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Thank you for the feedback!

As I've learned more about card game design I've definitely realized there are some weaknesses in the way this game works. The seed types / card progression in particular is a bit strange, as the weaker cards are literally just worse versions of the better cards and are therefore not great to add to the deck (as there's no way to get rid of them).

I would still like to come back to this game and expand or polish it, but I'm not sure exactly what I'd like to do (...or when I will have the time and motivation--although seeing people continue to enjoy the game definitely helps on that front!). The idea to make the win screen more satisfying is definitely a good one! And I agree some overhaul to how the seeds work is needed.

Maybe one day. Until then, thank you for playing!

Thank you for the kind comment! Very happy to hear it. 😄

Thanks for playing! I've definitely thought about coming back to this game and adding more features, but there's so many other things I want to work on too of course 😅

If I do one day work on this game more I definitely have plans for changes to the deck building mechanics though!

Haha, there is really no need to apologize for wasting my time. 30 minutes is an extremely standard amount of time for me to spend on jam games. If I was annoyed with the length of time I had spent you probably would have heard me complain about it. 😄 Not to mention, I really enjoyed almost every moment of it... right up until it started lagging, I was having a great time--something I maybe didn't emphasize before is that I felt like the configurations of robots kept things really fresh & consistently engaging. The robots that were grouped together were sometimes more appropriate to jump over, while other robots required eeking close to the edge, then running away, then jumping over and jumping back quickly, and then maybe you could jump over the remaining robots. I think if the game did have some kind of ending, say, 8 checkpoints in to it -- it would be a pretty solid little game!

But I definitely appreciate your consideration for my time!

Oh, I was playing on controller. I used the dodge roll a lot, but I couldn't figure out a way to both attack and not be animation-locked shortly enough to be able to dodge out of the way of nearby fridges.

I guess my feeling was that the fridge attack timing was randomized? So I couldn't predict when they would attack, and therefore I wouldn't know when to attack in order to be free to dodge by the time they would attack.

This game is great! Fantastic graphics and sound, super fun gameplay, normal combat is satisfying and the special attack is a blast to use. The story was funny and a great use of the theme.

There's not much else to say on what's good that hasn't already been said.

I will say I have, perhaps, a little bit of feedback I can give on what was unclear when I played:

1. I never figured out what the microwaves really did, it seemed like they never did any damage to me. Or maybe they were what was stunning me sometimes? But I figured that was the ovens.

2. Is there meant to be a way to dodge the refrigerator attacks? It seems like if there is a fridge close to you, there's really not enough time to react if it decides to attack. This is not really problematic, because the game gives you plenty of health, but if this game was meant to be about dodging I definitely did not figure out how to do it.

So hopefully that feedback is helpful in some way. But this game was pretty great. 😄

So first I have to ask -- is there any ending to the game? I played in to it maybe about half an hour or so, and at that point the game started to lag really hard. I couldn't tell if this was just a problem with my browser acting up (the game first started to lag seemingly when I received an email?) but I couldn't figure out a way to refresh the game and restore my progress.

However, in these cases, when source code is available, I do like to try to see if I can recover my progress just by hacking the game :) but from looking at the source code, it seems like there is no actual ending point to the game.

I would definitely recommend saying something about that in the description, or something, because had the game not started to lag I probably would have kept playing for at least an hour or more, thinking that there was an ending at some point (and that the game just happened to be really long).

And, just as a side idea: one thing I sometimes do in jam games is provide some kind of level select or fast-forward cheat code. I figure that losing progress if you happen to need to reboot the game for whatever reason basically means that, if any players ever do need to reboot the game, they are simply going to quit playing at that point. And there's no real harm in providing unfettered access to the whole game.

One other small criticism: The tutorial text, as well as the benches, both require pressing E to interact with. But... there's nowhere that tells you to press E to interact with interactable objects. I figured this out simply by trying E when I saw the notes, because they looked interactable, and I felt like E might be the right key. But I didn't figure out benches were interactable until I got to the second bench, figured it must be some kind of checkpoint somehow, and then figured out that I could use E.

So, perhaps it would make sense to say somewhere: use E to interact, and then have one of the tutorial notes say "rest at benches with E" or whatever. (It can be as explicit or implicit about them being a checkpoint as you like... but knowing they're interactable at all is usually helpful).

All that said, there was a lot of cool stuff here.

