itch.io

Dang, the audio-based idea sounds like it would have been an epic rhythm game if it worked. Still, that's an impressively short amount of time for a pivot. Thumbs up to you for still getting something on time, even if it wasn't what you originally wanted!

Glad you finally got around to playing my game!

If it makes you feel any better, I also remember dying a lot when I was first designing and testing the levels (even though I knew where everything was). Avoiding static obstacles was simple enough even without much experience with bullet hells, but I would always stop in front of lasers or bouncers by accident (I did this a lot on Racetrack and Railroad). I think knowing where the safe spots were and how I was "supposed" to beat the level did kind of help, but at the end, it mostly came down to trial and error. Since the game was completely deterministic, if I got halfway through once, I knew I could do it again. 

Then again, maybe the fact that I was bad at my own game was a good thing, because it definitely stopped me from making the levels unnecessarily difficult. xD

Thanks for playing!

Fun fact: you're the first person to have mentioned the dynamic music so far. It was a last minute addition, so I didn't think it would get much of a spotlight, but I'm surprised that it took this long for someone to mention it.

In the settings, I did add a turn indicator that tells you when it's your turn (not sure if it helped you) in case people couldn't use the screen flashing for whatever reason. But as you mentioned, it only tells you the state of the current turn, and something like a slider moving back and forth between two states that visually tells you how much time you have left until the turn switches would have been better. 

As for the controls, I do think limiting the speed for mouse move would have been the best option. I liked the mouse move because it allowed you to change between moving quickly and moving precisely on a dime. While I was aware of how easily you could cross the entire map in a single swipe, I wasn't sure how to fix it (I thought of slowing it down but I still wanted the sensitivity to be configurable). In hindsight, I'm not sure why I didn't think to just set a speed cal on the mouse move, because that's a really obvious solution.

It's funny that you mention the win state being similar to the lose state, because they actually use the same menu and functions (guilty as charged!). I made it so that everything stops when you lose (including the music) because I wanted it to be super unsatisfying. But I wasn't sure what to do for the win state, so I just made it do the same thing but changed the sound effect and let everything keep playing. Perhaps a more animated menu or some confetti might have done the trick?

At first I didn't know that I could shoot ice pucks to refill holes, so I went around rescuing people in the holes. By the time I saved everyone, there was still 40 seconds with nothing left to do.

On my second attempt, I tried fixing the ice like I was supposed to, but eventually, I couldn't keep up, and people fell into holes anyway. It seems like the most effective strategy for saving as many people as possible is to just not bother with fixing the holes and to just rescue people when they get stuck. Perhaps a scoring system that rewards fixing holes could balance this?

Also, that game over screen is too relatable...

I'm genuinely impressed that they were able to fit a program capable of altering the Earth's trajectory inside a floppy disk.

This was a pretty tricky puzzle. At first, I thought I was supposed to overdrive the lamp somehow because I didn't think to use the computer as a defroster. Eventually, I got to the point where I put the box on the computer, but I got stuck again because I thought that 50 C was enough to defrost the box, so I was trying to move the box around to the "right spot," unaware that it was my lack of heat that was the problem. Thankfully the hints and solutions were there, because I don't think I would have finished the game without them.

I had a 7 scoop tall ice cream stack but then I ran out of money for ice and it died. :(

I have to ask though, how do the sell price calculations work? Do you get a bonus for selling tall stacks? It seems to me like tall stacks of ice cream take more ice per day to maintain, so trying to grow large stacks of ice cream isn't economically worth it.

Also, if you don't mind me asking, what was your original concept, and when did you pivot?

The combat in this game is very satisfying and the art is very charming, but I never found a reason to use the time freeze mechanic (which looks very cool, btw). Since enemies all die in one hit and you can pierce infinitely, you can just clear enemies indefinitely by spam firing. Making the enemies faster over time (or making the enemy speed ramp up faster, if you did already) may help necessitate the use of time freezing.

