itch.io

Yeah, I had a conversation with another player downpage about that and I'll definitely be reworking the jump before we put this project down. Of all the mechanics, jumping was weirdly the hardest to get right in the timeframe, considering all the nonsense we ended up doing with it ;^.^

The final stage was meant to be a culmination of sorts; yeah, you had been betrayed by the Ambiguously Evil Voice (AEV), but you'd gathered so much power you were capable of handling it. Your thought about disabling walking while carrying the evil soul is interesting though; I might play with it a bit!

Hey! This is really good! It felt like I didn't really have control over whether I took hits on my monster or not until I realized that was exactly what the push-away beam was for. You created this nice little equilibrium where the monster often follows at juuuuust the right speed to take bullets that had been meant for me, and it was my job to disrupt that equilibrium whenever possible. This is slick af.

In terms of critiques, I'd say my biggest note is that your game overstays its welcome a little bit, particularly for a jam. You guys made a LOT of levels for the time allotted, and that's impressive! But also as a player, it means I've got a lot of content to get through before I can feel like I've completed the game. In a project that had been given time to breathe that's fine; more levels! In a project with a 48 hour life span though, it can end up being a pretty strong drawback. 

In this case particularly, from the first level with the big red guys onwards I kind of lost my sense of progression and escalation. The number of obstacles and enemies gradually increased, but it all kinda muddied after the following 3 or 4 rooms. I guess in some ways this becomes almost a question of man hour allocation and editing than just design; how many stages could have been cut without noticably changing the game? How much of that time could have been put to features or bugfixing?

All that said, you guys still did a superb job. You made a whole-ass game, it works, it's good, and you made your own sound and art to boot. With some tweak and polish this could become a twinstick worth remembering. <3

Hey! I don't know if this is specific to your android build or if I'm just thick or something, but there doesn't seem to be any collision on the walls!  I get the distinct feeling that's not how you intended walls to work. 

On the presentation side though, I'm hearing talk of procedural art and shaders, and that's pretty neat!

Lo siento por mi español!

Me gusta su juego, pero itch dice quest lo subiste más de dos meses ya, contra las reglas del jam :-(

Sibling game dev solidarity ^°^

We actually considered combat from the outset, but ultimately decided to spend our time focusing on the movement for the purposes of the jam.  Combat still may come in a later update, but it would take some doing considering the limited sprite set we used.

I'll be sure to check you guys out when I get home tonight!

That's a good point about pressing vs. releasing to jump, especially since we definitely swap between those paradigms in the back half of the game. Thinking on it now, I might try swapping it to more of a mega man style "shoot and charge" system. I still want the player to be rooted to charge the super jump, but there isn't really any good reason I can think of to not accept an initial jump input as well. 

I've been getting reports about that! I actually just identified and fixed that problem today, so it will definitely be fixed when the locks come off.

A neat idea, but it seems that the project you submitted wasn't in a playable state :-( That blows, since I actually liked the art style and presentation. 

At the risk of redundancy, I'm going to echo what the others have said so far, and say that I had a hard time understanding exactly what was going on. Part of that was me just not being very audio-inclined, although you clearly made some (actually quite good!) steps to mitigate that by adding a phone key set I could use to compare, and allowing me to replay. That's an executory problem--I had issues executing.

My larger issue was conceptual. I got the idea from reading the instructions posted on your page, but had a hard time translating them into what I was supposed to do in gameplay. Normally when this happens, what I recommend is trying to ramp up with some escalation; perhaps starting with a board that's like a third or a quarter the size--even to the point where it's got a no-lose solution. Then, once the basic loop is clarified, you can start getting complicated with it!

It's a cool idea--although bizzarely not the first somewhat opaque phone switchboard game I've seen--and I hope you're able to iterate on it further.

So obviously I'm not able to play and rate your game, which blows mightily. 

However! I can still give you feedback on at least one thing!

Looking through your controls, I noticed that you've got one character on wasd, the other character on arrow keys, and then some other verbs set to the mouse. I can't say for sure whether a setup like this works for your game or not, but I know that for a lot of games, having to shift my hands over to a different control style over and over can get cumbersome in a hurry. Consider whether this is the case, and whether or not you should look into binding those controls somewhere else on the keyboard!

