itch.io

wow,  thanks for the elaborate reply! Since I'm the artist of our team, some of the programming-specific info went over my head, but I'm sure it will be very helpful for the dev!

Your explanation for how Unity's component-based system differs from Godot's is very helpful. I'd heard before that it was different, but I had a hard time finding an answer to how exactly it was different. Your examples made it easy to imagine now!

Again, thanks for going through the effort of writing this explanation! We'll definitely consider dipping our toes into Godot, and your help has made that step easier and more tempting 😄

Do you have any tips or resources on starting in Godot?

Seeing as this was your first project in Godot and you were able to create a game with quite some complex systems in a short amount of time, perhaps the switch from Unity to Godot isn't actually as intimidating as I'd heard from others?

Really neat to get this look behind the curtain on your game 😄 Seems like you took a smart approach to only introduce the complexity of a game map after fleshing out the core systems.

Godot is definitely tempting, mostly due to Unity proving to be a very unreliable factor in the past year and also open-source software being cool in general! However, we have no experience with Godot while we use Unity on a daily basis, and we were limited to finish our project within 48h. So using Unity still made the most sense for us. For a longer term or commercial project I'd definitely consider trying out Godot though.

Thanks a lot! I saw your game being played by Mark on stream yesterday, congrats! It really caught my eye since both the concept and the graphics looked very cool. One of our game concepts that we didnt persue was also based around controlling an ant colony, but we couldn't figure out how to turn it into a game. Kind of amazed by how much you guys were able to do in this short timeframe!

Sorry to say that there's a new high-score Alexis... Think you can beat 109 days?

Surprisingly fun game!

Props for making the game so self-explanatory! The player will instinctively what to do and what to prevent. Seeing the ship sink, hearing the music change pitch; it's great example of "show, don't tell"

I was getting scores <50 when using the mouse, switching to my drawing tablet made a world of difference!

For some reason flicking to the top of the screen seemed to be way less effective than flicking to the bottom? Not sure why (or if it is just my imagination). Might just be that the hand was covering the indicator making me less accurate?

All in a day's work

Absolutely adorable art style. The graphics are amazing and the music goes along with it nicely. Presentation is really top notch!

The gameplay idea is inspired and novel as well. Although I feel like it could use a bit more variation and progression to keep the player interested.

Variation:
due to the amount and sizes of the monsters' spots being very similar, each monster felt the same. I didn't have to adjust my strategy for them. Having monsters with more wildly varying spot patterns  (for example: 10 small spots / 4 small, 2 large / 1 medium and 2 large / etc) would help to open up strategic decisions for the player ("should I clean the monster completely 1 by 1, or should I clean all spots of a certain size first across all monsters?").

Progression:
if the difficulty would ramp up (for example: more monsters, monsters with more spots, etc) the rounds would feel  more different from each other, keeping the player's attention.

Don't get me wrong - I really enjoyed my time with your game and think you made a lovely submission! So please don't take this feedback as criticism, but rather as enthusiastic brainstorming :P

PS: the leaderboards weren't able to load for me

🤯

Congratulations! I'll update the highscore in the description :D

Yeah, getting multiple income quests in a row really is the run killer 😅 Its requirement probably scales too hard for the player's economy to keep up with once you reach a certain size

Thanks for the kind words! I didn't want to make the messaging too prominent (beating people over the head with "capitalism bad" gets old fast). So I'm happy it still shone through despite this more cartoony form.

Cute premise!

The pixel art and music are neat. The GameBoy Color was my first gaming memory, and your work definitely felt authentic to the console. Enabling all the features of the device makes you appreciate each of them, whereas normally you'd take them for granted.

I think it would've been extra nice if you had incorporated the "built to scale" theme into an actual game mechanic as well, rather than just thematics. But I can imagine it would've been difficult to do so without distracting from your core concept, so I understand why you didn't do this.

Overall, a very amusing nostalgia-fueled experience!

Absolutely love the style. I can imagine it was a risky move to spend so much effort on an intro animation, but it is very much worth it. It really set the tone with that perfectly timed metal music kicking in.

The game feels very polished and cohesive. It takes a good minute to become somewhat comfortable with the controls, but luckily the objective is very straight-forward so this balances each other out nicely.

Shooting and reloading feels very satisfying, and the recoil moving you backwards is a clever downside to prevent the player from becoming too trigger happy.

It put a big smile on my face, awesome game and great submission to the jam!

Glad to hear our game hooked you! :D

88 is one of the highest scores we've heard so far, so great job on that.

