itch.io

I quite enjoyed this! Challenging, definitely, but I kind of like how some runs you just have to throw away in order to get more information about the level that you can use next time. Maybe a slightly longer time would be good, and yeah there are probably some platforming tricks to make the controls feel more forgiving… but given how rewarding it feels to complete the level with nearly perfect motions in just barely enough time… there’s merit to keeping it as-is!

Flashlight-wise, I think a simple improvement would be to have it always follow the mouse pointer, and then only be on while the button is pressed, rather than toggle on/off, so just peeking around with the light is a more intuitive operation.

Great interpretation of theme and limitation; nicely done!

Lovely concept and execution, we definitely started from a similar conceit here and I like the direction you took it! Trying to time two different patterns simultaneously was fascinatingly brain-melt-y; kind of makes me want to explore that concept further in any future rhythm games. Though I actually found it easier to have one hand on the arrow keys for the LHC and another hand on A and D for the other. I agree that some penalty for missing the beat, some sort of slowdown perhaps, could make the game less easy to cheese… but the forgiving nature of the gameplay isn’t necessarily worth sacrificing to that!

The art’s nice and communicative, the music syncing to the beat is really fun, and I’m kicking myself for forgetting to show a visual difference when it’s possible to purchase an item in our submission, as that works great here. Well done (and happy birthday)!

This is a lot of fun! Smashing through walls was on the drawing board for us when the limitation was first announced and I’m delighted by your interpretation. The platforming and wall-jumping are very rewarding to pull off, and I love the SFX and firefly visuals. Loved getting to play around that first area and just talk to other birds and figure out the mechanics, too, it’s a good first tutorial zone. I think I would agree that the difficulty scales a little quickly - but I don’t know if I’ve ever played a jam game that was perfectly balanced.

The start menu, chat system, zone transitions, speedrun timer, localization, nyan effect? It’s impressive breadth of scope!

Hey! Thanks so much for playing and commenting. Work and travel hit hard after submission; I’m really sorry that I’m responding so late.

Thank you for all the kind words! I’m delighted you enjoyed. Jordan’s work on the art and animation is indeed stunning. Glad you liked the UI too - it was almost certainly not the most efficient way to do so, but it’s actually a tilemap! Jordan made the individual tiles for it, which worked surprisingly flexibly given how much the layout was iterating during development (and given this is my first Unity game).

Onboarding and information overload is definitely a common critique! I’ve got to get better at taking time within the jam to take a long hard look at the game’s mysteries without the benefit of being the one who programmed ’em.

Thanks again for commenting, we really appreciate it; I hope to be more timely in future!

Hey! Thanks so much for playing and commenting. Work and travel hit hard after submission; I’m really sorry that I’m responding so late.

Ha, yeah, I played and enjoyed your game, there’s definitely a lightspeed + clicker similarity here! Gradual introduction of the tiles is a great idea; I had some early thoughts about them being locked behind reaching certain speeds, kind of defining different eras of the game? The organization of the grid into rows of three that sort of represent ‘tiers’ was originally intended for that - but I couldn’t find an easy way to justify narratively that ‘certain parts can only be constructed at certain speeds’, and for that and time pressure it hit the cutting room floor. Definitely regret that though; With the other comment above on this subject (and I actually got a similar criticism IRL from a friend as well) I think it would be a good priority for any update!

Thanks very much for all the kind words, and again, I apologize for my late response! I owe you all a timely rating-back next time you’re jamming.

Hey! Thanks so much for playing and commenting. Work and travel hit hard after submission; I’m really sorry that I’m responding so late.

Yeah the balance was a major element that we did not put enough time towards… I’m glad it errs on the side of ‘way too easy’ rather than ‘impossible’ but it sure could do with a more challenging arc. Glad you enjoyed the looks; even with the limited timeframe as you say, Jordan produced maybe 50% more assets than actually made it into the game, the mad lad!

Thanks again!

https://matthew-marmalade.itch.io/sparkship-engineer

Love the intro text writing. Was a bit too difficult for me to get past 40s; the instant-death was rough whenever my luck ran out - but definitely enjoyed it! The art/visual style is impressive, the sound is great too! Very nicely done, especially for a first time - I hope you do it again!