Not bad at all! The way the way the physics worked left me feeling a little bit at their mercy, though. I found myself unable to mitigate the effects of a swing more than once, with me usually trying to move out of the way, even by small amounts, just kind of making it worse on the back swing.

Physics aren't my strong suit (just ask the comments section of my own submission XD) so I'm not 100% sure how I'd fix this. Perhaps by slowing the astronaut movement down? Giving him a little jetpack that you can use to do microadjustments, in addition to controlling the space station? Something worth iterating on, at least. 

I did enjoy it though, and largely didn't miss the sound effects or space station to obstacle interaction, for my part. Those are little things that get left out due to this being a jam, rather than actual design problems. 

When I saw the concept for this game, I was worried I'd become easily overwhelmed with all the stuff going on. To that end, I can only feel like your decision to make it a slower, more methodical puzzle game was the right call. You did a good job of establishing a grammar of verbs pretty early on, and were able to communicate it to me largely by rewarding my own exploration with interesting results. This is definitely one of the better-designed games I've come across so far in this jam, despite its simple visual presentation, and that's definitely something to be proud of. Great job!

I think about the only note I can offer is regarding the top-right 2d area (The wasteland, I think?). It wasn't especially clear how to get up to the console and once I did do it, I wasn't totally clear if that was the intended result, or I just gamed the physics a bit. 

I'm so glad you liked it! Musik Kombat did the music and sound effects and they never fail to impress me with what they can crank out in so little time. The writing was my department, and I'm pleased it came out as well as it did. Could you possibly go into more detail about what you said about not being able to jump while running?

Ooh! These are good notes. I wanna try to address them here, if that's okay.

• The character dosen 't flip or turn when you move to the left
  
• You weren't using the arrow keys by any chance, were you? I did a silly and coded movement to work with either wasd or arrow keys, but only the animations work with the arrow keys. If not, good catch! I'll have to look into that one.
• If you fall out of the map you just keep falling for ever
  
• Shoot, I was sure I made that bounding box big enough. Could you tell me which level you fell out of (1, 2, 3, 4, or the hub?) and where you managed to slip through?
• And you can use the hover ability to fly anywhere you want so that is a bummer
  
• That's actually as-designed! We intended for the journey to the hero's soul to be a breeze, while the journey back forced you to use their special power to return to the altar. This is part of the larger metroid-vania style ambitions we had in mind at the outset, even though we had to phase them out for the purposes of this jam. One of my medium-term goals is to reintroduce this idea in a later patch.

Thanks for this input though; this is valuable stuff! <3

Sounds like you came just shy of the end! The jumping bugs are known quantities and I expect to have a fix for them out by unlock time, although I was sure I fixed the wall warping glitch, so thanks for letting me know! The backwards flipping thing is weird too; I'll have to see if I can replicate it!

I'm glad you liked it, though! This was our first time back in the thick of it for a while, so we're glad it came out as well as it did.

I see everyone pointing out that the green gem was a bit overpowered and, I mean, it was, but I'm not one to hop on beating an already dead horse, so instead let me come at you with something slightly new; a good way to fix the green gem problem without scrapping the idea entirely might be to give it a limited range of movement, such as along a pre-defined track or within a certain radius. It's a sign of quality though that a jam-level game's two biggest notes from me are "a little too easy" and "kind of finicky." Well done!

I like this! It's a little unfortunate that the chain length is juuuust long enough to get trapped inside of walls, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy compiling my chain gang of doom. Really good idea with some solid execution along side of it!

This is by far the most complex game I've played for the jam so far, but it's also the one I've genuinely had the most fun with. I'm a sucker for city builders, though I've never been great at them, and this just scratched that itch just right. My only real note is that it could be a little unforgiving at times; I found many more ways into assured bankrupcy than I did success, though this was somewhat cushioned by the quick turn-around time on getting set up again on my next try. 

Very well done and oh please do develop this more. <3

Never before has a man so foolish been given the power to summon barns so large.

