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Johan Helsing

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A member registered Dec 04, 2018 · View creator page →

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This felt like a really fresh idea. I love the quirky way to input words, and like others said the palette works well, and it has a perfect retro mood to it.

The dark lord moment really reminds me of inscryption :)

It took a while for me to notice the timeout bar, but otherwise, the tutorial worked really well, and nice to have a bit of humor and character to it as well.

Also cool to have an actual leaderboard.

Audio was great :) Cool to layer in new tracks when you get the second heart.

I also like the community feel to this one. Now I wished I’d joined mini jams more regularly, so I could feel even more part of it :)

Well done!

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Thanks, and nope, but I actually wrote the restarting code, I just simply forgot to add the key binding!

I’ll try to remember next time I do a puzzler :)

Hi, thanks for the kind words!

Actually, that was one of the really hard design decisions. I originally designed the levels so that the opposing sides had to add to 7, but in the end I relaxed the requirement as I thought it would be too hard to explain. So you can arrange the faces in whatever way you want.

In retrospect, I should probably just have given an award/achievement if all your dice were correct, and a challenge prompt if you completed with slightly weird layouts.

Thanks! There is a win screen, though… sure you didn’t mess anything up, or have some weird looking sides? That is, you can’t make a three like this:

 ---
|X X|
|X  |
|   |
 ---

Or maybe I have a bug I don’t know about?

Cool concept. I wish it was harder, though! After I figured out the mechanics, I never truly felt in danger of losing.

Cool take on the theme. Love that it’s also a deck builder. Think it has a potential.

Maybe introduce some danger that gradually increases as you stay in a level? Something like the ghost in spelunky, or the federation army in FTL? That way, staying longer for more gold is a gamble.

Also, after removing the movement dice, there wasn’t really much more to upgrade in the deck, so I ended up not buying anything the last level or two.

I like how the movement previews make it really easy to see where you’d end up!

Well done :)

Fresh take on the clicker genre! Great idea. Cool power-ups. Was kind of sad when it ended, was looking forward to build other kinds of “machines”.

I like the simplicity and the sounds fit really well.

One of the most fun games I’ve played so far!

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I think maybe there were too many lives or the levels too short?

I played through all 16 levels, and with the exception of level 10, all of them could be solved by just checking which type there is fewest of and then choosing all sides to be whatever is weakest against that one. So if there are only three rocks in the way, just choose all scissors sides and you’ve already solved the level.

I like the general idea though, and I think I would probably have enjoyed it more if it was with just one life or some other reward for being more careful (maybe count total lives lost instead of time and moves?).

The presentation is really nice. Clever and cool way to present the “map” from above then transition into gameplay. It was a bit hard to know which way was the “front”, maybe add some arrows to the map view to show which way is what?

The controls also work really well (much better than tilted keyboard keys).

Well done :)

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The view of the dice was a little bit confusing at first. I thought I was seeing it from above so when moving to the left, I expected the right side to become the new “top”, but it was the other way around.

Interesting gameplay idea. Most of the time, it was maybe a bit too easy, at least after the first two-three moves in each level, it was very clear what the way forward had to be.

I like the color palette and the minimalist look.

The win sound was a maybe a bit scary/noisy/loud idk… but the music, lose and walk sound all fit really well.

Creative take on the puzzle genre. Well done :)

You can still sell them though :D I wonder what happened to the poor guy I sold it to?

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Played this one for quite a while. Most innovative and interesting gameplay I’ve seen so far!

Couple of notes in no particular order:

  • Really interesting core concept. Feels very fresh.
  • It was a bit confusing to get started (what is surrounding?), can I control the villagers? etc. With the instructions below it was ok, though.
  • In the start when I had few diamonds, it felt like a bit of a gamble what tool I’d produce, if it was something I needed or not. Not sure if this is positive or negative, though. Kind of exciting.
  • My machine started struggling around turn 20 or so, and the framerate dropped a lot
  • It was a LOT of dragging, which got kind of repetitive, also annoying to do with my laptop mouse, especially after the framerate started dropping. This was what made my stop playing in the end.
  • In the beginning, managing resources and production rates were kind of fun, but after I got the shop and started using coins, it didn’t really matter that much what kind of resources I produced, since I’d just convert the excess into coins.
  • Dice rolls got less exciting the further I got. I had so many buildings I’d always get more or less the same amount of each resource each turn.
  • I really liked the uncertainty and gambling at the start of the game
  • The black and white look is cool
  • but it was kind of hard to see visually what was what, and what needed my attention. Especially since all the buildings are always blinking with their die number
  • It seems the unpaid/unfed counters are buggy? At least it showed zero even though villagers were still hungry or unpaid.
  • I think it was too easy, I never really felt in danger. In games like these I’d rather start over a couple of times, thinking about new strategies to overcome the challenges, but here that wasn’t really needed.
  • Love the yeti! Finally a game where he’s beatable!

