itch.io

Very well polished game! I had a few notes (sorry if others have said the same already):

• It would be nice to see the score as the game goes, so the player has some way of knowing how they are doing.
• I noticed a bit of lag during the traffic phase. I was playing on WebGL, and I saw it starting probably around 30 houses, for reference.
• A straight line tool would make road phase a lot quicker/more comfortable to the player.
• I found the rules about road-placing somewhat confusing. I didn't understand why I couldn't have roads which curved around houses (though I'm sure there is a good reason I shouldn't be allowed to do this).
• I think the game might be more intense if everything was happening at the same time, rather than in phases -- so the player has to react with reflexes and can't spend as much time planning everything.
• Strategy-wise, different kinds of roads/buildings might be helpful to giving the player more choices to make; for example, a highway-type road, which can't connect to buildings but doubles car speed, or a high-density building (like an apartment) which will have twice as many cars in/out of it. Choices/info like this will enable players to develop more complex strategies, if that is the route you wish to go.

Overall very well done! I noticed you are considering a full release -- good luck, I'm sure it will be great!

Very cute game, and the perfect level of complexity/size for a jam. Visually, I felt there could have been a better indication for the areas where shrinking will bring you to the mini world, maybe another color could be added for this effect (I felt it highlighted the apples well). Great job!

Yeah, we definitely needed to make the "Left Shift to Roll" instruction more clear, as a lot of folks didn't see it in our controls section. Feel free to let me know if you get soft-locked again, or if this works to fix the issue. Thanks!

This comment melts my heart, dude. Thanks for playing!

Thank you so much! Really glad you enjoyed, we appreciate the feedback!

Thank you for the kind words. Always remember there's no incorrect way to be a dude <3

Thanks! That was a planned feature, but unfortunately we ran out of time to make it work. Definitely something we'd add going forward.

Thank you so much! We spent a long time on the game feel, I'm glad it shows :D

Dude, thank you so much! (You thought that turlet was bad? Check your bathroom dude.......rising sea levels dude it wasn't me)

Yeah, we need to make a more clear tutorial for sure. There's an NPC who says it at the beginning (and it's in controls) but it needed to be more obvious, cause that part of the controls is not very intuitive. We appreciate the feedback! Thank you.

Dude I'm crying rn dude I didn't think it was possible...every time I have to abandon my dudes I tear up a little but I know the dudes get it, dude, they know I need that Knowledge Munchers Deluxe CD-ROM dude...

Gods love Dudes

Dude me too Dude

Cool! Yeah, I love pushing games to the limits, I'm always hoping there will be an easter egg :D Glad my playtesting was helpful! 

Ah, I see. I missed that, my mistake. Thank you for clarifying!

Pretty cool puzzle game premise! I felt the difficulty of the puzzles was perfect for a game jam, though if you add the ability to skip puzzles, you can definitely increase the difficulty of some puzzles without any risk of players getting stuck and giving up on the game. On the final puzzle, I found it a bit confusing how I was able to turn into super Dipper...I didn't really get why if I drank the big potions in a certain order, I'd turn into super Dipper and otherwise I'd die. I didn't feel like there was a clear indicator for that, and that it contradicted prior game logic which was confusing. Maybe I missed something, if so please tell me. Overall, this was a really fun game, great job!

Very cool game, definitely had me hooked for a little while! Is there a high score? I got level 111. Also, I had a few notes:

• After getting the ability that lets you generate little red walls, it becomes very easy to stay in one place and not be damaged.
• When increasing max HP, the bar extends past the edge of the screen which makes it very hard to tell how much HP you have. To fix this, you could keep the HP bar at a constant size, and instead have the game internally track max HP, and change the amount it scales the bar to represent this. For instance, if the damage = 1, and the player's HP is 10, shorten the bar by 1/10. When max HP goes up to 15, shorten the bar by 1/15 when taking 1 damage. You could also have a number representing max HP, though this may not be as aesthetically pleasing.
• Once the player has all the weapon upgrades, continuing level by level becomes a bit slow and rote. There becomes a point where you have so much HP and the levels take so long that the player is encouraged to just run right through the black blob, which removes most of the strategy and pressure which can make the game fun, and turns it more into an idle game. Not sure if this was the intention. I think in this case you could add some sort of boss, or limit max HP, to prevent the game from being too easy.

Overall, I enjoyed this game, the loop was fun and the graphics were nice. Great job!

This is an image of my max HP being so high that I would just run through the black blob to make the level increase faster:

This is an image of the red wall strategy I described above:

Thanks, that's exactly what we were going for! Glad you enjoyed :D !

That's definitely something we're going to work on going forward! The roll mechanic with Left Shift certainly needs to be tuned a bit. Thanks for playing and the feedback!

The greatest Easter egg of all is that the official Sega PC port of Sonic Unleashed is contained as a mini game within Dudestack...but only true believers can find it.

Did you try rolling using Left Shift? Just wondering if anything else happened that got you stuck. Thanks for playing and we appreciate the feedback!

Yes! If you hold Left Shift, you can roll the dude using WASD. It's in the controls section/there's an NPC who tells you about it at the beginning, but this was a detail we should've made more clear as it's an important control! Thanks for playing and glad you enjoyed!

