itch.io

Ah, so it was after all!
Nice, 100% completion~ 
Was a fun time, there were some sneaky placements for secrets
With a bit more fine tuning this'll be a perfectly nice compact little game.
'Course if you you decide to expand it more someday, that'd be cool too! 

Yeah, it was a fun challenge. I love exploration in games like this.
Like Knytt Underground, which isn't so collection based, but has a bunch of cool secrets if one goes looking for them.

That said, it honestly leaves me even more curious.
I counted the diamonds in that map several times, and there's only 55.
Which implies that the last 4 don't even exist, possibly the keys were added up with the tally?
Also that either the map is missing one, though I can't tell where it would've been from the map... or one of the ones I picked up got counted twice?

Really cool game!
Just ended up rushing to the ending to maybe sneak in one more rating before the jam ends, but left me wanting to come back and see if I can get all the gems

The graphics are so pretty, love the stylization here.
Some aspects of the rendering are definitely more than the NES would be capable of, especially the lighting up of the pixels when the character is in range of them.
It's very cool to look at, and the method of rendering out areas as you get closer works really nicely, looks great and aids to that feeling of discovery. Was a treat to explore for sure!

Sound quality was good, music felt nice and fitted the mood quite well, just a really well made little title.
Of the diamonds I did get, some of them were quite clever and needed some thought to work out where to go to get them, and some I have no idea how you would, but I very much want to find out later!

-Edit-
Alright, I concede ^^;
this is the best I could do, I swear I scoured every inch for those last 4 it feels like, but to no avail.
Also that one pogo on the left (you know the one) was so rough!, took me a bunch of tries. I wish the walk back to try again wasn't such a trek. That's my only real complaint as far as the gameplay...well besides missing those diamonds but that's probably on me.
I also ran into lag issues due to the fog of war, though they cleared up after some time, which was good.
Also found a couple bugs. One where if you beat the game, and immediately start a new game without refreshing, the end door was still open despite not having collected all the keys yet.
The second was if you mash the jump on the ground it'll input twice for a bigger jump. Avoided using it to shortcut to any of the gems though.
We actually had the same bug in our game too, I forget the exact specifics to fix it, gotta do something to incorporate a delay before allowing the jump to be activated again.
So close, yet so far...

I'd say this felt very much like Mega Man, but I actually beat it so that can't be right x3
Had an absolute blast with this one.
Makes me feel like the whole jam was created just because you really wanted to make this game and didn't want to wait to do so, that's how much passion is on display here.
The gameplay is an absolute joy all the way through, very responsive, enemy and platform placement is a bit too friendly for it to feel like classic Mega Man, but I'm not complaining one bit.
The tiles are also very well done, with a lot of care to replicate the kind of style those games had.
Also points for the little arrows in the rightmost stage platforms, good pointer for navigating the player without being too in-your-face about it.
Enemies are well sprited and look distinctive with good variety, and the player movement is very fluid and responsive.
Powerup system is cool, I like how if you pick up a third you can use your powers to swap the orb around to your preferred combo. Mine was Yellow+Red, very handy.
Music was stellar and kept the momentum going all the way through.

I don't have any critiques really for this one, I just wanted it to be longer.
You could honestly take the quality of what's here already, make more of it and publish it imo. It's that solid.

Really lovely puzzle platformer~
Puzzles all felt intuitive, but not too easy
was engaging all the way through, platforming felt good, and the graphics though simple were very effective at conveying information to the player.
Played all the way through and had a blast
Short but sweet, and very cute

Only got through a little bit, as I'm checking out more games
Gameplay-wise... it feels okay. Not my type of game at all, hitboxes felt very inconsistent, felt like sometimes I'd do the same thing I was doing to kill someone else just fine at seemingly the same angle of approach, and get repeatedly smacked for most of my HP.
I'd prefer more an actual attack, as it felt it was more just aimed to grind out enough health healing and damage to mitigate the awkwardness of the combat, which isn't appealing to me as a game philosophy.

Graphically though, what I've seen of the game is quite pretty, and knowing about the actual techniques used in making it, probably the most true-to-console design approach of any game in the jam.
Text is great, menus are nice, everything feels very true to what would be playable at the time.
It truly feels like an RPG made in the era... in both good and bad.

Controls felt a bit inconsistent, some movement buttons you could press another while holding and it'd change to that direction, others you'd keep moving with the direction originally held. Would be nice for that to be fully one or the other, though I personally think the first option feels more smooth.

Sound was also really nice here, just some solid chiptune music.