Oh, I also noticed that you can place the same item on top of itself, consuming your items without changing the board state. It doesn’t really do any harm because resetting is easy, just thought I’d mention as something that does feel like a bug.

This is so up my alley! Had so much fun, did all the levels, messed around on free play, love the art and sound. As other commenters have said some other layouts (I enjoyed restricting the board size with rocks in free play to figure out some basic behaviours) might help make the puzzles less of a gambling/pattern matching game but goodness it’s fun to watch and impressive that it works at all. And the idea of the goal being periodic patterns! Excellent interpretation of the theme, has such pleasing mathematical symmetry while also kind of thematically working to represent a sustainable ecosystem?

My advice, were I musing on ways to heighten the experience further, would be to provide a ‘step’ mode that lets you see the effect of advancing one iteration at a time… I think that would help a lot to teach/internalize the basic rules.

Fantastic job! Genuinely my favorite game this jam so far :)

This is really solid! The controls have a lovely acceleration, the obstacles are clear and forgiving, the animations are very funny, and the parallax/changing sky is well done. I especially appreciated how hitting an obstacle isn’t instant death; Marco appearing on screen is very threatening but you can still save yourself from there. Nice job!

Thank you for playing! I’m very glad you liked the concept/story, it’s what convinced me to go for this jam. I enjoyed your game as well, was about to go rate it!

Thanks for playing; glad you enjoyed the concept!

Re: shooting, that’s a great point - and it’s the first time making a game that has shooting, so, helpful advice! Particles for all sorts of things (spores and ash on the different tiles, sawblade sparks, rocket fire trails, taking damage from blight or mycelium, the healing perk, etc.) as well as more advanced lighting than just a vignette effect were on the list but like most polish had to be cut for time unfortunately so you’re stuck with first draft laser - I’ll definitely have improving that on the list if we come back to the game :)

Made it to cycle 3! Love a game about symbiosis; this felt like a good fit for the ‘make it educational’ limitation too! I was a little confused what the goal was at first, which might be helped by making the year show as 2XXX / 2100 and showing a ‘cooling value’ somewhere to directly feedback the players actions?

The art and the combo-based gameplay is nice; my first try I just placed a bunch of each type randomly and died pretty quickly; the second try I played in to the symbiosis and got a lot further. Nicely done!

Goodness, this is fantastic! Very ambitious, very fun. I’m always surprised when a 3D game like this runs so smoothly in the browser.

The simple run-and-collect mechanics work very well here, the controls make the platforming just challenging enough to feel very rewarding, the sound design is really solid. I really enjoyed the views of areas down below, the dawning realization that there’s a crashed rocket in the ground that’s the same as the one you’re trying to get into, the doom and gloom of every falling mushroom.

+1 to another commenter for the helpfulness of a shadow for platforming, and maybe the level design could be reorganized a bit to make use of the whole torus before the end unlocks (maybe some one-way gates?), and I would have liked if the ending cutscene resulted in you landing on a reset version of the original torus to play again (to complete the loop) but these are not really criticisms - it’s a very impressive game that you should all be very proud of!

Thanks for the web build! This is very nice and simple. The art is very cute, as is the game design - love playing as a hedgehog collecting mushrooms.

If I were to offer any suggestions for improvement, it would be to try to match the texture resolution on the sprites (a low-res hedgehog picking up a high-res mushroom looked a little off) and to maybe include another terrain feature as well as trees such as rock (I enjoyed spotting an additional mushroom on my way back with my first, and then having to navigate back to the one I’d seen with what I remembered of the landscape - additional terrain features would help with that) but that’s pure polish!

The gameplay is straightforward, but I’m impressed with the quality/inclusion of elements outside of the gameplay, too - main menu, tutorial!, sound settings, pausing. Nicely done! And good luck with de-cookie-ing your keyboard!

Lovely art - the background, the animations. I think the player moving with the moving platforms, and the enemies being a lot more forgiving (50% of the time I tried to jump on their heads, I ended up taking damage instead? Maybe if you’re currently falling, you should always win, and otherwise they get you?) would help with improving the feel? But I enjoyed it - the gameplay definitely had me saying ‘this time I’ll get it’ for a lot of retries!

