itch.io

Ah, you just had to take the most terrifying activity there is and make a horror game out of it, didn't you... cave diving...

Very atmospheric and eerie!

We liked the narrative of the journey, the change, and the return - Palindrome cave is a very suitable name!

Nice entry!

I love games like these - Having to search for specific words to get more information always makes me super happy.

The artstyle is amazing.

I love everything about it and I want more.

Great entry!

Neat idea with the gravity shifts, nice one!

Having texts that informed us about mechanics was a good move.

If there's one piece of feedback we'd like to give, it'd be to respawn you at the start of the level/checkpoint when you either die or fall forever.

Keep up the jamming!

Auto jumping was a good design choice for this game, nice one! 

We enjoyed the visuals/audio of the death screen. The fact that it was short so we could get right back to the game was a good decision.

For feedback we'd like to suggest some further tuning of either the rising death or the platform's vertical distancing. It felt like we ended up in a lot of situations where it was not possible to avoid death regardless of how well we did.

Overall we were engaged and spent 20+ tries to get as high as we could, 24 is the best we did!

Nice entry, great job y'all!

We think you found a really expressive way of delivering your story, you made your panel approach work really well!

Spooky and disturbing story, well suited for the jam.

The pacing was nice and the panel with the eyes added a lot for conveying Serenity's feelings.

Overall a well put together and polished jam entry, great job!

We thought both the visuals and audio were great and cohesive, they really delivered on the mood!

We found the game weird, in a good way - that way when you both want and don't want to know what's going to happen.

The submission page is beautifully put together as well!

Well done, great entry!

We liked the creepy creatures, the wandering one snuck up on us and spooked us good!

Unfortunately nothing happened for us when we pressed E by the red door, so we couldn't progress from there

We really liked the art style you pulled off here - Great combination of simple geometry and full screen effects!

It was a bit tricky to see what we could interact with, to improve clarity it might be an idea to only shows the Interact/Pry Open buttons when it's possible to interact.

The cube-based dust particle worked surprisingly well in this style, good choice!

Overall nicely done!

The mechanic with scaling your car to either be fast or have better turn speed was a really creative and fun idea - We liked that it had significant impact instead of minor number changes! It changed how we played the game, and we liked it!

If we were to pick an area of improvement, the collision handling with the other vehicles could use some tuning.

The art was good, and we especially enjoyed all the UI graphics - Very cool, very stylish, very chic. 10/10.

Well done!

The scale by camera angle is a neat mechanic, and we thought the game was cute!

As some people have mentioned, we also had some problems with collisions, but thanks to the forgiving spawn points we managed to finish the game.

We really liked the final grab and scale of the game!

Well done and keep up the good work!

This was a neat and tight game - A well compressed experience that was fun to play! Solid puzzling that kicked our problem solving brains into action!

If we were to recommend one area of improvements, it would be to tune the input for moving furniture a bit - it was fairly easy to accidentally unselect instead of moving it.

Great visuals - cohesive and cute! (Also the little squish-bounce animations for moving furniture is good stuff and we are most pleased)

Nicely done!

We think you've succeeded both with coming up with a creative concept and implementing it well!

The controls feel natural and behave exactly as expected. Nothing feels finicky or janky, it's a smooth experience!

The trickiest thing to understand for us was that it's ROOMS that you place, not doors. Perhaps letting the doors to each room have a unique visual could help with that? Once we took a moment and really studied the map and what was going on, things became clearer - Though that took a while on account of the time pressure.

One suggestion we've got is to wait a bit longer before starting the countdown - maybe after fulfilling a request or two? Giving the player some time to familiarize themselves with all aspects of the game - placing rooms, navigating, and requirements - would be helpful. The time pressure makes it a bit hard to really take everything in, which lead to us having a tricky time figuring out the mechanics or noticing the map properly.

We really like the visuals! You've got a very cohesive art style, everything fits well together and feels like it belongs in the same game. Making every room distinct through their palette and patterns was a great choice!

Overall really nicely done!

Heya, we had a fun time playing this!

Cool idea to split up the ships' health into multiple people! It gave a feeling of progress to the fight, especially combined with the second phase.

One of our reflections on the game is that it'd be nice if the restart time after death was shorter so you can get right back into the action again. It might also be a good idea to reduce the boss health a bit, the fights felt fairly long sometimes, especially when restarting them.

We liked what you did for the ocean, and the ships/pirates art worked very nicely in the visual setting!

Well done!

It was very nice that you took the time to put together a tutorial!

Good with the quick respawn time after death, so you can get right back at it without delay.

We think this game would benefit from some invincibility after taking damage, as well as a boss health bar to let the player know they're making progress.

Nice choice on the environment! Building the environment theme into the transition between bosses was sweeeet, nice one!

We really like that you've put the time and effort into make both telegraphing and different phases for the boss! It really adds to the game!

For what we'd like to see improved - The bosses die a bit too quickly and are a little bit too easy to kill. It made us miss the second phase of the bosses the first time we played it. A little bit more time for the bosses to shine would be nice!

