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I spent too long getting the visuals set up, so there's not much of a game there to win or lose! The mounds were going to be little spider eggs that hatch after a certain time. But hey, when you have like 10 minutes left you either give up or you say screw it and give the player infinite spiders.

I strongly urge you or others among the jam leadership to make this more clear on the jam's main page. Preferably on the same line as the requirement itself, not buried in the FAQ section that shockingly few participants seem to read. If I hadn't read this post myself I would have been under the impression that a real identity was required to be linked to the submission.

The talk you guys linked to makes a lot of salient points, but one of the most important points it makes is around the 5:30 mark - if you have any reason to stay anonymous you should. That gets glossed over fairly quickly, but it's a deeply important point. Especially since you will likely have children (13 or older, yes, but still children) submitting - people who are even less likely to give the requirement a second thought.

Regardless of your age, all it takes is one horrible person on the internet - one person who took offense to a review you left their game, or drew issue with some other game hosted on your Itch page they found after taking an interest in your work, whatever - to make life for you and your family incredibly unsafe, or at the very least quite unpleasant on and offline.

Basic internet safety, especially when kids are involved, should be a given. If you're encouraging behavior that challenges that safety, even inadvertently, I hope you and the rest of the jam officials will consider taking steps to change that.

I'm sorry for the wall of text. I have a few younger friends who are planning to become participants and wanted to reach out.

Thank you for your time, and good luck with your jam! (Also great job with the theme!)

A special case for turning in to an adjacent slime would have been nice. I kept accidentally killing myself 'cause I was parsing the "head" of the snake as the largest knight, not the comparatively smaller sword.

This is a whole-ass snake game. Well done getting that out there in the tight time frame you were given!

If I've learned anything from making a platformer, it's that you need to be more generous with your jumps than you think. I pretty much camped the bottom because it took too long to line up and make a jump up to the higher platforms.

I also didn't understand the perspective of the map until the enemies started spawning. It read top-down to me until I saw enemies walking along what I thought were walls, and even then my brain had trouble parsing the map sometimes. Slapping a lighter or darker color on the material for the sprite renderer/tilemap renderer for the background/foreground elements can help sell depth a little easier without costing you too much time.

Still don't quite understand what placing swords does for me. Maybe explain in the description?

For all my fussing, I rated this pretty darn highly. It's super polished and does what it's supposed to. For the time frame you had this is a really impressive piece of software.

Trying to clone such an iconic game is such a short period is a real power move. Good job more or less nailing it.

I have to fuss a little tho - making it so you can only extend the hammer through momentum precludes the play style to a single lane. Careful, steady progress is even more gated now (it already was since aerial momentum is such a big factor in distance traveled and "lift" arcs.) Being able to push and pull the hammer with a click would have been nice.

Then again maybe that's how the original did it. I've only seen it streamed, never played.

Good job making a thing! It is a good thing!

It's a whole playable game! With sound and music and everything! Holy crap! You're really efficient with your time.

It feels like the scoping on this was just about perfect. If I had any complaints it's that there doesn't seem to be a ton of counterplay against the bottles the player can engage in, but that's asking kind of a lot for a 3 hour project.

Good job!

I couldn't get the spikes/pistons to actually place. I definitely had enough money for them, and they'd show up on my cursor but clicking or pressing the button again didn't put them down. Cool idea! You're definitely cementing yourself as the tower defense guy in my head, lol.

Respect for the ambition on this one, and the actual combat was surprisingly solid. Some knockback would have added a ton of strategy to the combat element - choosing whether to try and slow down certain mobs with knockback or DPS down weak mobs, or whatever. I'll give your updated version a try after I rate all the other submissions.

Well done!

It's hard to give useful feedback for this format given that 3 hours is so tight that frankly having a playable game at all is an accomplishment. I had an issue where clicking too rapidly would highlight the fullscreen button on the Unity WebGL player template for some reason, maybe you set the mouse capture to something weird? Maybe it's just Unity being Unity? Not really a problem since it didn't mess with my clicks, just a weird note.

Good job getting something playable out! Make the buttons a little bigger next time, clicking those tiny icons in a tiny web player was confusing at first!

There's the seed of a neat puzzle game here! Nicely done in the narrow time frame. I ran into the stuck-outside-your-range bug too on both playthroughs.

