itch.io

this is a really tense challenge, thick with atmosphere. gorgeous art, fantastic audio, and a deliciously intense mood. I didn’t feel like replaying immediately after losing, so I decided to try this once per day — and after 4 attempts, I still haven’t beaten it, but I wanted to comment before the voting ends.

here are my notes:

• there’s no sense of movement when it’s dark. depth meter can help, but it’s really far away from the focus. left/right camera movement helps sometimes, but it’s very situational. I found it really difficult to move blindly as I didn’t have any sense of momentum without light.
• it would be nice if the alarm volume was dependent on distance.
• opening the pause menu or picking up letters resets momentum for some reason.
• picking up letters is annoying past the first attempt, breaks the flow of the game.
• keyboard support is not ideal. can’t close letters without using the mouse. can’t pause without using the mouse.
• the “running out of air” audio clip keeps playing and looping when the game is paused.
• there’s no good way of quickly restarting outside of ALT+F4, but then there’s the unnecessarily unskippable intro stuff to wait through.
• the UI is too bright, or game is too dark. it should be possible to brighten the game without affecting gameplay visibility.
• irreparable hull is extremely punishing.

excuse the hastily-written feedback as I rush to post this. I really enjoyed this game, and I’ll keep trying to beat it!

neat score-chaser with an interesting movement mechanic and unapologetically raw visuals. to be honest, I thought the solid monochrome prototype dash vfx you shared on the GWJ Discord looked cooler, but I guess it was a bit too epileptic.

I wish the sword would also work when not dashing, as I often fly into enemies with leftover momentum, though this might just be a skill issue.

it would be nice if the red grid wall was visible a bit earlier, so I could react to it sooner.

overall a tight and challenging game with an interesting gimmick, without any unnecessary fluff — it’s just my cup of tea!

that’s awesome, thanks for explaining!

I really dig this aesthetic. my only complaint is that the sound of the engine got a bit grating after a while. and like someone suggested, a speedometer would help with the sense of speed.

the terrain is so cool, how did you make it? I love how the mountains look so stylized up close, but they actually have a decent amount of detail when seen from far away — it’s a neat result!

challenging rhythm-platformer with a neat minimal artstyle — reminds me a lot of 140 in presentation and mechanics. the rainbow streak adds a lot of flavor, though I wonder how it would look if it didn’t reset between deaths. brilliant end screen, very nice touch.

having the jump on a different instrument each level was a bit disorienting, but I eventually got the hang of each rhythm. what killed me the most was the variable jump height, and while I usually love it in platformers, here it added another layer of difficulty that seemed unnecessary. especially as there were no rhythm element to it, just trial and error. also, some of the levels could use a bit more playtesting/polish, but overall this was a blast!

hilarious concept. I love how the controls flip around with the orientation, even the jump input changes — it’s really wacky and I’m here for it! some really clever levels too!

this was an intense experience. rather slow paced, but it left room for contemplation. I got a kick out of watching the time dilation in relation to the station. the audio was especially noteworthy to me, from the sparse voice-over to the brooding ambient music.

I didn’t feel like there was much to do, but maybe that’s the point — in this kind of situation, I guess all you can do it wait for the inevitable, while making sure all systems are running smoothly. I wish I could at least look around, but maybe this would mess with the framing of the visual effect. really interesting submission anyway!

non-Euclidean space is so cool to me, and this game does it well. I have no idea how I solved the final puzzle, I just walked in pseudorandom directions until it worked out. it’s a really short game, but a neat concept for sure!

the whole DS-esque “SecondScreen” concept is insanely cool! I turned my monitor 90 degrees and it worked great. though I think something’s weird with the resolution scaling, because the text was pretty blurry. anyway, I hope to see more utilization of the “touch” screen in future projects!

the info dump at the start was rough — maybe it’d be better to have a “help” button in each app so players can look for instructions when they need it.

I liked the gloomy mood and visuals, but the gameplay fell a bit flat in my opinion — I just think this type of “follow the compass” gameplay is not for me. and I’m not sure if I reached the end, as it abruptly stopped on a black screen after they said “I can’t”. it felt like a somewhat uplifting ending to a somber story, like the memory of the loved one must be kept alive. but I don’t know if it was supposed to end there, or if something went wrong.

really cool concept, I absolutely love the visual effect. it’s an interesting interpretation of how a blind person might sense the word through echolocation.