But from what I hear of how long it is, it's quite the feat for a jam of this length, especially for a solo dev.
From a technical standpoint it's really well made, I just wish there was more to the base gameplay as it feels in it's current state there's just not enough player engagement to be found for a game of its length for me.

Had a great time with what I got through (plan to get back to it later, and maybe read the map 'cause my natural compass is the worst, haha
Love the enemy variety on display here, and the difficulty was at just the right amount...though I guess I did play on easy lol. I usually go normal, but it didn't exist, and I don't trust hard in an NES context, lol
Got lost, only found/fought one boss so far, but it's been very solid.

A clear tribute to classic Zelda, right up to the not telling me where to go or what to do at all ^^;;
I do prefer a bit more lead personally, 'cause I kept looping screens and wondering where to go, but that's just my own tastes.
It clearly is made for that sense of pure unaided discovery, and does it well!
Graphically felt very true to its influence, and the maps and enemy layouts were well put together, pretty rude in places, but never completely overwhelming.

The music was good, but pretty shrill. Might be nice if they were toned down a little bit, and a volume slider for it could be helpful.
All in all from what I played so far, very nice!

Really nice game~
Animations are smooth and lovely, and it's super cute how all the enemies are themed around shoes/footwear.
Love the sock snakes <3
Gameplay felt very well put together, enemies were placed to provide a thoughtful approach to dealing with them, and the boss's difficulty was just at the right mark. One of those things where you feel 'oh this is gonna be real easy, and then the other one just throws a boot at exactly the right time to throw your plan of attack off, making you need to consider where both of them are lest you get bonked.
The victory lap portion of it was a nice touch, and the game getting to that point was just the right length for it to not overstay its welcome at all going through it again.
I personally wasn't huge on how slippery the main character is, just not my taste in platforming outside of context sensitive points like ice levels, but it wasn't too hard to adjust to, and the plentiful checkpoints insures it won't stop most people from completing.
Solidifying the platforms felt great and intuitive, and blasting enemies away with the wand was fun too~
Only real critique I can offer is in regards to the tiles. They could use more love, maybe some way to incorporate the theming into them as well? They just feel like a bit of a side note in an otherwise well-polished experience

Was fun, though very repetitive.
Would like to see more enemy variation/attacks, as well as arena layouts.
You do get overpowered quite quickly and some upgrades like mana and max hp didn't make much sense to upgrade after the first little bit, as you'll have more than you'll ever need of the latter, and the overcharging of your HP via magic makes upgrading it pointless.

For balance, it might be a good idea to scale the HP gain from magic to cap at your max hp value (or some% amount over) and to start scaling the mana cost of spells higher the more points into hp regain and magic damage you have.

One problem I did have was the sheer amount of mashing to move around. Might just be getting old but it was pretty uncomfortable.
Perhaps consider keeping the character moving until they stop holding down the movement keys, at least as a toggleable option, maybe for the weapon swing as well.

Shop music gave a nice atmosphere to the area, though the main music would have benefited a lot from a longer track, and possibly a new or remixed version of the song once you reached different slime colors, to aid in that feeling of making progress.

Hitting the enemy felt very inconsistent, not sure if it was a misleading hitbox issue or hidden accuracy calculation?
Felt like something that'd happen on the console, but didn't feel good to play with. Once you outscale them with your healing it's not a worry, but still does make it feel clunkier than it should.

I remember seeing progress of this in the Discord and thinking 'wow this looks really cool...but they do know they've got to make a game to go with it though, right?'
And at the current state, it kind of reflects that.
That said, the page? absolutely stunning, so cool, the attention to detail, all the little odds and ends, the movement of the manual with the page flipping, and everything encompassing that old school vibe even down to the carpeting. Not to mention the parody cartridge names and other bits, and the commercial footage with clips from other jam participants was a real neat touch.
Graphic design game on point. I hope to make something this cool if I ever commercially publish a game on this site.
The gameplay itself, not much to speak on right now, it's functional, parts are there, but feels like just a set piece so far, walk around smack stuff grab a key and repeat.
The code thing is a neat gimmick and as a nod to the old copy protection habits of old, is interesting
Some issues I found were enemies walking through doors and hitting you when they weren't visible on screen yet, remedied by me slashing like a lunatic at every entrance I went through, but probably not ideal, ha.
The Y sorting (I believe that's the right term) could be tweaked a bit to allow the pillar in the foreground of the door to render in front of the player when in the entrance area (as in the screenshot), which'd really help sell the pseudo 3D nature of the graphics.
I'm an absolute sucker for isometric games though, it's actually my favorite style of pixel art (and I know how finicky it can be to work with so props for that!) Looks real cool~

Hope to see you continue this and what you do in the future.
There's clearly a lot of love for the era on display here, and I'd like to see it become something truly special.  