One thing I really, really appreciate about this game is the combat system. So, we read this note that we can punch with the left mouse button. And then we go and try to punch the robots and immediately get destroyed, because it's really dang hard to punch robots to death.

And we have to rethink it a little bit, and realize that punching is basically completely useless, and that the only real way to destroy the robots is drop them off the ledge, or maybe to just outright jump over them.

This is great. It is wonderful, in my opinion, to have this punching mechanic with its only real purpose to be demonstrating its own uselessness.

I did eventually manage to actually kill some robots by punching without being killed myself, but.. this is still way harder than dropping them off the ledge, so the point still stands.

It's also a sort of fun bit of realism, so to speak. Like, in real life, you do technically have the option of punching a killer robot (were you to encounter one). But, in real life, you would almost certainly never exercise this option. So having options that you will never choose to use is a fundamental property of the real world, and incorporating it into a game is therefore creating a kind of realism.

I also like some of the little subtleties of the combat system. For example, if the robots are still activated while they're falling of the edge, they come very close to the other side and can hit you there if you're standing too close. But if you happen to walk far enough way for them to deactivate (with the question mark), they drop straight down... making this a more effective technique. I believe I only ever performed it by accident, sadly, but it's still cool.

I would say the combat was quite engaging, really, in a lot of the game that I played. I would often decide between jumping over a robot or leading it off the edge, depending on how many robots there were, how much space was available, etc. One of the most interesting situations was robots that were very close to the edge. This required some precision jumping to activate the robot and then immediately jump backwards to the previous platform. (I do think it would be helpful to have some coyote time in the situation -- sometimes I felt like I pushed jump, but fell to my doom, which was a little frustrating).

Other things I liked: it's neat how the benches take a little while to heal you up, with the litlte heart particle effect. This is a nice touch.

I like the way the robot sprites are designed. They look kind of like zombies, or like someone doing something silly with their hands, and this is a fun take on the evil robot appearance.

The player sprite is good too. I feel like the punching animation is quite appropriate for how useful I found punching to be in combat.

The parallax background is quite nice as well.

Neat game!

I did have a little trouble getting into the game. In particular, I started by looking at all the buildings, such as the bench, which I learned gave me extra actions. But I couldn't figure out what number actually represented my number of actions. I considered that it might be the hand symbol, but I figured that couldn't be right, because the repair button for the home base was available and there were 0 hands available, so if I really had 0 actions I shouldn't be able to repair the home base.

I ultimately thought maybe the tutorial had said how many actions there were, and so I immediately refreshed the game to do the tutorial again. But nope... no mention of the number of actions.

I finally figured out that every repair option except for the home base required 1 hand, and so clearly I would have to repair the home base before doing anything else. The game is adamant enough about this that I think players will be forced to eventually figure this out. But it did take me longer than I think is necessary.

One thing that I think would help is just adding a hover-over effect that showed the name of each resource. This would also make it slightly easier to understand what each building does, as then you could just look at which resource it claimed to produce -- although from reading other comments, it sounds like there is a way to see what the building does in the UI before buying it, which I did not figure out when I played.

The other thing I want to mention is I feel like there were not very many malfunctions in my playthrough. Maybe 2 or 3 buildings broke while I was still using them, but ultimately this was not really a problem and I just breezed through most of the game. (For what it's worth: my final score was 36).

That said, there was an interesting moment early on where I got pretty low on fish because the greenhouse immediately broke. It actually seemed like I would never be able to stockpile fish, because I only had 2 left, it would take 3 to upgrade the greenhouse, and my fish/day was 0 ... but eventually I was able to locate the fishing building as well.

This does mean that the screen-scrolling provides at least one meaningful gameplay element: some sort of exploration. I literally thought I might be fish-soft-locked (?) because the greenhouse broke, but there was a sense of discovery when I located the fishing hole.

One other thing I wanted to mention that I appreciated was the sense of story cohesion in all the buildings. My gameplay experience was broadly: Hmm, I need X resource. What building sounded like it might produce X resource? And then I would repair/upgrade that building, and I was almost always right about which resources it produced. The way that the buildings are drawn and named makes it very intuitive to figure out what resources they produce, and this is a super cool property. It makes it easy to get into the flow of generating the correct resources.

I also think that, due to the relatively small number of malfunctions I experienced, the game feels like it invites optimization. And this makes a lot of sense, because there is a high score. I think the game does a good job of driving the player to potentially trying to leave as quickly as possible, and that fits very well with the story.

