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Nicely done! Just like last year I'm a big fan of how you've made the game feel like a relatively complete experience with a lot of content considering the jam time. 

I played through all levels with different loadouts. I think that the main thing that would improve the experience for me would be better weapon balancing and making it generally harder, but I'm guessing that this has to do with the limited time available. 

The varied win conditions are a nice touch and my favorite part of it has got to be the chunky pixel aesthetic! Fun game! 

Thanks! I'm happy that you enjoyed it :) I suppose the recoil mechanic is now mandatory for a potential sequel, since it's been featured in both games. Difficulty was harder to tune in this one due to the randomness, but it could use some tuning for sure.  Thanks for playing! 

I'm still not sure I fully grasp the mechanics, but I did manage to fling things at the mech and do some damage! 

The game is very hard though, mainly due to the throwing mechanic. I think if the throwing were improved it would be much easier to get into it properly, there seems to be some interesting build options that I never really got to explore since I got stuck at the basics of throwing.

Certainly a unique an interesting concept!

I liked how this game immediately gets you invested with the 'protect your family and farm'-setting. It felt a bit sudden to be thrown straight in with a ticking clock though. I mildly panicked and tried to buy turrets (though I didn't have the money for that obviously) while also struggling to figure out how to control things.

Once I got the hang of the patterns, navigation and mechanics it became enjoyable. I really appreciated the anticipation of seeing strange creatures approaching on the horizon, it really added to the atmosphere of the game. More varied defenses, enemy behaviors and a bit more resources to spend every round would make it even more engaging.

All in all I enjoyed it! Nice! 

This game surprised me with how immersive if felt despite the lack of visuals (or perhaps because of the lack of visuals?). There is clearly a lot of potential in this type of experience.

To actually play the game properly I think I'd need more help. I could hear the sounds, which were all great, but their meaning was unclear to me. I didn't know which sounds were indicative of the beacon, rocks, etc, which made it hard to make meaningful progress. 

Another small issue is that I could not access the manual through the ' ? '-key.  On non-american keyboards that character may be merged with others, requiring the SHIFT-key to access, which in this case just caused the game to mock me for shooting at rocks instead :) . It seems like you allow remapping, but consider changing it to some other key by default, such as 'H', which would be available to everyone regardless of keyboard layout. 

Nice work, this game might be the most unique experience I've had so far in this years jam!   

6 hours? That's very impressive! 

I had fun with this one, it's simple and effective with a lot of retro charm. Nicely done!

This is one of my favorites so far! I love that you've considered the whole experience, from title-screen to tutorial, game and credits. Music and sounds are great, difficulty feels right, there's humor and the the world feels alive! 

I did fall into some bottomless pits that I wished were easier to identify and I wished it was longer, but over all this was a great little game/demo. I hope you expand upon it! 

Also best 'credits'-scene I've seen in a long while :) Nice work!  

Cool! this game was really hard, I only managed the first few levels in 100 tries/lives.

It's very nice that the game loop is so fast. The instant reset was jarring at first, but I started really appreciating it  after the first 20 deaths or so, and it really creates that "juuust one more try!"-feeling that I think is crucial for games of this kind.

I think that the game would benefit from a slower learning curve. What made me stop playing was the frustration from finally making it though a tricky bit and then instantly dying, followed by the realization that I would have to get through that same bit again only for the same thing to happen, again. So starting easier, with more save points/shorter levels, would make the game more suited to players like me. 

That being said, I can totally see how the right player will get hooked on this! it really has that "..one more try!" quality to it :) 

I love that eerie feeling of the mech floating around in unexplored space in the beginning. The sounds and the ever decreasing fuel add a lot to that feeling as well. I think the shooting segments would benefit from a bit more responsive controls and stronger feedback for when player/enemies get hit. 

All in all this is a cool game concept and I'd love to see the exploration side expanded upon. It is definitely my favorite bit of the game!   

