedback, but I definitely enjoyed playing quite a few rounds of it, great work :)

When I saw you posting about this in the discord and thought it was a really ambitious idea for a game, so far it’s the best take on the theme I’ve seen. I don’t think it ended up quite working for me, just too hard to judge the relative height, and the movement is really slippery and hard to judge. With the flat side-view for the messenger it kinda felt like he was more rolling around on his side than jumping? The shadow is also in the wrong perspective and doesn’t track where it should be, but that’s pretty minor. Feel bad for him for how many times he died in that well :(

I really think it’s an awesome idea to have tried though and would love to see how it could turn out with some more time to cook :)

This is cute, though kinda the opposite of what i’d expect in a speedrunning game. The jumping felt a little chaotic and i would’ve loved some more control.