itch.io

Honestly, you said it all. Specially at the end, that’s the problem in a nutshell and how to fix it.

The 30 second rule. Swim or drown.

only one thing to clarify: I did the want to not use Godot. On the contrary, I want to take it to the next level.

Having said that, I have a surprise for January that just happens to challenge me go stock Godot and GDScript.

This is just getting started.

I have so many stories to tell that are better than the game tbh. And yeah, this is, just like my previous game: a nice tech demo.

Thanks for trying it out! I’m here for the feedback anyways :D

the graphics seemed really prone to dying I developed this game on a laptop without dedicated graphics: an Intel UHD 620. And part of the reason why I went through so many technical difficulties was because I was hellbent on how I wanted this game to look like.

And I’m not gonna excuse myself, I agree, in lack of a better word, unplayable. I didn’t wanted to upload, but failures are also a for learning.

Glad you took a look though. I was expecting it to be reviewed by no one but at least someone did give me some feedback. I do these jams not to win, but to get feedback. For that I am grateful ♥️

Thanks!

(sorry for the late reply but) thank you sooooo very much for your sincere feedback!

You helped me clear out a looot of conflicts I had about the results, and to be honest, this is why I loved doing this jam. You can’t know how your strengths or weaknesses in a vacuum.

I have this newfound idea that I should harness more of my own personal strengths to make games memorable. Maybe gameplay needs a lot more research and testing for me to achieve the same result, yet I have a complete newfound sense of direction of where to aim for.

Gameplay is hard thing to balance. Right now I have a genre: Earthbound/Undertale-inspired RPG; and I am in the process of macerating these ideas I have in mind into something more cohesive and concrete.

My main lesson for this new project is to start from the gameplay up, whilst having a goal in mind: making it memorable. And I hope that with time I can post more about them.

Thank you sooooooooooooooooo much for your feedback, before now and hopefully in the future. You’re one hell of a good dev and I can’t wait for your next endeavours into this amazing world.

…and then Zeus said, let there be food! And there was food… and a lot of angry deities waiting for their meal.

I used to play a lot of Restaurant City as a kid, and probably one of those pre-installed games on laptops that also were about frantic clicking under stress.

Just as the ancient theme evokes Gods of times past, the gameplay evokes golden, nostalgia-filled days. Back when the Internet was a much different, tightly-knit, fun and exciting place.

This game is tight, fun and exciting. It’s not a God amongst games, but it sure may as well sit on the Olympus of this jam.

And as if I were to judge a God, I was much as detailed as I could reviewing this game than all of the previous ones I’ve checked.

Because if you’re playing in the big leagues, and aiming high, it’s all or nothing. And here’s where you see the marks of a demigod instead.

• Keybindings. Control. I found the WASD+E default controls to be rather cramped. The game offers a way to change keybindings. Nice! I tried to change… but it defaulted to the left click button? Turns out there’s no signal to release the lock on the binding. It triggers, but it doesn’t let go. When pressing Start, on the last frame, it changes to the last key pressed: left mouse button. It did make me lose some customers.
  • One thing I think would solve it all from the ground up: change to a point-and-click only control scheme. Just like those old Flash games, they were incredibly easy to pick up and harder to master. They got it right, no need to reinvent the wheel.
• Layout. I’m gonna whip out my past life’s experience and point out a thing I didn’t quite like with the layout of the kitchen. Ingredients were too close together, so it was easy to take the wrong one by mistake; an issue further compounded by the crowded default controls.
• Collision boxes. Oh, the vein of every gamedev’s existence. Either they were too close, didn’t register, or it picked the wrong thing, even if I was in the near vicinity of the object. I could’ve been 3 to 5 millimetres from the ~~air~~ deep fryer and it needed some wiggling to trigger.
• UI/UX: I’m gonna go full hog on this one.
  • Hint system: Going from a cramped keyboard control to the mouse to close the overlapping windows (and then triggering something because I overrode the controls); and then mistaking the plate from a tomato salad from a potato chip with tomato plate, because the sprite was similar enough from a distance (30cm on a 2K display, full screen, to be precise)… for me it’s a fail.
  • Ease of use: There’s one feature that the games I mentioned before did: you get the hints as you encounter them. They didn’t bury them in windows that you see once and then forget. You could recall the important and essential information as you went. There’s a difference between being hard for a challenge, and being hard for a bad design choice.
  • Small insignificant details: like spelling, the background floating away, and some very minor bugs that basically nobody but someone obsessive with detail like me would find. But they don’t break anything. Absolutely nothing.

