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Nice job and neat idea on the freeze mechanic. Very Super Hot VR. I had a lot of fun dodging around and trying to find clever ways to use the time stop. Well done.

Pretty good concept and first GWJ so nice job. I'll parrot some of the other comments. I didn't have much trouble with the enemies. I got into a rhythm and stopped needing to freeze. I was killing things before they were even on screen a lot of the time. There was a bug with the freeze mechanic you can retrigger it while its active giving you more time in the frozen state. Not sure if that was intentional but it did allow for an easier time marking all the enemies. I got to over 2,000,000 points and over 500x multiplier and called it quits. Really all this needs is an ending or a difficulty ramp that eventually becomes overwhelming and you've got the full package. You could also consider a cool down on shooting or some kind of ammo/reload mechanic so it mattered more that my shots hit or not.

In the end I had fun and was just missing the closure of an ending

Yeah they can be tricky at first but the ability to make small behaviors and build them into more complex ones is really powerful. I'd be down to chat if you'd like.

I think the forgiving respawn was the right call especially for the game jam. I think health could play a bigger role with different enemies or hazards? I think in the present state I only took damage from the lava and when the birds fell on me.  Were you planning on a 2nd level and ran out of time? The section after the portal seems like the start of another level but maybe it was meant as a final challenge.

This was super cool. Really liked the retro arcade look to it. The shield color mechanic was pretty neat but might be an issue for folks with Chromatopsia. Might want to consider changing the shield pattern or shape as a secondary indicator for what shield you have up. Same with the color of the lasers from the enemies. I had trouble telling apart the blue and the green ones.  I liked your freeze mechanic and I love when people spin it into a long acronym!

Great first submission to the GWJ I look forward to seeing what your team does next!

Spooky for sure. You got at least two jumps out of me :). It took me a while to figure out what to do but I'm not the best at these kinds of games. It was really hard to see out of the lockers so I had some trouble using them to hide.

Pretty good, I don't think I want to live with that lady

Hey thanks for checking us out. We did a postcard for Petrified yesterday. Did you get a chance to see it? I can pull up the text if you missed it. 

Oh thanks so much. The AI is just a state machine and some pretty dumb move towards the location walking. We didn't end up using pathing at all. The flashlight is a cone topped with a hemisphere and some additive alpha. That represents the vision cone of the people. They have three states. Wonder, Chase, and idle. Wonder is the big one. Handles following a pre set path of points for patrolling it also handles getting them back to either their patrol or sentry location. Chase handles them following the player and sitting to alert others around them. Idle just handles them standing still and being in sentry mode. Idle also does the snow ball throwing. I wish I had a behavior tree to handle the logic it's pretty messy in there. Let me know if there's anything more specific you are interested in

This was fun. The controls felt really good. I managed to not hit any penguins on my first run so I went back and tried. I wish I could back through more penguins without losing as much speed but I'm guessing they are there as something to avoid and not something to play with :). I did have some trouble spotting the UI on the main menu and in the game after I full screened. I assume this was because of the UI is Real wildcard but I would probably make your main menu buttons pop more and the UI a bit bigger post jam if you are going to tweak things :). 

awesome job

Wow. that was hard and hard was harder... Took me a bit to find how to change the difficulty but I figured it out. First play through I wasn't aware that miss clicks caused the speed up so it was pure chaos. Once I figured that out it was a bit easier. Are the bombs unclickable when they are initially spreading out? I feel like I was clicking it but it wasn't taking. 

Nice job.

Thanks for playing! It was really difficult to keep the "UI is Real" wildcard and help with hints and stuff. We tried to be subtle where we needed less then real gameplay indicators. I'm glad you were able to mess around and get the idea. Did you end the game by getting on the platform and interacting? You can do that at any time and get your "score" represented by the crowd you end up drawing to look at you shine.

Thanks again for playing!