"Genre: Adventure"

This made me smile. Congrats on picking up a new engine so quickly!

The intended path was down toward the lower area, you unlock a way to progress further there. I was banking on the drop in the crystal area to give you that hint, or just natural player exploration. A lot of people didn't get the hint that the jumps towards the potion aren't viable at first and just kept trying till they gave up.

Part of that is natural distrust in a jam game but I feel like i could have done a better job at earning it back in the early areas. The rest is mostly down to you not getting to experience the rest of the game. All the "lessons" I tried to teach through gameplay don't seem to have been effective in your experience, so the rest fell apart.

I knew accessibility was going to be a problem but unfortunately I ran out of time. Thank you for taking the time to document your play through for me. I'll carry those lessons with me into my future projects. 

Very consistent art. Took me a minute to make sure it was made with the art kit - that's some pretty transformative work! The jump was a bit too floaty to make bouncing off the dogs to reach higher areas feel "right". Also A and D work for movement, but W doesn't jump? You were almost there! I really dislike using the arrow keys for movement, not sure if it's because left handed or just not used to it. Keep folks like me in mind for your next project to improve accessibility - I was definitely worse at the game because I had to use the wrong hand.

The biggest gripe I have though is the spikes - they're waaay too easy to miss during play. I almost always only ever saw them after I'd hit them, and have some of the spears missing their heads and thus be "safe" meant you were looking only for tiny little white spearheads, which really don't stand out contrast-wise with the rest of the level. Insta-death traps need to be SUPER obvious during motion, and not just while you're looking at a static screen at rest not having to track all the other movement in the game and plan your jump arcs and whatnot.

Sticking points aside this was one of the more artistically cohesive platformers I've come across in this jam. Well done!

Mm, no, I think your tutorial right now is already plenty thorough. Too much more and it's going to delay getting to the meat of the game too much, especially since there's already an intro sequence before that. Maybe have references to the kinds of hands or what beats what? Highlight potential hands you might have the opportunity to build with the cards you can see. That sorta thing. That might take the fun out of playing poker though, not sure.

Whatever you implement make sure it's integrated in to the gameplay well and not like... a button you click that brings up a popup window with some text and images you'll have to memorize. And maybe have an option to turn that stuff off for people who don't really need it? I'm outside of my area of expertise with this because I'm so unfamiliar with the subject matter.

Once I understood how everything worked I enjoyed my time with this a lot more. The early introduction to the game could use some edits. Your description says ZXC for the various abilities, but in-game it's ASD. I also really dislike movement on arrow keys, but I think that might be a generational thing or something - I'm seeing a lot of it this jam. Having a way to use either would have been nice but configurable keys in a jam game is asking a lot. Just consider us WASD users for your next project?

The way you introduce the blue crystals at first it's not clear that it's expanding your max crystal count when you pick up the item, because it happens around the same time as the shooting introduction (maybe it's even just before? I'd have to replay to check.) I took that as meaning the blue crystals were your ammo and spent my time being very conservative with them.

Cool concept, and once you get your head around how it wants to be played it's pretty neat. Good job!

The absurdity of the premise was great, I would have liked to see you guys lean into it even more in-game and not just with your promo stuff. Eco jumping out of the water had a solid feel to it and was just the right amount of challenge to go after power ups in dangerous spots. I would have liked if the RNG didn't guarantee some powerups would be guaranteed damage if you went for them, but jam games and all that.

An on-hit effect when something takes damage was sorely missing. I still don't know if the zapper is just super weak or if it can't actually destroy obstacles like the other weapons can.

As a quick design note there's nothing disincentivizing the player from just sticking with a weapon they feel is the best they can find. Whether or not this is the optimal play, it definitely encourages a behavior that invalidates one of the mechanics that makes your game fun. Having to make that choice between "do well" and "have fun" is a losing choice regardless of which you go with. Having the weapons be powerups that exhaust on a timer, or giving some incentive beyond score for swapping weapons would be an easy way to nudge play back in the right direction I think.

Night got a bit dark on my screen.

In all, good job guys! You made a fun game. Not everybody can manage to get that far in a jam and y'all did. The world's a slightly brighter place with a lil' wizard fish in it.

Neat concept, and it feels great when everything falls into place. The mages spent most of the time hiding under walls so I had to kind of guess where they were - that was more tedious than challenging imo.

