itch.io

Thank you! I really hope you tried your game by randomly locking the camera,it was amazing as well :D

Magnetism has a lot of potential! I enjoyed it, totally forgot it was for a 3 hour jam, good job! I’d like to try some more levels :D

So, at first I haven’t playtested this game as intended. I didn’t realise that moving the mouse rotated the camera! Which made it really challenging, and really fun.

Then I tried it rotating the camera and it was still challenging, maybe a bit less, yet still fun.

THEN, for fun, I tried moving randomly the mouse at the beginning of the level and keeping the perspective locked that way for the whole level.

This is me playing upside down.

So, well, my advice is to try it yourselves and maybe add a modifier in the menu where you can randomize and lock the camera (within a certain range). You could also make a level in which the perspective changes in specific points, (like old Resident Evil games)! I’d really invest in that direction if I were you :D

I’d refine it working on this perspective thing and a couple more levels. Some more graphical polishing, and there you go, amazing game.

It was a clever use of the Pull and Push theme, I enjoyed the out of the box thinking.

Satisfying feedback from the dogs when you pet them, maybe it could “randomly” change pitch based on the dog?

On the gameplay side, it made me smile because of the cute dogs, although it could have used some simple variation like going up and down faster as the wave increased!

Overall a good base and good job for 3 (4 :P) hours!

Thank you for your kind words! :D

Thank you for your kind feedback :)

The idea was that the lower the amount of jacks the more it’s an action game, and the more the amount of jacks the more it’s a puzzle game. (The hand attack speed decreases with the amount of jacks). It’s kind of difficult to balance it though, because it is cheesable in that precise way you did. Also Jacks cluster a lot and that is kind of a bummer.

The combo timer is a good idea I was thinking about some way to include combos, your suggestion is very interesting, I’d also test that closing a patch will close it forever and make it spawn in another place, so that you HAVE to move.

Anyway, did you find it too hard?

I can program :D , I’m learning game design myself and need to improve, it would be a nice team up. We could benefit both by working together! Text me on discord so we can keep in touch, or drop me your tag and I’ll text you :D

I instead think that not being able to rotate the pieces is a very good idea!

I wouldn’t add a rotation function, otherwise it’s less of a puzzle. It just took me a while to realize there WAS a pivot, I thought they auto-rotated to the correct point, but I think I was just tired myself xD

My discord tag is Regoli#5938, text me there and we could keep in touch for the next Jams! :D

If I remember correctly, Pico-8 only has uppercase letters, these look smaller, maybe that is a secret font?

Uppercase pico font is bad enough to make me write code in Notepad++ and only open pico to test. This “Lowercase” pico hurts my eyes even more.

Anyhow, it doesn’t feel like it’s made in Pico-8, so you can change the font, at least to the uppercase font.

Traditions might be important, I feel like UX should be more important :)

I always like when I find an original pico-8 game, very nice game, nothing to say actually. As always jamming with pico-8 is a winning thing because you can scope small and polish your game to the max.

Very good job. Also congrats on going solo! The level design was very clever, I’d like to give you some critical feedback to improve on but I can’t think of anything.

Ok so, the level designer is a mastermind of evil. The levels are tight and there are set ways to solve them and every time I did something right, then I died because I forgot to do something beforehand (this is a compliment).

The mechanics are simple and brilliant, the music is really cute, the graphics are spot on, I love the console surrounding the game.

And, something I enjoy very much about your game, that I miss so much in most games, is that this game doesn’t need a tutorial. You can just learn everything by playing. (most games cannot afford this, but the games that do, like yours, are very immersive and stimulating)

I have no critical feedback, 5/5 stars very good. (Discord tag: Regoli#5938, if you like my games and want to jam together in the future :D )

It is a cute little game, graphics are heartwarming, tutorial is laid out in a clever way! A button for going to the next level could have been nice.

We have similar mechanics in our games as well!

So, I love the mechanics. The presentation is very good, the GUI is also spot on. It’s a very good game, simple and addictive.

I have only one critical feedback to give, the rest is perfect: the font is very painful to read, strains the eyes. I suggest to look for a slightly bigger pixel font, that has more readable letters, some letters are just terrible and fatigue the eyes so much.

But regardless, amazing job, one of my favs of this Jam!

It is a creative idea and interesting mechanic. The presentation is really good, the graphics are also cute. I feel it has a lot of potential as well to add traps and other types of enemies!

I have to say from a gameplay point of view, the animations could be sped up because the input feels unresponsive, there is too much delay between pressing the button and the action happening. I’d be glad to play it again with sped up animations!

