itch.io

molleindustria is the OG, you're in real indie land now

great game! (as always, you've pushed the boundaries and advanced our medium, thank you!)

Because there is very little content and no table progression (unlock x to unlock y to get multiball etc) -- I am relying on that difficulty to keep the game from feeling boring in the first 10 seconds :)

If I keep plugging away at this or if I make any more pinball games, I do hope to improve the feel of ball control as a top priority. Thank you again for taking time to give feedback, much appreciated!

it seems the engine only supports a single shift key, but I've added it anyway, it will just control both paddles with either key.

also added z x c and m , . as left and right paddle controls. / seems to be a browser hotkey shortcut for me, so I did not include it.

thanks for playing and the feedback!

A fantastic tool that I should have been using for years. Thanks for your contributions! sfxr, bfxr, and this have all been amazing for indie devs!

Thank you and thanks for making the game! I think the art style, the encouraging "you can do it!" starting text, the bubbles, the retro checkerboard, the sun "thinking" about the next word -- it's all great. I hope you continue to make these games and many people can have this experience from them. Learning is always fun, but to hit the right ratio of learning and gameplay is magic :)

Just completed my first English level! I will continue to return to this game many times in the future! It is a great way to learn something fun and new that usually feels inaccessible. This is a great idea and game.

Because it is multiple choice and because there is of course a universal "human logic" to the symbols on some level, it is possible to guess correctly -- sometimes even on the first try! I feel very good when I get it on the first try :)



EDIT FOR VICTORY:

I love this! I have no exposure to kanji or any written japanese, so the English mode is fun just guessing based on the pictograms and what "would make sense."

Really amazing educational game and I love the little text encouragements! Thank you for making this!

Your animation is fantastic! I can tell you love the classics, how long has this game been in development for so much artwork?

I appreciate that feedback! For me it was a way to make an impression or stand out without too much effort as a solo builder. It is certainly not high art, despite the soundtrack.

I'm happy with how it turned out though. The fact that it felt too gory means I conveyed the ideas pretty well since at the end of the day its just some colorful pixels and a little physics.

There's a danger in asking me for feedback :D

Whatever you end up doing with it, I think it's good work and I wish you luck on your future endeavors!

I really enjoyed this, I wish maybe there was some small minigame interactions that were unique between the different tasks but the concept is strong and I understand why you went with "mash on keyboard" for a one size fits all. Would be fun to scribble for art at least :)

But overall this is just extremely clever and feels great and everyone who plays can relate to the experience it's conveying. Loved the notepad text and code jokes as well.

You know, there's a billion trillion platformers out there. People have made every platformer you can think of -- and yet, very few (none that I know of) feature elaborate enemy AI like this. I think there's like a whole genre buried in here. You may be onto something kind of huge. If you just roll it back to a just a normal hero story platformer but have enemies with this complex of behavior routines, it quickly becomes something very unique -- especially if there's lots of enemies with different behaviors.

Very cool. Gets my gears turning :)

🍻,👑

I agree it can be less janky, I was thinking about how to make something semi-frustrating that might be interesting to watch someone play on youtube -- but that shouldn't be an excuse for it being quite so difficult and janky.

I'm going to try to refine it a bit more. Thank you for the art compliment, and for checking it out!

most unity web games feel sluggish to me, and this obviously is not sluggish. I don't know what you did, but I love how fast the dude bounces.

cheers mate, games are for fun :D

For some more interactions, maybe instead of sending "waves" that generate their intial positions off-screen randomly, maybe you could draw a line or something and units spawn along that line. I like the way it looks and feels aesthetically, I think maybe it just needs some more interaction. If not line-drawing to spawn enemies, maybe placing some deployables or something, traps, turrets, etc.

mockup attached for "line drawing mechanic" hopefully it's self-explanatory.

Feels great in firefox! I get a better sense of the game now that shooting and jumping work. I think this is a really strong basis to build something on, I can tell you're putting energy into the details which is where all the magic happens. Great stuff!

I didn't get very far, but I did explore, and I started creating my own lore. 

I'm not sure how to feel about your game, but I felt something :D

but now I found your game from this game, so the karmic circle of games continues on

Game of the year but my man these scooba divers are CHEATING.

Really well executed and it just does a unique job of making you see a common game in a totally different way. Diagonals are evil in forward and reverse connect 4. Maybe it's just a skill issue :D

I agree with all of that except for the part of adding more interactions. At some point it just becomes a rhythm game like any other but with a flappy bird theme. By using this one specific word, the mechanic is tied in. The whole game is kept short, its intentionally disposable. It's a microgame. You experience it, you are surprised by it, it ends, you go on with life.