I wonder how the game would have been if the map was smaller? I think maybe that would solve some of its issues.

This sound like a lot of negative stuff. But really, this game kept me occupied for a very long time, and it was really interesting gameplay-wise.

Cool mood/vibe. Love the palette: it’s colorful without being too noisy.

An impressive amount of features for such a short jam.

I was slightly frustrated by the inputs (for some reason, my brain likes to tilt the other way (so left moves you to the top-left) corner, and that made me make a lot of mistakes so I had to start over a lot.

Progression in levels felt good :), perhaps slightly leaning towards the easy side, but that’s probably for the better. I tend to make my games way too hard myself.

Nice little touches to make it juicy (Screenshake, particles).

Great work!

Thanks!

You’re supposed to make a “normal looking” dice by “stamping” the various patterns that you find lying around on the ground.

That’s very valuable feedback, though. I always feel like it’s a fine balance between over-explaining/hand-holding (and spoiling the fun for some people) and having people get stuck. Also, I guess my single playtester this jam knows my brain well too well at this point :P

Probably a better “tutorial” would just be more easy levels at the start, and then timed hints, or hints that trigger on certain mistakes.

I’ll add a short explanation to the description so people are less confused!

So I guess another way of putting this is: You can make a game in grayscale then tint it by multiplying with another color?

Glad you got it working in the end, and thanks for the kind words :)

I tried reproducing the bug here, but it worked with my ps3 controller (which pretends to be a xbox 360 controller), also on Windows.

If you remember/are able to get that error again, I can make a bug report for the engine (Bevy).

Thanks, that’s really good to know! Which OS and what GPU? (I might have went overboard with GPU compute stuff)

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Really cool take on the meaningless job thing. Reminded me much of the fish guy from what remains of edith finch, which is one of my favorite game sequences of all time.

Really solid aesthetics. Well done to make so much stuff in such a short amount of time.

I really like beans, though, so at least one part of each day was nice.

Extremely moody and creepy. The ambience and visual style/lighting complement each other well.

Really like the looks of this one. Nice and clean color palette. Reminds me in a way of mini metro.

Also interesting spin on the snake-like genre. Had a bit of a strategy thing going on laying out routes so they won’t block the next run. Really nice to see some original gameplay!

Great job! :)

I think this is the best spin I’ve seen on the limitation so far!

I like the variety in the different kinds of popups, and a really nice touch to add weapon upgrades in some of them.

The difficulty ramped up a bit little bit too quickly for me, would have loved to be able to spend a little bit more time per run.

Love the art-style as well :)

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Thanks, the game has an undo key (U/Backspace), but the instructions are kind of obscured by the effect, so quite a few people seemed to have missed it, which gets back to your second point ;)

Really elegant concept. Like how much you get out of so few rules.

Really nice to see more puzzle games with undo support.

The first level was slightly confusing, I didn’t really understand the movement until I was into the second level.

The 8th level was really great, had a big a-ha moment there!

The 9th level felt slightly too easy compared to some of the earlier ones.

Maybe it’d be nice with a few easier levels early on?

But again, really cool mechanic, and well done to create so many mostly well-balanced levels in just one day.

So most commonly you don’t use a scripting runtime with bevy (I don’t even know if there are any), you write the game logic in actual rust code. As far as I know, the game has to be recompiled in that case, forcing you to restart the game. Luckily, it’s usually pretty quick to restart a bevy game, though.

I usually develop with the game launched through cargo-watch, so each time I save code, the game is automatically restarted.

cargo watch -i assets -cx run

Also, for non-code assets (and also shaders), hot reloading is usually supported (but has to be enabled), so changes are immediately visible. This is even supported by a lot of plugins (for instance bevy_ecs_ldtk can update the level when you save .ldtk files).