For a game jam this is a home run. Just like a demigod is above us poor mortals with games that are not as fun, as consistent, or as replayable as this; but you know it’s not perfect. Perfection is bold and brash, but belongs in the trash. This is way better.

Sidenote: This game is probably another good candidate to check for some Godot 4.3 bugs that are so insidious that they cannot be reproduced consistently enough to warrant an issue on GitHub. There are several things I didn’t mention that are not the dev’s fault, but the engine’s fault. Have my theories but I ain’t smart enough to fix them myself.

I saw it on nomistreams on Twitch.

You know, I saw it and thought eh, looks easy enough.

Wrong. Absolutely wrong. It pulls the tablecloth out and makes you balance the plates, twisting your fingers 6 of the more finger-twisting words you’d ever type. Doesn’t apply if you know the languages, though.

It made my Velocifire catch fire.

The one thing is that I wish that the input box was cleared after each incorrect word. Now I’ll go do more typing speed tests to train myself to get a better score.

A journey into the mind of someone inside a storm, just realising the calm they once had.

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-12/rate/2973693

I saw a cat and you got me. No lie, that was the single best marketing strategy you can make on a game.

Rated and those graphics were just so adorable and cute I loved them!

do not the car, car must be dry and soft.

In terms of the package itself, it’s a very consistent game. Amazingly adorable graphics, an incredibly adorable main character, and a game that on its cover is just engaging in a way that it sells itself.

but

The physics. The balancing. It’s, indeed, challenging like a cat avoiding water. It takes an unbelievably gigantic amount of effort to coordinate yourself to make it out of the first wave alive. It’s the weightlessness of some objects, it’s the lack of friction; some objects behaved like they were on space.

I did try several times because I was digging the vibe a lot… but then it turned into just frustration. But it’s just a matter of tweaking values, playtesting, rinse and repeat, and there you go. Issue solved.

You have huge engagement potential, huuuge gameplay potential, it’s just behind some values for the rigid bodies and the gravity value.

The strategy of using a cat is genius. Genius marketing.

I always have this issue with more experimental games where there’s a balance between abstraction and concreteness; not being understandable or being too blatant.

Honestly, you struck that balance pretty well.

Really liked it!

The time loop strategy for these kinds of games (and the context of a jam) is one of the smartest moves you can make.

The game is gorgeous, maybe not 100% all artisanal, self made… but it’s well assembled to make a consistent game. Not everyone actually takes care of choosing, and adapting their bought assets in a way it makes sense. That’s something I really really value a lot.

Good audio/visual queues for the impending doom. A pretty solid interpretation of the theme that was both abstract enough to not be blatant, and concrete enough that I could understand it right away. That’s a balance not everyone can pull of in the first couple seconds of gameplay.

The puzzles…

I went through the 4-minute loop several times. I started making a mental map and figuring it out. The writing was a good balance between, again, abstraction and concreteness.

My problem is that the puzzles themselves strayed from that balance and I needed several playthroughs to kinda get them. Maaaaaaybe a bit more audio clues? That could be a good resource that’s already established, already consistent and in tune with the theme, and could help heaps to help you if you’re a bit lost.

And yeah I did clip. I love to try collisions and boundaries after the PTSD I had with my game. And… well, I did get out of bounds and had to restart. All of it at random. Sometimes on the rocks, sometimes on the edges of fences and walls. But collision is so hard to get right, that I can see where it can fail.