Overall, this game made solid use of the theme and created a compelling and intuitive gameplay loop. Good job!

EDIT: One last note, I thought the open/close building sound, and maybe some of the other sounds, were a bit loud compared to the music. I ended up turning the game down just because of how loud the close building sound was, but that made the music pretty hard to hear.

I love the graphical style! It suits the game well.

I think I ran into a couple glitches when I played. My first play through, I didn't know it at the time, but I'm pretty sure the faster-firing-speed upgrades were not working as intended. This is because I did another playthrough, except this time the gun was shooting way faster after I bought all the upgrades.

The other glitch was this: upgrading the gun to have the fastest swivel speed actually makes it work quite poorly. It will seemingly start to oscillate trying to lock onto a target, and so will effectively freeze itself for seconds at a time... and not shoot any bullets during that time. This means the last turn speed upgrade is actually a bad one to get.

That said, in my second playthrough, my secret trick is I was actually playing with an autoclicker (it's something I do sometimes with jam games). This was what actually enabled me to level up every upgrade all the way, because otherwise there simply is not enough time to collect all the scrap... so I guess maybe the broken fast turn upgrade is just karma for using an autoclicker. 😄

Actually, this is one of the mechanics I think is really cool. The way that free gears just pile up in the end game... but there's no time to harvest them... it's cool! In the early game you sort of feel like, "come on, give me more ships so I can upgrade faster!" and then in the end you do get a plentiful supply of gears... but one you can never access. It's a fun twist.

In my first playthrough, when I was clicking manually, I found the gameplay loop quite satisfying for a while. It's satisfying to be able to click precisely on a ship, and the way that they go splat, as others have said, is quite fun, and then harvesting them for gears is another bit of precise gameplay that helps add to the loop.

My opinion on the end game is not entirely clear. This is because in my first playthrough, the gun was malfunctioning (oh... how thematic 😉) and not shooting fast enough, so I believe I had to click more than I really should have had to... while in my second playthrough I was of course using an autoclicker and could have gone on forever if I had chosen to, from what I can tell. (I stopped after collecting 1000 gears plus all the upgrades).

That said, my feeling is that the gameplay works out OK when the gun doesn't glitch out. I think that it is a good idea for the ships to eventually overwhelm you, and I think that the non-glitched gun will actually help you for real in the endgame. That is to say: I had a reasonably fun overall gameplay experience with my first playthrough, and I think it would have been even better had the gun actually worked, so I think it works in terms of game design.

Note that I did not figure out at all that it was possible to harvest gears from the scrap until reading some of these comments. I tried clicking on various things in the scrap UI but never noticed anything happening. I think in this case even just adding an instruction on the game page like "scavenge for gears in the scrap metal!" would help players figure out what to do.

I did figure out enough for the game to be playable, though. I liked the core "malfunction" component -- it meant that we had to focus on the precision-mouse gameplay with a long-term goal of repairing the gun. It also gave some interesting tradeoffs--do I repair it now, or try to get the shield upgrade? I personally opted for as many shield upgrades as possible.

Absolutely agree on your pain point. Different skins for upgrades was one of those features I put on the "if I have time" list. Of course, I did not have time. 😄

Unfortunately for me my musical tastes consist of a great deal of enjoyment of unpleasant noise. I suppose I will have to tone it down in the future, considering all the feedback this jam! 😄

Thank you for the feedback!

Thank you for the feedback! I'm glad that the gameplay arc you experienced ended up making sense. I definitely wanted the probes to get really strong at the end -- the first time I played with the current ending, it was like, super exciting for me and a great experience, and I hope some of that translated to everyone else's playthroughs.

Also, thank you for the feedback on the sound! If I'm honest, I literally cannot even hear the drill sounds unless I buy the drills in debug mode with a bunch of extra cash (so there's nothing else on screen)... they just get masked by everything else. I think I definitely need to learn more about mixing to make the cacophony work a bit better... I tried to use a compressor on the SFX bus at one point, but it seemed like I got a pumping effect that was even more annoying. I think better sound design would help as well.

Thanks for playing!

Haha don't be too impressed by the apparent non-laginess of the game. 😅 For me, the end of the normal game lag spikes whenever a new enemy spawns. Moreover -- I actually originally planned for there to be two enemies on screen for longer, but the game just got too laggy with the larger enemies when there were two, so I cut it down to one. So the lag actually directly influenced the final game product!

