Nagrałem krótki gameplay, ale okazało się że jest bez dźwięku mimo że to wcześniej testowałem + strasznie pogubiło klatki, więc sobie odpuśćmy xd

• Ogółem spoko pomysł i całkiem przyjemnie się hopsa, ale nie jestem targetem gry
• Przeszedłem pierwszy level, drugi się nie odblokował, więc zakładam że go nie ma
• Pośmigałem po testowej mapce i potestowałem wallrun (poggers)
• Na początku miałem spory problem z ogarnięciem jak w ogóle skoczyć, bo próbowałem mocno przekomplikować dostępne elementy, tj. wbiegałem na trampolinę od razu trzymając parasolkę, intuicyjnie wydawało się to logiczne a w ten sposób prawie w ogóle nie dostaje się wybicia do góry. Potencjalnie do lekkiego ztweakowania, albo nauczenie gracza do czego są poszczególne rzeczy w króciutkim tutorialu (tj najpierw tylko trampolina i przymusowe wyłączenie wszystkiego innego, potem dłuższy skok z parasolką, itd). Na pewno racjonalizuję że miałem z tym jakikolwiek problem xd no ale takie rzeczy im bardziej łopatologicznie tym lepiej
• Zespawnowane trampoliny chyba za szybko znikają, jak ktoś po paru minutach już komfortowo gra to nie ma to znaczenia, ale na początku fajnie by było dać sekundę do namysłu
• Nie miałem żadnego dźwięku, również zakładam że go nie ma. Nawet mocno placeholderowe SFXy żeby był feedback dla podstawowych akcji byłyby super
• Gra z jakiegoś powodu nie odpala się przez itchowego klienta, musiałem bezpośrednio przez przeglądarkę
• Kursor nie jest zlockowany (Cursor.lockState w Unity) przez co sobie wyklikałem jakieś losowe rzeczy na drugim ekranie xd
• EDIT: a, jeszcze mi przyszło do głowy - fajnie żeby trawa miała jakąś teksturę albo porozrzucane kępki bez colliderów, żeby łatwiej było oceniać dystans

Yeah, it’s Unity.

Guess we forgot, sorry! Alt+F4 always works

Cheers, flOw was an explicit inspiration!

That’s a hell yeah from me brother. Part I enjoyed perhaps the most is how the swarm gets less directly controllable, you can start tearing off chunks and sending them on their merry way in the general direction of delicious smaller swarms.

rat moment

Congrats on finishing a game! Having people download extra software to run your submission is a pretty big ask in the context of a frantic rating period, in the future look into converting swfs into a directly playable format, or maybe pick up another tool.

Getting a thriving self-expanding system with a bunch of bees was satisfying! Seems quite easy to get softlocked without money, but I guess that makes for actual gameplay where you have to figure out the game with a strat that definitely prevents that.

Fun premise and very pretty! The precision platforming proved a bit too much for me and I fell through a platform once or twice, so I gave up after the green vial.

Yo! Food always exists but isn’t crazy abundant and you might not find any if you just swim around randomly. The little feelers on your head aren’t just for aesthetics, they guide you to it.

thanks for playing! that’s it, it’s a very short experience, I’m still working on the game description to make it clear

We made pretty much all art for our Global Game Jam 2024 entry in Wigglypaint (and won the jam site grand prix!), thank you for the lovely tool

brilliant

As of the time of writing, the correct font size and sampling rate is 19, not 18.

Hey, thanks! I’ll look into it, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re missing out on much - Beet & Spud is a silly gamejam effort with some fun art, but mechanically a wholly unremarkable (and barely functional) tower defense game.

Sorry, there was a break in development but mostly I just went silent with it - the full release is at most two months away! Thanks for asking.

Hey, I still want to make the full release available to purchase on Itch once it’s out, but can’t make a firm promise at this time. The only reason is the tax/legal angle not being super straightforward for Itch in my country.

Quite neat! Very hard, and in a somewhat frustrating way. I wish the boat had less inertia, at the very least.

I adore the little lamp

Hey! Queens are promoted from Pawns in very specific situations which you trigger through gameplay, and keep their upgrades. It’s explained in the Pawn’s description. You can sometimes trigger two conditions at once (starting the turn in the top row with a hand of 3 Pawns).

