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I'm so glad the grading had you on the edge of your seat. I spent a fair bit of time specifically on that animation sequence! "A?" is a true A- you scaled it perfectly. The question mark was just supposed to help convey Todd's surprise.

There are a couple of objects Todd asks about that are difficult to see on the diorama without crawling onto it. Maybe we could have leaned into those more? The camera and movement speed changes were indeed meant to confuse your sense of scale. It's part of why I added the "for-scale" banana for players to reference while both on and off the diorama.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful comment!

Thank you so much for the kind comment! And you might not have seen the pumpkin the first time. It's hidden away in a place that's hard to see without climbing on the table.

Thanks for the comment! I think you're right about having fewer objects- we got a little carried away. I tried to alleviate that by always asking about the same three objects for the second and third dioramas, but the first round of each is still pretty overwhelming.

Level 9 was devilishly difficult! Merging the fish felt very intuitive. The lily pads and cattails a little less so for remembering which fish could pass through, but it was easy enough to figure out again for each puzzle. Great game with some lovely art.

Very creative and unique concept! I enjoy the idea of having to essentially stay in second place, though it took me a while to see that my health bar was depleting at all. Adding some indication that the player took damage would help, I think, be that audio or visual. The art style was a good quality and very consistent.

Thank you for the kind feedback! I think we will indeed have to take a look at when the spell target locks in, if we do a post-jam update. The biggest reason it finalizes after the charge-up was to be sort of mobile compatible, so you can tap the button then tap where on the screen you want to place it. That could probably be a separate mode, though I wonder if it would make it more or less difficult to lead shots with that extra second or so of charge time.

Thank you so much! We've had some submissions to previous jams with pretty rough difficulty curves, so I'm glad to hear we're getting that sorted out now-a-days. Same deal with the level feel; I personally love puzzles, and @Duckblade loves arena shooters, so I'm glad the game reflects that mix.

Thanks for playing our game and leaving the kind response!

We were hoping to do the art ourselves as well, but we had an unexpected power outage that set us back a fair bit. The 1-bit style was really just the fastest thing we could throw in, but I am very happy with how it ended up looking. Post-processing is magic. Looking forward to next year!

Thank you for the kind comment!

• I'm glad you think so. We had tried the micro-tutorials in previous jams, and they seemed to go over well. I know I prefer that to a wall of text at the beginning.
• We've had a number of people mention that the spell key-binds were confusing, so we'll definitely have to look into that. I was hesitant to give them individual keys during development because I didn't want some worst-case scenario where the only active keys for a level were Q and P or something crazy. Maybe if we kept it to Q, W, E and then A, S, D it would be manageable. And the shooting through walls was just a result of time constraints, haha.
• Definitely agree on the UI. We didn't try full-screen until we were uploading to itch, and then spent the last hour or so making sure everything was at least visible on different aspect ratios. We'll have to think about UI sizing earlier next time.

Thanks again for the feedback, we really appreciate it!

A few others have voiced similar thoughts on the key-binds, so I think we'll be looking into a solution for a post-jam update. There are a total of six spells, so we initially didn't want to give each its own key-bind in a row as in a worst case scenario we might only have the Q and Y spells available, and surely that'd be too uncomfortable. We'll have to do some thinking, maybe use Q, W, E, then A, S, D.

Thank you for playing!

What a delightful and cohesive game. It took me a while to realize I was supposed to be helping the frogs to eat the flies, but I loved it even before that when my only goal was to keep the little guys/girls alive and happy. The art is beautiful, and I love the generative music. I haven't seen hardly any games that do that, game jam or otherwise, but I feel like it adds so much when everything meshes into one beautiful melody.

Thank you for letting me pet the frogs.

The storytelling was my favorite part of this. It was super cute, and it fit the theme well. The pictures in the book and the book itself were really nice, and the models in-game were good.

