itch.io

https://harold-krell.itch.io/louny-balloony

A hair-raising adventure!

An incredibly solid arcade game.

For a week-long jam game, this was insanely polished from graphics to gameplay and humor to music.

The goal of the game is to guide your floating pair of teeth through a series of obstacles that, when hit, unleash an awkward conversation topic on the screen. Each topic you hit increases your conversation-o-meter™ towards the red. Hit to many and you lose the game.

Aside from the neat graphical touches that include parallax backgrounds, I found the standout of this game to be the movement of your toothsome character.  The flight controls are incredibly tight, and for those having trouble mastering them, the key to movement is to hold a direction and pump Z/X to move swiftly horizontally.

The conversation obstacles that litter the screen can seem daunting, but the hitboxes are cleverly smaller than they actually appear, allowing you to navigate safely even between dangerous diagonal points.

Each level consists of different movement patterns for the conversation obstacles which requires you to slightly switch up strategies as you progress through the main game, although there is also an endless mode that provides an extended challenge as well as a training opportunity for newbies.

The humor of the conversations is woven very well into the gameplay, though a minor gripe I do have is that most players will most likely be too focused on the need for precise movement to notice conversation texts that pop up when you hit an obstacle.

I also want to give a shout out to the music if that was also made specifically for the jam. If not, it was definitely apt at least.

All-in-all, a pretty tight and amazing game regardless of how long it took to make. I'd go as far as betting this will most likely be the Game of the Jam from what I've seen so far.

A weird little collect-a-thon arcade game where you need to collect spirits and give them to people in order to increase your score.

You start the game as a tiny elf thing with a big net that you can use your mouse to move around to collect blue little spirit things in your vicinity.  I found the mouse movement for the net to be mostly unnecessary since you can pretty much get the same effect by simply moving toward the spirits with the keyboard keys.

Speaking of the spirits, it seemed like most of the spirits I ended up capturing were clumped together near the beginning of the game.  Then as I progressed, I'd eventually find them in sparser amount for the remainder of the time.

However, in order to actually score points, the spirits you collect must be "fed" to the random sad wretches walking about the area, transforming them into happy elven things.  These guys have a nice "[e]" symbol above their heads, so you know exactly what key you need to press to feed them, which I thought was pretty accommodating

A simple, yet maybe gameplay-breaking quirk I found was that the game makes it seem like you need to feed a single spirit to a single sad person in order to score, but even if a person has already been fed and made happy, it is still possible to keep feeding that same person spirits to keep increasing your score.  In fact, after a while, I found a single 'e' click on a person would result in them being fed multiple spirits at a time.  Because of this, I found the optimum way to score was to simply focus on collecting spirits for 99% of the time, and then the last 1% was to just find any single person to deposit all your spirits.

At the end of it all, you get your score and are encouraged to play again for a better score.  It's a simple game, but with a fun little premise that'll keep you playing maybe 2 or 3 more times.

Also, what the heck is up with that loud noise when you start?

A challenging restaurant/resource-management.  It has a nifty concept of not only choosing ingredients for cocktails, but also measuring the amount for each drink.

The game could use some UI adjustments to make mixing and serving drinks more intuitive.  Although hovering over objects with the mouse will display a tooltip with important information, the objects themselves don't really stand out from one another.  As can be seen from the thumbnail, many of the drinks share the same color of white/yellow/brown, and the only way to know for sure what type of substance each bottle contains is by hovering over the bottle to activate the tooltip.

This is also true for the different types of cups you need for each cocktail, which can be hard to locate on the right of the screen.  

Ultimately, the game is more of a point-and-hover game where you need to use context clues from tooltips in order to figure out what the actual intended gameplay is, which breaks down like this:

1. Wait for a customer to appear.
2. Hover over the customer to see their order.
3. Hover over the glasses to see which glass they want, then grab it with one hand.
4. Hover over the bottles to see what liquor they want, then grab it with the other hand.
5. Pour the liquor. Repeat with any additional liquor involved with the cocktail.
6. Serve the drink to a customer and repeat.

Memorization become a necessary component for an optimized playthrough since none of the bottles are labeled outright.

Also, I found in my playthroughs that some customers would queue directly on top of other customers, which messed up the picking algorithm for displaying tooltips, making it difficult to discern the correct order for a customer as well as delivering drinks to respective customers.

This is definitely a game that has genuinely fun ideas with it's emulation of practical mixology, what with having to juggle bottles and tumblers in each hand and having to manually measuring drinks out while you pour.  With a little more refinement on the UI side, this game could definitely have the potential to be an incredible standout.

A nice little platforming game.

Physics are pretty well handled especially regarding slopes, although some of the spinning platforms in the later levels will weirdly scale your character sprite when you come in contact with them.

The mechanic with having to knock out the children before you can collect them could probably be removed since once you actually find the children they pose no threat, so as it is right now it's just a couple of extraneous button presses.

One particularly frustrating detail is that when you run out of time in a level, it starts you back at the beginning of the PREVIOUS level, meaning you can actually progress backwards if you suck hard enough, which is definitely possible with the last couple of levels having a bunch of bottomless pits.

Despite that, if you like a good platforming challenge and want to test your skills, I'd definitely recommend this one for a good quickie!