This is one of those projects where it seems like your focus was less on making a complete game and more on trying out a new idea or technique. That's a totally valid thing to do and I can't really argue with these results! plonking stuff down was a simple kind of fun and I'll admit to no small joy in trying to discover exactly how big a tree I could make, before making an ever-diminishing conga line of them.

Been seeing a lot of tether-based gameplay, but yours has definitely made it look the prettiest so far. I agree with what others have said about the hitboxes, though I also encountered at least one situation in which the pink wasn't able to jump for reasons I wasn't totally clear on.

I always struggle on games where you have to keep track of more than one thing and lining up enemies to merge was plenty challenging, but you managed to make it not totally overwhelming on my brain, with a chill sound track to boot. <3

There's not much I can say that others haven't said already, but this is a well-considered game that came out solidly. Making the robot dependent on the human's line of site was a good call; a nice bit of asymmetry rarely goes amiss.

I've been seeing a lot of cool concepts, this jam, and this game is no exception. I share what others have said with it being a little hard to parse at times; a few of the descriptions felt up to interpretation and I was never 100% sure why I failed, meaning I could never be 100% sure what I needed to change to succeed.

This is cute though and I'm glad you made it. Well done!

For this being not only your first game jam, but also apparently your first time really making games this is actually very impressive to me. Not because it's the flashiest game or perfectly made or anything, but you avoided the single largest problem any inexperienced game jam participant can make; overscoping yourself. It's so deceptively easy to decide to make something you'd struggle to make on a normal time scale, let along a 48 hour period, and your handled that smartly. You sacrificed a bit on presentation, but it's paid off in quality; your game runs well and works how it should to the point that its design can shine through any presentation or coding quibbles. Well done!

As for critiques, there's all the obvious stuff; abstract shapes can only get you so far, the puzzles were a bit redundant, and some sound would have been nice. One very specific thing I noticed was that you left z-axis rotation on for your cube dudes. This isn't a bad thing and I can't see it affecting gameplay as it is, but It's something to be aware of if you were to ever introduce any physics-based elements to play. 

All around though, great job! May this be the first of many games you make!

Full points for originality. Let me just say that right out of the gate. I also loved the interactive main menu! The game's primary issue for me was information overload with a lot of data coming into my eye spheres and not a lot of connections being easily made, somewhat ironically, I guess XD.

This is so cool though. What a concept. Please push this further; I've got a feeling that with a little more refinement and user-friendliness, you could have something special on your hands.

That blows about the plugin problem! I'm going to watch this space because you got my interest. Sorry you weren't able to get in a working submission though; that's gotta sting :-(

Very well put together! Games like this aren't usually my taste, personally, but I can still tell that this is a solid piece of software that's well-presented to boot. It did seem like it was a little easy to run into no-win states, but I'm not confident enough to say that wasn't just me being bad at the game.

Never before have I been treated to such diversity in pigeon temperament. A triumph. XD

In all seriousness, I did have some problems with it; the obstacles were pretty unforgiving, but not in a way I found especially fun. Feedback as well was a little on the thin side, with many deaths leaving me not quite sure what I bumped up against. Consider using obstacles with clearer hitboxes, and don't be afraid of letting your player move a little more slowly or precisely!

All in all though, I can't knock it too bad. Everything worked more or less as it was intended to and there was clearly some sweat put into it. Keep up the work and I hope to see you in many jams to come!

As other have already said, this is a superbly polished game for a 48 hour jam. It's the little things, I noticed, like how the tether felt like it had real tension in it, how that tether could be broken, but how the game would also preserve the tether under certain circumstances, like while falling or when hitting a checkpoint. You managed to get through a lot of good puzzle design in such a short game as well. High marks overall; you've left me with very little to critique!

Deciding to tie two fundamental game verbs to objects which were equippable and unequippable is a nicely novel concept and I'm glad to see it put to good use here. Hit detection was a little fiddly in places; I had more than one time where either orbs weren't activating pedestals like they were supposed to, or I wasn't able to pick up orbs despite being right on top of them.