I wouldn't have minded some popcorn opponents with relatively low health pools. Bouncing off a chicken after you get a full map grapple off kinda kills some of the momentum of play. I'd either increase the movespeed of the player (and have a separate lower movespeed for when they're grappling and trying to swing to either side) or get rid of non-grapple movement entirely.

As it is right now it's unclear from the get-go how the game wants you to move around and if you buy into the grapple-to-get-around instead of just attack, the current movement doesn't serve much purpose.

I hope some of that was helpful. I enjoyed my time with it and wouldn't mind seeing a more realized version of the game in the future.

"Hello Allie" Uh-oh.

That was great! The file crawler didn't have the intended spook effect I think you were going for though, it mostly just listed the pile of files I'd been messing with to make my own jam game, lol. You had me genuinely curious what it would say next so I kept going. The payoff for sticking with it was retroactively completely predictable, but also super novel and fun to see at the time.

Let's see, criticism. There's not much, this was a pretty complete experience. Having tooltips when mousing over items in your inventory, or when selecting the item, or when looking at the item in the world would be good. I thought the health stims were keys at first.

There's a fun glitch where you can double-hit with the wrench if you click fast enough. That made the loops a lot quicker, and honestly I don't know that I'd fix it - it's a nice little moment of "haha I'm outsmarting the game" that doesn't really impact balance in any majorly meaningful way.

The wrench would disappear from my screen after interacting with doors at times. Clicking to attack would bring it back. Not sure if intentional.

Of course I have to compliment you on the flying-away effect with the tiles. You've probably gotten a lot of them and you deserve them all.

Thanks for the good time!

Super polished, great vision for the art direction. The whole thing felt wonderfully sleazy. Well done!

I'm bad at poker, so I can't really give any useful criticism I'm afraid.

Excellently crafted. My only major gripe is that the process of figuring out the rules per ritual is pretty tedious, but that's science for you. I suppose the pass/fail windows on either side could have been made to accommodate more visible (without scroll) patterns since you're almost always going to exceed their size, but that's more a limitation of the art kit than anything else.

Bit late to answer you but yes uploading ports of your game to other platforms is allowed.

Neat game. Movement felt nice. Having a crosshair is really important - you mentioned you wanted an old school FPS style feel, but those old school FPSes either didn't have vertical movement with their look direction, or they learned very quickly that lacking a crosshair led to a really poor player experience.

I actively avoided health pickups when I could because hearing someone chewing what sounds like an apple right in my ear makes me want to murder everyone in my general vicinity. Some iframes after being hit would have been nice. If an enemy got in range to hit me once, they'd usually hit me three times in a row.

Okay, I'm about to fuss a bunch here, and I want to be clear it's because I was really, really into your game and got a bit frustrated that it suddenly fell apart at the end. Cool? Okay.

Let's consider the core gameplay loop presented: Gather resources, defend the tower, expand your vision to gather more resources, scale up exponentially.

Now let's look at your antagonistic elements: Enemies that spawn with no pattern (we do not want the player to predict where they will be), enemies make no noise until they're on the tower itself (we want the player to actively seek the ghosts, not react to them.)

In my experience the goals of your core loop and the goals of your obstacle loop were at odds with each other. I want to expand expand expand, which means the longer the game goes on the less time I want to be spending staring at my starting area. The longer the games goes on the more I want to be placing ever increasingly large numbers of gathering buildings and cleaning up the old ones, farther and farther to the edges of the map.

The conflict created between the two systems is a good one. Early game felt solid and even on into the mid game, I felt stretched thin but not unreasonably so - I was challenged. Unfortunately the conflict doesn't scale, which is very much what your game centers around. At some point my expansion went beyond whatever curve existed and suddenly one-clicking ghosts wasn't enough. There were constant ghosts every few seconds and I ended up in a scenario where I had time to pan the map, clear a single building or place one, then I had to rush back over to my tower to click down more baddies.

At that point the delicate balance you'd nailed fell apart and suddenly the game didn't want me playing it anymore. It wanted me at home, clicking ghosts, and nothing else.

You have some systems in place to help mitigate that issue. The reflection mechanic and the heal assist are both interesting choices systemically. It seems to me you very much wanted the player to be the only solution to attacking ghosts, so all the power-ups act in service of delaying the threat or recovering from it if the player wasn't in time. Obviously you COULD combine the two buildings mentioned before in large enough numbers to let the tower defend itself in a sort of berserker fashion, but there's one big obstacle preventing that; resource scarcity.

