I loved all the varied artwork, and the controls were nice and smooth (I enjoyed trying to finally eat dragonflies). Nicely done.
There seemed to be some sort of control/camera fighting a couple times when I returned to the huts, but it would go away once I was within their radius.
Habidakus
Creator of
Recent community posts
Very nicely done, great music and artwork.
You might want to have the VFX preload in the splash screen as there was a hitch the first couple times I missed a note during the "combat". It also took me a moment to realize I was moving specific items in the bag when trying to get the flute below the fill line, but that might have been my own cluelessness.
Bonus points for all the nice extra menu pages, and multiple option submenus, rarely seen in a jam game, well done!
I liked the graphics, would have liked to see a little more variation in the backdrop (but I realize time ran out) and some more interactions with the frogs (either at least not-overlaying the ingredients, or possibly even taking the ingredients temporarily or some other interaction).
Would also like to have some more feedback when buttons are pressed and ingredients added (sound effects would really help out here), and maybe an accumulating tracker for recipes discovered (a corkboard where they appear once discovered, or bookshelf, or even just a stack of text).
Interesting idea, like to see where it goes.
Very nice puzzle game, I liked the mechanics and the humorous headlines between each level.
UX wise I would love it if when you're placing a prisoner block on top of another already placed prisoner block, rather than blocking you with a buzzer sound, it would swap the two pieces (so the piece you are holding is now in the jail, and the piece that was in the jail is now in your hand)
The music... I know that from somewhere, but where? It's not gillbert & sullivan... oh, this is going to bug me.
I really liked the artwork, including the nice background, although I wish I could have seen it at a larger scale as some of the font was hard to read at my resolution. I agree with some of the other comments that the button clicking could have had a little more feedback, and a way to balance the music volume. If you keep working at it, I'd also love other buttons to open up for more variety of clicking.
First jam and a complete and polished game, well done! I loved the feel of the dice rolling and all the UX was really nice. I think I would have liked to have seen a little more explanation/tutorial provided to the user their first game through (what to do, where to place things, what you were risking when you upgraded, etc...), and although the font works well for the health and numeric readouts, I found that I had to strain a bit to read any of the text written using that particular font.
I was impressed with both the shader work on the buttons, and that you had an arachnophobia mode.
I was a little confused by the three(4?) phases in the game, and how they mapped to each other... especially the phase that happened after the pachinko phase, as it seemed to go very quickly and I never understood the results of it (only that I had almost zero money when going to buy dice the next time).
I also noticed that there was no music until you played with the music options menu, but then was a little disappointed that the pachinko machine made none of the classic pachinko noises (IMHO the noises a pachinko machine makes is 90% of the draw to a pachinko parlor)
A very fun game - you took a very simple mechanic and ran with it to make a fully fleshed game. Nicely done. I did find it a little frustrating, and wished there were more checkmarks. Having to restart and go through the tutorial screen every time I was caught started to wear me down.
I also agree with the comments calling for a timer/clock, this would be a neat game to speed run.
I loved that you spent the time to add a tutorial level, very nice. I also liked the artwork and was amused at having kicking press buttons, nicely done. I must admit, I'm no longer the FPS player I once was, and these bugs did kick my ass.
I too experienced a noticeable load pause the first time I used both the shotgun and the grenade (playing on web using Firefox), and I suspect the VFX or sound FX is being demand loaded. If you can work them into your load screen (either hidden or otherwise integrated) it shouldn't be seen mid-action. The only other thing I could wish for is some slight color variation or pattern variation in the walls to help give the user more depth perception when moving about when there are corners (the eye will more easily sort the smaller patterns as further away).
Every time I do one of these jams, my "todo" list that accompanies the game as it's being made becomes soooo long. One of the items on the todo list was a player power up that could appear that would be called something like "silent keys" and it would make it so that monsters behind locked rooms wouldn't wake when the key was picked up, but rather only when the lock was finally sprung. Sadly, there was so much to do I never got around to adding it (I was still trying to balance the blue "dodging" ghosts up until the very last minute). Thanks for the feedback!
I've now made over a half dozen games using Godot, and UI/UX is still the bane of my existence. I doff my hat to anyone in the industry that excels at it.
Other games with numeric tokens that I could think of:
Mahjong - although the set of possible values might overwhelm the other systems.
Billiard balls - Interesting if you could have a binary mod, which acts one way for stripped values and another way for solid values.
Coins and/or othello pieces - their binary nature could lend itself to very simple rule sets, but if you don't restrict yourself to just one set of coins, then you could have intersecting binary rulesets (eg: pennies do one thing based on facing, but silver dollars do something different based on facing)
Also, there have been a couple games based on the I Ching, and I believe one of the ways you can represent that is a set of three coins - although that one might be a stretch as the I Ching is more rarely used for games.
oh, nicely done! Sound and dialog were excellent, artwork was delightful, and the dice-rolling was very satisfying.
