itch.io

I found a .txt file online that was supposedly similar to a Scrabble dictionary, put each word into a hash set when the app boots up, then check each word when you try to type it!

If you know Python, all the source code is available online on my Github. Here’s the script that checks for valid words: word_manager.py

Glad to hear you enjoyed it! Unfortunately I’m not planning on developing this any further now that Ludum Dare is over — but the source code is on Github with an MIT license, so anyone with a little bit of Python experience would be able to modify it pretty easily!

Oops, forgot to link it when making the page! It’s linked now, just expand More Information -> Links -> Ludum Dare.

Looks like that happens when you win the floating point math lottery by having the enemies bump the player or the phone table in exactly the wrong way.

The correct way to code it would be to check for zero here… but not doing that is faster which was important when I was making this game for a 48-hour jam.

Not planning on making any updates to the game at this point, but good catch, and I appreciate reporting the stack trace!

Had a lot of fun last time, and have just been waiting for the right game idea to try it again.

Thanks for playing, glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks for playing!

Performance is a really big concern for pygbag, but if your game is simple it might not be too bad. I had to do a bunch of performance optimizations to get this to work (notice how the download has a vignette effect on it, but the web version doesn’t). The audio might be finicky as well.

Glad you liked it! Had a lot of fun making this one.

Thanks for playing!

As others have said, the UI had some issues, especially in full screen.

Overall, there were some really clever puzzles and a fun twist on the theme. Some of the precise movements were difficult with the racecar-style movement controls. And it might have been nice to use a higher-contrast color for the lasers, which sometimes blended into the floor (particularly when they were exactly on the border of two tiles).

Impressive number and variety of levels for a game jam entry. Nice work for 48 hours!

This was really neat! Biggest complaint is the lack of a save/checkpoint system, especially since it takes a long time to move around and progress. It was interesting trying to count the enemies to see whether you should stand your ground, or just let your host be killed and have someone else pick up the sword.

Graphics are nice, especially the satisfying thwack when you hit someone with the sword.

Nice work for 48 hours!

Neat entry!

The combat was a little janky, but it was cool that you managed to put in multiple types of enemies and let the player use all their attacks. It would be nice if there were more visual ways to see hit points for you and for the enemies, rather than a number for HP.

The little bits of humor injected throughout gave it a lot of charm.

Nice work for 48 hours!

“Crashes when you win” is exactly the kind of odd quirks I love to see in game jam entries.

Game was really cute and a nice homage to duck hunt. I appreciate the fact you had pickups and multiple targets to dodge, which made it a bit more dynamic. I loved the duck’s flying animation and the fact it can rotate upside-down.

Nice work for 48 hours!

Awesome entry! The puzzles were really well-designed, but often had funny alternate solutions because of the yarn physics. The graphics are charming and polished. Great work for 48 hours!

Nice entry! The graphics and atmosphere were really interesting and well done for a game jam entry. There wasn’t a whole lot to the gameplay, but obviously only so much work can be done in 48 hours and you certainly nailed the visuals.

Thanks for making this!

Always love seeing PyGame representation!

Really nice entry. The controls and UI were all really smooth, and there was a large variety of tasks. I particularly liked running the elevator up and down and the light puzzle.

As others have said, the difficulty ramps up pretty quick (and I lost very soon). That said, for a game jam, balancing a little difficult might be a good idea rather than scaling up slowly and risking players getting bored.

Great work for 48 hours!

Awesome entry!

The art and UI feel very faithful to the original duck hunt. The controls are smooth and the sound was done well too.

My one gripe is that the enemy AI was a bit inconsistent; it was generally avoidable, but on occasion it would beeline the duck and shoot you before you could realistically do anything about it.

Awesome idea and great work for 48 hours!

First of all, I love the concept, art, and environment. The idea of a guide dog repeatedly slamming their owner into obstacles is a funny take on the theme.

