itch.io

Interesting idea with the drawing your own platforms, kind of like frozone in the Incredibles. However  I don't really get what I'm supposed to do, or better said, I tried some random stuff for dozens of times until something worked but it doesn't really feel satisfying, more like gaming the system. Also often it doesn't work as I would expect, like for example often the blue bar at the top goes down but no path appears in the level. The cursor is also so big I wasn't sure at first where the drawing happens. I think it's at the top of the snowflakey thing.

The game is also light on the theme, the freezing doesn't really seem to affect gameplay, it's just the thing that happens when you die?

Overall I was a bit confused, maybe it could help if there's a tutorial level or maybe a frozen element already so you can see what you're supposed to do with the drawing mechanic.

One thing I liked is that you can respawn very fast, like super meatboy, so you can keep trying.

With some improvements or instructions could be a really nice game! One way or another nice job making a whole game in 9 days as a solo dev!

Also btw the description sounds like it was generated by chatGPT. It's a bit long to read and I think people just want a quick fast "how to play"! So I would suggest making it much shorter, and it's always nicer to write it yourself rather than let a robot do it ;)

This is a cool take on the freeze theme, I could easily imagine this being a really nice game once fully fleshed out. 

It's good that you get unlimited shots, this lets you experiment a bit and shoot everything to figure out what can be used in what way.

I have one big complaint though, and that's the aiming. I nearly gave up on the second level because I understood what I needed to do, the aiming was just jumping around so much that I could not execute on my idea... Maybe slow down how fast the angle changes or something? It is killing a bit of the enjoyment for me.

I would also suggest building the levels in a way that lets you understand them step by step. In the second level for example I only saw the mirror kinda thing pretty late and only then understood that it's part of the solution. In the third level I would suggest some color-coding to help the player understand which gears control which part of the level. I had some trouble understanding how the pieces of the room work together.

Overall a great idea, fits the theme, and an impressive amount of levels and gameplay!

It's the first game in this jam that let you slow time rather than freeze something completely. I think it works well here because it makes the game easier. However, bullet time is not really new. And usually you can only do it for short periods of time, while it seems like in this game you can just slow down time for the whole game? Which makes it much easier to play. So I didn't really get the point. 

For me on a Mac keyboard it was hard to press left ctrl btw, would be nice if you also allow right ctrl! Or shift maybe.

It's the first game in this jam that let you slow time rather than freeze something completely. I think it works well here because it makes the game easier. However, bullet time is not really new. And usually you can only do it for short periods of time, while it seems like in this game you can just slow down time for the whole game? Which makes it much easier to play. So I didn't really get the point. 

For me on a Mac keyboard it was hard to press left ctrl btw, would be nice if you also allow right ctrl! Or shift maybe.

Super unique idea, and it's right at the core of the theme! I think a lot of games gave players control over freezing AND unfreezing, it's nice to see one where you can only freeze. It works out quite well and feels like being a babysitter lol.

It's great that you made your own music for the game, I think it must have taken a lot of effort! A bit of a pity you can't hear much of instruments that aren't strings as the player lol.

Btw I also did music on my team's game and I also used some strings. In my case it was from the logic pro library. One thing I learned during the jam is modulating expression in midi. I used it to give the strings a bit of a feeling that they are being played for real, that are being kind of faded in and out, so it doesn't sound like someone just pressed the strings button for 1 beat. I used this video to help me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCmH-YMtVPU it's for Logic Pro, but maybe you can find something similar in your DAW if you use something else. Hope this made sense, I just found it super useful and thought you might too!!

Overall a nice idea, and it could get quite varied with different types of music and such! Well done for a solo dev.

Neat little platformer. I was surprised there are relatively few platformers, but this one incorporates the theme better than others I've seen. It's kind of a nice game flow to make it to the next fire and stay in safety for a bit. Sometimes this waiting felt a bit long to me, I would suggest make the temperature go up faster if you're staying near fire :) 

One time I turned to ice and didn't know why, I think the collision box was maybe a bit big and I hit the spikes when visually I wasn't touching them. Also in one of the gaps I could stand on the spikes and they didn't turn me to ice!

For a solo project in a short game jam, not bad mate!

I'm sorry, I thought it would be easy to find out about mixels but I've been looking for like 20 minutes and I didn't even find a website or video that explains it! Basically the idea is not to mix resolutions. I read this in Michael Azzi's "Pixel Logic" book (page 21), you can find it on gumroad if you're interested. It says one should never mix resolutions. Basically all the pixel art should fit on the same "grid", there shouldn't be a sprite that looks like it was resized 2x, if that makes sense. Another way to say it is all the outlines of the pixel art should have the exact same thickness.

I love the blue color palette and that everything sticks to it! The scrolling backgrounds also look great, though from time to time there were some black bars that appeared in them when I was playing.