An impressive amount of world-building on display here, especially considering the short jam time. You can tell that a lot of love was put into both characters, environments and sound design. Nice!

It's super satisfying to blow up the turrets! Very nice! 

I must admit that I struggled a bit with the sensitive  mouse-turning and would have loved a bit more of a smooth movement. More than once I felt that the main reason I died was because turrets dropped all around me and I were unable to turn in their direction in time.

Other than that though I really liked it, especially the sound design which is great! It also felt great to blast the enemy shot out of the air before they reached me! 

Nicely done! 

Fun game! I tried it a few times and eventually got all the way to the end. Once I realized that the best strategy was to sprint and stop strategically, it became a lot more fun in some kind of platformer/worms-hybrid kind of way.  I think you should lean into this and make cards that enhance movement/traversal and cover mechanics! 

It would also be very nice to get a better sense of if I will be damaged by my own explosives, the grenades got me more than once :D  

Neat game! There's some really interesting ideas here that I think you should explore further. I really like the complex pattern that can emerge from the simple rules, it reminded me of cellular automata. Obviously some animation/sound/feedback would elevate the experience, but overall I think you have a unique and interesting gameplay mechanic here.

Thank you so much! 

Yes, much of what you describe are things I also wish the game had. Whenever I make games like this one there is always the desire to add more levels in, especially since that is very easy to do once the tools/systems are done, but I try to limit myself so that each level either teaches the player something new or uses the game elements in new interesting ways. In this particular case I felt that the current enemies/obstacles could not support much more than 16 levels. If there had been time to add more enemies, weapons, etc. then it would make sense to make more (and harder) levels.

It's interesting that you mention Into The Breach (one of my absolute favorites!) since that game does a much better job telegraphing the enemy actions, which removes any doubt of what will happen during the turn. I think that generally that is a better way to do it, since it encourages deliberate action by the player. Any randomness in that game is resolved before the player acts. 

Blastingbot 2 has a fair bit of output randomness, since you're never sure of the enemy movements.  This makes for tense and funny moments, but goes a bit against the spirit of puzzle games and limits the planning you can do. It was interesting to explore, but I'll probably handle it differently the next time around.

Thank you so much for the feedback!

Thank you so much for playing it! I'm glad you found it enjoyable :) 

Thanks for playing and for the feedback! 

I found the difficulty relatively hard to control, partly due to the semi-random enemy movements that introduces a lot of variation in difficulty. Puzzle games are also really tricky to get right without user testing, which I did not find the time for during the jam. So I'm sure that you're right in that it will be too easy for a lot of players.

The knock-back from the blast is actually pretty critical for the game to work. There needs to be some kind of cost associated with blasting, otherwise you can just blast every other move and inch your way across the screen safely. Since the goal is to move forward, having the blast knock you back two steps makes it costly to use. 

Moving only forward is also kind of nice in that you can (mostly) ignore what happens behind the player, so the extremely limited screenspace can instead be used to show what is ahead of the player. 

Thanks for playing! I'm happy that it feels like a worthy sequel :)  

That's so nice to hear! Thanks for playing! 

Thank you so much for playing! I'm particularly relieved you liked the music,  since that's an aspect of my work that I'm trying to improve on.

Thanks a bunch, that's really lovely to hear! 

Pico-8 is such a great place to try out ideas and it's super satisfying to make a complete game in it, even if it's small with limited scope. 

Thanks for playing! You're right that it deviates from the first game in that it has a lot more 'dynamic' puzzles (e.g. the map plays out differently every try). That comes with some advantages and some disadvantages, namely more replayability and solving through guesswork, but also much harder to design clear puzzles and to control difficulty.

Thank you for playing it! I spent quite a bit of time on trying to get the 'blast' punchy and satisfying without being annoying, so I'm glad that you noticed!

Thanks! I'm glad you liked it!

Thanks! Pico-8 is great, I highly recommend it. It's perfect for game jams thanks to the limitations that it imposes. 

