itch.io

Thank you very much! 🙂 I would love to make this work in Safari, and it's almost certainly possible, but I don't have an Apple device to test it on, so I'm flying blind on that front. Maybe some day!

77 sounds like it went very well overall, even if it didn't always feel fully in control.

In a few minutes right after the jam's rating period has ended, I'll push a minor update with a few improvements that people have requested here.

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it! There is a balance to strike with the feather controls, I want them to be somewhat challenging but ideally never frustrating. Honestly though I started out tweaking the physics to feel sufficiently feather-like and then mostly stuck with it. You can find a few very early versions (one from before swaying and rotation) on my Mastodon account for comparison.

Since you like the feather colors: there are a number of unlockable feathers! Two can be found through gameplay, the others are unlocked through cheat codes. If you want to try one of those, take a peek at this Twitch VOD while it's still available. 🙂

Thank you so much for the high praise! 😃

Thank you! 🙂

Should just be "dosbox trek'24.exe" from the shell. I installed DOSBox-X if that matters, but I think it shouldn't.

If you're playing the web version: I had problems with the camera (on Firefox, Linux). It kept dropping below the ground and spinning uncontrollably. The download version worked well.

Thank you very much! The current direction I'm thinking about is having a score counter as an optional element that you can activate after the first playthrough if you want to have it. I definitely want to avoid giving the impression through the UI that you somehow "failed" if you don't collect everything.

Thanks, these points are worth thinking about more. I'll see what I can do for 1.0. 🙂

Thank you! You're the second person requesting a score display, and I've been mulling over some ideas. I think for 1.0 I will put in a collected word counter that unlocks after the first playthrough.

Ah yes that helps, thank you! I can put in an error handler for that. All it means is that your privacy settings prevent the game from storing data in the browser, which means your settings don't get saved between runs (and you lose any unlockable content you've gotten when you close the tab). Not a huge deal for this game since it's so short.

That was a fascinating experience, thanks for making it! I got most endings (I think 1 through 4 as well s the secret ending). The game succeeds at feeling very unsettling. I believe the vibe you wanted to convey has come across. I read your description before playing, so that might have colored my impression, but I got the impression that the story was about someone experiencing memory issues and potentially other difficulties relating to forming an identity. Anyway, "fun" might not technically be the best word to describe this game, but it is well made and I had a good time with it!

Fun game! I tried the downloaded Linux version, that worked perfectly well. You nailed the vibe, I felt suitably badass even though I died twice. The shooting worked well even though I don't think I was very good at it. The visuals take me back to the days of Gravity Bone. Nice work, congrats on finishing it!

A very cute and compelling game! I've seen this one on my feed during development a few times and I knew it was going to be good. Managed to finish it all, but it did strain my (admittedly small) patience for puzzles. For my sensibilities, I liked that there was no timer.

I have two minor suggestions: (1) I would have liked a way to see the current level number while I was playing, if not on the gameplay screen then maybe at least on the pause menu, so I can know how far I've already come without quitting to the main menu. (2) Sometimes the rotation didn't behave quite as I expected (played on PC with a mouse). I've been through this while making a tetris clone, so I know that rotating grid-based game pieces can be more complicated than expected and can involve trade-offs. For example, if I want to rotate a piece multiple times, I expect to be able to right click on the same spot several times, but some pieces rotated in such a way they'd not be underneath my cursor anymore, which felt counterintuitive. Also, when rotating a piece multiple times, sometimes they'd travel across the play field, even though when rotating four times you'd expect to return to where you started. If it were me, maybe I'd try rotating the pieces around the point that I clicked... but then again you'd probably want to exempt the 2x2 square from that, since you'd probably expect rotation to have no effect on it. 🤔 Not sure, I'm just kinda thinking out loud at this point.

Anyway, great work, and polished in all the right ways. You have reason to be proud!

Thank you! I like both of those ideas, it's a good thing I left myself some wiggle room before 1.0.

Thank you very much!

I experimented with anchoring the physics to the camera coordinates instead of world coordinates. It makes the feather a bit easier to control, but doesn't feel right for the overall movement. I think I'll keep the physics as they are. From my experience during testing, you can get much better at controlling the feather in just a few attempts if that's your goal. Of course most players will only do one playthrough, and as long as anyone can get through with >0 words, that's fine too. 🙂

In this case it was that one floating platform that enabled the jump. My first instinct was to double jump at the apex of my jump arc, but I noticed that you get the most height if you boost right after leaving the ground. All the other stuff I was able to reach seemed intended though.

To be fair, it is expected in this genre to get increasingly difficult as the game goes on. The beginning felt very approachable, and my compliment for the balancing was sincere. But the overpowered idea sounds fun too!

So, this was a high-effort game to try out for me, first to install DOSBox and then to finish a playthrough. But I did it.😄 I'm not familiar with the original, but this seems like a high-effort remake. There's a fair bit of stuff going on and the simulation is very detailed and, for what the 1971 tech style permits, atmospheric. Nice work!

Funnily enough, the first game I ever made from scratch was also a DOS game written in Pascal. It is easily blown out of the water by this one though.

That's a really nice demo, great job on the animations. Gameplay-wise, I wished the longer attack were cancelable, and I think I wasn't very good ad judging my attack range, but I really enjoyed the visuals here. Looking forward to what you'll do with this in the future.

Very pretty game, been following this one on Mastodon as it came together. 🙂 I had no problems with the control scheme, although the physics were a little finicky at times. I got up here after I properly got the hang of the jump and died when I tried to walk off to the left.

The atmosphere here is lovely and the dialogue is funny. I guess you'll keep expanding it? I'll keep an eye out.

