It is indeed the rain shader. Will be fixed in the post jam version

You hit the nail on the head with all of your feedback! We've very slowly been developing the game further for a small improved release after the jam. All the things you've listed have either been addressed already or are on our to do list! 

In the new development build (not published) we have fixed your targeting issues, and improved the tutorial messages, improved the controls in general, improved performance, and made the whole user experience a little clearer. Other things that are coming is enemy artwork (with animations), more UI improvements, better balance and wave design, an endless mode, and many more sounds and music

Thank you for taking the time for such a detailed write up! And thank you for enjoying the game!!

How are you so productive!! You'll have to tell me some day. Your ideas sound really cool. Can't wait to see what you end up cooking up!

Phenomenal game, I don't have any feedback or bad words to say about it! Awesome artstyle, amazing concept, love the use of music, ties in with the theme, fun, and obviously well designed. You're clearly a very talented developer, and I hope you continue to make great games

Really cool game! I really like how you use the "fantasy" of being a smith, and turned it into a fun micro game with excellent mini games. It's fun, it's polished, and it's pretty! I don't like the song too much, but at least it's slow and relaxing, and doesn't really draw attention to itself. I also thought the game was a little bit too hard. And I was hoping there was a teensy bit more to the gameplay loop. But everything that's in the gameplay loop is great and very polished!

I like it! The intro and outro were cool, and you obviously had a lot of fun making the sound effects haha. Especially the monster uggggghhhs, that made laugh out loud more than once!  I always say you can really tell when a dev loved working on their game, and I can definitely tell you did with this one!

I like tower defense games where you have to reroute enemies, and moving the base was an interesting twist!

What I did not like was the fact that the turret placing is on a timer. I guess it's an interesting concept, rewarding stalling out your enemy for as long as possible, but it's also just very easy for the player to end up being punished for not saving enough money to place the turret on cooldown. It would maybe be better tied to certain wave numbers, and I think that should make balancing easier on you guys too. Right now, it must be very hard to estimate the strength of a player a certain amount of minutes in!

Oh I see you made a tower defense too!! I'll check it out!

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-12/rate/2973741 please try our game! I've rated and given some feedback on yours!

Interesting concept! Is it intended for the player to fly backwards after getting hit? Right now I'm getting teleported, and it feels strange. 

What you can work on in this game is more visual feedback, like when I hit spacebar to start a wave, and I don't see anything happening immediately (because the enemies are still walking forwards) then it's a good idea to notify the player through other means, like UI, or a graphical effect. Or something like just making sure enemies immediately walk into vision.

Another thing I didn't really understand is grabbing the ammo from the box. Sometimes i press the button for it once, and i press a second time, and it doesn't work, then i press a third time, and it does! Is there an internal cooldown? If so, either change it so that button presses always get the expected result, or notify the player of the cooldown through visual feedback!

I think that's all my feedback. Good job on making a game in 7 days! It's really hard, and you did a really good job!

Super smooth, polished game. You can be very proud of this one! I took some time to adjust to the responsiveness of playing a platformer like this on a keyboard. Gravity felt maybe slightly too strong for me (not sure on this), really requiring you to react very fast on all the falls. Maybe turning it down a smidge might make it slightly more accessible. But that's obviously preference, and maybe that's just me getting old :).

This game goes beyond the level of a game jam game. It is a fantastic concept, fits perfectly in the theme, feels extremely polished, and even has replayability features. It's pretty, the music sets the right vibe. And your economy system is incredibly interesting! In my head I'm already making an incredibly unfair comparison to the economy system to big indie hits I love like Against the Storm (ha). But for a jam game, that's very high praise. 

I do have feedback, but I don't think it's really fair for me to rate you any lower than 5*. The feedback would just be for things I think you should think about before you go for a release, and very obviously it would have been absolutely impossible to get everything perfect in a week in the first place. Know that I think the game is fantastic, and none of this is meant harshly! And besides, you asked me for feedback, and you gave me wall of feedback, so here is your own wall of feedback  :D

Feedback: 

The new player experience is a little bit of a mess. The tutorial helps, but a lot of resources get thrown at you fast, and I felt veeery overwhelmed. Each choice not directly guided by the tutorial is very hard to evaluate "correctly", until you get a sense of where things are going. 