You have almost everything cooked up, it just needs more salt and pepper.

there we go, both of them.

I will admit… between those two, the music was the common denominator of the good redeeming qualities of both games. Well mixed, little details like a bit of stereo bouncing, good mixing (something I completely failed to do in my game lol), no weird pops or crackles, and nice instrumentation.

You could tell they both had someone dedicated to sound and this certainly improves the quality of the game as a whole.

I don’t know if my PC hates Unreal, but I cannot explain how a simple game, at 720p low, runs the same as ultra 2K: 10-15fps.

I liked how the music had this little stereo bounce on the lead synth. Very little details like these are what make audio design stand out. Well mixed, well implemented, a loop that transitions smoothly (or that matches the game’s length). That’s pretty well executed.

Again, from personal experience, I did happen to live through an earthquake/tsunami (iirc, it was an 8.8 Richter scale earthquake? it’s the Chile 2010 one if you wanna look it up). The idea itself has a lot of it that’s actually real. We did have to hide, although the instructions were to stay inside during the earthquake, then go uphill for the wave. It was a speedrun for survival.

This is quite a perfect example of a “calm before the storm, after another storm”

Tsunamis always have a moment of calm after an earthquake where nothing happens, but then the wave hits and there’s your storm. And the anxiety is perfect for this theme.

Twist the idea a little bit, see how people react to tsunamis in real life, maybe even change it to an uphill race to survival, however dark it might be. And there you go, perfect interpretation of the concept.

And my last thing is… why does the timer start when I’m at the top waiting for the camera to go down? I couldn’t even begin to walk until it was 1/4 gone. I speedran to hide and… ok got to several places and got confused as to what did I do wrong?

Apart from that, the music and interpretation of the theme were very very solid. But I agree with the rest: it feels incomplete. It has solid foundations, though.

I have some PTSD because I did work as a cashier on retail for Christmas (in the toys section, unfortunately) and I know that experience all too well.

The music indeed reminds me of those retail days where I had this chill music blasting, while dreading every single second I spent picking up toys and clothing; or having to call the supervisor because the POS just crashed.

If you want to experience the vibe of what it is to do this for real, the music seals the deal.

I have a slight issue to pick with the graphics. When I was selecting the options to lower the graphics quality to the lowest (because, uh, my GPU is a toaster), I reached Medium and the back button moved. I had to move the mouse to the left to reach Low. Veeeeeery small issue but it’s the kind of detail that might get annoying in UI/UX work. But nothing than setting the width to the largest string wouldn’t solve.

Also… idk if it was me, but were these the collision shapes for the shoppers?

On that same topic… why soldiers? Probably they also need to buy gifts, they also have families.

And, this is a very humble personal opinion, as a first timer outsider to game jams and gamedev in general: It felt like a mod for a much larger AAA game. Why? Because I felt a disconnect between the absolute pristine detail that Unreal is capable of… and the more arcadey-fast paced fun of the game. It felt like a modded FPS. That’s how I’d describe it.

It’s not bad per se, but it’s the first game I’ve played that I had that feeling. Which is weird considering you folks did most of it yourselves.

That disconnect between aesthetic and theme, it made me a bit confused. The rest? No problem. Pretty good and solid concept that I can approve it’s so real it’s a Retail Simulator. We had calms and storms every single day.

Hi! just did:

apart from being a bit lost in space, I had quite a nice experience! Some hints and it would be solid. Nice game though, really stunning.

The one thing I really appreciate about games that look stunning, is when they look stunning and it’s made by the team behind it.

Of course it’s much easier to do something better when you have more cooks in the kitchen, but it shows that it produced a game that lives up to the screenshots.

The music… even the alarms were on beat with the rhythmic synth lead. that’s boppin’ points from me.

But now onto the meat of the pie: the puzzles.