Resource nodes expiring was a really great way to encourage me to expand ever outward and constantly be looking for mines to clear and refresh. But that combined with how completely rare diamonds are made that a problematic mechanic. I spent the majority of my playtime where diamonds were a factor with only two or three nodes uncovered. It wasn't until way late in the game that I found a field of nine or ten so far away that it wasn't realistic that I would be able to set up a bunch of mines there and still have a tower to come back to.

Almost all of your mid to late upgrades falter because of this.

Those are the big observations I wanted to make. There are a few QoL things I could suggest - having a dialogue box to clear an exhausted building seems redundant when it could just clear itself away on click if it knows it's exhausted. Hotkeys for the basic harvesters would have been a good way to keep players out of menus and zipping around the map. Etc.

This game is a good game. It was ambitious for the time frame you had and you executed on it really well. The wandering music fit the flitty gameplay style well. The camera move speed felt good. Clicking things felt good.

I hope you come back after the jam and patch it up a bit. For the sea of text I've forced upon you, it honestly doesn't need much. Tweaking just one of the things I mentioned would very likely nudge everything else back into place. If you do, let me know so I can beat the darn thing!

Particles. Particles everywhere. And judicious use of shadowcasters. Basically just burn all your jam time doing level polish and fail to adequately tune the basics like player movement and you too can have a pretty game! lol

Thank you for the kind comments.

This game ran terribly on my machine for some reason. Super choppy. The loading time was pretty long, so maybe that contributed somehow?

Super cool idea. At first I was kinda meh about the notion, then I got like.. two bones, then three, then I was in it. At some point I wondered what the point of collecting bones was and then I decided I didn't care because flying around town as a spooky skeleton snek was reason enough on its own.

I think something killed me by hitting the part of my body that was offscreen or something though 'cause I just sorta randomly exploded and died.  Which is a shame, I was getting to be a very big skelesnek and enjoying that very much.

Cool idea! If you want to keep it as frantic as it is right now it would help if you could tell which souls were what enemy. As the maps get harder it's harder to keep track of them all and if you're any of the slower units you're not collecting them as soon as they die, so you have to sort through a bunch at the end of the round.

Great job finishing a game! That's a big hurdle to get over and you did it!

It looks like you didn't import your assets as pixel art in Godot. You can go to the import tab and choose the 2D Pixel preset to fix that blurriness. Take a look at this article for step by step instructions.

Good luck on your future projects!

Solid early presentation! The colliders were a little confusing compared to the visuals, but not a big deal considering that wasn't central to the gameplay.

I feel like the game falls apart when it gets to the battle minigames. It felt like I was expected to fail at least a portion of the minigames it presented (or you have way too high hopes for player skill), and that's a pretty unpleasant feeling. With the mess of stuff going on on-screen I got zero feedback on how the battle itself was going, whether I was winning or losing or how much damage I was doing or receiving, etc. If that information was available, it was lost in the sea of minigames.

I eventually had to close out because the minigames just kept coming and I wasn't sure if I was in some kind of broken loop or if the health pools were just suuuper big.

This was an ambitious project and in some ways I think you succeeded, but maybe lost sight of the forest for the trees. All of the minigames worked well, but they failed to service the greater metagame you had going on.

I'm honestly impressed with how much you managed to get done in this timeframe. I think with better playtesting and a round or two of revisions this could be a really great game.

(Also nice sprite animations! Those flags looked great.)

I had to quit playing because I need to rate more games. I did not want to quit playing. You win. The whole thing, you won it. This is genuinely fun and polished and good.

In all seriousness I struggle to give you useful feedback. You clearly know what you're doing and all my complaints are probably just consequences of a lack of time. Having hotkeys for the four battle options would have made the repetitious combat flow even more smoothly. It was not clear why I could sometimes recruit more people - whether I had somehow lost someone or the town naturally grew or what.

I'm bookmarking your Itch profile so I can enjoy some of your other work when I have time. Thank you for making this and congratulations.

I was watching your stream as you played and cringing so bad over making those platforms so narrow when you kept missing them. I kept thinking to myself "please don't quit, please don't quit." That experience was as instructive as it was difficult. I think you were more than kind with your words, thank you for the feedback. 

