itch.io

Really cool concept - combining a sliding tile game with a puzzle platformer is a fantastic idea and made exploration of the world really interesting. I like that entering each room reveals its layout on the grid, and the orthographic projection works better than I would have expected for communicating which room each tile represents. Also really liked the various tutorials and hints printed on scene elements in the background, made them mesh with the world really nicely. Super innovative, I dig it!

I think the angle of the camera in each room makes depth perception a bit tough for platforming on some occasions - kept bumping my head on various platforms while trying to figure out how far back Kiwi was; maybe a drop shadow/indicator on the ground would help with that?

The idea alone was super engaging, but the game had a nice layer of polish on top of that - great job!

Neat concept - I particularly like that your game is relatively hands-off with the explanation and lets the player innately discover what's going on and how to proceed. Also really liked how you could chain objects off one side of the scale and still have the core mechanic work properly - at one point had a chain of umbrellas going which was pretty satisfying.

The actual movement of the pieces was probably the only part that felt off - I feel like the concept would work almost as effectively if clicking the object simply anchored to it at the clicked position. Toward the later levels, trying to coax the objects into a stable position started feel more frustrating than rewarding, but I can also see why you might have chosen the current control scheme.

Good job on the game!

Very slick pixel art platformer - was particularly fond of the user interface and level transitions. Movement felt pretty good, and I like how aerial attacks incorporated a sort of dash that you could mix up your movement with. Constructing your own map was also a neat addition, though at first it was a bit unexpected coming out of the platforming tutorial that came before it - I think leading up with the fact that you're building out your own path to the finish would clear that up on the first go around. All-in-all a very polished and fun entry, good job!

This concept is great, was really hooked on how unique it was! Simple to understand but super engaging. The art and palette were on point and pleasant to look at - same with audio, the chiptune track felt right at home. Characters and dialogue had a lot of flavor as well.

As some others have indicated, I think it would be cool to get some sort of heads up to what enemies might be dropping in next - maybe something like Tetris where you get a preview of what the next shape will be? Just felt like there were a few scenarios where several things would drop suddenly, which makes kicking stuff to the other side a bit frantic.

Great job on this, was a lot of fun!

Great little platformer you have here! Always liked omnidirectional combat in these types of games, and it felt pretty good here. Hitboxes felt just the right size to where enemies weren't overbearing, but also not too disjointed either.

Not sure if intentional, but I sometimes had enemies sort of get stuck above the player character - you could still get them off by swinging upward, but you'd rapidly start ticking health. Didn't really affect combat too much otherwise.

Great work, this was fun to play!

Very neat idea mixing 2D and 3D projections of the world for this!

Really liked the squash and stretch on the player character, movement and animation for them felt pretty fluid. I kind of liked that I could move the character in the two-dimensional plane by pushing them with the projected box, made the two worlds not feel too disjointed.

I think I would have preferred if the 3D view simply panned back and looked at the game world head-on or from an elevated angle. While the side-angled view is pretty cool, it did lead to a number of scenarios where the controls for the box went off-screen, and it could not be interacted with without moving the player character.

Definitely a neat idea, would love to see what else you could do with the base concept!

This game has great energy - no one expects the bald incursion. :)

Loved the art style on display here. Overall darker tone to the game was pretty consistent across the board, but will clear enough to distinguish everything that you needed to. Liked the effects on the directional indicator, and subtle effects like the screen shaking a bit whenever landing or colliding with a wall. Definitely made the game feel more alive. Character animations and menuing were also quite good.

For a few things that I felt could be improved - the speech audio effect was a bit grating; I get the general vibe that you were going for there, but I think after my fifth time listening to it from the vagrant was when I had to turn it down. I'm also not sure what the purpose of the text that pops up on collision is - it seemed like it may have been done for some comic-book style flavor; in that scenario, I think it makes sense to include, but maybe not on every collision event.

Overall a very solid game, well done!

Hey, well done on the game! The concept for the game was quite funny, but also really well presented. The simple shading style on the models looked pretty nice, and I like that the overall world wasn't overly complicated and drew attention to the tree as the centerpiece of the game. The audio was also hilarious, did get a chuckle out of the Wilhelm scream in there.

I enjoyed how you were able to continue placing down plants as the round progressed to deal with the concentrated areas in the waves, though it seemed like maybe the tree should grow at the end of the round and not the beginning? Felt a bit odd to introduce new placement spots after spending the preparation time placing stuff down, though I suppose those new areas could be used to place things during the wave.

I'll also throw out kudos for the user interface - the art for it is great and thematic to the rest of the game. Good job!