I enjoyed when the "metamorphosis" was sprung upon us, not only forcing us to play more hands, but with new dice sizes. Plus, bonus points for having clearly discoverable options and credits pages.
I liked the branch and ant designs, and the sound (and was impressed that you had an options menu to adjust the sound levels down). If you had more time I would like to see the caterpillar body be less rigid and adapt more to the surface of the branch it's crawling on.
Gameplay wise I got stuck on a level where all I could do was go back and forth between two branches, collecting two leaves while avoiding one ant. I could have also stayed on the half of the level where there was no ant and just passively collected the ever spawning leaf if I wanted to take twice as long with zero risk of fall or ant attack. The progress to fill the metamorphosis bar seemed a little long to me, I would recommend that either be shortened or add some more dynamic challenges to the level if you keep the accumulation rate where it currently is.
First time I played I ran into a geometry seam and fell through a branch to my death.
The second time I played when I finally got my metamorphosis bar filled up I ended up inside a branch, and couldn't move anymore.
This was a fun little game, with nice clean movement and art. I would have liked a little more feedback on when I was replacing one segment's powers with a new segment (I was confused by that), and some more options for weapons would be nice.
I agree with other posters that any audio might be nice (I can recommend the rfxgen tool for crafting some appropriate sounds for arcade style games).
I encountered a bug (no pun intended) after I died and started a second run in that the first wave of enemies never ended after the last enemy was slain.
I think there's something here with the gameplay and the mechanics, with the various pieces building on each other. It also opens the door to adding other pieces from other games that have well known point systems. One thing I would like is for more visual clues as to how each of the pieces affects each other. The existing tooltip system showing text is a great start, but having the tooltip system also highlight the other pieces that the hover piece effects would be really helpful (eg; when a domino is multiplying other pieces, highlight those other pieces). Also, it would be nice if the action buttons on the bottom were visually disabled when they couldn't be used (as I understand it, you can only "Add" when there aren't any pieces, so in that condition the "Add" button would be the only one not visually disabled). That said, UI/UX is a never ending battle, and so fiddly (it is the bane of my own game creation), I'm impressed with what was accomplished in a week.
I agree with previous comments about the background scrolling... reducing it to 1/10th speed will still give the dynamic effect you're looking for, but present a less "rushed" feeling to the player.
I love the variation on the fly wings. I got lost in a couple ways during my play through - one thing I'd love is if maybe there was a marker on the edge of the screen always showing you back to your frog house, and the other was what I was supposed to do in the x/8 stage. Some text appeared on screen briefly with a yellow waypoint indicator, but they both vanished quickly and nothing happened when I kept pushing flies into my house (eventually getting to 13/8). I wandered in the direction that I thought I remembered the yellow indicator pointed at, but never found anything.
Oh, and I love the way the camera pulls out with each eye - that's a really neat idea.
Oh, the "grand idea" was that it was the same path each time, but with brand new rooms with new monsters inserted into the path each time. You'd learn the mutations on the monster you met before ("oh, this is the room with the speedy blue ghosts, so I'll need to fight them in hallways") and meet the new monsters in new rooms to learn about them before they grew more powerful on future mutations.
Sadly I didn't get enough rooms or terrain variety in the game before the deadline (I promised myself to make all my own assets - foolish, I know) so it's not as apparent that the castle is growing, as opposed to a very repetitious procedural dungeon.
First off, the artwork is wonderful. That thumbnail alone pulled me right in to play the game.
Great concept for the game, would love to have seen the rest of the metamorphosis unfold, but unfortunately my game stopped right after turning into a zombie (music still played, but seemingly no key press that I could discover would continue the game).
I liked that you had both "couch" co-op and against AI, and appreciated that you took into account the paddle vertical speed to put more angle on the ball. It's been so long since I played pong I can't remember if it was pong or break-out that also had more angle put on the return if you caught the ball at the very edge of the paddle vs the middle of the paddle. I would have like to have seen, in the middle of the screen, text explaining how to get the initial ball moving (was it just a timeout, or did I need to spam some keys to get the ball to finally move? I was trying the ENTER key to get it to launch). I think I would have liked to have the ball travelling faster in the serve, as the first couple returns were a bit of a slow pace.
Unfortunately I'm really bad at platformers, so I couldn't make it past the first level (I was able to get the two blocks on top of each other, but I couldn't ever manage to get them both pushed over to under the exit without the top one either falling on my head, or miss-calculating the jump to re-balance the top block and pushing it too far). I tried a many times, but eventually just have to admit that's a skill I don't have. I loved the ambiance - the graphics and music really worked well to sell it.
Once I understood what to do, I liked the concept for switching from collection mode to the fragile watering mode - simple but enjoyable mechanic. I now, greedily, wish you had a little more time this jam to see what this would have ultimately become, given what we got with just a few hours of work.