 Maybe it would be a good idea to slightly more reduce the possible "incorrect" choices a player can make at the start of the game for the initial cards. Wood is a great resource to get at the start, but getting a building that helps you accelerate is more important, so the player needs to be helped to take one early. 

One of the things I struggled with is that it's too hard to differentiate between items you can acquire through buildings and only through the cards system (sand, titanium). I learned this pretty late, even though sand is an incredibly important resource early! Currently I think it's almost the most important one, because it activates so much accelerating/scaling. Perhaps it would help to show these two resources with a different icon shape, or  different icon color, to immediately notify the player that these resources are slightly different from the others, and maybe it's a good idea to mouse over and read the tooltip.

I played three runs of your game (all on the recommended difficulty). In my first play I tried following the tutorial, and somehow ended up not unlocking the wood farm until super late. This felt REALLY bad, because this building is so imperative, so needed, to succeed. I almost feel like the game should be a LITTLE more intelligent/helpful in offering me what I need to even stand a chance of winning.

In my third and winning run, i picked it incredibly early, built a lot of them early, and it allowed me to snowball and gain a whole lot more building cards due to not having to pick wood early every time.

Essentially, it feels really bad when you do not get buildings unlocked, card after card, that are paramount to progress to the win condition. Is there a system in place that decides when you get a new building choice? Or is it fully random? 

The same goes for citizens too. In my winning run, it felt weird having to build 50~ lighthouses because the cards would not offer me citizens. I expected the victory would come from continuously getting citizens from cards, but they just dried up. With lighthouse only giving one citizen, and the building being a lighthouse besides (what kind of bridge needs dozens of lighthouses!), it doesn't make sense for the player to be expected to make so many to get to the victory condition.

It took me a long time to figure out how to evaluate citizens. Maybe it would help to set more goals for your player to guide them to the right way to think about how to get a successful run. A % increase on your production buildings is great, but it only makes sense to do after a certain amount of production facilities are made.

Happiness and hunger are thrown at you quite early, but are essentially inconsequential early/mid game unless you really purposefully steer away from food for some reason. This really contributes to the overwhelming feeling.

Okay that's all the time I have for now, so I'll stop here. I haven't even talked about workshops yet. Anyway, fantastic game.

I'm going to check it out right now! I think the rest of my team is too, when they have time. We had already talked about doing so on our discord a few hours ago !

It's a 3d fps capybara vampire survivors! Cool idea! It was a little frustrating with the bullet not going where I wanted it to.

I love capybaras, and it was fun seeing all of them run towards me!!

 I hope you learned a lot from your first jam experience! You did a great job releasing this with less than a week's work, and you can definitely be proud of yourself. I hope next jam you can add a few more interesting features! 

 The pacing is a little weird to me, the building/gathering phase lasts a lot longer than I wanted it to, and I got a little bored of it. I realize that I can skip to the start of the storm, but that wouldn't be optimal strategy, so I didn't want to do that. I ran around my house in the storm, thinking I just needed to survive until the end of the storm, was wondering why the first wave lasted so long, and eventually there were so many mobs around my base, all my structures were destroyed. It wasn't until after reading the comments here that I realized that I had to destroy crystals!

I really like the rain effect and the thunder though, and the use of the theme. The storm phase is intense! And the metal music gets a big plus from me!

What a gem you made! Neat concept, cool art, well polished, good learning curve, great tutorial. Can't think of a thing I'd do differently really, except maybe flesh out the story (which is understandably out of scope for the jam). Great job!

Simple and surprisingly addictive! Just how many storms will this house have to weather?! I really like that in the storm phase you have to click very frantically and actively, and it's fun to have something to do in that phase. Very good, literal use of the theme! More fun than I thought it'd be from the presentation. I was hoping there would be an extra element/more content to mix up the gameplay after a few waves though

We do have cost on the blueprint card in the top right, but it's probably a little too tiny. And if you hover over a blueprint card (or upgrade point) the cost of the action points light up on the action point dots. But I agree about the point cost on the upgrade menu, it was another thing on our nice to have list to redo the entire menu. I think half of the upgrades don't even have descriptive texts! Oops. 