FWIW I played a little and everything seemed to work as expected, but didn’t spend a lot of time with it because the text is so tiny and light. Very straining on 27 inch QHD.

Makes my GPU boil and scream like a banshee because of uncapped FPS/no VSYNC.

I tried going through a gate, it consumed a key but nothing else happened, game logic partially locked up. I couldn’t move the knight and the blocks didn’t fall on their own, but I could still move and drop the blocks manually. https://streamable.com/2u1pm

It’s possible to do some weird thing in the menu where two selections are highlighted at once. I did it by accident by using a mouse and then a controller and was pretty confused why I just exited the game. The easiest way I found to reproduce it is to press something, drag the pointer out of the game window, and use up/down on a keyboard or a controller. https://streamable.com/caj9g

Overall this seems super polished and a lot more approachable than last DD, looking forward to playing it more and getting into the mechanics when you fix the GPU thing.

Well, setting up a mirror so it gets pushed and eventually burns a bug nest is probably the most satisfying thing in the game, so I dunno about removing it entirely. It’s just that you end up fighting against the mechanic more often than not.

Really neat emergent puzzling.

The hexes work really well.

Executing plans can be very fiddly and frustratingly timing-dependent. Maybe let the player lock a mirror so it doesn’t get pushed around by lasers and bugs? Perhaps even just one at a time. It’d help cut down on the tedium a lot, I think.

Laser sfx gets really grating after a minute or two.

The UI is straight up maddening to use. The tiered actions have hotkeys all over the keyboard, the tower selection doesn’t have a hotkey at all and you have to use the mouse for it, and the tower display hiding life/gold gets in the way. All the while the game pressures you to do stuff fast. It’s kind of impressive how obtuse this is with so few elements.

I did manage to get through a few levels, and had a glimpse at some of the puzzlier routing stuff which seemed potentially neat, but it was simply too frustrating.

Thanks! If you’re looking for snappy gameplay, try using the keyboard (1/2/3 to select cards, E to end turn) and only use the mouse to select exact destinations. It’s obviously different and occupies both hands, but after a little getting used to, you should be able to move much faster than you ever could with the old system.

Hi! The old nav controls aren’t really viable anymore now that you can stop on any square in range.

Ground texture at the very beginning is broken and flickers distractingly. https://streamable.com/9s1ct

The game causes a low static hum from my speakers.

The conversation text is awkwardly chopped up, maybe split it up so a single bubble contains a logical segment of a sentence.

There’s an awkward delay when the convo ends, same with possible responses popping up when you talk to a villager - wanted to speed up the convo and it caused me to accidentally choose something. It was the first time the response mechanic was shown, there aren’t any in the tutorial, so it caught me off guard.

Went looking for secrets under waterfalls, got stuck instead.
https://i.imgur.com/EzHVQYi.jpg

Weirded out by being able to jump out of the inn into the river with lowered walls, which I suppose should only be a visual thing.

Consider LB/RB for toggling between autotargets both ways, and put roll on something else. Also, the facing direction being taken into account for autotarget is clunky as you can only face left or right, when up would often feel natural. Consider just using a radius.

Overall though, very cute and comfy. Fantastic UI work. This looks very GMI. Looking forward to spending more time with it when it’s more polished.

Played for around 15 minutes.

Reminds me of Ord quite a bit

Strongly feel it should be more streamlined, I get that grindy gameplay is the whole point but half the steps in navigation feel unnecessary. Every single time, exploration requires confirming that you’re in an area, waiting until it ticks down, choosing explore, confirming that you’re exploring, waiting until it ticks down, and only then actually exploring with timing being relevant. You can make it last just as long but feel better if you cut down on the superfluous stuff but expand the last part.

Didn’t play enough to have a good idea of what you’re going for thematically. The naming estabilished a mysterious, slightly eldritch vibe, but the characters were bland. “5x bar for recipe” or whatever the Queen said felt like something you’d see spammed in MMO chat.

Cheers. The deck is standard deckbuilder fare but it’s clearly dumb to assume everyone knows what standard deckbuilder fare is. I’ll work on that.