Also, I completely could not get the game optimized enough to run on the web. (I did try! I spent a few hours fixing the rendering lag, and then spent more hours writing a custom GDScript physics engine to try to speed up the physics enough... no avail. Perhaps after the jam is over I can fix it!)

I appreciate the suggestions for more on-theme content! If I'm going to be honest I generally am not interested in following the theme too closely unless it's a concept I want to delve deeper into. For this jam, I saw the theme, thought of "malfunctioning self-replicating probes", built the probes in Godot, and then came up with a game that I could center around the probes. For me, the probes really are the central concept of this game, and the probes are inspired directly from the theme... so for me, it follows the theme. Obviously it is not a very interesting use of the theme, and is perhaps not deserving of very many Theme stars. But at least now you know where I am coming from. 😄

Thank you for playing and for your feedback!

Thank you for playing!

The risk of exponential growth is, or at least was intended to be, the real point of the game. It was extremely intentional on my part that a small slip up early on leads to total doom (and I experienced this myself while playtesting). Moreover, I broadly figured the best gameplay arc would be: player slips up, loses, restarts, and then wins. I guess the idea is: I wanted this game to demonstrate just how scary exponential growth is.

(I originally thought I might title the game something like "fragile defense" to try to communicate how... well... fragile your defense necessarily is against exponential self-replication. Unfortunately I also had recently set myself the goal of making a game with a really long title 😄)

The language about good ship coordination, and what not, is really also about destroying the enemies before they start replicating.

So depending on what exact kind of difficulty unbalance you experienced, it may be completely intended. Of course, even if the unbalance is intentional, it still might be bad. I personally think I like the idea still, but YMMV. 😄

One side note: enemies shouldn't be spawning while the tutorial is open. If they were that's a bug. Also, for reading the ship "info" screens, it should be possible to do that while paused--but this is only communicated in the game description so it may be easily missed.

Thank you for the feedback!

Thank you for playing & for your feedback! It's great to hear that the game balance was working well. That was definitely something I tried to get right.

I've been doing more weird improvisational and/or synthesizer based music for my games lately... it's definitely a bit bizarre, but it's, I think, less stressful for me to make and sometimes turns out quite nice. I'm glad it ended up working for you!

I think this game might have my favorite use of the theme so far. As others have said, the malfunctioning does not really feel like a significant part of the puzzles, or anything like that -- but that's what makes it so good, in my opinion. This game really does feel like playing as a malfunctioning robot. The malfunctions are not significant in some special, predestined way... they just are a fact of life for this robot, and we get to experience that by playing this game. I think that's really cool, and I really enjoyed that aspect of the game. I mean: seriously! I felt like I was a malfunctioning robot for real! It's a great encapsulation of that experience.

The raising-malfunction-rate-over-time mechanic also contributes to that. It really does feel like you're a robot that is just breaking down and getting more and more glitchy. I love it.

Also, I found there were some satisfying puzzles in there! Level 9 really made me think and I had to restart it a couple times.

Strangely, level 10 seemed really easy? You can just go hit each of the three switches (the ones where you press G) and then you win? I think the design of level 10 might have gotten over-thought and you may have missed the obvious solution (I've been there, when designing puzzles!)

The only mechanic I didn't really understand is why pressing Repair always damaged the robot. I think it could have been useful to be able to repair in some cases, due to the spikes, although I eventually learned that you could press against a wall to change the spike cycle... so I guess the spikes are a pretty fair puzzle element (the player should be able to avoid any damage unless they malfunction).

Overall though, I really do think this is one of my favorite entries so far--the puzzle content was satisfying enough, and the malfunctioning mechanic was super cool. I also enjoyed the music. Great job!

There's a lot of good stuff here but I do have a couple complaints I want to briefly make:

I think the visual effects are probably too intense -- especially with the camera glitch, the game was pretty hard to look at and as far as I know I don't have any specific visual processing disorders or the like. I think this effect should unquestionably have some kind of setting to disable it.

Second, the moving platform sections really broke the flow of the game. I sort of counted for the horizontal platform and my estimation is that, if you miss the platform, you have to wait at least 24 seconds? That seems like a very long time. In fact, for a very long time I was completely stumped at what to do at that section. I kept trying to get the checkpoint or jump on the floor or something, because I simply had no idea to begin with that there was a platform. I think the moving platforms would benefit from some kind of lever system or similar.