Thanks a lot for playing; really glad you liked it! (It’s a late submission which explains the lack of ratings).

Thank you so much for playing and your kind feedback, it means a great deal! :)

I suspect the primary reason it’s had very few ratings so far is that it was a quite late submission! But yes, hopefully we can get some more attention before the rating period ends, I’d love to see more folks play it.

https://matthew-marmalade.itch.io/mushnet-defender

Unfortunately had some unexpected schedule conflicts (and an overabundance of ambition of course) but it got finished in the end :)

The look, the controls, the music, the expressive and articulate protagonist, the steady realization that flipping a fish before eating it = more points, the lovely clouds, the speak button, the tidy time limit, the name. (<- a list of all the things I really loved about this very good game!)

That’s all one can hope for, really! Thank you very much for playing and the kind words!

Thank you! Immense credit to Ellen on the lovely theme, I’ve been listening to it for a few days now :)

Thank you on the animations! This was definitely a project with a ‘learn how Godot animations work’ goal so a simple-enough test case that really couldn’t be comfortably achieved programmatically like the crane was a good fit.

Having watched one or two people play the game in person I’m inclined to agree with you on the reeling mechanic, it’s definitely missing something. Perhaps it could flash when you’re supposed to press the button - or as a baseline, Harbor could just explain that part in the text? Something to think about for future mechanics for sure.

Overjoyed you loved it!

Thank you so much for playing! The controls have been improved slightly since first submission - a lot of the gameplay made more sense with the kind of visual feedback that there was not time for - but I’m glad you were able to enjoy regardless :)

Thanks a ton for giving it a try, and for the recommendations! Disco Elysium has been on the list for a long time… Currently I am on a long-overdue very-intermittent Baldur’s Gate 3 playthrough, but someday… The comparison, however, is too kind, thank you!

Goodness! This is deeply kind - though I must confess, I think maybe ‘finishing it in 72 hours’ was helped by soaring past the deadline and submitting a day late :P

Extremely fair criticism of the performance - there is definitely so much room to tidy that up. A lot of the scenery could probably be baked into textures instead of full sprites, and I need to get the hang of using Godot’s animation system instead of hardcoding light movements… I was actually kind of hoping this would push the boundary of performance as I normally try to keep that aspect pretty tight. Something this resource-intensive gives me a chance to explore how to profile a Godot project. Hopefully it doesn’t crash anyone’s browser in the meantime!

This is exactly the response that it didn’t seem reasonable to hope for! Not joining this jam was under consideration for a while, but once the idea arose to share this world and the feeling of residing within it… that felt like a core that deserved love and soul. I’m glad you like the art - I was immensely lucky that the player in that game had already done excellent character art way back (originally used for 2D paper miniatures during combat!) and gave permission for me to redraw them, otherwise the conversations might have been a lot more empty! And mad props to Ellen, of course, for taking the idea and turning it around into the three lovely melodies you hear in game, let alone actually going out to sample a river - truly heroic to save a game about a bard from being completely silent.

I’m honestly delighted beyond words that the writing and story resonated with you. Thanks again for playing and commenting!

This is really excellent! The art is so charming and cozy - you mentioned D&D in the description and I can really imagine wanting to explore and talk to all of these people in a game! And I always love when games allow devs to bring their existing impressive skills (in this case in illustration) to the table, even when they’re new to the coding side of things!

Bugs-wise, the restart process didn’t really work? I ended up in a strange halfway state with 1 bird already collected and an inescapable text box from the mayor, and collecting the bird again threw an error.

Like everyone else in the comments section, I really hope you go further with this! The idea of getting to know the town better over the course of a longer game, so it feels more like a home, is really compelling. Nice job!

Nice, I love a scratch game! And varying the speeds of the arrows made it really non-obvious which one to go for, creating some nice moments of tension where I had to switch directions very quickly. The upgrades felt very solid too; getting two swords suddenly felt much more capable.

The ending inversion was unclear on the first run as others have mentioned, but otherwise very enjoyable!

https://matthew-marmalade.itch.io/sword-and-song

(One day, I will finish a game on time. One day!)