The gameplay was on the verge of being good, but needed some in-game explanations to improve the experience. Things like the chicken egg knocking over pitchforks and the emu egg exploding were not intuitive to me, and I only figured them out after re-reading back to the web page. I also found the invisible walls to be a bit confusing. I understand they're meant to keep you on track, but for things like the spikes in the emu level, I ended up just walking around the full border looking for a way to escape assuming that the invisible wall had a hole somewhere because the spikes didn't scream "breakable" to me.

I still enjoyed the adventure of becoming a dinosaur though!

Really digging this art style. Never thought a pixel-y white silhouette could make me feel so much dread as it approached. Very simple, but that works well here. I did find a way to cheese it: if you spam-click the button, the enemy never gets to take their turn.

Wow, that was quite a levels with some good puzzles. Like @Jaylus said, the items were very intuitive, didn't feel like I needed any explanations except that the bomb at to be falling to explode. The music and art style complemented each other well. My only suggestion would be to let the player move the cursor more quickly by holding the button down instead of having to tap it repeatedly.

Looks like had very similar takes on the theme! We even had thoughts to add endless waves and a crystal to protect in ours too. Very cool to see the path we could've taken!

I loved the art in this game; it was very cute. And having a variety of attacks to choose from was also very nice. I do wish the keys for each ability were shown in-game as well as in the directions because I kept forgetting which was the explosion attack and which was the spin attack. Players (i.e. me) are forgetful and won't remember any but most basic of controls after they navigate away from the directions haha.

Also, you made the music for this during the jam too?! That's awesome! I had just assumed it was pre-made or borrowed from somewhere else until I read some of the other comments and checked the "Did your team create the vast majority of the music" answer. It was just that good. Great submission, esp. for your first jam! Congratulations!

That was a lot harder than I was expecting, especially with the timer. I didn't fully appreciate the "next move" indicator at first because the timer had me convinced I needed to move the map as quickly as possible. Because of that, I thought the snake moved independently and was frantically just spamming keys trying to get it closer to the snake. Once I realized the snake only moved after I moved, things got much more think-y and less spamm-y, though that timer still had me anxious! I think I agree with @gerrrard that seeing a couple moves ahead could be cool.

Fun game and good submission!

Our games look pretty similar! Even the same base art pack and with chargeable abilities, just different genres. It's cool to see a similar take on the theme that turned out so differently.

I really enjoyed the game. I'm not really one for the match-three genre, but adding the chargeable summons/abilities makes it a lot more fun for me, plus the adventurer moving along the top with a health bar. 

I really liked the polish in this game with the sound effects and animations upon matching, very satisfying. And the ability to summon boss minions was really cool too, though I was never quite able to fully charge the boss summon. Nice entry!

This was a lot more fun than I was expecting from the screenshots. While there wasn't all too much content, I enjoyed all the dialog and thought it was well-written, and it matched the "Role Reversal" theme pretty well. I just wish there were a second and third day.

"Come back tomorrow and I'm sure there'll be more puzzles and mechanics." Liar! 😆

This game has some great potential is seems to only be held back by that 48-hour time constraint. I really enjoyed the platforming, esp. with the twist two kinds of gravity. The art was also top-notch and very stylistic, and I thought matched the music pretty well.

As others have echoed, I had some difficulty understanding when things would and wouldn't try to kill me, as well as what was triggering the gravity to switch. The first tutorial was awesome and clearly explained everything. I especially liked the double-jump being communicated with a second, smaller space-bar on top. Just do more of that, please (if you had time, that 48 hour limit is rough haha). Just something pointing to the timer in the top-right on the second level, or some text saying that you can't collect the key until all the enemies have been killed would go a long way, or that health packs only actually heal you in certain gravity. 

But that's all polish, and what you made in the time limit is awesome. With some more time to expand the tutorial and such, I could see this game doing very well.

I got to the end of the game and was like, "Wow, that was short and didn't really fit the theme very well." Then the screen faded out and back in, and I saw the twist. Very nice, and clever level design to keep it interesting despite the twist. It made great use of the theme, too.