OK, so those were my complaints. Now on to the good stuff.

I really like how this game looks. The player character looks great, the world looks great, I love the parallax effect.

If I understood the coin mechanic correctly, I thought it was pretty cool--my thought was that the coins were everpresent in the level, but you were able to reach different ones due to different glitches. This is a fun idea.

I thought there was a good variety of puzzle solving and gameplay differences between the different glitches. I liked how the glitches revealed new sections of the level, and I think the game ending / loop mechanic is fun.

I think the player character has good-feeling movement. Sure, there's no variable jump height, but the jump feels good IMO, and has a somewhat unique feeling.

The music was a lot of fun as well.

This was quite nice! I especially love the way that the 3D perspective is used here. There's a lot of fun little objects in the environment, and things hanging above your head, and this is a really cozy aesthetic touch that I haven't seen much before, and it adds a lot to the atmosphere of the game.

I had a lot of fun trying to move really fast through certain puzzles. The player movement has that sort of snake-game feel, where you can easily overshoot the square you're trying to end up on by one. So, it's satisfying to correctly execute tight turns and the like.

I found that the death mechanics were a little glitchy. In particular, I played this game to various stages of completion approximately 3 times. Every single time, my cube eventually ended up rotated abnormally--it seems like the transform is somehow not getting reset when it dies? And, in my first playthrough, the cube eventually turned completely invisible (presumable the scale got permanently set to 0 somehow), and I decided to restart the game at that point, as it became much harder. Also, when respawning, the cube would end up moving really fast and going through walls--although this only seemed to occur after dying several times. I think this bug should be reproducible just by holding down the arrow keys immediately after respawning--it seems like the cube sort of glitches through walls and then dies (because you usually hit lava very quickly while this behavior is occurring).

Despite these bugs, I enjoyed all the gameplay. I found the maze puzzle at the end genuinely took a while to figure out, as there were a lot of little factors, like which walls you could and could not move through. I also liked the way that the world was one continuous space; I think this contribute to the atmosphere as well. Overall, great little puzzle game!

Oh, one note: I did play with the Windows version, although I also tried the web version after my guy turned invisible, but ran into the same rotating-bug. All that is to say: the Windows version seemed to work fine for me!

Really cool game! I love the combination of a generally fun base game, plus the additional layer of gameplay twists. 

That is, the general concept of combat with autonomous weapons, where all you have to do is move around, plus the whacky weapon upgrades--this is a really fun game on its own, it's fun to try different builds and its fun to layer multiple categories of weapons on top of each other.

But then, the additional layer of the malfunctions was quite fun by itself. All the graphical variation was super cool to see, and a lot of the malfunctions made the gameplay more interesting -- although I would say that, by the end of the game, it was probably getting to a point where the malfunctions were more annoying than fun, simply due to the number of them active at once. I think that's completely fine, however--it gives the game a nice arc, and I think that the boss fight does dial back the annoyance a bit, which helps round out the game. (Side note: I was very bad at the boss fight, and ended up with -150 health or something).

Unfortunately I did run into a problem that this game does not run very well on my computer at all. At first I tried the web browser version in fullscreen mode, and it basically just did not work. Next I tried to download the game (Windows version), and it worked even worse -- the game hangs either on the first or second level, and it hangs hard -- it's difficult to even open task manager to kill it. This admittedly was not very fun to deal with. (I also briefly tried to run the Linux version over WSL, but I don't think I have my computer setup for that to actually work lol). Eventually I managed to just play through the game on the web version, and it ran mostly fine -- although it did occasionally lock up briefly, and it seemed like it might break entirely at some point. I did eventually get to the end though, thankfully.

I think this is especially unfortunate because it meant that at some points during the game, when the game performed some kind of intentional malfunction, I couldn't tell whether that was a gameplay mechanic or if the game was about to freeze again (... and therefore force me to start over).

In any case, though, I did have a lot of fun once I managed to find a way to actually play the game. Besides the gameplay, I think the graphics were wonderful (especially will all the variety from the malfunctions), and the sounds seemed quite nice as well.

EDIT: Oh, well, I figured out why the game wasn't working when downloaded. Apparently my graphics card was unplugged. Now that that's fixed, it works fine when downloaded. 😄 It's possible that all the issues I experienced were just my graphics driver having a bad day. In particular, I realized something was up when I started playing a different GWJ game and had similar-ish issues.