I am on the camp where I got very lost after the first puzzle. I swear I clicked everything. I swear I read every single screen. And I was trying to open the other doors but I couldn’t figure it out.

The numbers puzzle wasn’t the problem… the problem was figuring out what to do next. I went in blind without reading the comments and now I realise that I wasn’t the only one.

Apart from that, the vibe was spot on and the impending doom and anxiety was precise. Pretty well done game!

HI! I remember yours! I did it a week ago. The review is a little buried, but I did try it! Had some control issues but the humour was just what I like.

and the little sandwich is just too adorable <3

Half the colour, half the text. Maybe it was the contrast, but nothing waaaaaay too complicated.

The audio is something that I’ve found in almost every Godot 4.x game, where it’s waaaaaaaay too loud on export. You cannot hear it on the editor, or even in your own machine. It manifests when someone else plays.

And I took a look at the Godot code and to be honest, it seems like it overrides the volume you set on your game or in your machine. Don’t know how else to explain it.

The audio either broke eardrums, or was broken itself. At least right now it doesn’t dangerously break eardrums.

Although… it’s funny how everyone says the bugs are in-topic. Makes me really rethink the way to make and understand how players interpret your game. Veeeeeeery interesting thing, though. Thanks!

Yep.

Dead on.

[I used Godot, but the reason is exactly the same, though. I almost could’ve make it move and slide like a normal staircase, buuuuuuuut I had so many game-breaking bugs, that this is one of the few that made the game compile. I will make some kind of postmortem on these bugs sometime, should make a fun devblog. However, skill issue on my part, 100%.]

Even in an empty house there’s something, even if it’s a plan just chillin. (It’s more of a technical decision, but it’s nice that all that remains is just a lil plant).

Your game… wow. I left a whole scroll of a review. You see there my opinion, but overall, it is daaaaaamn good.

This is one of my top ones but… you know this one tears me apart for one really sad reason: I just couldn’t really enjoy all of it. It’s like I found a fun-sized Snickers on a cupboard when I was super hungry, to find out it was molten a bit.

I kept on going as far as I can go. Explored every little place, pressed E like a cookie clicker on everything, had SUCH AN AMAZING first impression that I was like: ok, this is it. This is the one.

…but I don’t know if I’m way too dumb, missed something, but there were a lot of doors I couldn’t open. I clipped through a wall and nothing happened. The controls were fine at first when I was making progress… until I kept backtracking and they grew ever so floaty and mushy. I had to reaaaally wiggle my way through portals to fit, and sometimes doors were stuck making glitchy flickers that I thought were part of the game. Don’t know, probably not?

The chromatic aberration with scanline shader (aka, the VHS filter) was awesome until I started getting a little headache with the weird movement. Sometimes it was soo dark I couldn’t even tell where I was. The map, too. I loved that it had a layout that was challenging and I had to remember where I was because I needed to know where I wasn’t.

The sound acting was… how did you even manage to get it to sound this good in so little time?

I went as far as I could. I tried to eat the Snickers bar down to the last bit… but I couldn’t finish it and my head hurts a bit.

Credit where credit’s due: this is probably one of the best of the jam, hands down. You deserve the spotlight. It’s just that daaaaamn I wish I could’ve just gone a bit more. But I spent a bit more than an hour. This is one of the ones that need a full release, with the filter/controls/gameplay smol little tweaks, and there you go. A banger.

Sidenote:

I have some pretty spicy opinions on jumpscares. I don’t like them at all in games. I find them a cheap, overused resource that makes an otherwise fine game terrible, like a mould on a piece of bread. However… your game’s ones aren’t cheap jumpscares. I do prefer these, more tasteful ones than overusing it to replace a better plot. You have a plot. You have the right to use them because they’re done tastefully. This is something that’s more personal so it didn’t really tip the scale for me.

…I see exactly what you mean about the game. After this I’ll probably do a “Director’s Cut” of my game and do a Mac build.