Also, is it just me or does the music slider not work? I was messing with the sound settings and while the SFX changed like it was supposed to, I didn't notice a difference in the BGM. Perhaps your range is too small?

The absolute dissonance between the gameplay looking like something out of ULTRAKILL and the setting consisting of penguins running around squawking made me laugh so hard that I had to stop playing for a good 20 seconds or so. Nice going with the art!

I do think the game could use some instructions. Even something as simple as a "how to play" on the main menu would have been helpful. I did eventually learn how to play the game through trial and error (holding down the snowball button charges shots, penguins can unfreeze if left unfrozen long enough, etc), or at least well enough to win the game.

I have to ask though: how does the penguin AI work? At first, I tried chasing down the penguins, but it seemed like they would always strafe me if I got close enough. I eventually won by sniping them from long distances, which seemed to do the trick.

This one's interesting. The ability to freeze things introduces puzzle elements into what would otherwise be a pretty normal platformer, because you need to think about how to "dimension hop" between the frozen and unfrozen world states to get to where you need to go. I will say though, the freeze meter kind of runs against the spirit of a puzzler. Limiting the amount of time you can freeze platforms for forces you to think quickly, limiting the amount of time you can use to strategize deeply (although if that's what you want, that may not be a bad thing).

That said, take that with a grain of salt. I wasn't actually able to beat the game (I got stuck on this jump), so I might just be bad at platformers.

I was convinced that I almost had it all together, only to make it back to the van and find out that I was completely wrong. :/

Definitely wasn't expecting to see a murder mystery for this jam. I do wish there were more hints though. Hints that pointed to specific pieces of the puzzle such as "the culprit had a different goal that night - what was it?" or "whoever hired the killer must have had a motive - who are Santa's rivals?" would have been helpful, since I didn't get anything from the first two hints at all.

Still am interesting submission nonetheless.

Kind of reminds me of the old Papa's Kitchen games (what a throwback!). Not sure what's with the freeze button though - is there a reason not to just freeze right before every customer's order and unfreeze right after completing it?

Glad you had fun!

I got quantum computing but then I had to stop because the game froze. :(

I must ask though, how does the thermodynamics simulation work? I connected all my towers in a massive pipe network, but no matter how many towers I added, I never once was even close to not having enough waste heat to run any one of them. Was it just because I had a lot of waste heat?

Thanks for playing!

The graphics thing is totally valid. When I was drawing the sprites, I exported them at 1:1 scale because I didn't think the sprites would cause problems when scaled up. I developed this thing on a laptop, but since I didn't bother to test it on any large screens (I'm not sure why I didn't, considering I actually did have a 1920x1080 monitor nearby), I didn't notice it.

I just went and tested it on my 1920x1080 monitor. Even though it was smaller than the resolution you used, it was still noticeably pixelated.

Thanks for playing!

I spent the entire first two days of this jam working on the music. Glad to see it paid off!

I think this game could do with a tutorial, if not in-game at least in the description. I kind of figured out how to play just by trial and error, but I couldn't figure out how to stop myself from freezing every time.

At first I was like, "well, it's just a twin stick survival game but you need to make a campfire once a night. How hard can it be?" A few minutes later, I was frantically trying to weave through the pile of enemies to relight the fire before it went out.

I did have some lag spikes even on the executable, and I also noticed a strange bug where if you start harvesting another resource pile without finishing the previous one, your previous resource pile will be left intact but unharvestable. The game feels complete otherwise though - SFX, art, and juice are all at a very high level of polish. Well done!

Interesting. I must ask though, how does the enemy AI work? It seems like they just wander around and use some sort of echolocation to try to find you (that also conveniently can't detect you when you're crawling). When one of them spotted me hiding under the table and started charging at me, I had the brilliant idea of crawling out from another side of the table. I figured that since crawling was silent, it would keep attacking my last known location under the table without knowing that I already left.