Unfortunately, I got in a death loop after falling in the water with the jumping fish. And that was fine, and I replayed the game and got back to the same spot again, but then I fell again (after getting a bit farther) and got in the same loop again. I'd love to see the rest of the game, but I don't really want to replay it a third time just to potentially get in that same loop again.

All that said, even from the bit of the game I could play, it looked and felt great. The animations on the knight and goblin especially were top-notch, and the platforming felt very good. Solid submission.

Man, I love me some diegetic UI. Everything looks great and feels great. I loved that the adventurers and king had so much character without ever needing to read a line of dialog. In fact, beyond the tutorial, there wasn't any text that I could see, and yet everything was so intuitive. I think that's indicative of some masterclass UX, right there. The only bug I ran into was not being able to see how many coins were in my purses, but I managed by just trying to be as conservative as I could.

Great, great game. Astounding art, fluid controls, and an interesting hook. I loved the details and polish like pausing time when the switch happens or the couple frames of grace right after a swap to not take damage. It was fun trying to balance between placing your towers to defeat all the bots while also trying to place them such that you could dodge them. At first I wanted a way to see how long before the switch would happen, but I honestly don't think it's necessary with that pause and grace period after the swap. Great submission!

This is a really cute game that I could see easily becoming a very fun mobile game. The difficulty curve was perfect, easy for the tutorial and then increasingly difficult without ever feeling unfair. I was able to survive until about 30s from the end when I got greedy and tried to move a trolley across the entire map to get a coin (since I had all of them up to that point) and ran face-first into it.

One thought I had is that it would be nice to be able to drag the trolley across multiple tracks at a time, directly following the cursor and snapping to the nearest track instead of having to swipe multiple times to get one across the map. That'd require some rebalancing, I'm sure, but I think it would make the game more enjoyable. Great submission!

This is one of the most creative takes on the theme I've seen so far. I love the small bits of polish you added to keep everything consistent like having the mouse actually have to click where to spawn the enemies instead of just the buttons just spawning them randomly. The mouse movement also felt very fair, which I think is a great achievement. Good game!

I've seen a other submissions where you play as the camera man, and I really appreciate that yours is so forgiving in that it counts the seconds the target is in-frame rather than immediately give a "game over" when you lose them. As others have said, it would be nice if we could see farther to the right to better anticipate what direction we need to go, but I enjoyed it other than that.

I've played a few games this jam where you play as a side character, but this one takes the cake. It felt great to play, everything from the running and luggage physics to the pixel art animations and sound effects (not to mention the itch page design and trailer). I think my favorite part was accidentally sending the elevator up as I was getting off, then forgetting and later falling down the shaft. I also really liked the whole "one piece of luggage per hand" thing. I felt efficient.

"Thank you soo much."

Very creative take on the theme! I, like the others, didn't understand which combinations on slot machines gave which rewards; I've only ever seen the "three-of-a-kind" win in movies and such. Once I got the feel for which combinations paid out what and how they affected the customer's mood, it was a lot more fun!

Really cool idea, and I think it would've been a good submission to the "Out of Control" themed GMTK jam a while back too.

I really appreciated the details like the red '$' particles when I dashed to really drive home what it was costing me. Good submission!

Thanks for the kind comment and compliments!

About the ice blast, we actually buffed it twice because my co-developer/designer is too good at playing games, and I couldn't beat his tutorial levels. Probably still needs another buff haha, though I think the permanent slow it gives adventurers is underrated.

I agree about the level length, but there's a trick to level 11 that lets you beat it within about 30 seconds. It's really more of a gimmick level based on a bug we thought was too funny to fix for the jam. As a hint, pay attention to the sound effects and focus on targeting the archer that feels different from the rest.

Thanks again for taking the time to play our game and leave feedback!