We also enjoyed the backgrounds - so nice and colorful!

Well done!

We think swapping out your spells is a neat idea with plenty of potential for growth!

The improvement we'd like to see the most is to have visual and audio feedback when hitting the boss and when getting hit! It would also be neat to see the bosses have more attack patterns, most of the time they were running away from us.

It's neat that you have a hub, and we think it fits a Boss Rush game quite a lot! It's nice to have a place to rest between fights.

The concept for this game is really good! We think there's a lot of potential regarding the mechanics for the movements. We can easily see the concept as something that can grow into a really popular game with some more time and polish! It's a fun and exciting core mechanic!

Something we'd like to recommend with visual language, especially when using simple geometry, is to let colors have specific meanings.

In this game red means death for walls, but it means "You can hurt me" for the boss. Likewise purple can mean immortal if on the boss, or about to be lethal on the platforms. The small guys' bullets are white which is also the color of the platforms you can stand on.

Consider assigning colors meaning and sticking to them - red for stuff that hurts you, orange for stuff you can hurt etc. It can help a lot with reading the screen quickly as a player.

The music was really catchy and fit the game's speedy vibes well! Props to the audio designer!

Well done everyone!

We like the character design!
The idea of shifting between characters, and that one of the characters power up the other one is a really neat idea! It takes a while to get used to, but when one does it's easier to focus on the gameplay.

One of us has played a lot of shmups, and thinks this type of gameplay with that big of a shield could be good for introducing new players to the shmup genre - as it doesn't require as much precision as the more hardcore type of shmups.

Our feedback on improvements is that we'd like to see a bit more juicyness in the game. A slight sense of acceleration, particle effects, some animations or just simply scaling the sprites up and down slightly - we think there's ways to really breathe some life into the game with fairly small means.

Overall an approachable shmup, well done!

Very cute artstyle!

Our main feedback when it comes to gameplay is to be a bit more generous with hitboxes. For example make the player's attack larger and make the enemy's damaging boxes smaller. It was quite difficult to hit the walking enemies without getting hit yourself.

The arc and timing of the jump was good but it could do with a bit of extra height, jumping over projectile attacks required fairly precise timing.

Neat way of telegraphing what obstacles would come up in the chase scene, nice one there!

Overall a cute experience, good job!

A good way to keep assets more cohesive is to decide on a color palette beforehand. Sites such as https://lospec.com/palette-list can be helpful - I find this site useful even though I don't usually do pixel art.

Shadows can make a pretty big difference so deciding on a shading style for all art can also be helpful - soft or hard shadows? Which shadow color? What direction does the light come from? A more technical tip is to use a multiply layer for all shadows with the chosen shadow color.

Being able to adapt to other art styles is a very helpful game artist skill, though that one can take a lot of time to build up. In general discussing what styles and techniques the artists feel comfortable with ahead of time and trying to pick ones everyone feel they can do justice can also be a good approach.

We hope this was of some help and wish y'all good luck in future endeavors!

Cute and well exectued artstyle!

Would be neat with an option to snap the clothes into the correct spots.

Magical girls hitting their 30s was a neat take!

We were fairly confused while playing this. Keeping track of who was talking and what was happening was not easy. We'd recommend sprites for all characters, and make sure to slightly light them up or raise them to indicate they're the one currently speaking. Another handy trick is to give each name a unique color to further clarify.

We enjoyed the world the characters lived in and the atmosphere/mood it expressed through the writing.

We'd also like to advice a more distinct visual difference between spoken dialogue and actions - make it clear if something is said or done, use quotation marks or other techniques to differentiate.

Cool artwork and good job!

Time stopping as a core mechanic is very neat! We enjoyed the sound effect of stopping time, but would have liked to see a visual effect as well - especially one that indicates time is currently stopped. Perhaps a color filter on the screen?

The various different types of art styles felt a bit clashing, a more cohesive look would've been nice - For example if you'd like to keep the 3D/2D combo giving the 3D models pixelated textures of a similar pixel resolution to the 2D artwork would work nicely.

The movement mechanics felt pretty nice, but the ability to dash an infinite number of times got a bit out of hand. Similarly being a bit more forgiving with the jumping would be neat - in some of the level design you can barely make the jump.

The ability to stop time and put a whole lot of knives in the air felt very nice, excellent use of time stopping - Good job!

Great artwork!

We do enjoy us a good time loop story, it's a nice narrative device, so thanks for including it! When it comes to the story it would've been nice to see Atsuo gradually fall in love over several loops as he gets to know Yua more, as opposed to the more 'love at first sight' vibes we got here.

Overall a well put together visual novel experience!

Hi there! Yes we locked on and held all the various mouse buttons and keys, but did not manage to perform any attack

Good looking world, we enjoyed the backgrounds giving it extra depth!

The movement physics could use another iteration, especially the jumping and wall jumping. Regular jumping felt very sudden and often lead to hitting your head on the ceiling.

