Super interesting and well-executed game. The combination of the fast paced (but strategic) combat of vampire survivors with the deck building of Slay the Spire is really really interesting. I would have said it wouldn't work well, but I think you've made it work and feel good. Nice work! I my only complaint is wanting more flavorful cards/builds that seem exciting.
obna
Creator of
Recent community posts
Love the visuals, character design, and sound design. Very complete and playable. Great work putting this together. I also like the concept that a dice roll will determine whether your strategy needs to be defensive or offensive.
To me it feels like the design of this game is in a tricky place between action gameplay and turn-based strategy gameplay, which is a cool idea, but very tricky to execute because action games are usually super fast paced and TBS games are usually slow and thinky. I'm sure it's possible to combine them, but it's just hard to do. Currently the gameplay of this game feels pretty random, not the dice part but the combat part. It feels like the enemy movement RNG is the thing that lets me succeed or fail, more than my strategy. I think it's also a little too easy to get a draw currently, so I can just wait until I get a good roll, have a bunch of shots, and I can spray them around. I'm sure good enemy UI is very hard to implement, but that's a big issue right now. Also, I wish the barriers felt more impactful.
I think shooting down 3 lanes is a good set up for some simple strategic puzzles, but I think this game needs some balancing and probably some more mechanics to really stand out.
Still, it's clear a lot of work went into this and it's very impressive.
This game is excellent. It features one of those great core mechanics that is simple, but that you can use in lots of creative ways. I love the art style, the general vibe, and the excellent puzzle designs. Here are some notes I made as I was playing.
- I wanted there to be more puzzles with just the core mechanic (before you introduce the purple-blocker mechanic). Even if they are trivial and easy. I want the opportunity to do a few "easy" puzzles that require 1 fold, 2 folds, 3 folds, before I have to be constrained and think really hard about where I can fold.
- The design of the purple-blockers feels a little chaotic, messy, and distracting. The rest of this game's elements are so simple, clear, and elegant. The design of the fold-blockers doesn't fit in.
- The platforming feels smooth and responsive, so why does dragging this block feel totally different, like from a totally different game? Is it a necessity because of the 3D sections later? Interacting with the block feels VERY clunky and annoying, so it would be worth doing some work to improve.
- I'm on a mac with a track pad and I currently can't figure out how to even access MMB. I'll dig up a mouse when I get home and play more, but I agree with the commenter below that MMB is not a great binding to rely on.
This puzzle was the best puzzle I've played in the jam so far. Fun to think about, fun to execute, lots of tricky steps.
Excellent work!
I really like the style of this game, the chunky text printing on the screen, the funny writing and images, the beaver theme. All of that is great. There was a lot I didn't understand like something about an AI? and Musk? but that kind of added to the weird fun.
This type of game can be tricky to balance, and I think the balance is OK right now. It's really hard to succeed on your first try and I think that's a good thing. That's way better than it being obvious and easy. but the bigger issue right now is mechanical clarity. I get there are some stats and I am trying to keep them all high enough to survive, but it's not clear which actions will affect which stats. I need to be able to make a plans, react to the conditions of my stats, but currently that's hard. And it feels like there is maybe some RNG that determines the outcomes of some events? Which is fine, but I'd like to know when I'm choosing something risky versus something reliable. It would also be good if I had a better sense of my goal.
Another thought I had is that some of the stats feel more compelling than others. The keeping your belly full stat is very compelling, but the...skill points stat didn't really make sense to me, so I wasn't really excited to improve it. Sanity and money are also pretty compelling, so I guess it's just skill points that I think need improving.
I genuinely had fun playing this. I felt like I was exploring a weird beaver world and fearing for my life. Great work!
Hey!! Kudos on getting this complex game up and running! I did 24 waves, so there is something grabby about your game for sure. I really like the idea of the elemental currencies and combining them in different ways. That's a cool unique idea!
Tower defense games really depend on balancing and design. BALANCE: Here the balance is a little too easy, so I don't really have to think about what I'm doing. I just put towers down and upgrade them a lot, and I can play for a long long time without ever losing any life. In a good tower defense game you should worry about dying in the first 5-10 waves. You should be forced to make a specific plan to deal with specific enemy type. Often there are suddenly a bunch of fast enemies that force you to slow them down. Something like that. DESIGN: There are a lot of things the player needs to understand in a tower defense game. What do all the towers and enemies do? What would strategic and non-strategic decisions look like? Currently I can't really tell in this game. I can't really tell what the different towers do, if they have different ranges, different effects, so I don't know why one would be better in one place or another. I don't know how the different enemies are strong or weak. In a game like this I need all that info so I can make a plan. Currently the clearest tower is the magma tower, because I can see exactly which tiles it affects and when. Its range and attack frequency are very clear, though I'm not exactly sure about its effect. Damage + Slow??
Another important issue here is that upgrading currently feels totally unrewarding. Mostly I don't see anything different and I can't even see damage numbers go up. I want to see those towers get bigger and badder! Instead of having lots of cheap upgrade levels, you should consider having just a few (3-10) , but upgrades that cost a lot more, so when I make an upgrade it feels big and meaningful. I should be saving up, and hoping to upgrade a tower just in time to save the day.
