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Thanks for the feedback! The artists did make a death effect, I just didn't have time to put it in. They made quite a few fx that didn't get time to be put in. Explaining the mechanics was also something that just didn't have time. I usually do shorter jams, 12 hours - 2 days, this was the 1st 2 week jam I did, and thought I could tackle more than I was able to. I pulled 2 all nighters at the end just to get it even playable with the mechanics we intended. Such is the nature of overscoping.

One thing I think wasn't explained well enough at all was the resource system. We call those "Threads" you start with 4 of them. While they are gold, they are available for the player to use. Each card has a Thread Cost in the top left that says how many Threads they'll use. When a Thread is spent, it turns gray until the next wave, where it becomes available again. Some cards have 2 numbers in the top left, the 2nd number being how many turns a Thread is used for. When such a card is played, the Threads it used turn blue, and designate how many waves left they have in such a state. Blue Threads are busy working and can not be used to play cards until they are gold again. There are 2 different types of Thread Reservation, one performs the action every turn (a buff card for instance will provide it's buff for every turn the thread is blue), others perform their action when the Thread completes its job, turning gold again (Overclock is an example of this). Some card animations and icons would go a long way in explaining a lot of this.

I think there are some balancing issues early game, you can get RNG'd out of being able to do much (your example of long range tower not attacking is one of these, as is only having 1 web tower in your opening hand, as a web tower requires another web tower to create a web.) Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to play test this to even notice that until post-jam, and would be something I fix if I put more work into the project. As for the long range towers, their radius really needed to be a ring, not a circle, every little thing takes time.

I think the lack of displaying the deck, discard, and trash piles also creates some confusion. Your starting deck is 5 cards large, and it's pseudo-randomized at the start of the run. When you defeat a level and add a new card, it adds it to your deck as an option to play. When you draw your cards each wave you draw from the deck, not the complete list of cards. Meaning if you get unlucky with card picks and have very few tower cards in your deck, the game can get very hard. I would make the cards you have a choice from a bit smarter if I work on it more, favoring to usually put a tower card there, maybe tapering off to equal chance in the later game as you start to need less of them.

Its unfortunate, but I don't think anyone will even see the boss we worked on. We built the game completely level-less to test specific things really easy and fast, so it wasn't in until the last few hours, they really needed to be done earlier.

As for your question about timers, it keeps the game moving, it forces the player to make a choice and play. Tower defense games can really drag on, especially in longer waves and later levels. I'd remove it for this game completely going forward because I feel like it clashes with the card game aspect of this game because it ends up removing your cards while you're in the middle of trying to play them.

WebGL doesn't allow the dev to write a file to your PC to save, it only allows the writing of a cookie. And cookies suck and are super unreliable for saving.

I just lost a game because webGL allowed my right click to create a hidden context menu in the browser that I then clicked on, forcing the page to go back, and it didn't have a save from the run.

I can't wait until the standalone build is available, either here on itch or on steam. (I already kickstarted)

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "hard to control"? You have complete control over how fast you move (from completely stopped to 3x base speed), and it's basic WASD movement with very little floatiness, so I'm surprised to hear that it's difficult to control.

If you push the blue bar to the right, you'll move faster. You can counter this by shooting more often. Try to balance movespeed and attack rate to not push your blue bar too far thus making things difficult to control (and nerfing your damage)

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

I've done a few twinsticks in the past, so I was mainly focusing on improving my understanding on the genre, while playing with some new mechanical ideas to force some resource engagement on to the players. I think it did okay, maybe rockets are too obviously good compared to the other weapons though, as the only 2 people who have beaten the boss (that I know of) employed the same rocket tactic.

What highscore did you manage to achieve? :)

The blue bar is the opposite of the red bar, so it hampers damage and provides a movespeed boost, while red hampers movespeed and provides an offensive boost. The spacebar active debuffs the enemies as well, red reduces their attackspeed/damage, while blue reduces their movespeed and can even stop them in place.

Thanks for playing! :D What score did you get up to? Did you manage to fight and/or beat the boss?

Thanks for playing! :D

I really struggled with communicating what the red/blue provided, but I think most people are figuring it out well enough with some experimentation. Blue bar gives movement speed while hampering proj speed, damage, attack speed, activating it with spacebar gives another speed buff and reduces the speed of nearby enemies. A full blue bar when pressing space will stop all nearby enemies, while a full red bar will stop you in place.