Thanks for letting us know about those bugs, the fact that you even used the demolish feature means that you were employing some advanced strategies.

The randomness of quests can definitely make or break a run. It turned out to be quite difficult to find the balance between "there's always a way out so it is too easy" and "there's no way to complete this quest" (we erred on the side of the latter)

Thanks for your lovely comment!

We all know the game jam curse all too well , there's never enough time unfortunately 😅 Still, you made a very funny game, so plenty of reason to be proud of it!

We saw your comment on the main page before ratings went live. Thanks for the kind words, it really made our day to see the first fellow jammer respond positively to our game :D

Thanks for the kind words!

You are right, a camera that could pan and zoom was on our list of additional features that unfortunately didn't make it into the game.

It is indeed possible (though uncommon) for pieces of land to spawn so far away from the central landmass. If you'd want the perfect layout, you could try restarting by going back to the menu, since it generates a new random map every time. Had we had the time to implement our camera,  then this wouldn't be much of an issue, but I can imagine it can be annoying now.

Cute visual style and very original theme!

The gameplay is a bit difficult to understand. After some trial and error I think I got the hang of it, but unlucky runs are definitely possible (having all employees work from home on your second day already makes it very difficult to progress). Nonetheless, it is fast and fun enough to go for another run a few times.

One tip would be to spread the tutorials out across their relevant phases. So for example, have the tutorial for managing workers only before actually starting the workers portion of the game. Now I had to read 10 screens of tutorial text, so by the time I finished I'd already forgotten most of the first slides.

Amazing submission!

The concept is immediately clear and speaks to the imagination. Very fun to just mess around in, whether it be for a score or just for the sake of finding your own solution to the challenge.

You even managed to make the move, rotate and scale tools intuitive to use - something that anyone who has ever opened a 3D modeling tool can attest to is not as easy as it sounds!

The artstyle is great too, the 2D and 3D art go very well together. The entire game looks and feels very polished and the dialogues were funny.

5 stars all around from me, thanks for the great 15 minutes!

If you use the Shovel button on a water tile, you can create a new piece of land. This is essential for progressing in the game, but in hindsight we didn't explain this clearly enough.

We'd love for you to give our game a second chance, and perhaps update your rating if it affected your enjoyment. In any case, thank you for your feedback and for playing!

EDIT: we have added it as a tip to the top of our game page's description. Hopefully this will help out other players as well :)

Cute art style! It goes well with the simple premise of the game, overall it feels like a cohesive experience.

I appreciate that there's more sticks in the level than you need to get to the ending. One of my sticks went out of bounds after I was tackled by a boar and I was afraid I couldn't finish my run, and luckily I didn't need it to finish. And I imagine for the speedrunners among us it provides more opportunity for finding the ideal run as well!

Post your highscores in the comments below!

We managed to reach 80 days on our best run so far.

Creative concept! It took me a little while to grasp though, it wasn't clear on my first few runs, resulting in game overs seemingly coming out of nowhere. Once I actually understood what was happening, it clicked and it caused many interesting gameplay considerations.

For example, when all coins gained enemy behaviour, I had to evade everything and make sure no coins spawned. Which is completely opposite of your instincts to blindly grab treasure chests and kill enemies. This made me constantly re-evaluate the circumstances and adjust my playstyle. Great use of the theme!

 Presentation and controls were good, the shooting felt nice and punchy. The main player graphics were a bit lacking though, it didn't make much sense to me that a generic skeleton would shoot without having any ranged weapon.

Lovely idea,  great execution! The whole game feels polished, and alternating between the sometimes challenging puzzles and the freeform drawing was great to keep it a digestible experience. The voice-acted developer commentary was great. One of the best and most creative submissions I've played so far during this jam!

Very fun concept! Managed to defeat the second enemy on my second try... And only figured out I could rotate items afterwards!

I liked how the amount of items you receive, was higher than what you could handle. It enforced me to prioritize between attack and health, but also allowed me to keep juggling items by dragging them back to the top of the screen. I think the juggling would be an even better mechanic if some items in the backpack would be consumed after use (for example, a potion that heals instead of increasing total HP). Then the player could keep juggling items to restock his backpack after a consumable was used up. This would also add something to do during a fight with an enemy, which was currently passive.

I enjoyed the color palette of the game and the music was soothing.

The text log felt a bit useless since you didn't have time to look at it during gameplay anyway, but it was a nice touch to read during downtime.

All in all, fun idea and great execution!