It was so similar even the music and the wallpaper were similar to what I have on my PC right now. And it struck a chord that I… did not expect to see here.

this is the trip of all time.

idk if the sound designer will see this, but when I first heard the music, I thought I turned on the music on my PC by accident, because the first note was EXACTLY THE SAME as a [very well known breakcore artist that talks about similar topics]. I was almost expecting an amen break to suddenly break me on the climax go we ball now.

And to add more serendipity to the stew… the background was the exact same colour as my wallpaper on my PC. It made me feel, legit, that it was playing with me or something.

To probably add more to the kinda person I am… sometimes I felt like the stories were direct references to events I lived through. Therefore I think this kinda game is like a dagger to a very specific audience, but it’s going to fall flat on a looooooot of people.

The oooooone thing I really feel like that needs a bit more balance is how text is presented. I go through it super quick, but it typed out slow for me. Sometimes I feel like there has to be a better way to tell a story than just text or a figment of pictures from a stormy past. Pacing is the key to the game.

Seriously, add some breakcore beats at the end and you seal the deal.

[audio worked fine on Edge for Windows]

I think your game has something that’s very unintended: it aims to be something, but it shines bright on a whole different genre.

take my 5 stars, this one is a brainworm of a game. blursed in the absolute best way possible. i’d have this one in a window in a kinito pet-like game.

lemme be clear: i loved it. a lot.

there’s something that’s gonna haunt me tonight about this… experience.

I think this could be one hell of an entry point for a horror game. And in the most positive way possible. If whatever I was doing was the point of calm. Doesn’t matter if I was being a cashier on a sunday on Christmas Rush on retail, while the POS just rebooted or in a field full of puppies and a calm breeze.

You’re getting your storm here.

ok nevermind, the more time I let this marinate in my single (1) braincell the more I like this game. Take my full marks. I loved it way too much in probably the most unintended way possible. A lasting impression, indeed.

after playing i put that mixtape and just let it sink in.

ace of spades/10, quite a ride for me.

All the other kids,
with their pumped up decks,
took me into the city,
to see Balatro play.

There’s a veeeeery thin thread thread between abstraction and concreteness. One treads on the verge of being misunderstood, the other in being blatant. Dancing between these is like flipping a coin and land it on its side.

I have a huuuuuge soft spot for anything that show opposites being contrasted, side by side, at whatever level of abstraction or concreteness it’s on. I didn’t know what I was doing with the cards until I burned through my stack, stuck between an irate dad and annoying Chad.

Probably not a spoiler, but that end slipped me through the tragedy of stormy upbringings. I hope that chamber was dry empty, because beneath that facade of sweet, sweet artwork; you know stuff was going on.

You played me like a fiddle. Nice artwork. Confusing, yet interesting artwork intertwined with a story that treads very closely between edgy and introspective. Audio that was well mixed and balanced. You all walked the fine thread and down came something outta left field. This is the stuff I like.

played, rated, keep on cookin you onto something.

be proud of your releases.

This one is kinda difficult for me to rate.

Objectively, It had something going for it until I got rekt not knowing where I was, and just laughed out of a weird confusion mixed with the kinda slapstick humour you’d see in Monty Python. I was kinda sorta confusedly entertained in a way I can describe it like that: slapstick humour.

Subjectively, I remember very vividly trying to do stuff like this, but being so scared of releasing it that I never did. Took me 10 years to take the courage to actually release something. You took the leap of faith, regardless of whatever bug or design issue, or anything. In a game jam, a released but flawed game is better than a beautiful project on your computer. Because you have something to show to the world, you are a game dev.

the mouse needed less delay tho, lost the lil guy. rip in pepperoni.

let the bro cook they onto somethin/10

you really did surprise me with this one.

(played, to wave 5, and rated. gameplay surprised me a lot!)

ok gonna be real honest, I came in and saw “tetris but with physics and can’t rotate” and I just thought aw snap here we go again, thinking I wouldn’t get it.