Very creative application of the theme! I thought it was a clever twist on the turn-based style game to have the recursive battles. I would've enjoyed a bit more variety to the individual battles, as the strategy across them felt a bit repetitive. If the individual battles used different maps, perhaps with different enemies, layouts, or maybe even power-ups, each battle could feel unique and require the player to innovate and build on the strategies they'd developed. I think this could add a new dimension to your game, if you decide to continue development. Also, I really enjoyed the sound design/audio. Great job!

I really dig the core mechanic of the puzzles here; how does this not have more ratings? I'm very impressed with the quantity and challenge of the puzzles you came up with in only 48 hours, though I'd love to see more. A great feature to add to this would be an undo button to reverse the last move from the player. Would definitely make mistakes less tedious, and hard levels more fun. Overall, this was fantastic, and I hope you continue to develop this game.

Cool concept and fun to play! I think it would be nice if the player had  few lives instead of dying to one hit, and would be cool if there were some kind of power ups, if you wanted to expand this game. Great job! 

Quite a satisfying little puzzle platformer. I always enjoy this style of map/maze where different screens are accessed through different routes. Nicely contained and cute! I thought the mechanics of advantage/disadvantage of each character were well-balanced in the puzzles, too. Great job!

Very fun game with a great sense of humor! I liked the variety of objects and the different strategies. I would've loved to see more levels. Also, not to brag (brag incoming), but I got 0.02 meters off.

Very cute game and quite challenging! Nicely done :)

Cool game! I really liked the core mechanic of climbing endlessly up to avoid lava. The camera was a bit hard to control, but once I got the hang of it I was able to do some pretty cool climbing! (before, of course, dying from too much lava in the blood lmao)

I really liked these puzzles! Very creative concept and fun, while being somewhat tricky. (I didn't have to skip any, proving that I do in fact smell great). I think it would've been fun to have some extra hard puzzles at the end, as I can imagine this set of concepts leads to some pretty complicated stuff. Fantastic job, and good luck on future development!

Haha, I loved my frog army...until the giant snake demolished it. But we came back! And got demolished again, lmao. Also the buff snakes were cool, but they totally skipped tail day lol. 

Very neat concept! Reminded me of the original Donkey Kong a bit. Pretty cool how it got much harder when the mountain was steep. I did notice a slight bug; if you walk all the way to the left off-screen and keep going, the character disappears from the screen (falls off the map? I'm not sure) and isn't hit by the boulders. Then the camera goes all the way to the finish and you win automatically. Also, I think it would be cool if there was someone at the end throwing the boulders. It could be fun to beat the game and reveal who the enemy was, to add a bit of story. Overall, great job!

Thanks for letting us know!

Very cool concept! It's super satisfying to watch the clone army grow as you go around the map. The minimap was super useful in determining if it was safe to clone or not, I just wish it was easier to tell what size enemies were nearby -- maybe if they were color-coded it would be easier to remember which is which? Super fun, great job!

This game is incredible , loved the application of the theme, very fun, and really well polished. Only small note I'd have is on grabbing the food it's sometimes hard to control the rotation. This could be a really fun couch co-op game for four players (like Tricky Towers, with climbing). Fantastic job!

Cool game! Fun to crush everything as the big frog >:D I think it'd be fun for the frog to have some enemies trying to eat the player character, and then when the frog is big the player can eat the enemies too! It'd add a bit more challenge and be satisfying to get payback on the enemies (kinda like Pac-Man). Also really liked how the music changes between big/small mode, nice touch. Great job!

Super cool game! I really enjoyed making the kaiju huge and destroying the tank/barbed wire. I think it would be a bit easier to control the sizing if you could hold down the mouse-button instead of having to tap it a bunch -- my finger got tired, lol. Great job!

Love the scroll wheel idea, and The Witness. Forgot to mention earlier, but the passive tutorials worked great in your game. And no problem! Happy to provide the feedback, and I hope future development on your game goes well!

The level I got stuck on was after learning about scaling vertical/horizontal only, there's a level where you go under a roof and past two large boxes, then have to go up a very tall and narrow chimney-type space, with three boxes. I managed to turn them into steps once in order to get up, only to fall into an inescapable pit on the other side (I didn't extend the pipe far enough to make it to the door. Since I was stuck here, I reset and tried to get up the chimney a few more times, but couldn't make it work a second time. Part of it was the narrowness of the space (Purgob would get stuck) and part of it was the difficulty of precisely selecting which block to scale and how to scale it. The controls of QE/JK worked fine, but weren't the most intuitive for my brain to translate to take/give scale, and up/down. I'm not sure what would be better for this tbh. Maybe I needed to play a bit more for my brain to map the controls to what I wanted in my head, lol. On this particular level, at the very least that pit at the end should have some way to get out of it, especially because (if memory serves) you can't see the other side immediately after climbing out of the chimney, so there's no way for the player to tell if they'd get stuck.

Side-note on game design broadly: I agree against skipping in puzzle games overall. That being said though, I love puzzle games which give you a choice of levels to do and force you to do some, but not all in order to unlock the next sets of levels (with some exceptions). Great examples of this (and great puzzle games) include Baba is You, Bonfire Peaks, Pipe Push Paradise, and A Monster's Expedition (I recommend all these games, especially Baba is You).  I find this feature empowers puzzle designers to create much harder puzzles without alienating a more casual audience. I for one love super hard puzzles, but I like to be able to bounce around between different ones while I process the challenging ones.