Thank you for the comment! I went back and forth a bit on where the spells should target and decided on after the delay just so players could play the game using only the mouse (just clicking the Magic Missile button will automatically shoot it at the nearest enemy, and clicking the Lump of Lava will spawn it at the cursor after giving you time to aim). If we end up updating the game after the voting period, we'll probably add a specific mouse-only mode and change up some of the controls. Thanks again for the kind feedback!

Thanks for the comment! I noticed that about the arrows in the last level as well, and I think it's actually a bug throughout the entire game that just isn't noticeable until you have like 50 archers shooting at you. I set the arrows to despawn after they've travelled a certain distance, and it seems the archers sometimes stop walking forward just a smidge out of range. As for the instantly killed out of nowhere, yeah, definitely should've included a damage taken cooldown. That last level actually has several archers stacked up to appear as one until they collide with a wall, and they shoot simultaneously so that all their arrows hit you in the exact same frame. Not great design 😅 Thanks again for the great feedback!

That was hard, but very fun. I don't know if it means I'm a good typist or a bad typist that I struggled so much. The presentation was simple but stylistic and felt perfect for this kind of game. The particles that spawned when you fully typed a word were extremely satisfying. I also think this is one of the most creative and perhaps best interpretations of the theme I've seen.

Couple suggestions if you ever wish to update this: 1. I feel like making the rules on the left uppercase could remove some ambiguity when you're having to reference them quickly and not remembering if that 'L' is actually an 'I' or a '1' or what, and 2. maybe ensure the next word that appears after a new rule is added actually uses that rule to ease the player into the change.

This feels like it was very ambitious for a game jam, but it's all there and even feels polished. You did great!

I did struggle a bit being dumped into the deep end from the beginning with all the mechanics. I think a smaller level first with maybe only 3 out of the 7 stats would've helped ease me into it. As is, there's a lot of text to read and a lot of cost/reward choices to calculate in my head right off the bat.

Phenomenal art. It took me a bit to understand how the day/night cycle affected the monsters and which flowers could be interacted with, but once I understood those, I had a lot of fun solving the puzzles. It was a great idea to have the monsters also spread the taint as incentive to avoid them or block them off.

Very cute and creative.

I got confused on which spells were which and had to keep scrolling down to double-check before telling the player which to use. Could be nice to include some text in-game.

Awesome concept. While there were a lot of tasks to keep up with, I appreciated that you simplified them so I didn't have to hyper-focus on one (like fixing errors in the console by spamming any key on the keyboard). I also loved details like the enemies not dying until you move the health bars to 0% yourself.

Really cool idea that was held back by the platforming mechanics for me. The jumps felt low and floaty. The in-camera check also seemed a little buggy, particularly on the last platform of the first level. Is it just using a single raycast or something more sophisticated? Anyways, great job with the game and making so many levels for it. It looks great, even if the platforming was a bit unforgiving.

Wow, I didn't expect a game jam submission to give me such a profound feeling of dread and anxiousness. Awesome! That combo of not being able to see much except the flashes of a monster and the tense music were great. The art was great too, especially the sea monster and particle effects. I do wish the game gave me a popup or something when I died explaining why though, because there were a few times I still had a decent amount of health and oxygen left when it restarted, so there must've been something I missed. Solid submission!

Very cool idea and some interesting levels. I especially liked the level with the roles of moving right 0, 1, or 2 spaces. I agree with @Ben Flavell below about the chairs being colored being confusing, might be nice to not have those be visually linked when any actor can land on them to win.

Really cool submission that has more depth than it seemed to at first. The graphics and music are top notch. I could actually see myself coming back and playing this after the voting period if there was some sort of goal other than a new high score. Fantastic submission to the jam.

Also, I noticed in one of your replies you mentioned that being able to put two artifacts in the same row at the same time is a bug, but I think that it actually has pretty cool implications as a feature. Near the end of the game, when you have only a couple of rows open, you can put junk items that don't match color or type at the far end of the row and quickly drain your savings to cycle your available artifacts until you find one that matches. It essentially gives an optional time limit as those archeologists will eventually get to the artifacts and run out of energy for little in the way of points if you're not fast enough.