I wandered around aimlessly for a good while, not sure if there’s a goal or anything to find, but what a mood. and the sitting animation when idling is a nice touch, it makes the whole experience feel very serene.

the number keys didn’t seem to do anything for me though.

very nice mini-metroidvania with open-ended exploration and neat mechanics. I like how all the abilities tie into the dash, and the freedom of movement offered by the last ability is awesome. great art and audio too. this is overall a really impressive jam entry!

what a lovely coincidence that you found this jam. I dig the audiovisual aesthetic, it fits the theme really well!

I appreciate the calm exploratory thing you got going on, it goes well with the whole aesthetic of the game. unfortunately I couldn’t figure out where to go after getting the dash — I went all the way to the left, but it seems like I’m missing something to progress that way. I did a few laps of the map without finding any other ways to go, so I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.

the platforming is very smooth and polished, but the camera could use some work. the main issue is how it jitters — there are multiple solutions to this, but I would recommend looking into “physics interpolation” in Godot 4.3 (or see the lawnjelly smoothing addon for Godot 4.X). also, the camera feels very janky when it tries to focus on something in the world — maybe it would be better if the trigger was more gradual based on the character’s distance to it.

(unrelated, but: I wishlisted Realm Of I, it looks really cool!)

I absolutely love it when games turn out to be more than they let on, and I’m really glad I went into this completely blind. the progression here is really thought-provoking, and the ending is just … impeccable. great concept and incredible execution!

while the jellyfish bell/“head” is harmless, the electric tentacles do actually damage fireflies. the jellyfish is immortal though.

thanks!

thanks for all the feedback and kind words!

the risk/reward of shooting the spike is my favorite part hehe. regarding the stab, the reach might be longer than you think, as the sprite/hitbox is larger on the first 2 frames of the attack. edit: I came back to this when working on the post-jam update today, and yeah I see your point now. I’ll increase the range of the stab a bit.

there’s no pathfinding around the asteroids, just bouncy physics. there’s actually no pathfinding at all, just a simple boids algorithm for the fireflies, which doesn’t even account for the asteroids or jellyfish.

about the looping space, you’re right that it mirrors both axes. Saad and I had some disagreements on this, but I didn’t budge as this implementation was the only thing that made sense to me. it effectively mirrors across the center of the circle, regardless of velocity direction. any other solution would be more complex to implement, and less predictable in my opinion. there’s a subtle hint in the circle shader, as it’s mirrored in the same way that the space loops, though I really don’t expect anyone to notice that detail hahaha. anyway, nice to hear it grew on you!

I thought I fixed that bug with dying on the edge of the void, but I never tested it lol.

and yeah, like Saad already replied, there was supposed to be a love story with the sun — unexpected love between Nothing and Everything. the fireflies were supposed to be the sun’s minions or something like that.

oh and space piano is a great mood for sure — Saad really delivered!

awesome visuals. surreal vibes. but the combat is really unbalanced — the assault rifle outperforms both the shotgun and the heavy pistol by a lot. weapons don’t work at point blank, which made it really hard to grab the milk without getting trapped. I resorted to luring everyone far outside the town, before I ran back in and grabbed the milk with no trouble (it felt like cheating). loved the ending though, great work!

very satisfying platformer! interesting mechanics and good progression of challenge. the rotating lighting/shadows does a lot to elevate the minimal aesthetic, it’s a really cool effect. the audio felt a bit grating to me at times, but no big deal. and I found the slight delay after death to be annoying, as I don’t get control over the character when I expect to, which messed up my flow on some levels. minor gripes aside, this was a very enjoyable game overall!

solid platformer with a fun gimmick! I really enjoyed the momentum-based mechanics and multiple paths.

I have a pet peeve with games where the dash goes towards the aim direction instead of the movement direction, it makes no sense to me.

the time slowdown when Lloyds explode is neat, but maybe a bit too exaggerated, and at times inconsistent/unpredictable — mostly when dashing through multiple Lloyds, though I also experienced a few occasions where the slowdown didn’t seem to trigger at all.

outside of those nitpicks, this was really enjoyable and well executed! smooth and satisfying gameplay with a simple structure and interesting mechanics — I especially liked the gimmick introduced in “ME ME ME ME”. and I really dig the level title drops, very reminiscent of APE OUT. great stuff!

it’s a silly little Asteroids-clone, I’m really not expecting anything in terms of feedback lol

insanely cool 1-bit art!! great music and gameplay too. at first I thought the choice in the beginning of the game was very interesting, but after finishing the game it seems like there’s no reason to not take 10. having that choice doesn’t make any sense in retrospect.

it’s unclear that spending the last bit of oxygen is penalized with such a long cooldown — it took me a while to realize it, I just assumed it was supposed to be so slow. also, feedback for hitting/defeating enemies are lacking. and the game felt a bit slow/grindy at times. nitpicking aside, this is a really cool game!

beautiful minimalism

lovely experience, I really enjoyed it!

sure!