This was a lot of fun. I enjoyed your platform mechanics and you built some of your puzzles around them well. I had a hard time finding my last green gem but was able to find it in the end. Sound design was very nice as well. I was curious if the decision to not punish falling off made late or part of the core design from the start?

Thanks for playing! I am always surprised by how much folks get done in these jams. Our artists are amazing. Every time we set up to do one I am always concerned we've bitten off more than we can chew especially for Art and then our art folks keep kicking butt. In every jam I have done there has been art we haven't used because we ran out of time. I need to do better as a gameplay person to keep up with them.

There is a web server that has the image and some json to provide the text and link. Its similar to how a leaderboard would work where you've got just a bit of external data that gets loaded from the web.

oh man I'll have to give that a shot! thanks for the tip

Very chill game. Almost too chill. I made it over 11000 before I let my skier freeze. I think you need some kind of goal or a mechanic that ramps up the difficulty as you move down. I'm guessing that was planned but time got in the way. You've got the framework just need a few more bits to take it to the next level. Art was good and the character was cute Good job!

Sound design was very nice. Sound is often over looked and I think your game really benefitted from having complete sound. Keep up the good work

ramp up on the enemy count was intense! I have to admit I'm not very good at this game. Good submission.

interesting concept. I liked the inclusion of the bestiary that was a nice polish touch. I am really bad at judging the spore guys. I seem to always get hit by them as I was passing. No idea how far into the forest I was able to get but I never made it out. Art style was neat but I found the background a little hard to read but other wise it was cool.

I liked this. Pretty creepy and it was fun to test out what all the different things were. I saw the landmine, thought "that looks like a landmine" and then promptly blew myself up. Very fun. I did get a bad generation where there was only one way out of the room and there was a hanging enemy guy that I couldn't see how to get past. Otherwise lots of fun.

Good job. Straightforward concept and executed. You had custom UI are for your start menu and that's awesome. Not sure if this is also custom art or a pack but it was a good choice.  I think there are just a few things you could improve on to bring it to the next level. You need a way back to the main menu once the game ends. I think you could have also had the ice melt in more stages so you give that time left feed back a little more regularly. I think some sound work with the ice cracking and the monster making noise would have added to the frantic feeling when the generator is our of gas. I think you want to lean into that feeling of pressure more in a game like this. Over all a good effort

Neat concept and executed pretty well. I played a bit without using the EMP and it was pretty tough. The EMP makes lining up the shots a bit better. unfortunately its hard to know how the bots will move so knowing when to EMP is tough without memorizing the patterns. I don't really know how you would fix that so its not a big deal really. All in all solid game.

Thanks for checking out the game. Mayor Gruber visited Mikecicle on the first day of voting. Unfortunately there were some issues with glue on the postcard and so you can't read it any more (bug with the button) but here is the text:

I found a nice snowy place that reminds me of home. The trees here are a little… blocky I guess? I don’t think these trees will do at all. I don’t think I should hang around here any longer than I have to. I just saw a guy sliding down the mountain completely frozen in ice! At least he smashed through an ice wall that was blocking my way. Don’t worry I have a few more places to search. I’ll send another postcard tomorrow!

Love,
Mayor Hans

Thanks for playing. The movement mechanics were somewhat of a split vote on if you should move without holding/pressing the jump key. It was ultimately my call and I thought that making the choice more deliberate helped with the sound ping mechanic when you land.

Love it. I tried all three control options on the first level and thought that mouse was super OP. I like that you forced me to become accurate in my mouse movements in the later levels. I like that the music and laser pews synced up. I was able to complete all of the levels. Really cool game. Did you have any ideas for other puzzle mechanics or hazard types you didn't get to use?

Agreed balancing is one of the hardest things to do during a game jam right after proper scoping. 

Hey thanks for the kind words. I recorded all the sfx (first time trying that). The music I found on a free sounds site. You need to collect snowballs from snow piles first and then you can click to shoot your snowballs. That could have been much clearer in the instructions but we were up against the clock running on very little sleep :).