Yeah, the I was still balancing the procedural ghost & room generation even at the last hour... getting a bad combination on ghost powers early on can be rough. I think in hind sight I should have had the distance they can teleport grow as waves go on, so initially they teleport such a small distance they can't dodge the scythe, but it tips the player off that this particular room will be harder in later waves and these ghosts will need to be fought in narrow pathways to defeat them.
I liked the artwork on the enemies/weapons/walls and the music was jammin'. I think I would have liked a little more feedback on when the player was taking damage (it's hard to keep your eye on the health bar moving while in the middle of a fight) and it seemed like sometimes the enemy was spawning right on top of me - I don't know if they were just stealthy, teleporting around, or spawning in close to me. I didn't understand the purpose of the small alcoves at the edges of the room - they seemed like they would be a good place to make a stand at, but perhaps I was just bad and couldn't make a stand there as the enemy would get in the alcove easily with me. When entering the level it would have been nice to start facing away from the big pink teleport -in-ball (or did I miss it's purpose?)
Very interesting, and I liked this approach to metamorphosis. I would have liked to have seen a little more guidance/tutorial on the civilization level -I didn't ever figure out what a civilization was, or how to make one (I was assuming it was something to do with birds at the time, but reading the comments it seems it had to do with aliens which I hadn't encountered in my civilization level... so perhaps I was doing something wrong). Also I really liked the cozy vibe with the space whale, the music, and the construction, but I feel that somehow the gravity and the physics engine (sometimes being crushed at the center of a gravity well) worked against that in some way - maybe if whales have some intrinsic ability to phase/ignore gravity when a button is pressed that might ease back into the cozy vibe?
I liked the gameplay idea of only controlling your mirror for a limited amount of time, that was a nice approach to the mirror agent. Unfortunately I'm not that adept at platformers and got stuck on the first jump puzzle (jumping from block to block to block) so I couldn't evaluate the game past that.
I liked the take on controlling two objects at once, and where in many of the other games it would take me a while to get to terms (or never get to terms) with controlling two objects, in your game it felt very natural right from the start.
I did have a little trouble making use of the cannon, and I think this was a combination of it being a parabolic arc and altering where it was aimed as I moved forward and backwards (or maybe I just didn't ever understand how to aim it) so I ended up relying entirely on the sub's torpedoes for damage.
I got confused as to how to eliminate the barrage of incoming fire that appears from below the map - and that ended up killing my sub and ending all my attempts at progress.
My skill set was woefully under what was needed for the first level of the game (I think I successfully reflected the minotaur's attack accurately back onto them once, and never survived more than 15 seconds) so I don't think I could give this a fair shake. I realize having different difficulty settings is rough to squeeze in during a game jam, but it would be lovely. I thought the UX was pretty damn good, especially the smooth options menu.
I was surprised and delighted to find a character creation section in the game, and enjoyed the wanderings.
Also, having done some minor (less than 60 second) narration in a previous jam, I know just how hard that is to get right, and so congrats to getting some excellent dialog in a jam.
Sadly I got lost in the post-swan maze, and so after wandering for 10+ minutes I had to move on to the next game.
Man, I really liked all the little touches you managed to get in -- the watery sloshing of the health, the shader effects, the way the enemies stuck to you when they "bit" you. Lots of little polishes are really nicely done.
Concept wise, I do love that the player is their own worst enemy - bullet hells are not my forte at all, but I love that effect, of realizing that missing or firing too much is going to come back and haunt you in the end.
Fun cozy game - I especially liked the muted almost talking noises that happened during the level transitions. I would be tempted wonder what the game might be like if there was a "par" for each level, where you had to clear the level in N shots or less - maybe for some of the more advanced levels? But then that would go against the cozy nature of the game (and really, what would be the point if you could just restart any level)... in any case, the game designer part of me wondered what sort of pressure could be applied but still have it be cozy.
Loved the sound effects - unfortunately bullet hell games are not my particular skill set, so I wasn't able to progress far in it, but I did appreciate the complexity of having to keep track of three different dodge states.
I noticed that the state change was only cycling in one direction, which means that to progress I just needed to watch for it and scroll the mouse wheel in one direction - there's something odd about having a bi-directional control (mouse wheel) that seems to only ever need to be moved in one direction. I'd experiment with either switching the control of this to a more simple form (tap button X to re-sync) or to have the color cycle to a random state, so that mastering the mouse wheel would make for faster transitions for the player.
I love the art style in this game, and the advancement of the puzzle complexity was great.
I would like it if after the first couple levels your player "earned" the ability to see the numeric angle they were setting things to (or there were art changes when at specific angles, like 45' or 60') because it was a little laborious to walk back and forth between laser and mirror to make minute changes... The walk back and forth is ok for the first couple levels, but it might be a nice quality-of-life to earn that visual feedback later in the game.