But timing things up with the music and making the pipes work better, you're definitely correct on.

Thank you for playing and the feedback!

Indeed I did not make it to the "optimization" part of development. I need to put a hard cap on particle creation somewhere in there. You reached the "CPU wall" boss. Thank you for playing it!

Ahhhh yeah my browser often has issues with space bar in web games for whatever reason, I have to switch over to a different one sometimes to make it work. I will try it again in Firefox in a bit! Thanks for letting me know, sometimes with web games it's hard to tell if there's a bug like that on my end, I'll give another try and see how it changes things to be able to jump :D

I'll reach out! Thanks!

Great sound track and voice over! I felt like it was maybe a bit too easy for a jam game by giving the extra lives, but if it were built out into a full game, I could see that making sense.

Loved the additional ball types to deal with and the responsive controls. Great work!

(+1 for excessive particle gang)

Cheers, thank you! I've spent the last day wishing I had spent more time making the QWOP-inspired controls more responsive with better visual feedback, but I'm glad people are having fun with it as is!

Romhacking.net  is going strong, rom hacks are by definition non-commercial and underground.

Newgrounds of course as mentioned. 

(edit: I want to include Pico-8 too though I wish it was updated more and was even bigger than it is!)

I very much support your initiative; I think you're just vocalizing something many people can feel which is that the entire industry has raced to the bottom and the players have come to expect a bait-and-switch from every product that they see. People want art and innovation, but they can't be expected to dig through the crates in the back of the record store to find it. We should be the DJs who bring those records out of the crate and play them publicly somewhere.

I think a platform dedicated to completely unmonetized games could be a reasonable starting point for that. But how do you pay for a platform dedicated to free stuff? the age old question :) Might need some wikipedia-level community contributions to make something like that work.

(Edit: and to touch on your original point of "Underground" vs "Indie" I think part of the issue is that the non-Indie industry is using the "indie" label for games made with teams of 20 people lol)

This week I'm going to polish this little thing and make the typing function smoother and more responsive feeling. I'll throw it up on Newgrounds and update it here once the jam rating period is over. Thank you for playing, Anon!

I think there's lots of distribution channels for that stuff. People still download homebrews and rom hacks. The big barrier I think we face as underground game devs is audience. Perhaps its a lamentation of the fragmenting of the Internet, but now all that's left (it feels like) is Newgrounds holding down the fort, and that is mostly creators supporting creators.

I yearn for an AddictingGames.com or something like that to just capture the "Youtube for games" audience like we had back in Flash. Where you could put out any product (either ad supported or completely free) and there was never an expectation of the player paying money to access the games.

It seems that the phone stores (walled gardens) have completely centralized how most people interact with casual games. Those devices are highly supportive of predatory monetization, so most people have probably learned by now not to play games on them. No website focusing on free-only games for phone+pc has emerged to replace them. It's an odd place to be.

In any case, I'm a numbers hunter. That's always been the appeal to making things for free for me. I'd love to make money on my games, but if I can reach large numbers of people for free, I'd rather do that. Back in flash you could do both. I hope we get back to something like that some day.

I know, its kind of a trick. The more you watch the screen the harder it is sometimes. You just gotta focus on the keyboard and hit those S M A S H keys :D

I refused to even look at the original when I made this and produced the assets from "memory" hence why my lemon fish looks so... special.

Thank you :)

You folk are extremely talented. This is a jam masterpiece!

There's more game devs than game players now (joke but, that's how this fractured version of the web/steam/console/mobile ecosystems feels), but if you find a way to reach players, I'll make as many non-commercial underground games as they can possibly stand to play :D

Great audio also! Love the whole presentation and reasoning. Gameplay itself was true to Flappy Bird difficulty for me. It felt very... connected to the source material (in pacing) while being wholly otherworldly in presentation and gameplay, which I imagine is the intent.

This is a really clean execution. 

What truth was revealed!?!? My score was 21, maybe I didn't get far enough for the truth.

Yes right now breaking the streak is way too punishing and the rhythm is a bit unintuitive and awkward feeling. I like it, but it can be refined if I work on it a few more days. Thank you for playing!

Ty, I think it's just that the bar has raised very high. I miss when just being able to put together a flash game meant at a minimum, thousands of people would play your game.

These days the audience is fractured, we're like musicians playing for musicians. It's nice, I just want to find the players again without going through a paywall ;)