Well, let's just say that it didn't work. Do enemies always know where you are once they spot you?

Man, I'm a bad driver. I keep accidentally hitting the penguins. :(

Right, the problem with that is that for accessibility purposes, I wanted to let the player configure the speed of the mouse. Although capping the mouse speed might have been a good alternative.

You may have noticed that on the later levels, you need to be more cautious in your approach because things like the wall lasers prevent you from recklessly teleporting around. That's the approach to design that I should have used.

Thanks for playing!

The mouse movement being overpowered is something that's been brought up. I tried designing each level to be beatable with all three movement modes because I wanted the game to be accessible to those who couldn't figure out how to use mouse move mode. But since a lot of the levels require you to move over long distances to get between safe spots and mouse move mode is so much faster than either of the other two movement modes, a level that would normally be hard with either of the other two movement modes will almost always become a joke with mouse movement.

If I were to do it again, I probably would have designed all the levels to require more precision manuvering. Since the main strength of the mouse is being able to move very fast, this would have made it less overpowered without making things more unfair for the other movement modes.

If you want the game to actually be challenging with mouse move mode, hard difficulty might be up your alley. :)

Glad you enjoyed!

Did you disable the screen flickering? I added an option to enable a turn counter in the settings because I figured that some would find the screen flickering discomforting and turn it off. The turn counter provides an alternate visual cue to the screen flickering. If you haven't already, try turning it on!

Impressive that you two made the whole game from scratch - I did the same thing and it was no easy feat. The only thing that would have been cooler than jamming out to heavy metal while shredding zombies would have been jamming out to heavy metal while shredding through zombies with sound. The music got me hyped at first, but the lack of feedback made it feel kind of incomplete. I'm assuming that was a time issue, given that you obviously had to spend a lot of time making your own assets. Believe me, I've been there. :/

Still a fun game nonetheless (even though I got an F).

I wish you could control the speed of the minecart with A and D the same way you can in the level select. This also would have been a good way to make the difficulty adjustable (slower for more time, faster for more challenge).

I'm pretty bad at this game (couldn't beat level 6), so even when I was able to hit all the boulders, I would still die because they were close enough to the track to hit me. I probably tried that level about 20 times before I gave up.

Still fun while it lasted nonetheless.

Remind me to never be an office worker in the Arctic for GWJ Inc. I lost so fast that I didn't even finish a single ice block shipment.

I do wonder what the point of the 3D environment was, though, since it seems like your computer is basically all you need as an office worker. I'm assuming that you ran out of time - what else did you have planned for the 3D environment that you didn't get to?

Interesting how you can corral the enemies by clearing out the ice that they need to spawn on. It kinda ties in with the premise too, because while your planet is on its last legs at first, you eventually gain the upper hand against the aliens as you defrost more and more of the planet, putting you in greater control of the battle.

I must ask though, how do you win?  The progress bar at the bottom made me think that once I cleared out all the ice, I just had to finish the wave and then I was done, but they kept coming. Do you need to both defrost the planet AND clear out all the waves?

The development of the composition is actually pretty interesting. If you listen closely, you may notice that there's two different sets of lead instruments. Some of the instruments only play on the first half of every measure (e.g. the analog bell and the kick drum) and some of the instruments only play on the second half of every measure (e.g. the analog times synth and the snare drum). This was done to create a distinct divide between the measures (although whether or not the divide is noticeable is a different story).

It's more obvious if you're wearing headphones, because the "player" instruments are panned more heavily to the left, and the "obstacle" instruments are panned more heavily to the right. Try playing with headphones if you haven't already!

This could be a super cool storytelling medium, but as it stands right now, it seems kind of empty. At the end of the game, I was surprised at how little of the backstory we got to read. Also, since time only passes when you take an action and there's not that much to do around the base, it feels more like an idle game than a resource management game.

Is there more planned for a sequel?