Unique game, clean UI, the blasphemy mechanic is interesting from an emotional point of view as well.

Some useful feedback: It took me quite a while to understand that the blocks I was placing had a different pivot every time and at the beginning it was kind of frustrating not to have a “restart” button and just having to skip if I messed up.

But these are not major issues, it’s still a very good original game, also congrats on going solo! :D

Thank you for your kind words :D Did you find it too hard?

It’s hard, I like it.

The feedback I can give you is that I did not find intuitive the distance moved by projectile, I feel maybe another grid or some way to show the user how much a projectile will move in a turn is necessary.

Very good presentation, fun game :D

It needs some balancing for sure! Thank you for your feedback

Thanks a lot, we're aware of the red block clustering, yeah it needs some thinking. You can also play with a friend in local coop :D

Thank you! We had much feedback from the jam that the field of view is too small, we might tweak the size or give a slider in the settings :D

You're right, we actually didn't think about the UI in a "resource based" manner, we framed it as a bullet hell, but as you said it's much better to know how many crops of each type you have at the same time

Thank you, you gave us some useful insight! 

After we enlarge the viewport a bit we will surely fit all 4 of the crop numbers in the same screen :D 

We received much feedback about the viewport so we will surely modify it! We won't make it so you see the whole 4 plots but at least a bit more so it's less frustrating. Thank you very much for your feedback and I'm glad you enjoyed it :D

Yeah unfortunately it's kind of a headache, the player needs to move the camera around a lot with the mouse to understand where enemies are coming from. We will zoom out the viewport post-jam and test it, I hope you'd stick around for some playtesting if you're interested :D

I'm sorry to hear that you often ran out of crops D: Do you have any suggestions to make the game more beginner friendly? 

HEY! I really really love your game, I'm happy that you took the time to play ours :D 

Yeah we kind of dislike the zoom as well, we will expand the viewport a bit and/or if a pixel artist comes forth we will readapt the graphics! 

Oh, that's strange, there should be only 4 plants, you should be able to select them by scrolling the mouse wheel or pressing buttons from 1 to 4, does it not work?

The plant you're planting is the same that you selected for shooting! It uses the same ammo, we should make it clearer, thank you very much for the feedback :D I was going to do animations, didn't manage in time, but I'd like to improve the graphics post-jam

Thank you very much!

Thanks, it's good to know that you enjoyed it :D We would like to work more on the UI, we initially wanted to make 3D audio with spawning sounds to guess where the monsters come from, but there are enough sounds. Maybe some small arrows on the edge of the screen could do, we'll have to see after the jam if we can zoom out the camera a bit!

Thank you for your feedback, we might work more on the title and include the word varmint inside it :)

I'm glad you did :D

Keep up the good work! It's a fun game and it's polished!
I understand that it's procedural, is there a "guaranteed" solution for each level?  Like do you build the level from the solution? 

It's ok to run out of momentum, it happens. I think it's a good game as of now, if you feel that you can improve it well, I'll be glad to stick around and playtest! :D

It stands out as a game, it's a creative idea, addictive in its simplicity.

I don't really believe that the visuals were too cluttered, I like the chaos going on. I think that it's not about clutter but about the palette:  important stuff should contrast more and particles should be a bit more in the background.

Anyway, since the mechanics are not too complex I think you can afford a bit of chaos :D 

Good job, very fun, I hope you are very proud of it :)

I rejected WASD. I played with arrow keys 3:)

 
Gave me some Doom and TormentorXPunisher vibes, definitely a fan. Are you going to add sounds post-jam? I'm looking forward to it cause I had real fun! Good job :D

Very well done graphics, it is indeed a pleasure to control Guatemoc (it's also fun to wiggle its sprite while on the ladders :P ) 

The game is fun, even though I'm not the best player for puzzle platformers, I tend to love more action. It is a bit slow on restarting but that's not necessarily a bad thing, it gives more atmosphere.

I can feel the attention to detail you put in the game. Good job :D

Very original game, I laughed a lot in seeing a drill in a turn-based battle like an old final fantasy. Fun experience, really great job doing it solo. 

Can I ask you how many hours a day did you work on it? 

This game is dangerous. It's so addicting, you ash.
Nothing to say, it's very good. And I read you did it with a mini engine in C, so I mean, you just sat on everyone else that used Unity or GameMaker... 

10/10

(Secret: we had this idea some days before the jam started, it was just a coincidence that "Plants As Tools" came out as theme xD)
Thank you very much, I'm happy to hear that you enjoyed it, also, your entry was amazing.