As others have said, the controls and camera work can be a bit wonky. I think this is a situation where keyboard controls might have worked better than mouse if you’re only controlling left/right. Once I started to get the hang of it it was really fun messing with the physics, especially if you can get a tight turn to swing into something.

Overall, nice work for 48 hours!

Yes, the sound guy did a great job with all the gurgling alien sounds. Thanks for playing!

Thanks for playing! I agree the artist did a great job!

I enjoyed your entry a lot, thanks for circling back to play ours!

There are five stages. You actually “win” by losing each level, with a final score based on how many times you killed the hero. We were really rushing the balancing/playtesting phase at the end, so the pacing may be a bit off.

Thanks for playing!

Neat entry!

I loved the atmosphere, fish animation, and overall presentation. The UI and transitions were all really nice and polished.

As others have said, the controls are a little funky. I think a big part of it is that the camera lags behind the movement; so if you do a sharp turn, there’s a period of time you can’t see where you’re going until the camera movement catches up. It was also sometimes difficult to gauge the depth of the pickups, but the radius on them was generous enough I never missed one I thought I should hit.

Great work for 48 hours!

That was a “cheat code” for testing the game that I decided to leave in. It’s even mentioned in the README.txt if you download the Windows build.

Not planning on patching it out. :)

Oof, thanks for playing and good find!

The game was created in two days, so I’m not at all surprised some bugs slipped through.

Thanks for playing!

Hey, a couple questions that might help narrow the issue down!

• Are you running the game in browser or from the Windows build?
• Does the crash seem to occur at random or at particular times?
• Are you getting lag/low frame rate?

Hey look — this floor was generated procedurally!

As always, your games are extremely polished and impressively scoped for the length of the jam. There were a lot of items, stats, and enemies that felt pretty distinct (although some of the equipment bled together, especially at higher rarities where everything became a stat pile).

The seed mechanic was neat, and made you choose between keeping your letters around as equipment or using them as a word. The choice became a little tedious in the late game, since you could almost always spell a 10-15 letter word, but you had to puzzle over it with your fifty letters and use the drag-and-drop interface. It would have been nice if you could convert the chaff into wild cards or something else to clear up space and make use of large numbers of duplicate letters.

Like any good roguelike, there seemed to be certain lucky items that let you get a crazy lead early on. I got a broadsword — and upgraded it twice to Legendary — which turned my dual-wield pump-actions into an instant death button. There were other distinct and enticing strategies as well, like building for magic and movement speed.

The worst part about the entry is the endgame. Once you have all Mythic equipment, it slowly becomes more and more tedious as the enemy health scales and you stop getting stronger. By the end, both you and the enemies are very tanky, and it takes several seconds of continuous shooting to kill even the weakest enemies (and even with the broken broadsword build). I kept a scroll of teleportation in my inventory as a panic button and used it a few times if enemies trapped me against a corner or something. It might be an improvement if enemy damage scaled more and health scaled less, so that the gameplay never turns into a pillow fight.

(Side note, if your HP goes to zero while teleporting to spawn, the “Game Over” screen appears but you don’t die! My last couple floors I just played through the game over screen after having panic-used a teleport spell and put the game in a weird state.)

In terms of roguelike-ness, it’s obviously deviating from the “classic roguelike” formula by being real-time and not grid-based. However, you still keep the spirit with the items and interactions, high-res ASCII graphics, and little tropes like the ability to kill a shopkeeper and take their stuff.

Great work for one person and one week!

Unfortunately, I’m not able to make a Mac version myself with pyinstaller.

However, if you’re comfortable running from source, the directions should be pretty similar to the Linux directions on the Github!

Unfortunately, you can’t. The game was programmed in 48 hours so I didn’t have time to account for resolutions other than 1920x1080.

Unless you’re talking about the cards going off the bottom edge of the screen, in which case that’s just how they look until you hover over them!