• holding down the mouse button and dragging over multiple words didn’t work as I expected it to. let’s take “a █ c” as an example: dragging from a to c should result in “█ █ █”, not “█ b █”. what I mean is that when dragging to toggle multiple words, the state of a word should only be toggled if it matches the state of the first pressed word.

• it’d be nice if hovering the mouse cursor over ████ would make the underlying word visible, like white text over the black ████.

• punctuation is a bit weird to work with. I found myself thinking it should be separate from the word when inking, because I felt like it restricted how I could use the words — but maybe that’s an interesting restriction? limitations like that are not necessarily bad. I’m really not sure about this one tbh.

• some parts of the poems don’t seem to be “designed” in a way that’s meant to be experimented with. this is hard to convey, but as an example there’s this part “survive and live endure and greet” where I wanted to use “live” and “endure”, but there’s no “and” or comma to support this. I encountered this situation a lot, where I was just missing a little word or some punctuation to make a nice phrase. I think this could be improved by putting more thought into how the poems are arranged, and considering how they could be remixed instead of just setting up puzzles.

• the options should be accessible while playing.

• the music shouldn’t restart when I press “options” or “start game” from the main menu.

• something went wrong with the encoding for the apostrophe in “heart’s”:

this is a great mood! I especially enjoyed the music as I kept experimenting with the poems — and I mean experimenting literally, not trying to solve the puzzles. I did not find the puzzle aspect very interesting, as it felt like pure guesswork, so I resorted to the walkthrough to progress.

that said, there’s real beauty to this concept. I really enjoyed it when I stopped trying to guess which words the game wanted me to click — instead, I just played around with the words, seeing what I could come up with. that’s real art, held back by widespread ideas of “what a game should be”. (I have some gripes with the mechanical implementation of things, but I’ll spare you the nitpicking details for now.)

also, I love the meta-level itch page stuff, that’s ██████!

gnarly! I really dig the audiovisual aesthetic, and while the gameplay is a bit bare-bones, this is a truly awesome entry. I appreciate the overall mechanical minimalism, it’s a playground where you get to make your own fun, but I found myself missing two core mechanics: riding switch and variable jump height.

controller support would be nice, but no big deal. I also wanted to mention that there’s an issue where the mouse stops moving the camera after the game loses focus.

and by the way, great write-up about the procedural animation — that’s really cool to see!

shooting the spike is a risk for sure, but I think it’s worth it in some situations — especially once you get used to the looping space, and you’re able to reliably catch it again.

thanks for the kind words and suggestions!

wow, look at the URL for this page, it’s really nice

nice update, great work! the added pixel preview is wonderful, and your solution to the Q-problem is very elegant — it even made vertical flips more predictable, which was nice to see.

if you’re still working on the game, I have two suggestions for the “game over” score screen:

• a max score next to the achieved score would make the score more understandable, e.g. “letter readability: 17.55/26.00” or something like that.
• it would be nice to see the resulting alphabet and individual letter scores (basically the same alphabet-view that is using during gameplay).

by the way, how is the poem score calculated? it says “accuracy”, but I assume it’s also based on how many letters/words/poems I write in time.

well, not exactly. I use a Switch Pro controller remapped to act as a virtual Xbox 360 controller using reWASD. if I don’t use reWASD, my controller doesn’t do anything at all in Drive — which is normal, most games don’t support this controller, hence the remapping.

I don’t think I’ve ever had issues with this outside of Drive, but I realize I have a pretty weird setup… it might not be worth any investigation on your end. I can always remap the inputs on my end to get the intended button layout anyway.

well, since you asked for it:

the main jank is the camera, especially the up/down rotation (pitch). I suggest adding some interpolation to the camera movement/rotation to smooth it out. and consider spawning the car on the ground so the camera doesn’t shake violently when the game starts.

hitting the curb makes the car freak out. rolling the car is really wonky. maybe a higher gravity would help. otherwise I think the suspension could use some more tuning.

it’s too easy to spin out — I like a challenge, but it’s rather inaccessible. maybe the starting max speed is a bit too high.

using a controller doesn’t work right for me. the triggers don’t do anything, and I have to use up/down on the left stick to accelerate/reverse. analogue steering works though.

