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Thanks for the feedback.

Now that the jam is over, one of the things we want to do is take the time to tweak and tune some of the basic mechanics like jumping, and try to get it feeling just right.

We will definitely be adding music to the game at some point, but (particularly since neither of us are musicians) had to accept it wasn't going to happen in time to be included in our submission for the jam.

Thanks for the feedback.

The getting lost thing is definitely something we've recognised watching people play the demo, and have been thinking hard about how to improve. Rather than banging on about these ideas here, I might post a devlog soon on what we learned about level design in the course of this jam.

Thanks. Abuse is certainly one of the games we've been inspired by, and I think it's fair to say we've both kinda wanted to build a game that used those assets ever since they were released to the public domain. But I think if anything our game is a more direct descendant of older console run'n'gun platformers like Turrican (even though it's not a game I ever particularly loved). That might be just us showing our ages though :D

Thanks for the feedback. The level for this demo is shorter and simpler than ideally we would have liked, because time was short, but hopefully it managed to give a bit more sense of the "exploration" gameplay that we want the game to offer than a pure tech-demo would have done.

Movement in a game like this feels like it will be the most straightforward thing to implement, but then the deeper you get into it the more decisions you start having to make. We'll definitely be looking to tune it as we continue to work on the game, and hopefully can dial out whatever is making it feel "floaty" to you.

Thanks. Greater variety of enemies, with distinct behaviours/strengths/weaknesses, and boss bottles are all definitely in the plans, but we were very limited in how many of our aspirations could make it in to the alpha/tech-demo release we'd decided was our goal for this jam. We hope to show some of these enhancements soon.

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, complete separation of aiming and movement is an awesome mechanic and would be the dream, but without a mouse or twin-stick controller our feeling is that it's impossible to pull off without massive compromises. We've thought about ways we could use the six-button version of the Mega Drive controller, but I'm still reluctant to go down that path - I never had one back in the day, so it doesn't feel like "authentic" Mega Drive experience to me. And even with the extra buttons, the worry is that it would become slow and fiddly, sacrificing other elements of the game we're ultimately trying to make. This tech demo gives us the chance to play around with fundamentals like the control system, though, so I'm sure we'll experiment some before moving on.

Speaking of an authentic experience, it's awesome to see the demo be played on a CRT. I feel like I understand now why there are musicians still putting out their albums on vinyl :) 

Oh, ain't that the truth. Enemy AI is tough at the best of times, and even more so on retro platforms where you really can't just throw compute cycles at the problem. We similarly accepted that we had to make do with very minimal AI in our tech demo, so trust me I feel your pain. I'd like to think my comment was intended constructively, and hope it didn't come across too critically.

Hey, thank you so much for the feedback :)

"When will it be finished" is a huge question and one we absolutely don't have an answer for yet. We have so many hopes and ideas for the project, and still don't know which of those will realistically make it into the final version of the game. But we're proud of this alpha/tech-demo that we built for the game jam, and are super-excited to keep working on it. The plan is to publish regular devlogs and updates to the game here on itch.io, and encourage you to watch out for these. (First small update should drop this weekend, once judging for the jam has closed, and will feature a bunch of the things that we didn't quite manage to complete in time for our submission.)

Thanks for the gameplay video, too. The bump in exposure is great, obviously, but I was also personally stoked to get to watch somebody from outside the team playing the level we hastily cobbled together for the demo, and see which of my ideas worked and which... might not have translated quite as well as I'd hoped. That kind of raw data is absolutely priceless - we truly appreciate you taking your time to play our game.

I got briefly stuck early on - either had missed a villager I needed to talk to, or needed to talk to them again, I think. But got past that eventually and went on to complete the game. Would benefit from greater variety of enemy behaviour, as once you figure out how to kite the mobs one at a time so you can just kill them individually it gets rather easy. But the look and feel (and music) of the game recreates adventure games on Nintendo platforms (in the vein of Legend of Zelda and the like) really nicely.

Nice puzzles - love the use of the Sokoban style mechanic. Floor switch tiles could stand to be a little bit more distinct - I'd been playing for a few minutes before I realised there was a visual cue - but that's a tiny gripe.

Fun, even though I'm bad at it. I think bubbles in games (especially retro games) will just always make me happy for some reason. Shame there are no sfx or music, which could really bring this to life, but the graphics are lovely.

Cute little puzzle game. The mellow vibe was really enhanced by the music.

An interesting submission - feels like a contemporary game concept on retro hardware. For all the platform's branding, to see a true 3D game (rather than 2.5D a la Doom and the like) running on it feels pretty novel.

SGI machines always felt almost like mythical artefacts, back in the day, so it's very cool to see it as platform for retro gamedev.

I honestly can't play 6DoF shooters for long - I always dug the concept, but they just break my brain. (It always made me sad that I couldn't deathmatch in Descent with buddies who were into it at the time). But I managed to peek at this long enough to appreciate the accomplishment. And the neon visuals feel like they really capture the SGI aesthetic. So congratulations on a game that made me disoriented, nauseated and happy all at the same time :)

Did you by any chance ever play "Rebel" on the ZX Spectrum? Way underappreciated gem, in my opinion, and this reminds me (in the best way) of that. Cracked a huge grin on discovering the water upgrade - really nice little bit of game design, that. One of the games in the jam I spent longest playing, and could totally see myself coming back to it.

Nice theme/concept, and I really liked the flame mechanic which felt very original. Congratulations, also, on  the impressive degree of "feature complete-ness" that you achieved in the jam.

Brutally challenging - to a point that, I'm not gonna lie, I personally found hella frustrating. But I know this is exactly what lots of people look for in a game. It may not be for me, but the game knows exactly what it wants to be, and solidly achieves that. Nice work.

Easily one of the games in this jam I've spent the longest playing. Really appreciated the level design for the way it uses and combines various mechanics. Great job.

Combines, like, three simple mechanics to make a game that is absolutely more than the sum of its parts. Every now and again my brain would just lose its grasp of the control systems so I'd panic and plummet into the ground and die, but I could totally picture myself with a classic 2600 joystick getting to grips with this game. Also really liked the graphic design. The visuals are super simple, but clean and stylish, and way classier than anything that ever launched on the 2600 back in the day.