Hey look, another rhythm game!
Question: are you penalized for ringing the bell when you're not supposed to if there's nothing on screen? Sometimes I would be so concentrated on the TV that I wouldn't notice that the bells were frozen in multiple layers of ice, so I would spam tap the arrow key in between series of notes to try to free it as fast as I could.  It's definitely a bit annoying to be hitting a chain of notes only to find that one of your bells is frozen (then again, maybe it's my fault for not paying attention to my bells when I'm not using them).

I look forward to seeing what new songs you've got for me tomorrow. :)

Glad you liked it!

Did you try any of the other control schemes? I added a click to move control scheme and a WASD/arrow move control scheme because I was worried that the mouse control scheme would be too hard to learn, especially for people who are used to traditional bullet hell controls. I personally think that the combination of speed and precision you can get with mouse control mode makes the game more fun, but it's definitely still possible to beat the entire game with either of the other two control modes (on normal mode, anyway; hard mode might be a different story).

Thanks for playing!

Are the two beeps that you're talking about the ones that only play on certain levels? Those are actually supposed to be the laser sounds. I wrote them in the same LMMS file as the music but exported them as separate tracks so that they would sync up with the laser movements, but would only play if there were lasers present. I probably should have just made them sound effects, though, because they desync a lot more often than they should.

Are you supposed to still be able to move around and shoot after getting negative health? I'm assuming that's a bug, although being able to revive yourself by healing after taking mortal damage like in Earthbound would make for a cool mechanic.

I played this game until I got so powerful that I had more shards than I knew what to do with. Then I had to stop playing because the game crashed. :(

I do wish there was some kind of autofire system though. At first, I tried to time my ice beams carefully, but once I had my entire spellbar unlocked, I found it much simpler to just keep spamming the spells as soon as they recharged.

Glad you liked it!

Did the music desync for you? You aren't supposed to be able to move at all when the screen is red, but I think the music sometimes desyncs so that the beats are off by a few miliseconds. I personally always counted "move, move, stop, reset," so I never noticed that you can move at the start of the obstacles' turn. It may be more noticable on different machines (since it seems like the amount it desyncs by is dependent on loading times).

Luckily, I never experienced any UI breaking bugs.

At first, I thought I was supposed to freeze certain items to let people get across by jumping on top of them, but once I realized that wasn't the case, the the optimal strategy just became swiping back and forth and freezing everything. Are you supposed to be able to freeze large groups of objects in place by clicking and holding? 

Also, this game works on mobile. Don't ask me how I know this.

Oh yeah, that might do it.

I actually tried this on mobile too, out of curiosity. It works, but it's unsatisfyingly laggy. If I had to guess, something similar probably happens if you try to run it on a low-end PC.

Impressive for your first jam!

I got to the chess part three times (and lost within 30 seconds at all three attempts). On the first attempt, I assumed that I was supposed to get rid of the king, so I tried going straight for it out of the gate. I think I ended up destroying the king but dying in the process.

On the next two attempts, I tried to remove as many pieces from the board as possible by lasting as long as possible (didn't work either, obviously).

Oh man, FishCrate! Physics-wise, that game was probably more rage-inducing, but I think the checkpoints definitely made it more tolerable.

I did notice that sometimes when I froze, I would land on a fireplace that wasn't at the very bottom. Were the fireplaces supposed to be spaced out in a way that made them act as makeshift checkpoints, or was that unplanned for?

Oh oops, I didn't even notice that lighting the lanterns stuns the boss! Since they kept going out when I lit them, I assumed I was supposed to beat the boss first before lighting them. Guess it was the other way around...

Sorry to hear that. Did you try using WASD/Arrow move mode?

I found that with mouse move mode, re-centering the mouse by picking it up and putting it back down would cause the star to bounce unpredictably. It helps if you only re-center your mouse on the obstacles' turn.

Also, I had a problem earlier with click move mode where the star jittered back and forth when I tried to move at very low speeds. I thought I patched it by changing the movement calculation, but it's entirely possible that I didn't.