First run I kind of made a mess and then rip. Second run though… made it to wave 5. Huh. It was like 4D Tetris, where you need to think ahead of time where the blocks fall to make a solid wall.

ooooooooooh…

I then started building little castles and shapes that if hit this way like the enemies do, they’re gonna fall like this. And then you add another enemy. Had to re-engineer on the spot.

Apart from the audio jumpscaring me (which, tbh, I think every Godot 4.x had this audio level issue; my game did too, to a dangerous degree; and many others that I play did); and some art decisions (like the game over screen) that I didn’t really vibe with…

Solid gameplay. Good idea!

There we go!

11/10 melted my poor GPU (but felt glorious in 2K)

I haven’t reaaaaally played Myst in like, ages. But my experience can be summed up as: oooh this looks pretty! gonna check absolutely everything I see!!!

I was confused because I instinctively pressed Left Click to see if something happened but… nothing. Then when the Press 'E' to interact. prompt came… OOOOOOH!!!!

I figured out without even reading the instructions everything but the interaction. I think that making it a click instead of E would have been a better instinctive choice.

There was some jank (mostly, the stairs), but eh. It shows that it is put out to look pristine in my immaculate 2K display (even if it ran at like slideshow speeds on my Intel UHD, kinda like Myst. Made the experience much better, to be honest.)

Not gonna say more to not spoil… but let’s say that it wasn’t a storm. It was a thunderstorm. I didn’t even see it coming.

Walking simulators, story-driven experiences, maybe something that’s more focused on graphics or music than gameplay. Even on Desktop-only. I’ll try it!

I made a game a heavily psychological/experimental game. Everything down to the engine was either recompiled, modified or done by me entirely. The storm is inside your head, and calm is just a memory. https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-12/rate/2973693

I wanna try more experiences like this. Show me yours and I’ll give it a shot. Will download it, try it, and give it a (usually longer and more in-depth) review. Desktop games, specially those more experimental, deserve more love ❤️

(thankfully I understood enough Portuguese to understand the instructions) This game would shine in mobile. I swear the slingshot mechanics (kinda sorta reminded me of a vertical Angry Birds?) made me wanna try it on a touch screen.

The ooooonly thing I have is that… the theme interpretation was a bit too unclear to me? I had to read the page to know what it was about. It happened to me too, so I kinda where it comes from. Usually when you try to distil an idea to its core, the has to be a concrete interpretation that comes to it. It’s the balance between being too literal or too abstract. That’s a rope difficult to tread across.

Yet even for me it was a bit too abstract. The gameplay though was a polar opposite. Maybe that’s your storm and calm.

The ending SFX was a bit too loud, to the point it startled me when it happened.

I thought the little trees were also choppable, but welp. Lost a couple clicks there.

Didn’t know it was colourblind accessible though. Games usually don’t really take into account accessibility, specially when it comes to graphics. Now that’s something that I reaaaaally wanna see more.

good work!

11/10 very soft

As I try to do for everyone, I tried the other non-web versions.

• The Android version [Galaxy S22+, Android 14, One UI 6.1] and it didn’t register my inputs???
• The Windows [Windows 11, i5-8th gen ultrabook CPU, 32GB RAM, also for the single (1) Edge tab this RAM allowed for, Intel UHD 620] worked fine, though.

Weird. I ended up playing on web, the way it’s intended to be, for this kind of game. To be honest, judging by the theme, I would’ve stuck with web-only. More for thematical consistency than anything else.

Now onto web:

At some point it also blew everything on screen when I was about to die, and let me continue. Windows seems fine overall, though.

Overall, yeah it’s quite an interesting twist on the classic dead internet router game. You need that extra skill of hand-eye coordination to be able to get further. It did have some awful bugs that didn’t even let me play on Android.

Probably, if you could port it to something like JavaScript+HTML5, and hook it up to Chrome, it’d be one hell of a prank/fun experience to pull on your fellow humans.