I wanted to add a powerup for making projectiles screenwrap, but time D:

I'd challenge you to push yourself to the boss! 765 is pretty early on still :)

A pretty simplistic clicker game.

The audio get's super repetitive pretty quickly. maybe mix it up a bit, so the same like 10 second audio clip with phone ringing isn't on loop.

There isn't really an end to the game (at least not one I found), and after a pretty short time the upgrades get too expensive to really want to sit there clicking it longer. Maybe some kind of exponential mechanic like Cookie Clicker resets, or Clicker Hero's ascensions would help.

+1 for stonks memes though

Very cool! I love the aesthetic of the game! The music fits the theme and art perfectly. The gameplay even fits in with the blossom theme.

Any time the dragon was on the screen I couldn't see where my petal was going, making the problem worse as the dragon took over the screen while I bumped into things behind it that I couldn't see. This was made worse anytime I had to move backwards slightly to avoid getting stuck on the branches. The backwards bits as a whole didn't really work well, the petal just often get's caught.

Really cool, extremely challenging (for people as bad at platformers as I am). The cash hidden in the walls is clever, but REALLY hard to notice. Without your assistance, I probably would have given up.

Art style is great! I love the color pallet. Good choices for audio as well. I'm glad to see one of the RSJ games fit in a little cut scene with some story for the game too! Very well done!

Of course! Just wanted to let you know, there is a new version of the game out that doesn't need port forwarding to host a game as long as UPnP is enabled on your router/nat device.

And previewing enemy moves is working with matchmaking. :) Enjoy!

I can't make the camera/board stay to a place you rotate and let go, I play tested it that way, and the change in perspective makes clicking on certain moves impossible and causes you to play moves you didn't intend to play, thus I must force it to a top down view whenever a play is possible to prevent these issues.

As for the previewing enemy moves, it actually is implemented, and if you play via direct peer to peer (which currently requires port forwarding) or in sandbox mode, you'll see it, there is an option to turn it off in both cases. The matchmaking system currently disables it by default (as previewing moves is intended to be disabled for ranked mode, when it's added), though this is changing in the next version for non-ranked matchmaking to display move previews.

Thanks for the feedback! :)

Saro is working with me to provide Mac builds, though it's currently out of date, I'll get another from him soon.

No it will not work in WebGL, and I have 0 intention of ever making it work for WebGL. I will release it on Steam/EGS/etc when it is ready, until then, it can stay as a downloadable executable for the sake of playtesting.

This game was really pretty! You nailed the look. Very unique design, clever take on the theme, and it's memorable!

 It was just frustratingly hard to get the rats to do what I wanted instead of run into a corner to get stuck and not chase anything that I telekinesis for them.

I've attempted a similar idea game with directing 60,000 cats (litterally, haha get it?) around with a laser pointer, but the cats could want to do something else, like chase a ball, or sleep, or get in a cat fight, or some other other cat things. I was never able to find a flow that felt -good- to play. Your game felt to suffer a lot of the same gameplay flaws that mine did.

If you happen to explore more with this kind of a gameplay concept, please let me know the outcomes of those attempts!

Swarm mechanics are really hard to pull off! Good job taking this on during a jam!

Right click doesn't seem to be captured by the game only on my end though, causing me to right click -> back in my browser often while trying to play. This is a common problem with webgl, I tend to just avoid using the right click in my controls when doing webgl work.

Thanks! :D It was a fun one to make, and our artist did a REALLY good job!

Hey! Thanks for playing! The jumping is a bit sticky, yeah. You needed to let go of the arrow keys when jumping to make it work, else the movement velocity holds you against the wall. I didn't have time to fix that bug... 12 hours is pretty tight.

As for coins being where you couldn't get to, some of them were randomly spawned by one of the other devs.

At the end, if you jump on the platform above you can get a better view of the Sirenheadosaurus!

And you're right, we should have had a "Start" button at the title screen so you could read the full beginning of the madlibs.

Thanks! It's a shader with a custom render pass that I made and had some mechanics ideas with. Unfortunately I didn't have enough time in the jam to experiment with the mechanics idea I had, such is the nature of game jams, I guess! The effect is a mix of dither and fresnel.