That aside though, this game was very well-executed! I especially liked how forgiving the walkable angle of the drawn platforms was --something that could have easily brought the experience down.

I also want to point out how smart an idea it was to make platforms only drawable from existing platforms. It would have been nice to have the freedom, but also extremely abusable. Much better to limit the scope like you did for a 48 hour jam.

A well-done puzzle game! You put some time into the map design and it shows, and I found myself outsmarted more than once. It was a little too easy to lose track of one of your characters from time to time, especially on some of the larger levels, but that's something that can be easily addressed with a little more work on information clarity. Speaking of, it would have been nice if there was a visual indicator on a character who had the water walking buff, but it was never so complicated that it became an issue for me. Great job, overall!

A cool idea that's a unfortunately hampered for me by the controls. For me it bordered on a little more uncontrollable than was fun and I had a hard time making any kind of real progress. Goofy physics sims are always fun, except when the physics begin to work against you, like they did here. That said, this is definitely an idea worth exploring more; I see potential in a pseudo-co-op game like this that's driven by physics interactions, it's just not there yet.

This is actually a really fun idea; a kind of ghostly tug-of-war where you're having to consider both your own field, but the angle that your position is going to make your opponent travel through their field. That's really unique. That's solid.

Which is why the execution was a little disappointing for me. The big killer was light distribution; it became clear pretty early on that whatever system might have been present for balancing the lights on the ground just wasn't doing its job, and it resulted in several rounds where there was just no way for one side to win, including one where one side spawned with no lights at all!

Ultimately this isn't a bad problem to have; it's a problem that can be fixed through iteration and tweaking, rather than something being fundamentally wrong with the idea, but it's definitely a problem, especially since it's kind of the crux your game is built on.

Wow, what a concept. I can honestly say I did not ever expect "two guys tide together trying to indirectly stab one another" to be a game I came across.

That said, I was left kinda wanting. The enemy character is a little more durable than is fun to play, though I did appreciate that he fought you more and more as you went on. There's actually a lot I do like about this game; the cool slowdown effect between dashes is cool and I really can't overstate how much the concept caught me flat-footed. I just wish there was a little more to it.

I'm always wary of multiplayer-required games on account of having no friends. But I've got you this year, GMTK2021! I brought someone along and now NOBODY CAN STOP ME!

In all seriousness this turned out to be a great little co-op puzzle game. It worked more or less as intended and while I had serious doubts about us finishing at the beginning, we did make it all the way through to the end, we had so much fun. No real ending though! That was unfortunate.

It was a little unclear at first that if one of  us didn't activate our magnets then we wouldn't get all tangled up together. Once we figured that out, we did much better though. All in all though, a great little project, it's definitely gotten the highest rating out of me so far.

I like this kind of order of operations puzzling. A little disappointed about the lack of sound, but that's the nature of game jams; you can only spend so much time on any one thing. I like the idea of stacking and controlling multiple square guys, and I kinda wish you developed it a little more, even at the expense of fewer levels.

I like it though! There's a lot of room to explore in this concept and I hope you find the chance to do just that.

Thanks for the feedback! This is actually us coming off of about a 6~8 month hiatus from game dev, so it's nice to hear that was your most noteworthy problem with it. We published it knowing the physics were a little jank and one of the first things I'll be patching when the locks come off is ground detection (also dialogue! Shame on me for not making it skippable/pausable!) We'll definitely be noodling around with this project for a bit and I'll definitely be refactoring a lot of the code and such so watch this space, I guess!

Thanks so much! <3

I really enjoyed this! It's a clever puzzle game that doesn't take long to figure out the basics, but you prove pretty quickly it's got a lot of applications. I did encounter a softlock bug; I held the ice man's block with the plant guy, then moved far enough away to do a warp. The result was that plant man couldn't move while in his dimension any longer.

That's side effects of only having 48 hours though. This is still a well-put together game that executed on its idea with flying colors.

Hey! I'm the guy who did the code for most of this project, including the screamer. Fun fact: while building and testing the monster, I managed to spook myself multiple times despite knowing full well exactly how it worked, as Musik Kombat can attest to.