It might depend on what Python libraries you have installed on your Python instance. If you have numpy, scipy, etc., they can get pretty big! If it’s just pygame it’s usually manageable.

There’s a way to exclude specific libraries in the pyinstaller config file, or you can set up a fresh Python environment through virtualenv or similar.

Hope that helps!

Hm, not familiar with the Itch.io app… but I did realize that the executable was not originally tagged as for Windows. Perhaps that fixed it?

Thanks for the detailed feedback!

Agree that the biggest shortcoming is the lack of a tutorial. We went back and forth on some mechanics up until the last day, and were only able to work for two of the three days, so we just didn’t have enough time to put it in. Instead we just gave the first few customers very long timers and hoped the UI was good enough to orient yourself after a little while.

That’s a good point about the placement of the categories… definitely should have put them in the same positions (left to right) as the triangle! Sometimes the most obvious things only become obvious after the jam has ended.

Sorry about the window size, game jams are not forgiving with time and deadlines and my graphics library is not as trivial to deal with this as Unity, etc.

Thanks for playing!

Thanks for playing! The theme implementation was the robo-chef who throws in an ingredient at the start of each customer’s order. Certainly not a very sophisticated AI, but you do have to collaborate with him.

The artist and sound designer did some great work considering we were only able to work two out of the three days! Glad you enjoyed it.

My understanding is that you have to use LootLocker to be placed in the top three games.

The top 3 winning games are required to implement Lootlocker leaderboards to ensure score accuracy.

But it looks like from the API documentation you can just directly call into the API with POST/GET. Any engine should be able to do this; I’m tempted to try to do it with Python/PyGame.

Nice entry!

The concept was interesting for sure. Unlike normal shooter games, there’s actually a potential downside to just firing randomly, since the stuns are often what kills you (on the other hand, the multipliers are really important as well). An interesting side effect is that dice that are rolling in a way where a 6 is possible will also show a 1 side.

The sound effects and music weren’t made for the jam, but you chose great ones. Gave a very goofy but hectic feel.

I do think the projectile speed for the player could be quite a bit faster. Especially because timing is so important in what you’re shooting, making less guesswork for the player would be really helpful (as well as making it easier to hit enemies as they start moving faster). As a rule of thumb I usually make bullets very fast, on the order of around 5-10x the player movement speed, unless it’s something like a rocket or grenade launcher that moves slow and hits hard.

Nice title! Love the wordplay (no bias here…).

Graphics are simple but you definitely made the most out of them with the shading, colors, and particle effects.

Well done for 48 hours!

Nice entry!

Loved the little details like screen shake and the variety of power-ups you included. Unfortunately didn’t have anyone to play against, but had fun tossing it back and forth with myself!

I will say that an important part of the strategy in Pong is that the position you hit the ball on your paddle matters; hitting a ball with one side of your paddle will send the ball in that direction, rather than just bouncing off the same everywhere. Adding this feature in would have added a lot of strategy since you could aim at particular power-ups or try to score on your opponent more easily.

Nice work for 48 hours!

Spooky!

The giant explosions were really satisfying. Especially since the spiders went flying when they were hit. Gameplay was pretty basic, but hey, 48 hours is not a lot of time.

Some kind of reloading indicator would have been nice, rather than spamming shoot until it worked. It was also a little annoying that the dice sometimes traveled farther/took longer to explode based on I assume how the physics worked.

Thanks for adding credits to all the external assets within the game! A lot of people don’t do this, but I’m sure the people who created the assets really appreciate it.

Nice work!

Glad to hear my previous comment was helpful!

I’ve been thinking about just taking them out and replacing with a similar type of attacking

I’m not entirely sure what you’re saying. Taking out the melee classes and replace them with classes more similar to the ranged ones?

I personally really enjoyed the melee classes. Or at least enjoyed the fact there were ranged and melee classes and they behaved so differently since it adds a lot to the replay value.