The corruption mechanic is very fun. Having towers become extremely powerful with a risk of losing the game is a great risk/reward mechanic, although I guess there's not too much risk as long as you keep a reasonable supply of money.

One possible flaw I see in the corruption system, however, is that it is restrained by whichever tower corrupts the fastest. That is, when I played, I went with the blue tower and the lava tower for a while, and eventually got one of the moon towers... but then I had to repair my towers much more often, because the moon tower corrupted more often, and so the blue tower never got a chance to be corrupted. (Similarly, while I had the blue tower and the lava tower, the lava towers often did not get corrupted--although maybe this is a good thing, because from what I can tell, the corrupted lava tower is actually weaker..?)

One note: I originally played this on my high-dpi computer monitor, and then on my phone, and in both cases, the text is really small. When I set my computer resolution lower the text becomes a more normal size.

Anyways, I had fun playing, enough to play through on both my computer and my phone! I found the blue towers quite powerful with the freezing ability, and ended up winning with them both times. In my second playthrough I made sure to avoid getting any moon towers so that I could make the most of the corrupted blue towers, which was a fun strategy.

This was a great concept, and executed quite beautifully! I loved in particular how all the settings (the normal settings and the music) were blended into the desktop environment. It just made the game super cohesive--the entire game literally is taking place on this desktop.

The microgames were enjoyable--I loved having to close the spam windows at the same time as performing the microgame, and I also liked the Beardy interactions, although I think I personally would have liked the falling obstacles to be slightly harder to dodge, as they never really felt like a threat in my playthrough. That said, the times when he yoinked my game window were quite fun.

One UI issue I ran into: I initially completely did not pay attention to the file names, and so I figured "Endless" was just a name of some file I needed to clean up. Eventually I realized it really was an endless gameplay mode. At this point I tried to close the window, but the X buttons don't work (which I guess makes sense, because it would be annoying to accidentally close one--although that could be an interesting hazard!) Okay, so I figured I would just open one of the other files. At this point both the Endless file and one other file were open, and everything seemed to work. Eventually I did manage to lose in the Endless game, and so I was able to close the window. However, at this point, the spam windows stopped spawning and Beardy stopped attacking. And then, what seems to have happened is I won the 10 microgames that I needed to, but then the window just didn't actually get completed, and I had to re-play it again, and at that point the spam windows and Beardy started working again.

So it seems like there are possibly some bugs happening there. One possible UI improvement I can think of--enable the close button when two files are open? Or maybe instead of a close button, have a minimize button, that paused that file (so the next time you opened it, you would be back where you left off). I don't know, some things to consider.

One other thought I had: I think it would be cool to have some more particles/animations, e.g. when blowing up the viruses in the shooting game, or collecting them in the collecting game, etc.  This could just slightly improve the game feel. That said, the "instant despawning" effect does fit the overall aesthetic of the rest of the game.

Overall, I had a great time with this. It was a lot of fun playing with the different features on the computer, and the core microgame gameplay was really good as well.

Well, I absolutely appreciate the feedback! I may well return the favor this upcoming Ludum Dare :)

Warning: lots of info regarding Ludum Dare music and sound incoming!

The DAW I used for this game is Reaper, which is nice because it is cheap and not a subscription fee -- overall very nice IMO. However, I used to use LMMS, which is completely free, for Ludum Dare music. It's honestly in some ways easier to use than Reaper, and I don't do anything with Reaper that is that different from my LMMS work.

Besides the DAW itself, I used a handful of virtual instruments:

- The drums are from Spitfire LABS -- which is a collection of free virtual instruments from Spitfire Audio/

- The bass guitar is Ample Bass P Lite II, which is free and honestly is one of my favorites--it has actually inspired me to start learning the bass guitar!

- The piano is Spitfire's "Felt Piano," which I got because it was apparently used in Celeste's soundtrack.

- The synth parts are done with Matt Tytel's Helm, which is a nice synthesizer. He also makes Vital which is pretty neat as well.

- The strings are another Spitfire LABS instrument.

But, I have made music a whole bunch of ways over the past few years doing Ludum Dare.