The decklist shows the contents but not the order, you draw a random card from the remaining ones so you can calculate likely/guaranteed moves as it gets thinner. When you’d draw from an empty deck, the discard gets shuffled and reused.

​It’s not strictly a new release, but recently got to a stage where I’m excited to start showing it off to more people :)

Play Pawnbarian​ (browser embed)

Rock Paper Shotgun: Have you played… Pawnbarian?

Pawnbarian is a quick-playing rogue-like puzzler. You use a deck of chess moves to jump around a tiny chessboard dungeon, crushing enemies and dodging their attacks.

It’s still an alpha/demo but decently polished, just lacking in content. It was originally a game jam game (for 7 Day Rogue-Like 2019) which I’ve since fleshed out pretty significantly. The feedback has been great so far, and I hope you’ll have fun with it!

Thanks!

It's both, it ended up in the original version by complete accident but I decided to leave it in as an easter egg, with all of its buggy jankiness in place. You can actually keep beating that stage forever!

Thanks! That's bizarre, everything seems to work fine on my side, and I didn't really change anything compared to the old version, other than the button placement. It's a very straightforward piece of code. I appreciate the report, I'll keep an eye on any more reports.

Thanks. This is working as intended, Cantrip is already extremely powerful as it is. I'll reword it so it says that it repays the move, rather than makes it free.

Thanks as usual!

Moving a splash piece onto an adjacent square currently does not kill cornered/against-the-wall goblins, even though they cannot "run away".  (Ex. moving to B1 with horizontal/vertical splash when goblin is A1)

I'll keep an eye out, but I couldn't reproduce this in many different scenarios. The interaction between Splash and Nimble seems to consistently work as expected, and I can't think of any possible timing issues/race conditions either. If you notice this again, writing down the exact board setup would be super helpful.

Blightsack tooltip says that it leaves blight on all adjacent squares upon death, but only leaves it in diagonal squares.

Played for around an hour in various combinations of Human/Elf and Fighter/Assassin. Dragon's Lair was impossible for me, and Goblin Hive was trivial.

Overall, sadly I gotta say I didn't have a lot of fun. It feels like Dominion with slightly smaller numbers, and 1 less of this and 2 less of that on multiple cards is enough to really slooooooow down the engine building. I strongly feel that you need some punchier effects. No 4 cost card for the Fighter is a pain point.

UI is clear and straightforward.

I feel like the effects are terse enough that you could just show the entire cards, having to hover over everything until you learn the effects was a bit fiddly. Not a big deal though.

Just a small cosmetic thing but the stats label covers cards from the top row of the shop.

It's weird that you have to end your current phase when pressing the restart button, I thought it does nothing at first.

Thank you so much for your exhaustive feedback, and the kind words! It really is an insanely fuzzy feeling to have a dedicated player of my little game.

I'm sorry the design changes in this new version didn't meet your expectations. I'd like to talk about them a little. Hopefully this doesn't come off across as "well this is actually GOOD for you", because you enjoy what you enjoy. I just want to explain my thought process.

The move from 4 to 3 cards is a consequence of the Cantrip upgrade, which often ends up letting you play 4 or 5 cards in a turn. In fact, this version is balanced so that you can go infinite in the bossfight if you finish the levels optimally and only buy Cantrip upgrades.

Now, the harder sell - you rightly noticed that I punish players for being methodical. It was very much a conscious decision to encourage "speedrunning" with the loot track and enemy design. Just as a player of other games, I find it boring to be slow and methodical, and when that's the optimal way to play, I feel like I'm cheating myself out of having fun. I believe this is a widespread sentiment, and it was probably the most common complaint about the Classic version. As a designer, the introduction of these new elements is my way of protecting players from themselves.

I really appreciate you willing to give this new version a chance despite not liking the direction it's taking. It'll be a while yet, but going forward, I want to design some new "characters" with different decks and inherent mechanics that mix up the gameplay. It might be very interesting to introduce a character balanced around, e.g., freezing the loot track and not having to care about turn count, and actively encouraging methodical play.

Thanks again!

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Thank you for the insightful criticism! I definitely agree the game is too frantic and was mostly an experience in getting simple feel & juice right, so I'm glad that part worked out at least.