Thanks! The original idea was that you’d sacrifice other cute little creatures and for it to be a bit more macabre (other creatures squealing and being animated etc). Also, it would eat everything in the universe so you’d literally have sacrificed everything just to feed a hungry bird.

Thanks! Yeah the idea was that you’d feed it the entire universe.

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I think I probably didn’t read the instructions properly and never pressed space, so probably Firefox was working, so my bad.

Not sure what was wrong with chrome will give it another try later.

This was on windows, btw.

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I had a bit of trouble starting the game. Or maybe it’s still in development?

Firefox: After I click start, I hear the music, see the ships and can fire, but they don’t move and I don’t see any walls.

Chrome: Nothing happens when I click start game.

Looking forward to try it! I love Achtung, even so much I’m actually also making a tribute game myself right now.

Love the animations and feel of shooting/teleporting, very satisfying to smash through things!

Very cool idea :)

Had some big a-ha moments.

Love the soundtrack :)

Cool idea and impressive in such a short time! :)

Ah, understandable. Cool idea, though. Maybe try a few different scales and see what comes out? I think random notes from a pentatonic minor scale should be a pretty safe choice.

This is a really fun concept! I got 56 zombies on my best run. Lots of emerging strategies to be found here, which is really cool. Like figuring out how different obstacle patterns affect the flow of zombies.

A few other points in no particular order

  • The animations could have been a bit quicker, or perhaps queue up the input for later. I kept hitting to early so my inputs were dropped quite often, especially after I got better and wanted to play faster.
  • The “wait” action was a bit under-communicated, I discovered it by accident after playing a while.
  • The tilted orthographic view is kind of cool, but also a bit weird wrt inputs, I kept tilting my head.
  • The slicing sound is a bit loud compared to the music, but otherwise really cool.

Great job! had a lot of fun and a lot of playthroughs!

Art style and palette is really cool! The player looks kind of unfinished, though?

As for the controls, it felt a bit easy to slip over the edge since the camera and controls don’t align. But it would be a shame to compromise on the isometric style. idk… perhaps you could have had walking by clicking with the mouse, or just blocked the player from going over the edge. Generally, I prefer games to not be puzzly challenging and platformey challenging both at the same time… but I guess that’s just my preference :P

Pretty cool concept :) Would have been cool to see other shapes unfolding as well.

Squish animation on the character looks really good, and the win animation is also really cool :)

I’m not that good at platformers, though, so unfortunately, I didn’t manage to see all your levels.

Audio is also pretty pleasing.

I kind of wished for the platform tones to be more in-tune and creating harmonies, though. But I guess that might just be an artistic choice, though?

Thanks :) Glad you enjoyed it!

I’m using 2d signed distance fields and exponential smooth minimum.

https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions2d/distfunctions2d.htm

https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/smin/smin.htm

The cool thing about the exponential smooth min is you can add an arbitrary number of sdfs together smoothly and very efficiently.

The parts of the rings are vesica sdfs transformed by the first part of exp smoothmin with additive blending into a framebuffer. I then do a second pass to “decode” the framebuffer, applying the last part of exp smoothmin and colorizing it.

Sorry if that was a very dense explanation.

Btw, I almost ended up not submitting the game because I spent most of the game jam fiddling with those sdf rings and had no idea what to use them for until the very last hours.

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Thanks! Shame about the audio. WebGL is hard :(

Yeah, not really sure what to do about going into the purple shadows… Some people seem to love the puzzly challenge, while others think it’s unfair. I guess I need to find a way to make it easier without completely handholding the player.

Thanks!

A friend of mine also had that problem with not understanding the controls. Scratching my head how to make it more intuitive once the rating is finished.

Also thanks for reporting on the performance. I suspect more people have issues cause the view/download ratio on the page is a lot higher than usual. Guess I’ll have to do dig up the profiler.

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Great use of colors. Also the menu animations etc. are amazing. Feels super juicy.

One perhaps counter-intuitive thing was that the lightning powerup made the the knight go faster, while I expected the zap to get bigger. idk. perhasps just my expectation.

The animation of the zap is also really cool.

I think the hitbox for spike detection is perhaps a bit large. It felt a bit unfair sometimes in the falling part with the coins.

Liked the sound effects and music as well.

Otherwise great job! :)

165s / 11 enemies / 41 coins :)

Cool and pleasing art style. The music really fits the mood.

It ended in the middle of a level for me while I still had coins left to collect.

Love the ship and the sharks :)