itch.io

Didn't know Fermi questions had a name, so that's cool to learn! It was very much the vibe i was going for when making this. Party game would definitely be the direction to take something like this in.

Thanks for playing!

Didn't really know what to expect, but this was honestly kind of awesome.

The shielded enemy was a great use of the mechanics which i enjoyed a lot.

The last level was really good too - starting with the clever puzzle of the floor being scale-able, and ending with a real novel scenario of having to create an arena as you're fighting. Would love to play an arena shooter that's nothing but that, to be honest.

My only major criticism is that the gun-building didn't really do much for the game. Increasing and decreasing size are just opposites of eachother, so there isn't really any interesting way to combine them. The ending hints at some more interesting options like scaling yourself, but as it is, it'd probably be perfectly fine just using a slider, or even just reducing it to a binary shrink/grow option.

The lack of a proper crossheir for the shielded enemy was kind of annoying too.

But there's a lot of potential here.

Can't go wrong with the Robotron formula, and it's always nice to see a take on the genre that makes you think a little about how you're shooting. Might be interesting if you could get more points or something by keeping enemies big for a while as the current system heavily rewards killing enemies in one go, which you'd probably do anyway.

I appreciated that the projectile enemies didn't spawn every wave since they're more stressful and not having them around for a wave or two gives you some breathing room.

Interesting take on a dialogue system that i'd love to see explored further. Really cute to. Ending was a bummer though.

Cute little game. Throwing the little Blomps around has a nice feel, which can be rare in puzzle games.

Seeing the premise I was kind of worried about physics jank, but it honestly works really well and i never had any issues getting on the ladder or climbing it. Props on that.

I also liked the cute character art.

I do wish the combat and ladder mechanics interacted more. As it is, the only real interaction is that you can use the ladder to box in or walk over enemies, but the level design doesn't really enable it. It feels like you're really locked in to either combat mode or ladder mode.

It's missing some standard tetris features like holding down the button and ghost pieces, but it's a neat twist on the formula. Having a limited number of scale changes is a smart way to keep the game from being too punishing.

Really satisfying to play, and replayable too with both the secrets and the upgrades to change things up.

The pre-game infodump is kind of rough since it's a lot harder to take in information about a game you know nothing about. I personally had to restart because i skimmed it and missed the pull-up system.

It also seems kind of redundant to have both level-dependant upgrades and secret-dependant slots for them - at least for such a short game.

Those are really minor things though. Enjoyed this one a lot.

Getting sniped for being big felt a bit random without any story context, but the puzzle of hitting the background target was neat. The platforming physics were well done - felt tight to control. Wish the game were a bit longer, but that's obviously difficult to do in just 48 hours.

Not much to it once you've figured out the four animals, but it's fun while it lasts. Kind of wish i could use some of all that money to buy a faster shrink ray or something.

That's fair. I did want to do something like that but I was kind of worried that giving too much information would make the game more about the math problem of comparing two things and less about the trivia/guessing dimension of trying to guess sizes yourself.

It's also turned out to be pretty of difficult to figure out a system that can display both a hamburger and a mountain to scale at once in any reasonable way, and i didn't really have the time (and hud space) to figure that out.

Browser version didn't work at first, but it seems to have sorted itself out somehow. I enjoyed it!

Tried downloading it, but it gets stuck on a grey screen during the intro cutscene. Looks fun though.

Thanks for the kind words! To be honest, the old-school style originally came about mostly through me not being much of an artist. I think it ended up working fairly well though, and it's something i'll be sticking to if i go further with the game. The level design is definitely inspired by that era of game though. There's a level of playfullness that you don't see much in more modern games that i wanted to recreate.

I really like the bank shot mechanic a lot and there's a nice variety in the kind of effects you get from the slot machine.

Using your ammo for the slot is a really good idea in that it sets up a cool risk/reward factor where you trade off some defensive ability for a chance of  a power up. On the other hand, since it's the only way to get ammo, you're kind of forced to 'farm' chips to not run out, which isn't really ideal for an action game.

One thing i will say is that having a risk of simply running out of ammo and losing made me really invested in the outcome of the slot, which is something i think a lot of the other jam games which try to minimize the randomness are missing.

One thing i'd reccomend looking into for pixel art games is having a consistent resolution. There's a lot of different sizes, and it looks kind of odd when, for example, the pixels on the slot machine are twice as big as on the player character. I also think some of the sprites are getting slightly warped due to the screen resolution not lining up with the sprite resolution properly.

Other than that, i think the sprites are all farily nice, and the use of lighting really helps make things pop and look polished.

Overall, a nice experience with some good ideas.

Thanks! I knew that mapping out the sides of the cube would be a big hurdle for the player, especially since you can't rotate the camera, so getting that right was definitely a priority.

Changing weapons when the dice was hit was a lot of fun.  It added some nice chaos that enemies could hit it, while also giving opportunities for strategy by abusing it yourself.

The preassure plate really killed it for me though. Having to constantly guard the dice was really obnoxious, and it was annoying to bring it back too - especially since you have to do it every single time the dice gets hit, even once. Having to keep it still also disincentivizes using the dice, which was part of the game's charm to begin with.

Overall, the game looked and played nice though - the sounds when hitting enemies was especially satisfying.

Something about mixing the strange Bosh aesthetics with a kind of wierd genre-blending gameplay really works. 10/10 for aesthetics, and it plays well too.

I'm not 100% in love with the dice implementation though - You occationally get a scenario where you have to make some interesting choices, but a lot of times you just get railroaded where there's only really one way to distribute your upgrades.

I also wish there was a little more feedback on the towers as it's sometimes kind of hard to tell how much damage you're doing, but it's not a big deal since the game is mostly based on dodging anyway. Slighly more annoying was that i found it kind of difficult to tell the hedgehogs from the rocks when there was a lot of stuff on screen.

Those are all minor problems though. I think you've got something really special here.

Looks great, sounds great, and plays great. The balancing could use some tuning though. The game got a lot less interesting when i realized i could progress by just spamming the mouse buttons on the hearts and stay around full health forever.

I also don't think the dice upgrades were very exciting. Unocking the sniper is cool, but it's kind of unclear why you'd want the others. I'm assuming they increase the probability of getting that type, but it's kind of underwhelming compared to the much more tangible effect of bigger bullets or more ammo and health especially when all the types are useful.

Considdering it's a Jam game, it's seriously impressive when those are the only issues.

A very solid game. Hits just the right spot where there's room for strategy while still being approachable and quick. The three dice types are also very well thought out with the attack as a straight forward powerfull option, and the teleport letting you get creative.

My only real gripe would be the coin system. They're just kind of annoying to get. I had a level where i managed to clear out all the ghosts, so the only thing keeping me from getting all the coins was the tedious task of having to repeatedly grind for 1's to get into all those tight nooks - i ended up just skipping the coins.

Sprites were nice, and i appreciate the effort to use randomness to create variety by having different classes and enemies, but the combat mechanics weren't particularly engaging.

Because the health pools are so large, the impact of any individual roll is very small, which takes away from the excitement that randomization can give. At the same time, there wasn't any way to control or plan around your rolls either, so there wasn't much strategy.