Interesting puzzler! Great pace of introducing new mechanics, it never felt overwhelming while also keeping me engaged throughout. I loved how the different mechanics interacted with each other, and that there wasn't a "wrong" way to do it, just more or less efficient ways. Music and graphics were also nice. Overall, very enjoyable experience!

Really fun idea and game! I like that the sidekick concept is not just a narrative, the gameplay really is different than a normal dungeon crawler. You managed to make escort missions fun, and all it took was a somewhat competent escortee!

Graphics are charming and clear (nice post effects), music also fits well together. Nice job!

PS: fun to see other (ex-)Chimps participate! Hope you guys are doing well. Rider Worlds is a blast so far, in case any of you worked on it.

-Rutger

Very clever game! Love all the unconventional strategies it allows for, like letting the second enemy nearly kill you, then swapping health bars with him and finishing him off. The system does seem easy to exploit, so I wonder if additional content could be made challenging without constraining the player's freedom... Anyhow, creative idea and good execution! The graphics also look good and the theming works well with the gameplay.

Like the best idle games, this game is very easy to get lost in for half an hour, even though it only seemed like 5 minutes. The "grinding" by just typing the randomized prompts, combined with the letter shop and the challenges, made for a complete loop that cleverly tied into one another and kept me engaged throughout, constantly giving me new goals to strive for. Great work!

Thanks for your nice review! We had indeed planned more mechanics.

We'd also thought of the deactivating platform, we envisioned it as a lily pad that would go underwater on every 8th beat. Another idea was to have frogs coming in from the bottom as well, although I also like your idea of differently colored frogs jumping on different beats!

However, on the final day of the jam we didn't progress as fast as we'd hoped, so these additional mechanics unfortunately didn't make it in.

Fun variation on Tetris! I enjoyed acting like a little helper to the actual Tetris player. I even managed to make it onto the highscore board!

The platforming feels satisfying, the squash-and-stretch and the VFX really elevate it. Being a Tetris derivative enforces a pretty simplistic aesthetic, but despite this the game's presentation still looks professional and polished.

Well done!

Quite difficult due to the amount of frogs and their movements. After a few runs you start to see patterns and can use these to create openings and to herd them together. Simple but fun!

It's interesting to see how all the variations on Frogger are so varied! You chose to make the car playable, while in our game you play as the rivers.

Intriguing concept. It's not much of a game, but I can imagine that there wasn't much time left for it due to setting up the underlying systems. It would be really fun seeing how your character fared in the hands of other players, and if you can create a character that gets unanimously killed/spared due to their answers. Would be cool to see this expanded upon, great and creative use of the jam's theme!

Soothing atmosphere due to the music and the slow movement. The game is brutally difficult, but the controls are tuned just right. It really gives that weighty underwater feeling without sacrificing any precision. The red blinking is good user feedback.

The farthest I got was the plastic bottle graveyard, although most of my runs ended much earlier than that. It certainly kept me trying for a good 30 minutes, but eventually I had to throw in the towel.

Fun game, nicely done!

A lovely twist on deckbuilding games. It looks at it from a completely different angle, but it still has all the same qualities as those games by making you think about how to optimize the synergies and pitfalls of each deck. It allows you to finally execute the perfect strategy that you never get the chance to enact during real card games like Magic the Gathering, due to other players putting a stop to your plans. Very satisfying when you succeed in making your strategies work out exactly the way you planned.

Difficulty was just right.  The hero's deck is quite weak so he really needs the player's help as Lady Luck. The second and the third fight required a strong strategy and each had their own approach.

The only complaint I'd have would be about the dialogue,I found the writing style a bit annoying. I ended up skipping through most of it.

All in all: amazing game, by far the best I've played in the jam so far. It has a lot of potential to be expanded into a full release. Really hope that it gets the attention it deserves and that you'll keep working on it!

The monkey mascot is a cute character design, I especially love how expressive his face gets when you hover over a very bad decision. The artstyle ties in well with the sudoku style, great job on the visuals!

I found the gameplay a bit difficult to understand, figuring out the hints was fun but most of them didn't quite make sense to me. Perhaps starting on a smaller grid would've helped with learning to understand the game? Nonetheless, it was fun to toy around with.

Very creative idea, to turn this joke into its own game! Nice to see ideas that are not derived from other games for a change :)

The music sets a relaxing atmosphere that fits the calm gameplay very well.

Definitely has that "one more try" feeling.

Clever way of tutorializing, by putting the controls on the signpost in the environment!

Haha yep, I bet we all have a list of things that we wished we could've worked on if we'd just had the time... But that's the nature of game jams! Nonetheless, you did an amazing job :D