Thanks! :) 

Thanks for playing! I'm glad you liked it!

Thank you! I'm glad you like it! 

I can't take credit for the on-screen control though, since those are part of the HTML-5 export from PICO-8, so any PICO-8 game should have them when played in a browser. It's a nice little thing, especially for slow paced games.

Thanks a bunch for playing!

Thank you for playing! I was hoping that the quick resetting and short levels would allow people to experiment their way towards the solution, so I'm happy that it seems to work!

Thank you! And thanks again for organizing the jam!

No worries! For what it's worth I think it would be a great idea to also ask people about the game engine when games are submitted in upcoming mechjams. It's a great way to find out about things - I had not heard about Corgi Engine before you mentioned it for example :) 

I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean by "if you can't do the programming yourself feels like it should be mentioned". PICO-8 provides a code editor where you write everything relating to the game from almost nothing in a subset of LUA, so it's all programming. 

As a 'game engine' it only provides the ability to draw basic shapes like rectangles and circles (using code) as well as referencing locations in a sprite sheet and playing sound effects you compose yourself. Compared to some of the big game engines like Godot or Unity, Pico-8 (intentionally) provides way less in terms of out-of-the-box  functionality. You can see the API here if you are curious: https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/APIReference . If you want something as basic as a start screen that transitions nicely to the game, you'll have to program the state machine that handles that yourself.

I checked out some of the other entries in the jam, and none of them seems to list the game engine as an 'asset'. The game page also already clearly states that it was made with Pico-8 under the 'Made with' label.

Glad you like it! Hopefully the difficulty curve is reasonable, it's a bit hard to judge how tricky puzzles are when you're the one making them.

I tried to make resetting the level super quick and simple (with [X] ) so that it would be as easy as possible to experiment towards solutions.

Thanks for playing! 

Thanks! I aimed for a small but 'complete' game, so I'm glad you found it polished.

Thank you for playing it!

It's made in PICO-8, which imposes similar limitations to TIC-80. So this game was limited to a display resolution of 128 by 128 px, 16 colors, 8192 "tokens" and a maximum of 32kb of total data. To make it a bit friendlier to work with I use VisualStudio as an external code editor and Aseprite for sprite editing, but it all gets imported into PICO-8 which effectively works as a game engine with additional restrictions on top. Music and sounds were composed using the tools inside PICO-8, which are actually really great!  

Thank you so much!  I'm glad you enjoyed it and found the difficulty curve appropriate, it was one of my biggest worries since I did not have the time for proper playtesting. 

Really fun little mechman (pac-mech?) game! stomping the little innocent bystanders felt so so wrong and still very fun. Like other commenters my main gripe is with getting stuck, but all in all it did not impact my enjoyment of the game that much. 

Nice work! 

Thanks for playing it! I'm a fan of your youtube gamedev videos by the way, ever since the last mechjam, great stuff!

Very cool! This was one of the games that I played the longest in the jam, I very much enjoyed it! 

I got all the way up to lv 17 when the last enemy thought it would be a good idea to escape away over the ocean. I tried to hunt them down and managed to fly to a different island, which was a cool, but I never caught the enemy..

The art style is neat, but it would be even better with some stronger visual impact of the rockets and bullets. It's very satisfying to take down a whole cloud of bots with a missile and it would be even better with some debris and extra explosions. The upgrade system is very effective and satisfying as well.

Nicely done, I really like this one!

Glad you liked it, and that the whole gradual introduction of mechanics seems to work! Thanks! 

Very solid jam submisssion! I had a blast hunting down the enemies and trying out all the guns. There is clearly an ambitious game being made here and I hope you keep working on it. My favorite part was the responiveness of hitting enemies, with the hit counters and effects it felt very tactile.

I wished the player mech moved a bit faster/was more agile, but that's just a small detail in an otherwise fun experience! Nicely done!