One thing I used to use a lot of was SoundFonts. I believe they're basically an old, somewhat standardized sampler format, or something. But, the basic idea is, you can download a big SoundFont pack that has like a hundred different instrument sounds in it, and at least to my untrained ears they all tend to sound nice. They're a nice way to quickly get a lot of options for acoustic-sounding virtual instruments without researching in-depth a bunch of specific plugins; you just have one plugin that plays SoundFont files and then you can browse through the SoundFonts you downloaded and see if any of them sound right for whatever you're doing. (I have been considering getting back into SoundFonts myself, but they are actually harder to use in Reaper than in LMMS...!)

Also, a nice DAW-less way to make Ludum Dare music is through beepbox.co. It's a great tool, very easy to just dive in and start making music with, all you really need is a mouse and some speakers. The last time I used Beepbox for Ludum Dare music was Ludum Dare 45. It's definitely one of my favorite tools, even if I haven't used it in a while.

(And, speaking of classic Ludum Dare sound tools -- maybe you've heard of sfxr and bfxr and the chiptune sounds they can generate. One more tool I can recommend in that genre is sfxia, which is unfortunately kind of obscure but is great at making clicky sounds IMO)

Well, hopefully some of that information is useful. I'm not sure quite where you're coming from, maybe you already have a DAW you're very comfortable with, and all. But, now you know what I use!

Anyways, good luck with your first Ludum Dare! 😄

Thanks for playing!

That level has a lot of history, strangely enough. A very similar level is in one of my previous games (Super Box Bot's Package Push). Both of them come from a fractal pattern I started drawing just for fun maybe 7 years ago. Funnily enough, it took me a few years before I sat down and figured out how to algorithmically represent that fractal, despite a couple of failed attempts! It is kind of a tricky pattern.

Anyways, I took a screenshot of the solution and uploaded it to imgur here.

If you want a hint, though, here's what I could say: start with a small piece of code that gets around the first U-shaped bend, and then see what would be necessary to repeat that process around all 3 bends.

I love the graphics here. The submarine just feels good to pilot because it's kind of cute, almost.

I did have some trouble figuring out what to do. I didn't figure out where I was supposed to go in level 1 the first time I beat it, although I figured it out the second time. I also didn't realize for a while that the enemies have more than 1 hitpoint--I thought they kept shooting me very effectively, but it turned out I just kept hurting myself due to explosions.

I'm not quite sure how to beat the boss--I gave it a couple tries but it seems like it would always kill me by the time I could shoot around 15 bullets.

I think the variety in levels is really good. Level 1 is all about combat, but is easier to do when skipping all the enemies. Either way, it's about combat or speed. By contrast, level 2 is all about precise movement. And of course level 3 is the boss.

I do actually think that restarting the whole game works alright here. I don't love it for the boss section, as it means it takes a long time to get to the boss. But for the first two levels it worked pretty well, as it meant I had to try two times to figure out level 1, and I had to try again after I lost to the boss, at which point I could figure out level 1 even better.

So overall, a nice little game. 😄

Thanks for the feedback! I thought about smoothly interpolating between the cameras, but the problem is the game camera and the fish cameras have different FOVs... I think the total solution would be to smoothly transition between different dialog cameras, and then fade to black when switching back to the game camera. Maybe I'll try to do that for the post jam version.

Just out of curiosity--I had thought I already had 13 ratings yesterday, I just thought I should ask if you might have forgot to give a star rating.

But either way, thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it! 😄

Really nice game. My favorite moment was when, after I had bought all the upgrades but the last, I finally started to explore the actual geometry surrounding the level. It was a huge change in pace--I no longer cared about the minerals whatsoever, and instead only about the actual environment around me. It was a cool moment because the actual setting of the game had seemed to be almost meaningless for most of the game. The fact that it was set in the ocean was arbitrary. But when I finally just stopped going after the metal so hard, the ocean environment was quite meaningful. And I think the abyss part of the environment really nails this. There is no ore in the abyss. The only reason to go in there, aside from the narrative one, is to see the environment itself. I don't know, it was just a nice thing.

Aside from that, the core gameplay loop was very nice. The upgrade system worked really well. Having ores that become increasingly valuable that require increasingly better equipment is just a really nice way to build that kind of upgrade-loop system. One aspect of it that I especially like is when you get just a tiny bit of the ore at the next pressure level. It really motivates you to want to get the pressure upgrade for that level and get the hugely increased cash flow (which, of course, will shortly be matched by hugely increased upgrade costs).