The mechanics are very creative, it's fun to change the position of your boat, and you always have important fast decisions to make while in the level. Unfortunately it was often frustrating for me because I had three actions that did nothing to solve my problem, maybe they are all "move right" when I'm already at the right side of the screen. I would suggest making the swapping a bit faster or the enemies less numerous lol.

It was also often frustrating how slow the sub moves. When you have to swap abilities and quickly press the right one, you don't have a lot of time, and this could be improved with faster movement or swapping I think.

The music felt a bit monotonous, but also kind of fitting for the atmosphere. Could have used some more instruments, or a longer melody maybe!

About the art by the way, I would suggest sticking to a single resolution for the pixel art sprites, that ties everything together even better! Maybe google "mixels" to see what to avoid. Ideally you would also make the text and UI elements pixel art, but with the small resolution I see why you went for a different approach. Also it's a lot of art to do for one person :D

One thing that is unique about this game that I really loved were the crew members. There's so many different ones to choose from, and they have different abilities that really make a difference. Again nice work giving the player choices that matter. It's also nice that you can upgrade crew, though I wasn't sure what to do once I all upgraded them. Getting more money at that point is kinda pointless I guess? The designs of the crewmembers with their names and stuff are really cool though.

Overall a game that presents a nice unified experience that flows quite nicely. Especially impressive that you did this all yourself, including coding, graphics and audio. Very well done!

It was a great idea to limit what the player can do to two things! I'm really impressed by how well the mechanics fit the theme and how well it still works as a mechanic.

The things you can do are very simple, yet the ways in which you can use them are super varied and creative. It involves thinking about what is possible, and it involves executing tricky combinations of the two inputs like freezing to turn at a corner. It seems like this game applies the design philosophies you hear about in video essays like those from Mark Brown's GMTK. Well done!

The music fits (although you didn't make it) and you put some real effort to also theme the whole game about ice and freezing, with the penguin and the snow effects and the backgrounds. I also like how the penguin freezes at the goal area and again recalls the theme. Talking about it, you did so well to make the player character so expressive, I love the flapping as well as the freezing, and love the sunglasses!

The only criticism I have is that sometimes you feel a bit tricked, like when you go on a platform and you don't move with it like in most platformers. The levels with red ice behind the goal area also kind of fall into this category, it's very hard for those to get the timing of freezing right. Though I did it after a while, it didn't feel as fun as the rest. I would also suggest adding some checkpoints so if you brave one difficult stretch, you can tackle the next one in peace. But this is maybe a bit beyond the scope of a short game jam, and it's just as great to have more levels, which you made a lot of! Totally worht spending the time on that.

Overall, a phenomenal game that integrates the theme at every step, is fun to play and offers lots of content for a jam game, especially for a solo dev.

The idea is quite original and not something I've seen before in this way!

I played three times and each time I did not understand what I was supposed to be doing though. My guess was to match reaper traits with traits on the top card, but I lost points when I would have expected to gain points.

For example, one person likes gastronomy, but when I click the reaper who likes cheese and wine, that resulted in a failure, even though in my opinion those traits fit together.

The theme is only loosely met in narrative, and even then, it's not quite a strong connection. I like that not everyone made a game about ice and penguins though :D

I love the title screen where you see the cute slimey aliens, they're really the stars of this game! The art of the icea cream truck and the cone mountains in the background are really cool.

I also liked how they slowly melt while waiting for their ice cream, and how the freeze theme was tied into the narrative. Apart from customers slowly melting, the gameplay doesn't really involve the freeze theme though in my opinion. The idea of the main game is also essentially a single-player version of Overcooked, which is fun, but also not necessarily a fresh idea.

For the controls I first tried clicking the ingredients and stuff, maybe you could think about this input method in the future. I think it might be more intuitive. Since you need the key controls from the start, you might also consider just always displaying them, I found myself constantly having to press space anyways.

And finally, for the art I would suggest going for either pixel art or non-pixel art, to my taste it looks better than if you mix the two. You could also look into "mixels", which is when you mix resolutions between or within sprites of pixel art. It happens a lot on this game, and in pixel art it usually avoided because it looks less like a unified visual style!

I have given a lot of criticism, but this game deserves a lot of praise as well. There are two main parts, cute art that is quite unified in terms of colors, nice music and sound effects, and for a game made in 9 days it's quite good! Especially with what seems to be the largest team of the whole game jam. Nice job coordinating everything and producing a whole game together!!

To add to this, I was using QWERTZ and I didn't know at first why I couldn't place the colorful sprinkles :) I had to press Y instead of Z to do it (on mine I think Y and Z are switched compared to US and UK keyboards).