Nice work, very respectable scope and balance for your first-ever game! I definitely didn't see all of it, I'm not super skilled in this genre. But the video showed me some stuff I didn't reach because I keep dying too early. 😄 It was fun though. Again, nice work!

Cool experimental concept, you found a way to actually incorporate the fediverse and interactions happening in it. I'll be honest and say that the physics are not quite yet what I would describe as "predictable", but it's all fun to look at. 🙂 So are you planning to extend this after the jam or is it done?

Honestly it's probably too early to critique this one, but for what that's worth, I really like your player character sprites!

Puzzles with time pressure are really not my genre I gotta admit (I failed the tutorial, lol), but this seems well thought out, and I did have fun. The visuals with the map as the background end up feeling very atmospheric.

Nice concept and cool execution! It's on point for the theme and it's even about the fediverse. The flying physics felt hard to grapple with, especially for turns, but that might be just me. I managed to finish the easy mode on default settings just in time. That was fun!

Nice work, that was a fun game! Simple enough to understand right away, but complex enough to make it feel like a challenge. The Atari 2600 was just a little outside of my own time, but I respect the graphics. Why is it called Marti, is that the seagull's name?

Nice work! I have a fair bit of experience with platformers and was able to make it through this one without too much trouble (did die twice though). The graphics are charming and on-theme. I enjoyed it.

If you want critique on the level design: in terms of gameplay pace, this feels like more of a Mario than a Super Meat Boy, so my gamer brain expects every hazard to be telegraphed early enough for me to feasibly react to it the first time. That is to say, this feels like a game I should be able to win without knowing the map, if I'm a sufficiently good player. There were a few spots here (the cloud in level 2 shooting out of the narrow passageway got me the first time) where I think a hazard appears too fast to react unless you already know it's coming.

I infiltrated a competing cyber corporation and all I got was my brain hacked. (Got them on the second try though)

Congrats on the custom engine, that looks like it can facilitate some fun stuff. If you ever want to enable web exports, take a look at Pyodide, I've used it before to get a command line Python script to run in the browser. Should be relatively easy to get it to run inside itch.io and other places.

Thank you for packaging up an emulator to play on here, I would not have had one ready to go otherwise. That was a fun little platformer! It was short, but I liked how you ramped up the difficulty.

This was one of the few games I played ahead of the deadline, because the splash art intrigued me. I ended up 100%ing it! Had a bunch of fun. Towards the end I was so fast I had to deliberately crash into the ground in order to not win the game before I could finish buying out the shop. Despite that, I think the upgrades are well balanced. I guess the art is all by you? Lovely aspect of the game.

Btw: during my first playthrough I launched myself to the left just to see what would happen (and because the game allowed it), and I ended up falling out of the map. It's a game jam, we're here for the rough edges and all, but if you want to polish this a bit more and being this silly had never occurred to you, I recommend restricting the launch angle (or putting an invisible wall).

I got to level 10 or thereabouts, I think I got kind of adept at outmaneuvering the giant, or at getting him stuck on corners. In level 2 I set myself the challenge of collecting all the seeds and getting all the dogs before leaving, after that I just continued on through until I felt I'd had enough. Was fun though! Very charming concept.

I also read all your dev log entries just now. The journey from "yay!" to "welp..." feels very relatable.

That was an incredibly unique experience. Whoever says video games aren't art has clearly not played this one.

It strikes me as distantly Edmund McMillen-esque, if that's a compliment. Might be the combination of relatable childhood memories with somewhat unsettling body stuff. The physics here were absolutely delightful. (So were the visuals and audio for that matter.)

It's a jam game so I don't want to sound entitled about out-of-scope functionality, but it might be even more fun if you could actually deform the lollipop depending on where you lick it, instead of it just shrinking.

I heard that Oregon Trail was known for being brutally difficult, but this game was pretty smooth sailing (ha) on my first try. Finished successfully in 12 days and got 305 points.

I think the game didn't cope perfectly with my 4k monitor that I have set to 200% zoom (on Firefox, Gnome, Linux). I assume that's Unity's fault and not yours. The backgrounds were still very pretty!

First I wondered if I was any good at being a birb, then I understood that I was asking the wrong question. That was fun, thank you!

Also, I've been seeing PICO-8 games on social media for ages, but this is the first one I ever played myself.

Many thanks to you as well! Nina and Randy did wonderful work, and I feel bad for having to render the clouds so brightly tinted for fg/bg contrast reasons. The sprites were even more gorgeous in their original palettes.

I did some testing in Vivaldi (coincidentally on Linux too) and didn't run into any problems there, but I'm intereested in what might cause the game to fail to load. If you can still make that error happen, and assuming you know a bit of web dev, I'd appreciate if you could take a look at the developer console. The game doesn't really surface many errors in the UI, so any information about what went wrong will probably only appear in the console.

As for the gamepad support, I've read that it is wonky in Firefox on Linux. I was able to read the left thumbstick of my Xbox 360 pad, but all the other buttons and the right stick were wildly out of order. It's disappointing if the left stick isn't even reliably working across different gamepads. But yeah, apparently that's better supported on Windows.

Thank you so much! I'm proud of the customization and accessibility options we're able to offer.

Do you think it would be beneficial to have more direct tutorialization, like a popup saying "try pushing the feather into these"? My hope was that with so few things on screen, it'd become obvious what to do because there isn't much else you can do.

59 seems respectable for the first try! I've thought about an in-game counter as well, but didn't want it for the first playthrough. It could be something you unlock by reaching the end for the first time.

Thank you! 🙂 I'll let our musician know. I've gone back and forth on whether it would be better if the words were more readable. It might be fun to know what you're exactly collecting, but I also like revealing them at the end as a little pseudo-twist. You do technically have a chance to read them in-game, especially if you pause it, but between the font and the small size it is very difficult.