Or are you describing giving a melee-type attack to all classes, including ranged ones?

This could be more interesting, but I still think my gut instinct is that dedicated melee classes are more fun.

Random thought, if you want to spice up the regular gameplay with more abilities on the base spacecraft, you could do something like a “special” attack with a cooldown that differs by class (e.g. throws a bomb, triples fire rate for a few seconds, makes a black hole that bunches the enemies together).

Have a lot of feedback for this one! I actually quite enjoyed this, so don’t take it as me railing on the game, but there were a lot of small low-hanging fruit for improvement. And sounds like you’re working on a post-jam, so hope some of it is helpful!

The game has a really satisfying core loop of killing enemies, collecting their juice, and spending it on neat upgrades to get progressively more powerful. The upgrades were varied, and behaved differently for ranged and melee ships, so there was a lot of variety.

I do think more variety in enemy design could help here though; most of the enemies were relatively weak, but came in large numbers, so the best builds were almost always more bullets, more pierce, and more AoE. A few enemy types that were big tanks could incentivize single-target damage more, or some enemies with shields on one side that can only be attacked from the back to incentivize maneuverability, or enemies that move fast and hit hard but are squishy to add variety.

I do think in general your bullets could travel a lot faster. Slow-moving projectiles rarely make that much of a mechanical difference, but feel a lot worse to play with, especially if your ship moves close to the speed of their projectiles (it looks like you had some randomness to projectile speed, but I could definitely race the lowest rolls there with my ship). Can’t recommend enough watching The Art of Screenshake which is definitely the most impactful 45 minutes of education in my entire time making games. Feel free to also look at how the faster projectile speed in my entry makes the weapons feel.

Here’s a list of other (relatively minor) things that would be really quick to fix but help a lot:

• Make the shop wait until the end of a dash to appear, or keep dash velocity. When dashing, you’re almost always collecting XP in the middle of a horde of enemies, and it feels bad when you level up and it cancels your dash and strands you in the middle to take a bunch of damage.
• Prevent getting duplicate upgrades on the upgrade screen
• Make the damage indicators for enemies drift up a little, or move in a random direction, or appear in a slightly random position. As-is it’s hard to tell whether you land one or multiple hits since the indicators are on top of each other.
• Add an indicator for dash/projectile radius, like a glow or particle effect. This makes it easier to get used to the spacing of it without having to experiment nearby enemies.
• Add more obvious visuals for dashing. Especially with the brawler, it was hard to tell when the dash was over and thus hard to gauge the distance of the dash. Adding an effect or change of color would help a lot. The guardian felt a lot better in this regard, since the speed boost was more obvious.
• Add more obvious visuals for taking damage. Especially for melee ships, it was sometimes hard to tell whether you took damage, or if you mis-spaced and took a little at the end of the dash. You might consider screenshake, flashing, particle effects, etc. You could even make the player take a lot more damage, but explode, killing nearby enemies and giving a bit of breathing room to escape.
• A nice-to-have would be a comparison of your current stats when taking upgrades. Saying “1 extra dash distance” is a lot less informative if you don’t know what your current stat is. Adding one to two is a big increase! Adding one to nine is less impactful.

I’ll also say that for a game jam game, I would make the extra characters more easy to unlock, or make it more obvious what the requirements are to unlock them. I would have loved to experiment with all of them to give more detailed feedback, but wasn’t sure what I needed to do (more play time? More games? More total enemies killed?). I would also generally only expect players to play your game for between 5 and 20 minutes and balance unlocks accordingly. I only ended up playing with generalist, brawler, and guardian. On a similar note, it would be nice if the runs took less time or scaled up more quickly in difficulty; all my runs ended because it felt like the difficulty stagnated, so I intentionally died to try a run with a new character.

Again, had a great time with the game, and most of these are minor details that might push the game to the next level. Great work on this in 48 hours, and would love to check out the post-jam version if you end up completing one!