This is fantastic - the art, the animations, the simple implication of the dragon with the bobbing eyes… the replicas were also a brilliant ‘aha!’ moment when I figured out how they worked. And the risk, gambling, and continuously increasing and accelerating greed meter is the best example of the limitation I’ve seen so far!

(I also appreciated discovering how holding e is an alternative to having to press it continuously)

This is awesome! Unscrupulous food preparation is a very amusing interpretation of the limitation, the identification mechanic with all the overlapping criteria is very well designed; and I had a lovely moment of genuine panic when I was idly looking through the book thinking the game was paused and realized suddenly the time was still going down in the background.

I ended up getting all the way to day 5 by just automatically cooking any non-pink 50-80 low-medium probably-wasps and hatching everything else - though I’m sure if I had fully memorized them all I could have gotten even further.

Hello! Yeah, a few people have brought up the easy difficulty (what comes of attempting a genre I have no prior proficiency playing I suppose! What seems lightly challenging to me ends up being a walk in the park for a wider audience.)

The game’s objective is definitely to ‘get as far as possible’; though I think it would have improved the game a lot to build on the story hook of ‘adventurers trying to pay off their debts’ mentioned in the description, and use reaching an amount of gold as a win state. As for dungeon floors, we were definitely hoping to make variations on the dragons and dungeons to imply they were different hoards, but there did not end up being art budget for that - so this is in fact the same dragon in the same dungeon every time, that you are just continuously robbing. What can I say; you’re playing some greedy folks!

Thanks a lot for giving it a go, and the kind words! (and I’m in much agreement about the lovely art, all credit to my teammate there!)

Definitely could have used more playtesting (by someone better at the genre :P) and tuning time to make the fire the desired amount of scary yet dodgeable - t’was a fairly naive implementation; more of a ‘tennis ball purgatory’ than a ‘bullet hell’ I suppose! Glad you had fun anyway, and thanks for giving it a try!

Thanks for giving it a try! Making the title logo the cover was good advice, and all credit to my teammate for it (and all the excellent art). Still very much in a learning phase at the moment with respect to integrating music and sounds… but I could definitely do with my next game not being completely silent :P

Love a tower defense; very impressive to make one that works this well within this short time limit! Coupling the health and currency together (as many people have already stated) was very clever.

https://tectane.itch.io/dodgems-and-dragons

That’s really fair; my biggest takeaway from doing this jam was that I need to get better at tutorials (or at least get better at designing UI with tutorials in mind)! I think I leaned a little too hard on the idea of a magical language you have to experiment and fail in order to learn - which is not very user-friendly, especially for a jam!

If you (or any other readers) are still interested, the key clue is that the bees will look for single flowers on the board, then use the patterns adjacent to that single flower to make a jar. If there are no single flowers, nothing will happen, and if there are no single flowers with adjacent patterns, nothing will happen. So to make the most basic jar:

1. Place a single flower somewhere
2. Using a different type of flower, place a group of two adjacent to the single. The bees will fly to the single flower, the adjacent group of two tells them to make a basic jar of honey, then they return to the hive and produce the jar.

Thanks for playing, anyhow! And I’m glad you enjoyed the visuals, they turned out much better than I expected.

Lovely story and art! Impressive style, characters, and execution of the text-based mechanics.

I hit a few points where the text seemed to slow down a lot? Bad cat was laughing character by character for about two minutes before I was able to advance, not sure what was going on there… But I really enjoyed it overall; a great adventure :)

Pretty fun! The lighthouse is a great thematic pointer towards where you’re supposed to be going. Running and jumping around felt pretty smooth, too, and though I didn’t try it out making it mobile-friendly is really nice. The light mechanic is a solid limitation interpretation, too - I died a couple of times mere seconds away from getting a light on the ground, which had me wanting to go again immediately!

I was a little confused by the chasing shadows - maybe they could have been fully destroyed by the light, but deal a lot more damage when they caught up? As it was I kinda just ran past them. And it took me some precious time to get the hang of the box-moving… maybe an example box in the starter room to move out of the way of the door or something, without time pressure would have been nice?

Overall quite impressive! (almost as impressive as the number of cookies; I haven’t seen too many projects yet but that’s the highest so far, nicely done!)