Thanks~
Very fair. I did toss around the idea of trying to do that with the sound, but quickly decided that it just wasn't feasible to do so.
As our main musician on the team had quite a lot on his plate already, what with us deciding to make a rhythm game of all things, the added restriction and the time it'd take to learn a program made for making it, making it sound good, and finishing it in time to set it to tracks so the rhythm part works with it....yeah ^^
Didn't want to stress him out that much.
Still I'm pretty darn pleased with the music he put into it, he learned a ton and it really showed.
It would be cool to have a toggle for a more true-to-NES chiptune, but I can't make that a promise as I can't speak for him and whether he'd be wanting to do that much extra work involved for the game.
Glad you enjoyed the music as in spite of the not true-to-console sound design though!

And yeah, that was a little touch of mine I just couldn't help but get added in. Makes me smile :)

Thanks for playing!
Yeah, the cherry thing was a last minute bug that got missed, but you can skip it with shift+q to see the little bit left of the game that's there so far.

Glad you enjoyed it!
Lots of work was put in, and I think the general group consensus is to have a bit of a breather for now.
So while I can make no promises on any dates, I can say that there's desire in all of us to take what we've made and finish off the bits that needed more time.

All very fair critiques! Thanks for giving it a go.

The submarine is definitely on the list for things that still need touching up, just ran out of time to focus on it.

I personally think the wall jump is fine, it's placed specifically to be impossible to progress without learning it while also being in an area where falling has no risk, so people can learn about it before it's needed.
However it is unnecessary in the previous level, so we were thinking about adding more opportunities in that first platforming level to learn about/use it earlier.

The cherry glitch is known, one can press shift+q to work around it for the time being.

And yeah the rhythm part is still missing more incentive to hit the notes. We've got some ideas for it, but none in place yet. By far it took the most time to program/make songs for as nobody had worked on a rhythm game, or composed songs really beforehand ^^
With the deadline looming, it was either get the rhythm mechanics more solid but a level or two less, or include the rest of the songs/battles we had made with the rhythm mechanics in a playable state, and we opted for the latter.
We're very happy with what we managed though, and do plan to (after a bit of a break) get back and put the polish needed into those last parts, and maybe do a bit more...

Didn't have the patience to get very far with it, even with infinite lives.
Not a fan of how easy it is to get out of control, and the wall rebounding felt awful to deal with.
But I can respect that it's that way by design, even if it's not my kind of game at all.
Dunno if the NES could actually move that fast, felt more like something on Genesis or similar to me.
The main character is very cute though, and was nicely animated.

Fun game! The throwing mechanic felt nice, though I found myself sometimes placing stuff down when I wanted to throw it.
Mechanics were all solid, and had a good NES feel to them.
Enemy placement really seemed to reinforce a slow and methodical approach to things, and that combined with the permanent health loss and how long it can take to grind out upgrades did make it a bit rough.
I don't know if I'd had it in me to start from the beginning the third time, but thankfully managed to beat it on my second attempt going.
Sound design was great though, really enjoyed the music.
Story bits were nice, that ending text though, wow
All in all, very solid, would recommend to anyone having trouble to pick up the shield upgrade soon as possible. Didn't realize what it did at first.

The camera was a bit hard to deal with and felt a bit too zoomed in to tell what was going on sometimes
climbing took a while to figure out.
I quite enjoyed the haggling minigame at the end, that was an unexpected little bit of interaction~

Had a ton of fun with this one!
Controls were really tight and responsive
Smacking back projectiles and pogo-ing were both a ton of fun, as someone who has Hollow Knight as one of their favorite games of all time, this gave a lot of similar vibes mechanically, in the best way!

The boss fight was quite simple and enjoyable.
Almost beat it all in one continue, but mistimed one right near the end, oh well

Not much else to say, enemy placement felt well thought out.
Would've liked it to be longer, but only because I didn't want to stop playing.

Cool game! Not a genre I go for usually, but remained fun throughout, difficulty never felt unfair or too much to overcome, just the right amount for a quick engaging playthrough.
I did get blasted pretty hard on stage one, because I assumed the sprites would scroll off screen after a while like in a lot of shmups, and then they all started stacking up on me. Lesson learned, haha!
Some of my jam mates played this yesterday, so I couldn't help but see what happens if you don't catch her.
(sorry, if was for science!) and yeah... fair enough
(Worth noting that upon trying to continue or putting in the password for the level after the fact, it immediately brought me to that same screen. Unsure if intended as a punishment, but I assume not)

Graphically it's really nice! A bit hard to see some sprites though, as a previous commenter mentioned.
For me, the constant usage of two layer parallax did take away a bit of the NES feel, felt more like a game made near the end of the NES' life, and was ported to SNES partway through development. 
I love parallax though, and it looks great for it, that's for sure.