Hey! As the guy who did the music, thanks for the feedback on the feel of the track in the main portion. It's really useful to get specific feedback like this. Also very good to know that it can be hard to find the clickable areas. Thanks!

True, I think if the enemies were faster the game might be impossible to beat haha. I tried a kind of stop-and-go strategy before that and it didn't work so well. so that's why I resorted to just running through.

Lmao I started doing the same thing, it really helps!! And is in the spirit of the game :D

You can pet the dog in this game, which is the most important sign of quality.

But it was generally super fun, and it ran better for me than any other game, probably because it's made with phaser :D Great job on the artwork especially, it's cute, perfect for a game like this and was easily readable for the game purposes!

It was a bit difficult sometimes ot tell what I did wrong, or what you can even control. I didn't get for a long time that you can change the color/fur of the animal, and the collar. I was also sad to get thrown back to level 1 after I did a single mistake in level 4 ;(

Also the theme is very loosely applied, but hats off for a creative interpretation! At first when I saw this I thought of a part of Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga where you have to get your passport photo taken and you can sabotage it by making faces lol. Maybe something like that could be a future game ;) Also very reminiscent of the kinda games kids play.

First off, it's amazing to find a fully voice acted game in a game jam. What a nice surprise! It added so much to the experience as well.

The enemies are a very cool idea for a sort of Zelda-dungeon style enemy. I noticed after a while that they can't catch up to me, so I never really had to freeze and just ran through all the levels. It works if you don't run towards them too much. Because of this strategy, the second enemy was not a challenge at all... However, it was still not trivial and I had a lot of fun trying to ourmaneuver all the enemies, and sometimes I did have to freeze still.

The whole game is very on point with the freeze theme, with the gameplay, art, music and narrative of course. Nice job producing a very unified game with a bigger team!

Oh also, I really loved the option to go back. Unfortunately I pressed enter and so accidentally chose the same ending again, and after that I couldn't go back anymore lol. Also gotta love the Skyrim joke ;)

The beginning is really good to get you oriented because it can be a bit hard to find your way. The art style with the glowing "stars" in the walls and objects is quite unique and I really enjoyed it. It lends itself well to the genre and feel of the game, too.

This game is probably most on point about the theme of the jam than any other I've seen. The having to freeze is quite fun and tense as you don't know where the monster is coming from. After a while it also led to me freezing before I hear anything because my reaction speed was too slow so I was "expecting" a note soon and froze pre-emptively. It makes you quite tense and paranoid as to when that note is gonna come and it feels very fitting that you get scared in advance and just stop and listen.

However, the fullscreen didn't work for me and it was very hard to find my way around the maze, I didn't know where I had to go either (where exactly is the center? Do I have to go up or down or what?) It is fun that you can jump over many gaps but it was too hard to find out where I was going after a while, and after I dropped into a hole after getting very far, I gave up.

Overall, a super great game idea and great fit for the theme!

Thanks! We were wondering how much we should help players with the puzzles, it's good to know many people made it without any help!

The visuals look really cool for a jam game, I like the sort of comic-y feel and the colors are nice and soft and comfortable. It works well ith the music, too, even if you didn't make that haha.

In the beginning I didn't know that I was supposed to find the room in the hospital after I arrived. I also didn't know what the bar on the left does with the blue and red and which way it moves and what makes it move. I now think it's a timer, and it symbolizes the organs heating up and unfreezing. Perhaps some explanation or an arrow, or even a timer on top of the bar could help!

I think finding the room could be made easier by a bigger minimap, because even once I understood I had to find a room, it felt like flipping a coin which path to go down, because there's usually only enough time to go down one path, and if the room isn't there, you're out of luck. It might be benficial to add some basis for the player to decide where to go. Maybe the names of different hospital wards, and the player has to remember which organ they have, and then guess which ward is most likely to contain their goal room?

Driving fast was fun, but at some point I noticed that I can't do that because missing the exit basically means losing, and the exit can come very unexpectedly. It creates a nice game flow though of first speeding up super hard and then slowing down and waiting for the exit. Maybe you could announce the exit sooner though that the player can have more fun with fast driving and doesn't have to be nervous all the time :D

Désolé pour mon français!

Les graphismes sont trop mignons! Le cri du pengouin a eté déchirant lol.

Au début j'ai pensé que je nage dans l'eau, mais plus tard j'ai remarqué que c'est un platformer et qu'il faut sauter sur la prochaine plateforme. Si tu utilisais un autre arrière-plan, peut-être ça communiquais mieux que c'est un platformer :)

Parfois j'ai été resté coincé sur une plateforme et je sais pas pourquoi. Et parfois il y a eu trop des plateformes et je n'arrivais pas à avancer. On pourrait remédier à cela en reduisant le nombre de plateformes peut-être.

//

The art is very cute! The penguin scream when you lose is heartbreaking lol.