Thanks for playing.

Nah its fine. Thanks for the offer!

This game is pretty frantic. I'm not very good because everything is falling apart for me almost on the off. I can keep a few things managed but some of those minigames are hard to do or very time consuming. I liked the dynamic between the fishing and the fish fry. I would play into that style a little more where one task is feeding another. I like this though and would love to see some more to this.

That was fun. Apart from some strange issues with overlapping windows blocking the x underneath it was pretty solid and did what it said on the tin. I struggled to read my email while playing but I managed it and I thought the stories there played out well. I enjoyed that you added an endless mode I was shooting for 1000 pop up closed and got close-ish. Loved the BSOD

This is really neat. The IK stuff for the arm is really neat. I have no idea how I'd put that together myself. The aesthetic was really cool. The puzzles were simple and the movement was fun. I soft lock myself when moving one of the moveable nodes and couldn't figure out how to recover. There could be something here with some more time spent thinking about the puzzles and mechanics.

I really love your jam submission text. Gave me a good chuckle :)

Would love to see where you take this.

Oh man! Physics games are tough! I made it though. I didn't realize that my name was going to be used for the high score list so I used my real name (Ray). I did it though. All the way to the end and I can say I held first place for at least a little. 12:40

Good game. It works pretty well. The launch platforms are rough to line up and predict what the box is going to do. 

All that said though I had fun and that's what really matters.

What atmosphere! I wanted more! You've got the framework for a neat incremental kind of game you just need more layers! Are you going to keep building after the jam?

Saw this game while scrolling through the list and wanted to play it (good game image). This is a really neat idea. There are a few rough edges but all in all you have something that could be a really fun and cute puzzle game. I'd love to see some tiny (maybe just dots) skiers going down my slopes, maybe some ski lifts! That is all really easy to say after the game jam is over. Its all a balance between getting the game working and adding the little extras. Are you planning to take this idea further after the jam? I'd love to see what more you do with it.

This was pretty good! You've got some pretty key platformer mechanics in there. There is a really difficult balance in a platformer between the mechanics (jump, double jump, wall jump, etc) and the level design. I think you are almost there and with some small tweaks your game would be really tight!

Sorry typo-ed. I didn't get too frustrated is what I meant to say. I was able to complete the game but I do like that you provided the cheat code

Hey really loved seeing your game develop in the gwj discord. I really enjoyed your game. The puzzles were fun to figure out but not so challenging I got frustrated. I died probably 20 - 30 times on level 7 trying to jump those spike after the first freeze fall :). Really solid game! 

Sorry you ran into collision issues. It sucks that you had to lose progress due to it. We wanted to add save/load but it got cut due to time (as so many things do). I think its important and so we'll probably get it in post jam. We'll take a look at the camera. Its probably just a matter of limiting the pitch a little more but maybe we can clean it up a little so you can still use the high camera to nail jumps.

Jeffula does in fact read a lot. I mean he is like super old.

Thanks for playing!

If we ever put this game into a box I think we should have your opening line on the back of it! :p

Thank you for all the kind words. I think we all really feel like this one came together well in the end. I'm sorry you missed the bit about turning in books. We really needed an in game message (it was even on the task board) but just didn't get to it in time. Collision issues have more or less been sorted out in our current build but didn't make submission. 

Again thanks for playing!

Thanks for playing. We fixed a lot of the collision issues post submission but it wasn't really a game breaking bug so we just rolled with it. I'm glad you felt the tension of being high up there with a big stack. We wanted to communicate more that you could cash in books by going back to the bookshelves but again ran out of time for an in game message. 

I'm really glad you like the book stack. I spent probably too long on it but it really felt like its own character in the game and so we wanted it to feel good. I'm proud of how it turned out with the animations from our artist combined with the dynamic book stack movement.

The art style is really neat. I wasn't really part of the "look dev" for the game but its pretty neat how it all works. 

Thanks for playing!