Thanks for playing it a second time, we really appreciate you taking time out of your day to write such detailed feedback and we really enjoy reading your comments! And thank you so much for your kind words. You and all the other kind commenters are absolutely making my day, week, month, probably even year.

This is by far the highest quality game I've played this jam. The art is professional quality. The song is playlist material. The polishing and animations are top notch. And jijigri made it solo? AND submitted it three days before the deadline. How did you do that? What a pro.

I don't really like the first two levels, but the lava level is a cool puzzle platformer stage! It's a little rough with the hardest part of the level 3 being at the end (these darn birds!) making it all feel very punishing and unfun if you fail a few times. I also couldn't discover what the trigger was for the controls to flip in the glitched stages.

I was a little confused when the game sent me back to the menu (good that you added a little bit of text that the game wasn't over). I was hoping the levels would change significantly (maybe all of it upside down would've been cool), but repeating the same jumps wasn't that exciting.

Also I don't really understand the point of the spin mechanic?

The glitch idea was an interesting idea, and an original take on the theme, though!

I love Bloons TD! We definitely mentioned the game more than once when discussing upgrade paths! It was quite a struggle to develop all the unique upgrades within the time limit of the jam. I guess it was a little ambitious to begin with :) but we're happy with where we landed

Amazing feedback, thank you so much. Like Cal said, we pretty much agree with everything you wrote!

This game is art. The artstyle and presentation (including the language use) is very quirky and meme-y in a good way! Very lovable.

 I read your warning about the sound volume and thought: "What are they talking about? The volumes are fine!" and then I stepped outside. I love my ears, but after today I don't think they love me back.

I hope you learned a lot with this jam, and hope you get a little more time to add some more content in future jams.

I really like the full screen shader effect and the use of audio. The game has a great eerie, isolated vibe, and that's pretty unique and cool! It took me a while to figure out what to do despite reading all the notes (maybe you can put more instructions on your itch page for the time being). On my first play I figured out how to navigate the storms, then I got to the oxygen tank and i spam clicked to figure out what it did. I guess that emptied it (there were no safeguards or visual feedback). Then I died trying to find the crankshaft(?). The second time i stayed alive but still could not find the darn crankshaft!

Also on the page you say there is no winning - that's no fun! If I solve puzzles you have to give me a reward!

Anyway, great job making this in a week. And you did a great job with the sounds especially, really sold the vibe for me.

I had to read the page to figure out what to do. I guess my brain just assumed "build stuff on island!". It's an interesting concept, being/representing the storm. I like the use of music, really driving home the theme of calm/storm. It took me a while to figure out what ways objects were rotated, could have used some arrows!

Amazing art! Three well done mini games, and it all looks very polished! Great job!

Me too! Maybe after the jam, haha

I tried it again, filled in the solution from the solution sheet, and got through the rest just fine! Loved it. I love these kinds of puzzles in general, and the vibe and aesthetic was lovely. The story didn't fully land with me, though. Anyway, great job!

I didn't really understand the controls, so it was hard to play. The ship didn't really want to move where i wanted it to, and moved slowly when it did. And then at some point I died without really understanding why. It definitely has a cool vibe though. 

Really fun, cool concept. Love the name. I actually made the same pun during my team's brainstorming session, then a day later i saw your clam animations on the discord, haha. Was looking forward to playing this!

Yeah, and unfortunately the person we were counting on to do music ended up having tech issues :( but that's life! Thanks for your comment!

It's very pretty and cozy! I got stuck on the first puzzle. I even opened the pdf, and I had the order correct, but I haven't a clue where to go from there, even with the pdf!

Interesting concept, but I don't understand the calm part of the theme. Good job though!

Reminds me of Doodle Jump! I like the art

I laughed a lot. Very funny use of the theme. Good choice of music

This game is very quaint and wholesome, not at all bloody. No sir!

Thank you! 

♥

Thank you so much. I will think on it!

It's finished like this. I might make a follow-up or a bigger version in the future. But for now I'm undecided.

<3 thank youuuu