At first I thought you're floating on shoals on water! But only gradually realized that you fall down and it's more of a platformer. I think a different background could communicate better than you're looking "from the side" rather than "from above". 

I also found myself stuck on platforms, not knowing why, and I played probably 20 times where there was just nowhere to go, and I couldn't reach the next platform. I think one remedy could be more careful collision programming, and for the other issue, you could put fewer platforms! Quite often they were blocking each other.

Sent a request!

Hey! I'm a self-taught game dev with 4 years of programming experience, check my games on my itch profile! Love the soundtracks and sound designs, do you want to team up? I'm most comfortable in the LÖVE2D lua framework but also thinking about finding a team where I could take more of an assisting role with code, maybe in Godot or Unity. Unavailable on Aug 5, partially available Aug 6, free for 8h+ on other jam days. Timezone EEST. Let me know if you're interested 😁

The feeling of the game fits the theme incredibly well and everything works quite well together. Loved seeing my little players spread out over the map :) I also liked their little speech bubbles and the fact you can click everything and it will make some particle and sound effect. Though I didn't quite get all the mechanics, I was just clicking the spawners until I won... seems to have worked!

This is not only a great idea but also incredibly fun! The choices really matter and it's super exciting to make a sword with like +40 attack :D I like that there's different enemy types with different weaknesses, and that there's three loot types. 

It may have been cool to be able to choose which loot type you want to build. It also took a little bit to understand what info shows up where, the tutorial definitely helped a bit but also didn't explain everything. Finally, the game crashes for me after like 10-30 seconds in Chrome :(

I love the choice of art style, it works really well! And I feel like the whole game has very high replay value :)

Sorry, by beach ball I meant the cursor symbol you get on MacOS when a program isn't responding x)

Thanks for the strategy feedback!

Many people had the idea of "you control the villain", but this game actually delivers on that promise really well. It really feels like you're trying to overwhelm the hero with your minions! It's also really fun to place the monsters and to think about your strategy and about possible weaknesses of the hero.

Obviously there was limited time, but I feel like it would get exponentially better if the player had more minion types! Personally I also didn't figure out how to progress and get better minions, or that map with the castle that's on the itch page 🤔

Mad props for making all those games with all the graphics, music and sound in just 48h! Loved the music, the games were super fun and I think overall it fits the theme super well. There's so much variety in the games as well, you did a really good job with that.

One thing that didn't work so well for me was the last minigame, the one with the singing! I only get minus points, and I tried it twice.. I felt like it's a bit fast and unclear how to make points

5/5 presentation, truly breathtaking

Wow this was extremely polished! I really enjoyed the game and the art and sound are really good, too, everything works very well together. I see how the theme kind of fits in, but it doesn't feel like a very "reversed" game in a way that it's a totally different experience. But you DO have to think about how to heal all your guys, so there is some aspect that works quite well.

I tried playing in Safari, Firefox and Chrome. In each browser I waited a full minute and the game still didn't load. Maybe my old laptop is to blame though!

This is the cutest art and best music I've seen in the jam entries so far :) It was hard for me to figure out how to make points, and the timer went down super fast and stressed me out a lot.. I really like the idea of making the songs and then playing them too! The whole vibe of the game is just great, with the ratings in the end, and the dogs and ducks and sounds 😊

Thank you for the feedback, this is also what I got from others. I guess it's always easy for the dev to get many points haha

Thanks! It was an important feature and I wasn't sure how well it would work :)

The error was on Safari. Now I tried running on Firefox and Chrome as well. With both of them, there's a little spinny loading circle that freezes, and then the browser crashes. The problem might be my old 2013 macbook!

When I boot it up, it just shows a gray screen and the Godot logo, and then I get a beach ball and I have to quit it. Might be my super old 2013 macbook that's just too weak to handle it lol.

Mad respect for making all this art and the menu graphics in 48h! I'm sure many people thought of a "you're the game" concept, but I think this game manages to implement it in a pretty fun way. I like the framing and the little intro, and I like rooting for my lil character as she makes her way through the level and just wants to have fun.

I'm not sure it was intentional, but at one point I missed a platform because I just pressed space as fast as possible, and didn't time it. This could actually be a very fun aspect, intentional or not, that you do also kind of have to "play" and time your jumps, to ensure the player is happy. Just like some games give you a generous hitbox or something so it "feels" just right.

An idea I had was that you could have a rock-paper-scissors type combat system, and you could make the right choice for the player even if they press the wrong button. Help them just enough and they will feel good. Help them too much and they will feel cheated. Maybe then you can also have different player personalities. So much potential!

And finally, this is just a very nice product to have made in just 48h.

P.S. for fellow mac users, you have to right-click and "open" the empty-looking icon in the downloaded folder and on the warning that pops up, just press "open" and the game will start.