Really well done on this game! Going through the tutorial, I felt like there could only be so many different machines, but you just kept adding more of them! Each of them had a place, too - all of them were pretty straightforward to understand, with maybe the exception of the stacker, but I felt like it played a pretty critical role in many of the levels. Menuing was really polished (liked the level transition effect) and most of the audio and art were consistent to the theme of your game. I liked that the tutorial was interactive, it communicated the core concepts very effectively.

Not a whole lot to say otherwise - as placement of the machines is on a click-and-drag effect, it would be nice to see them attached to the mouse cursor, just so that you can be sure of what you are putting onto the tiles. I found in a few instances I would start placing down conveyers when I meant to place down a machine.

Very well done, best of luck in the jam and on your future games!

Very neat combination of card game and tile game. Being able to both play and move cards around the playfield with the allotted energy was interesting enough in its own right - having the cards scale up and down on top of that was really cool.

Something else that I think you did really well was all the smaller quality-of-life stuff, like snapping the tiles into place, visualizing the lines of attack, etc. I think the visuals and audio could be a bit better, but they get the job done, and the core gameplay isn't made any worse for it. Well done!

I'd say combining the two jam prompts was a wonderful idea and led to a pretty unique creation! Colors were simple but communicated exactly what they needed to for a game of this type. I think the timing system for the shifting size had advantages and disadvantages - I liked the timing being integrated into how the character traversed the world, but also felt like I had to wait for a while to input my desired actions. But I understand that you're fairly limited by the control scheme, so I thought it was executed pretty well given that!

This was a pretty polished bullet hell game! Thought that the difficulty curve was pretty good, introducing you to new enemy types gradually and then combining them in interesting ways - also liked that the health pickups weren't just randomly dispersed throughout the field but started showing up as you increased in size. The player movement struck a pretty good balance between floatiness and snappiness that I feel is critical to this type of game.

Not a whole lot to comment on otherwise - sometimes the health pickups came on a bit rapidly, so it felt like I could incur damage freely at some spots. It seems like there might be a buffer between when you're allowed to get hit again, maybe that could be shortened a bit? Well done on the game!

Crazy detailed game world in this entry, models and colors looked great. AI-generated content was used to pretty good effect too, that title screen is awesome.

I think on top of making decisions to drive the game world, it would be nice to be able to interact with the playfield or pawns in some way, kind of in the spirit of "Black & White" or other games like that - feels a bit detached otherwise. Great job on the entry!

This was a trippy experience, and a really unique concept! It took me a second to understand that it was a two-player experience, but even controlling both sides of play is neat in its own right. The fluid simulation and audio are done pretty well.

It may help to color code the players in some way to correspond to the color of their jets - with a lot of turbulence on the field and little activity, it can be a bit difficult to tell what's going on. I sometimes also felt like the power-ups might have spawned too close to one gate or the other.

Neat game, good job!

Impressive scale on the world for a game jam entry! The modeling and world design was definitely reminiscent of older Nintendo games and was overall well composed. Menuing and interaction with elements in the world worked pretty well for the most part. As others have indicated, inputs felt somewhat difficult to execute, but the movement itself was satisfying and not overly floaty. Nice work!

I just want to say, the visual style on display here is incredible - excellent use of post processing effects and materials, really hard to believe this is an Unreal Engine game. The scenery and level design was also very good and definitely reminiscent of the era of gaming you were going for.

While I understand that this is mostly a reimplementation of the base gameplay of Superliminal, I think you've done a pretty good job of that - it certainly doesn't seem like an easy mechanic to replicate, and I thought the actual scaling worked fairly well in practice.

On the flip side, the engine may have caused a bit of friction regarding the physics aspect of the game - I had quite a few of the scalable objects bounce around randomly after scaling them, and had to fight to keep a few of them on their buttons. Also ended up soft-locking myself the first time around with the mirror, as it fell over once after I went through it.

Think there's definitely some interesting ideas you could explore with this concept, and would love to see some of the additional ideas you've previously mentioned implemented on top of the base mechanic. Great job on the entry!

Pretty robust implementation of a tower defense game for the allotted time! I like the interactivity of the player character alongside the standard tower defense elements as in games like Sanctum - keeps the actual wave phases pretty interesting. The sprites themselves also look pretty good, and I like that the muted color palette was consistent across most of the gameplay elements.

I think a few additions to the UI could help with gameplay - maybe take some of the descriptions from the tutorial and add them to the hover details for each of the towers? Found myself forgetting early on the effect of each tower, though it wasn't too much of an issue. There were also a few instances where I felt like the player was taking damage from an unknown source, but I might have been missing a mechanic somewhere in there.