I think the other cars are too aggressive, which leads to a lot of awkward situations. it’s cool to see other cars, but I think they would work better as “traffic” — I mean, I would prefer if they were passive obstacles, not active threats. I love the Burnout games, I just don’t think the “car combat” works as well in Drive.

it’s a bit weird to see the multiple copies of an aberration at the same time, effectively reducing the choice from 3 to just 2 or sometimes even 1.

some aberrations cancel out other aberrations, like aberrated clutch and aberrated wheels. it’d make more sense to me if there were some permanent consequences, like +15%/-10% instead of +/-10%.

the portal is a bit small and hard to hit sometimes. I think it would be nice if it was the same width as the road so it’s impossible to drive past it.

I’ve encountered an issue with the level generation where the road crosses over itself, making it impossible to proceed:

issues aside, I think it’d be nice to see some more road variation — especially wider and narrower roads to play with leniency. another thing: there’s currently no real sense of progression, so crashing doesn’t really seem to matter in my opinion. maybe a simple scoring system and local leaderboard is all you need.

I hope you find this helpful, good luck!

nice game, short and sweet! I really appreciate the option to skip the lore at the start, it makes it easier to revisit the game. more games need a choice like that!

unfortunately, I wasn’t able to play with a controller because of two issues: 1) the Windows build is missing the pck file so I wasn’t able to run it, and 2) controller triggers (RT/LT) don’t work in web exports (known issue to be fixed in 4.3). however, the web version worked well with keyboard+mouse.

I amassed around 70 mushrooms before I realized I was supposed to break the gate, so I was able to face-tank the boss while spamming heal. I checked the lore and it does tell me to break the gate, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me before I randomly walked up and noticed the gate’s health bar. I think it’d be nice with some clearer in-game directions.

also, I found it a bit awkward that the upgrade menu appeared instantly as I attacked the last enemy, before I could even see them die. a short delay would make it less jarring.

nitpicks aside, this is an impressive first jam game, great work! and thanks for the shout-out in the credits, I didn’t expect that haha

did I win?

neat game! it was pretty fun to see the screen fill up with attacks, too bad it ended just as it started getting challenging. also, the dash was a bit awkward — I expected it to go in the direction of movement, not towards the cursor. other than that, this was really cool, great job!

nice update! the driving is much more controllable now. there’s still some jank, especially with the camera, but overall great improvement.

this really blew my mind, and it’s now my #1 favorite walking sim of all time.

I felt a calm sense of hopelessness while browsing through the rows of color, before giving up on perfection and deciding “this is probably good enough”. relaxing yet stressful, this was just an incredibly unique experience, I had a great time with it.

the only thing I felt lacking was the possibility to check the description of what I was looking for, so I wouldn’t have to rely on my memory or pen and paper.

really cool non-euclidean adventure! there were some really clever bits, and I liked how I had to explore around to find the way forward. the portals aren’t always completely seamless, but they’re still really convincing and I kept being surprised by where I ended up.

I fell off the narrow plank a couple of times because I misjudged where the center of the screen was — I think this could be remedied by adding a small dot to help with the platforming.

minor gripes aside, this was a great trip!

stylish game with great tension! the dynamics of shooting and reloading are just stellar, I especially like the moment of darkness after shooting a bullet before pulling it back. I read your reply below about the indecision around requiring one or two shots to kill enemies, and I have a suggestion: deal double damage when hitting the middle of the glowy part in their chest. this way, it would be possible to one-shot enemies with careful aim, though it would be tricky in tense situations.

I encountered a few issues, I’ll just list them:

• max mouse sensitivity was a bit low for me, and it’d be nice to be able to adjust the settings without restarting the game.
• the dash sometimes goes diagonally when I intend to dash in a cardinal direction, this happens if I dash right after changing movement direction.
• trying to dash while walking down slopes doesn’t always work.
• there’s definitely a checkpoint missing after the section with the round tables, before area where streetlights come out of the ground.
• there’s no indication that enemies are immune to damage while coming out of the ground.
• the hammer pull animation sometimes doesn’t play — it works, there’s just no animation. it seems to happen if I am mashing R and RMB after shooting, but it’s relatively rare.
• the game closed after I met the red person sitting on the bed, I’m not sure if that was the intended ending or if the game crashed.

those are pretty minor issues, this game was really enjoyable and very well made!

this was lovely, I enjoyed it a lot! I just couldn’t figure out the “loading bar” part without reading the comments here, I think it was a bit too cryptic. it really clicked with me when I did it, but there’s no way I would have figured it out by myself without more hints from the game. nice song and very cool concept!

what a disaster, I love it!