Have you played the Kingdom Rush tower defense games? I think those are some of the best ever made and worth checking out.
Nice work on this! I hope you keep working on it!
Cheers! Happy to see a game I played and liked from GMTK in the PJJ!
The movement feels much improved in this version. It's still a challenging movement system, but since it's more controllable now, it's more fun and less frustrating. I think it could still be balanced to be a tiny bit more forgiving, but I'm not a big skill game person. In this version I started to see how different arrangements of blocks were little jumping puzzles that I actually had to think about and which were really satisfying to solve. You've done a great job creating moments similar to Getting Over It where you make a mistake and fall all the way to the bottom, which is a cool level design trick. I also think the resizable ice blocks is a cool mechanic and could be used in interesting ways.
At first, I didn't understand the instructions and thought I could resize myself, and then I couldn't tell the difference between the resizable blocks and other blocks. Eventually I understood. The biggest struggle I had was with camera movement messing up my dragging, which did feel frustrating when I was trying to make a very precise jump.
Nice work! Hope you keep working on it.
Wow, easily one of my top 5 from this jam! The nested scaling is the best i've seen in the jam, and I love that you can see meaningful things in the smaller layers. The mechanic of finding smaller and bigger keys is delightful. The whole experience is designed and balanced really beautifully. Awesome Job!
I love factory games and I love the idea of code factory. The art assets in this game took great! After reading the tutorial several times and trying to build things with the game's components, I could not understand what was happening in this game. I could not understand what my goal was nor could I understand what I was supposed to do to achieve it. I can tell there is a lot here! Nice work on getting this up and running!
Loved this game. Easily one of my top 5 from the whole jam. It's great response to the theme, and does a beautiful job of giving an ant's-eye-view of a picnic. Eating fruit was very satisfying and I loved that you can crawl beneath the table like an ant would. Wonderful. I had a hard time understanding what the larger goal I was meant to accomplish was, but I had a great time anyway. Awesome job!
I love the concept for this game and I'm sure it took A LOT to get it up and running! It looks great and I love the moments when people are mad at you. It's clever that you use text to describe all the magical scaling, because that allows you to do much more than if you had to make art for all those scenarios. The big issue that holds the gameplay back for me is that it doesn't really feel fair. When someone wants a "big" mushroom, there is often no way of knowing which of the two big mushrooms will be correct. There has to be some way I learn which is right for which situations, but currently it doesn't feel like I can. Still a very cool game!
Nice work on this little platformer! I really like the idea that different foods would affect your size and your size is the key mechanic. It took me a while to understand that that was what was happening. I ate foods completely without thinking and I made it to the very end. I think your level design should force me to understand the mechanic and use it to my advantage, but currently I can just eat things at random and still be fine. Interesting and very playable game!
Very fun beach cleanup game! I love the feeling of scaling up the school of fish, though I expected that it would happen more gradually. I thought cleaning up the trash and watching it disappear was very satisfying, but the mechanics of pushing were very challenging and could use some tuning. Overall a good experience and a very complete game. Nice work on this!
This is a great looking game and I love the way you emphasize time scale along with distance scale. I had a hard time playing for more than 1 min, because my fuel would start depleting so quickly it felt like nothing I could do. I also wished that I had a destination of some kind so I could have a goal to work toward beyond just staying alive. Still a very playable game! Great work!
A fun experience of wall running, jumping, and exploring a 3D environment. You built a lot of mechanics for this game, which is really impressive. For me, some of them still felt like they needed tuning, because even the tutorial area was challenging for me. Still, it felt very complete and playable. Nice work!
Best response to the scaling theme I've seen in the Jam so far, and probably my #1 game of the Jam. The weird and playful world and the unique scrolling mechanic make me really feel like I'm exploring. They make this feel like much more than a point and click adventure. This game also creates really funny surprises with the scrolling too. 5*5*5*.This is a Masterful game and deserves the top 20.
Super fun, well-executed game, with a STORY MODE? Ya'll outdid yourselves. I love the Tower of Babel theming. I also went for a mythological theme. The enemies speaking in different languages is a fun touch. The way the physics work, it's hard to feel like I'm "building" and it feels more like I am "piling". That could use some tuning. Still super fun and playable game!!
Very fun, very complete little game! You've done a good job of creating a quick refresh, run-based game where I fail fast and try again almost instantly. That can be hard to get right, but you've made it really fun. The movement could use some tuning here and there, because I kept getting stuck and it took a while to figure out how to get unstuck, but overall it's very playable and responsive. Nice work!
This game is great! Easily one of the best games from an art perspective that I've seen in the Jam. Very successful simple story framing and a really funny progression from eating food to eating parts of the office environment. I was excited for another phase of eating even larger things, but I expect you ran out of time like all of us. Excellent job!
One of my favorite games of the Jam so far. A puzzle game by someone who really knows puzzle game design. A very simple mechanic, a great response to the theme, and it's implemented very creatively across lots of puzzles. Your auto-walking approach is similar to the one in my game, but your game feels more lively and faster paced. Excellent game.
This is probably the best, most fun implementation a mechanic I've seen a lot in this jam: scale your character and that will affect weight and jumping height. You have tuned these mechanics in a way that feels flexible and playful, and created levels that are tricky without being frustrating. Excellent work!