Really cool game! The shells that speed you up are a super nice little bit of game design, as they make some things easier and some things much harder. In a lot of the levels, I would get certain shells and avoid the other ones, and this dynamic nature of the shells also means it's possible to try a couple different strategies to try to win the level. I had a lot of fun playing through this even though it didn't take that long! 😄

I played all the way through the game! The variety in environments, as well as the day-night cycle, really gave a lot of flavors of experience through the whole thing. I found the fishing pretty manageable, and I thought the fish skeleton item that dropped from fish was a lot of fun.

I did game over once, but the game seemed to maintain my progress. I think that's a pretty nice feature, and it might be worth listing somewhere on the game description. I never figured out exactly what I was supposed to do in terms of interacting with the purple fish--it didn't seem like it was wholly possible to avoid its attention, and I wasn't sure what to do if I did catch its attention. So if game over had meant restarting the game I'm not sure I would have played all the way through 😅

That said, this game definitely had some horror vibes. I didn't actually know for sure if the game would save my progress, so I was still quite anxious about accidentally activating the purple fish. At night especially when it was impossible to see anything the game felt pretty intense.

So, overall, a pretty ambitious entry, but definitely has some nice things going for it!!

I really like the blue particle effect, where the particles all go towards the player. I'm not precisely sure what the goal is, but I find that the tractor beam thing the player has feels quite good to use, and the mouse-based movement controls are pretty interesting, especially when combined with the beam mechanic.

Fun little card game! It definitely seems like the special cards have a few kinks. In particular, I ran into the same softlock as some others, where I had one card left that I couldn't play. I also noticed that one of the CPUs seemed to play a red skip on top of a blue card (when the pollution was 0).

But, I do think the card rules seem to work pretty well overall! One round I won, I had an interesting combination of special cards, so I had to try to manipulate the pollution level in both directions. It seems like a nice variety of gameplay scenarios can crop up with this rule set--for example, another game I had mostly blue cards, which was interesting as that round was much more based on what the CPUs did to the pollution level.

One note on accessibility, that I thought of while rating: it seems like the only indication of which cards a special card is allowed to be played on is color. I wouldn't be surprised if the red and green skip cards were hard to tell apart for someone who's red/green colorblind.

Playing minigames to boost your combat stats is an absolutely great concept. I had a lot of fun just pumping my stats waaaaay up and then crushing all the enemy fish.

I also love all the puns. 😄

I think the implications of only horizontal camera movement are very cool for this game. It really changes exactly how exploration can be done, as now I am forced to swim into an area if I really want to check it out. This really solidifies exploration--particularly, physically moving through the environment--as the mechanical center of the game.

Mouse look systems are of course easier to use for the player, but I don't think that an easier system like that is strictly necessary for this game. The camera as it stands right now does really work with the existing gameplay.

I like the underwater fog effect. I guess I can confirm it works on the Windows version of the game, on my computer. 😄

Thanks for the feedback! Alternate control schemes would absolutely be an improvement, maybe I can think about adding some if I end up doing a post-jam version. 😄

This game has an extremely strong narrative. It takes the question "what if there were suddenly a very strong financial incentive to clean up the ocean," and just executes it very well. The amount of cleaning required to find the magic QR code would be very much, so the game makes you do a lot of cleaning. I really did feel like I was sifting through a large number of QR codes to try to find the magic one. I think this is because, in game play terms, doing 80 things really is a pretty significant number. So, the game ultimately works out pretty well.

I think the movement in this game, although difficult to control, is pretty fun--in particular, I like that jumping out of the water is just a matter of literally pointing yourself towards the water and building up enough speed. It just has a good game feel, I think.

As such, I did try jumping out of the water a lot, but I wasn't able to figure out how to score an aeriel somersault. I couldn't manage to somersault over the boat (only over empty water), so maybe that was my problem.

Note there are 12 sprockets so it should still be possible to win if one gets glitched , but I guess I didn't broadcast that clearly enough. Thanks for playing!

I'm not precisely sure if I actually found a softlock or not, but it seems I am stuck in a series of rooms that I can't get out of, as the only door out is locked on the wrong side, and the only other exit I can find is blocked by a very fast geyser that I can't seem to dash past.

I like the variety of enemies and other objects in the underwater environment. I just wish I could figure out where to go! 😅

I really like the puzzle solving aspects of the levels with the orange jellyfish. I found that trying to manipulate my way around them was pretty interesting, and not something I've really seen before. However, I think the puzzles especially are too hard to realistically complete repeatedly when the game starts you all the way over every time.