The watermelon movement seemed pretty unbalanced in the players favor depending on the the computer running it.
Likely not using delta time for the speed values I'd imagine? Not much of a coder myself yet, but I know that can cause issues.
The idea is neat though, I doubt there was anything like this made back in the day.
The timer seems much too long currently.
Maybe if the melon had more options, like a dash that recharged over time, or had limited uses, the balance would be better.
It's hard to say, since the speed can vary so much from machine to machine what the intended game feel was when it was made.

Thanks so much for playing!
We had a lot of fun making it for sure.
I completely agree with the up-to-jump thoughts, I'm not huge on it either, but we felt swapping the dedicated jump button around outside of rhythm segments wouldn't be very intuitive overall.
Some time after the jam period is over, we'd definitely like to go revise the controls with less restrictions, and some more configurable options.

Wow! Really impressed with this one. Very much kept the spirit of those NES multicarts alive.
Lots of style and personality added to each game.
Man do I suck at Snake style games though! Love the implementation of painting the tiles, was very satisfying
The Pacman-esque  gameplay of grand theft auto was pretty fun! Kinda got into the groove of it, which I usually fail to do in actual Pacman titles, probably because they don't make use of the screen looping.
I did notice it had a bug where if you pause you can still keep moving around and collect everything, and the cars have no collision then, so it's a free win at that point.
Far Sea Invaders was great, quite humorous, though a bit rough to mash through on keyboard. This one definitely made me wish there was native controller support. ... ... pun unintended.
Temple Mayem was easily the roughest for me, I'm so bad at these ones. Made it past level 1 though, and that's good enough for me.
The music was spot on, too! 

Cool start to a game so far. I enjoyed shooting coins into the air as opposed to just an activation, that was a nice touch.
Day night cycle was pretty cool! Felt a bit too advanced to keep that NES feel to it, but very nice looking, as well as the other environmental details, like the use of negative space in the forest to add that feel of depth.
Music was very nice as well, really suited the atmosphere of the game.
...also I appreciate being able to hold both move buttons and moonwalk in place, it makes me happy.
Bare bones for sure right now, but shows some solid potential towards something grander.

Admittedly I didn't notice what B did at first and thought the game was intended to involve stopping to fire at enemies. I almost prefer the extra bit of challenge from that.
The game felt rather simple, once you get a good strafe going you can easily go endlessly.
Some variety in enemies or attacks or speeding up as you go later into the game would help with this, as well as a hi-score implementation, like typical arcade-style NES games.
Music was the highlight for me, pretty solid chiptune track!

I did manage that while experimenting with the controls, but it felt a bit too tough with the timing for me to get consistently, and with all the climbing back you have to do if you fall, I didn't want to risk the time loss.
By climbing to the very top, of the previous chain and timing it right, I found enough space to squeeze by it, which given the very purposeful feel to the previous chain lengths I imagine it was set up so to do just that as well. So kudos to having multiple solutions to puzzle around it based on personal preferences and strengths

Great game! One of the most authentic to NES feeling games I've tried so far in the jam.
That one part across the chains with the beetle was so rude, I almost gave up on my ability to get further, but I managed to get through somehow! (not even gonna talk about the difficulty in level 3) 
Movement was stiff in all the ways that I'm glad most modern platformers avoid, but perfectly encompassed that classic arcade-y vibe. Whipping felt snappy and satisfying to defeat enemies and activate gears with.

I do wish it came with a way to pause, as sometimes I felt myself wanting to take a break between attempts, but the timer is pretty tight in stage 2 especially to step away from. The death audio for enemies was a bit shrill and could maybe have been toned down a little.

All in all though, really well done!

Thanks for playing!
There's a bit more to the game, but that was an accidental glitch that was added into it. You can press shift+q to skip from there into the last part.
Story is still a bit of a work in progress as we couldn't fit in all we wanted to in the time limit, but hopefully we'll fine tune the rest sometime after the jam o/

Really cool game!
I wasn't sure how the gameplay would feel just looking at it, but the balance between gathering resources, and the unusual line based hitbox made for a very satisfying yet somewhat frustrating experience.
In a good way though, felt very much like a classic console game, that has you saying "I know I can get a bit further next time!"
Took a a few plays to understand how you stop from slowing down, but otherwise felt very intuitive.
Didn't quite get to the end during this first playing of it, but am left wanting to come back to it and see it through!