The music was also pretty banging. Good job on the entry! :)

Simple and effective movement here, quite liked the feel of the wall jump and dash. The level was small in scope, but well constructed. I like the integration of the leaderboard and the game being speedrun-centric, though as others have indicated, the text on that screen was a bit hard to parse.

Good job!

Quite liked the mechanic here, probably my favorite interpretation of the "weighing scales" concept. Simple, straightforward, and relatively engaging.

I think the difficult part here is depth perception and getting a good sense of what may or may not collide with the scales (or wings); I think having a bit of adaptation and learning there is good for the core gameplay loop, but I feel like perhaps the angled view of the playfield made it a bit tough to understand where things were vertically.

Great interpretation of the theme, good work on this!

I was caught so off guard by the whole extra game at the end - really got a good chuckle out of that one. Timescale go brrrr indeed.

There were a ton of interactive elements to the gameplay loop that I feel really elevated it - the shaking of the cutter, the physical spinning of the press, the falling spikes along the left sidebar... all of those added a lot of flavor and were handled really well. The premise was also refreshingly simple and effective (and wholly original, I would guess lol).

While I think there is definitely a plus in having the player discover how to interact with the different elements of the game naturally, some views were a bit confusing to me - it took me a minute to understand the interface for the press and how it corresponded to the scale in the requirements, though maybe I was reading past something. Other than that, I think the coloring for the mouse buttons on the cutting interface caused me to interpret the reverse of the intended actions at first, but relatively minor issues overall.

Great entry! (+1 for the dynamic menu as well)

This is a beautifully simple concept that actually has quite a bit more depth than I was expecting - was quite impressed with the different ways that you've found to explore the scaling mechanic. And the general gameplay had a relaxing vibe to it that I quite enjoyed.

For improvements, I think that some sort of visual indicator over elements in the scene to indicate that they were scalable would be helpful - this wasn't too much of an issue until the first hole to the outside of the building, which took me some time to realize that I could interact with. The audio/visual feedback of the "Object Blocked" might cause a bit of confusion, as I sometimes felt like I had to get an object blocked to proceed.

Other than that, solid entry with an enticing concept - interested to see what else you could do with it!

I do enjoy a cozy fishing game. :)

Was pleasantly surprised by the variety of fish in the game, and the art for each of them was well done. I personally felt like the timing of the "click" was in a good spot, as visually it seemed like it would be way harder than it ended up being. Good work on the overall vibe!

Something I feel could be improved is the payoff for catching a fish - with the great sprite art you have, I would have liked for it to show up on screen after a successful catch, perhaps accompanied with some appropriate effects/audio. That really composes the dopamine hit of most fishing games, and I think would help with the general gameplay feel. Congrats on the entry!

The pixel art here is quite stellar for a game jam entry - it felt consistent throughout the level and the elements within it, which I feel is quite often not the case with some pixel art games. Excellent job on that.

Others have already mentioned the stranger aspects of the enemies, so I won't get into that; I do think the environment could be used to better effect - I had a strong urge to break every object on each level, and really would have liked to discover anything within them, whether that be powerups or health boosts. Just something or another to reward the player for interacting with the level.

Thanks! The game uses Unreal Engine 5 - probably pretty overkill for a game of this type, but it was what we had the most familiarity with going into the jam. While it had its obvious downsides in not being able to target the web, it did end up paying off a bit by having a relatively new audio synchronization system (Quartz) which really reduced the overhead for us on the actual "rhythm" part of the game, as it handles most of the latency compensation under the hood and follows the beat/bar pattern that we wanted for the game.

I really like your idea of tying more audio/visual effects to the sliders; we originally wanted to get more player-driven audio elements into the game, but ended up getting pretty bogged down by the main audio component, which was a lot trickier than we originally imagined. Also agree on the positive reinforcement aspect - we really wanted to encourage open-ended/exploratory gameplay, but felt like score/accuracy alone might not be engaging enough for a subset of players;  as you indicated, there's probably a better solution to that than the health system we ended up going with.

Thanks for the detailed feedback!

Love the aesthetic in this entry - the visuals and audio mesh really well and made me quite nostalgic of older shoot em' ups. Also really liked the look of the damage numbers and guns.

I wasn't too bothered by the FOV, but I did have to fiddle with my mouse sensitivity outside the game to get it to a playable state.

Overall a solid game, great job!

Very cozy color palette - there were a few issues with parallax sprites in the background getting clipped, but a great art style overall. Good job!