Wall jumping worked about half of the time - it felt like the physics for it was sort
of accidental. Consider setting the player's physics material to have 0 friction and minimum friction combine - this will lead to the player sliding down the walls. Instead implement wall hang/jump with code logic. Ray cast in your facing direction to check for a wall, and if there is one turn on the hanging animation and reduce the fall speed each frame. This should give you much better control over the mechanic.

We also have some advice on the camera. Consider letting the player look down sliding the camera downwards when holding the down key. Also to improve the camera feel while jumping consider keeping the camera height bount to the platform the player has beneath them - this reduces the amount of up and down movements and makes it easier to keep track of your environment.

Navigating this game world felt challenging, we'd recommend trying to create an intended path for the player to follow when playing the game. Then do your best to show the player this path - placing interesting things along it, lighting that attracts the eyes, and minimizing the amount of non-vital paths. Hinting at an upcoming area can also be a nice touch - such as adding a few of the props from that area close to the entrance of it.

Unfortunately we were not able to experience the entire game, we got stuck on the spikes and had to restart several times.

Throwing sparkling blue magic at enemies felt good and we'd like to see more of it! We only managed to get the dash mechanic but we're curious about the energy charge attacks.

Great pixel art!

We enjoyed the classic JRPG gameplay! The abilities felt varied and balanced, the fights felt challenging and long enough to be worth using buffs and debuffs.

We felt that the several different art styles in this game clashed a bit with each other, something more cohesive would most likely give a better overall visual feel.

Good choice on keeping the game fairly concise with no over useage of battles.

Overall we had a good time playing, good job! (Also the grandma pixel sprite is adorable)

Nice opening screen!
One of us is an avid Touhou enthusiast so she'll be writing the feedback with that in mind.

I feel the character movement is too fast and don't give the player the precision they need to properly avoid the bullets. The walking side to side was too fast but the jump was especially imprecise and hard to control.

The enemy bullet graphics felt well matched to their hitboxes, the bullets also had nice patterns and good speeds!

A somewhat longer grace period after getting hit would be good, as well as stronger feedback when taking damage. I would also suggest making a short invincibility period after getting hit so that the player can reposition themselves.

On another point consider having the character automatically always shooting, there's no particular reason not to be shooting all the time so right now the player is simply forced to hold down a button to play the game.

Cool main character design and nice audio! The dimension modes felt nice and juicy!

A lot of good things going on here, from solid visuals to an innovative core mechanic!

This one sparked a lot of conversation for us, mainly due to the main mechanic. The comet dash is visually satisfying and can feel great to use, but it suffers a bit from slightly difficult useability.

Here's some suggestions and things to consider:

We think the game feel would improve a lot if the player could activate the comet early for example by right clicking again. Another approach could be to only use the left mouse button - Hold down to enter slow mo and start marking, release the button to go. If you move the mouse through an enemy they get marked and the final position of the mouse is your end location of the dash.

We really like the core concept of the mechanic, but with a bit of polish on the controls for it we think it could really shine!

Great character art and also really legit looking UI, one of our favorite games for the jam so far! Very good job!

Nice color scheme choice! It complements the character design and power theme well.

We like a lot of the concepts around this - controlling smoke and then later on merging with it for more direct combat. Feels magical girly with it's two forms!

We'd like to see a bit more polish on environmental hit boxes and level design. Currently there's a lot of waiting which isn't that engaging, and some of the timing based rising platforms could use a bit more forgivness on the jumps.

It would also be nice if it was possible to punch while moving.

Overall a nice concept, good job!

Unfortunately this game needs a bunch more work before we can give it any meaningful feedback.

Good luck with future endeavors!

Nice character model!

Quite frankly there's a lot of core mechanics that need more work. We did not manage to attack, so we didn't end up slaying any foes.

The concept of becoming smoke and gliding up walls was very nice, the camera up direction changing felt actiony!

The animations would benefit from another iteration, they felt a bit clunky and strangely paced for most of the actions.

We'd like to give the game another try once the fighting is in place!

Nice audio and visual design!

The standard jump arc and the slide feel satisfying, but we felt fairly out of control a lot of the time. The attack slide was very fast and platforming became a bit finicky later on with the jump just barely reaching the bottom of wall-jump paths.

We enjoyed all of the nice visual effects for the various actions the player could take, the attack slide and the upper cut were both very juicy!

We would have like to see another iteration on the movement mechanics and a slighty more forgiving level design. It would probably be nice to also be a bit more generous with the player's attack hit boxes.

The enemy design was nice, we especially liked the big looming gorilla-like shadow - it's attack telegraphing made it the nicest to interact with!

Also we're a sucker for a nice boss fight, so thanks for that!

Overall very good job, you've put together a neat game!

We thought the idea of ice cream themed Magical girls was neat!

The character design allowed the player to easily identify the girls and recall their names - connecting narrative/visual elements to something already known is a clever move for that. And we much prefer seeing new takes on it as opposed to the more classical fire, water, wind, etc setup.

We would have loved to know more about their individual ice cream powers!