I think you achieved making exactly the game you wanted to make. That's really impressive for anyone, not even considering it's your first jam.

As others have mentioned, I had a lot of issues with the animation syncing. Eventually I realized the game was a lot easier if I actively ignored the top half and only watched the arrow line, which makes it playable, but kind of ruins the effect you were going for I imagine.

The gradual ramp up in speed was really unexpected, but felt pretty fair. I kept expecting to just die eventually but you got me to do the "flow state" thing indies always moon over and I just ended up knuckling under until the end. Made it out with 413 and all my hearts but half of one! I'm weirdly proud of that. Which I think says something about the inherent compelling nature of your game, flaws and all.

I hope you keep making more stuff in the future. Not all of the games are inherently engaging - their devs have to make them that way. And I think you did with this one.

Hitting ESC to recapture the cursor for me. I had to click in the game window for it to capture, which usually meant spending a wand ammunition. Having ammo on the fire wand felt superfluous anyway - it was so common it didn't really seem like there was a point to having it not be infinite.

The other wands felt pretty balanced, though, and I can see why you ammo gate them. Bonus point for procedural, gotta respect anybody who dances with that dragon on a time limit. The river of souls was a super solid touch and absolutely made me stop for a second to admire the ambiance. 

I kept getting caught on corners of walls if I tried turning while moving - dunno if the strafe speed is slowing than the forward speed or if there's a square collider on the player or what, something was up. Also kept getting snuck up on from behind by enemies because turning meant losing my sense of direction too easily and enemies make no noise until they attack. That also made them hard to hunt.

Smart choice with the bonfires though - that helped a bunch with navigation. And there's this weird sense of satisfaction at flipping one, like popping bubble wrap or something. If you continue working on this after the jam that interaction definitely deserves a little bit of juice to accentuate that small moment of fun.

In all, a bit rough around the edges but I had fun with my playthrough!

Literally the only criticism I have is that the game could get up to its spooky shenanigans slightly faster. I must have done like three circuits between all three wells before I got my first yokai. I would have dropped out then if I hadn't seen all the buzz about the title already.

And if my only problem with the game is that I didn't get to see it sooner, that's a pretty good problem to have.

A couple of tweaks could have made this go from good to great. The projectiles are SUPER readable, which is great 'cause you've got to be able to rapidly read the situation and respond in a twitch shooter like this. The enemies however are the same color as many other tiles on the map and the mages move slowly enough that they don't immediately stand out. I had to resort to firing vaguely in the general direction the blue flames were coming from because I couldn't take the time to pick out which tiny white pixels were the ones I was supposed to be shooting. I actually ran into a couple of mages that way.

Other than that, a competent little shooter. Solid jam entry.

This looks really solid and ALMOST feels great to play. It might just not be my genre of game, but I found having to manage that many keyboard presses alongside tight jump timings to be pretty intense (direction + dash + timing a color shift.) It would have probably felt a lot more natural on a controller.

The movement also felt kind of mismatched for the precision the levels required (which I know is basically the pot calling the kettle black considering my own game's problems.) Jumps almost always sent me flying farther than I wanted to go (or never quite far enough. Trying to land on the tops of those thin vertical walls was pretty janky.

I expected to just fall through platforms that didn't match my color, rather than them being "deadly". Kind of a minor complaint, but felt a little overly punishing.

Fussing aside, music fit well, aesthetics were spot on and generally lent themselves well to the game's vibe. And like I said, I have a feeling this just wasn't my kind of game. FWIW I also don't think I'd have a good time with Celeste, so if anything you're in pretty great company there.

Found a bug by the way. On the... fourth or fifth level? The one with the upside down cacti and exit door - I fell after making everything turn gold. My character didn't reset back to the top of the level like it had in previous levels and instead got stuck outside the world. I tried dashing repeatedly to get back up but I guess it was caught outside the map border's colliders or something. That level skip option was a really smart addition to deal with things like that. Great job!

I didn't have time to play with the platform friction, but I got a rudimentary coyote jump in. Several people had suggested it and your comment kinda pushed it over the edge for being a priority addition. Thank you for the feedback!

Thanks for the feedback! Can you clarify what you mean? Like holding the button for less time results in a shorter jump, or something else?