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This is your best-looking game yet! The art for Kevin's Escape was simple, clean and effective, but this is on an entirely differently level. The big chunky sprites are gorgeous, and I loved your color choices!

The difficulty felt pretty spot-on! It took a minute to realize that my bullets could destroy enemy projectiles, but this was a fun little romp once I figured that out. I wish I could hold the fire button to shoot continuously instead of tapping repeatedly, but it was not a huge inconvenience!

I have only ever used MESEN for NES emulation - I was shocked that it worked at all! I will have to give it a fair shake onba "real" GB emulator some time soon!!

That recorded video is actually the MESEN emulator in windows. I downloaded the ROM because I saw your note about the web build having some issues!

This is cool! I think this would be much cooler in the hands of someone with more rhythm, though! I eventually turned the background music off because I was having a pretty hard time syncing my drumming to the same speed - but I think that is more a skill issue haha. Some of the samples were a little abrasive, and a few seemed to produce feedback that bled into other samples - but that might also be a problem with the me, not the tool. Overall - cool as hell! I don't feel equipped to evaluate this as a music-making tool, but as a jam entry, I LOVE it. Great job!

Here is my best attempt at making a tune:

I'm so happy to have played another entry in the Detective Mane franchise! This feels like a bite-sized expansion to the original, and it was nice to be back in the world of pleasant folk and low-stakes crimes.

Looking back at my feedback for the first game, you retained a lot of the things that made the first one shine! It's cool to see Detective Mane in a new biome, and changing the setting was an effective way to make the game look fresh while still reusing some of the existing assets.

I like the idea of background music using drums reminiscent of Detective Mane's home in Africa, but I think the loop needs to be a little longer - I needed to turnt he music off after a few minutes.

Great work! Sorry to hear that you were sick during jam week, but I am so happy you managed to submit this! What a treat.

The animated pixel art here is so polished! I am so impressed by the seamless transition between swimming and treading states, and it looks good even when rotated to swim at odd angles. The water texture is subtle, but also looks awesome!

I know you said that the swim speed based on the mouse distance is unintentional, but that seems like a cool mechanic to explore!

Thanks for submitting! You have a really solid foundation! I would love to see a finished version of this!

Awesome! A worthy successor to Mouth Man.

I have a few minor complaints:

• The running animation is not quite synced to the player move speed, so it sometimes looks like you are moonwalking.
• Even with z-targetting, it is pretty frustrating to actually land an attack on the skeletons - it seems like it is always better to avoid them altogether.

Now for the good stuff:

• The soundtrack is good! And it was cool to hear the tracks fade in and out as your moved between areas!
• The art is good! You captured that low-poly 3d platformer look! The lighting, models, and level layouts all evoked the collect-a-thon era in the best way.
• The Halloween theme was a blast! I loved the hopping skeletons, rolling skeletons and cobweb trampolines.
• There was a lot of variety on display here. You manage to create a lot of different platforming challenges, and densley pack them into connected biomes that really feel alive!
• The movement was a little quirky, but overall it felt really satisfying to run and jump around the world! Just travelling from point A to point B was a good time.

This was great! You nailed the difficulty level for a 5-10 minute game! It was challenging without being frustrating. The checkpoints were generous, but I never felt like my hand was being held at any point. And the "fake" blocks added some nice variety - it was almost always funny when I forgot about them and fell to my death. Great pacing overall.

The respawn animation was very cool! It was one of the most professional-feeling effects in the whole game. And I loved the over-the-top giant fireball attack in the third stage. It was super satisfying - a nice reward for clearing the first two stages.

The music was a little grating , and clashed a little bit with some of the sfx. And the jump felt a little bit stiff at first - but it was perfect once I got used to it, so that is barely  a complaint!

Great entry! Cool implementation of the theme, and a fun, complete experience! Of the games I have played so far, this one feels the most like a finished product. I look forward to seeing your team's future projects

Thank you for playing!!

One of my blocks fell through the floor, and a new block never came. I think it was because I tried to move downwards as I was arriving at the bottom row.

I have not written much python in my life, but this looks like a pretty compact implementation of Columns II. It's impressive that this whole thing is less than 200 lines of code.

What made you decide to create this particular game based on the theme "Pocket"? Is there a way to "pocket" falling blocks to save them for later, like in Tetris?

Thank you so much for your detailed feedback! I have been kicking around the idea of a "physical" digital game for a while, but this was my first really attempt. It's so encouraging to hear that this clicked with you! Thanks for taking the time to play multiple runs!

I just tried the all-pennies strategy! I love seeing a giant flock of copper descend on the incoming nintendo switchs or fancy sneakers lol

This is such a cool design! It's like a single-lane tower defense game combined with an auto-battler, that also has the feedback loop of an incremental game. What was your inspiration?!

I agree with Captain Melonlord's comment below - I think showing the player the stats of the different coins types would help make this more strategic. Currently, it's fun to watch the battles play out, but it feels a little like I am picking units at random.

I love that you are able to buy coins mid-battle. It builds great tension, where debt is approaching quickly, but you are trying to hold out to buy an expensive emerald or gold bar.

Congrats on the relase, and thanks so much for joining the jam! This is so impressive for a 13-year-old. The games I was making at 13 were not nearly this sophisticated, you have a lot to be proud of! I'm excited to see your future projects.

Congratulations on the release! The image of a physical pands pocket on a billiards table made me laugh - I totally expected this to be related to the corner pockets.

This was super challenging, but as the speed increased, I was able to occasionally find a very satisfying ball-dropping rhythm.

You might need to go into the "Embed Options" section of the edit game menu, and either make the game launch in fullscreen by default, or else adjust the embedded window size to match the room size. The game window is cropped in windowed mode.

This might be more exciting if there was a penalty for missing a ball - maybe you can only miss 3 balls before you restart the game. Currently, it's satisfying to nail a drop at high speeds, but it's easy to spam the spacebar and eventually get lucky with no penalty for failure.

Thanks so much for submitting a game!

Thanks for submitting this, my man!

I'm very impressed with the smoothness of that kangaroo walk (hop) cycle!

I am intrigued by the fact that you can pocket the big fan. I know that a puzzle platformer is the obvious direction to take this in, but I would love to see more of an immersive sim/playground approach. Not only could the fan blow the player across wider gaps, but it might also blow crates around, or redirect projectiles.

The small amount of parallax on the galaxy background coupled with the ethereal music go a long way towards the overall atmosphere.

This is awesome! Congratulations on your first game release - as far as I am concerned, this would be a very impressive submission even for an experienced team.

The main mechanic here is so cool and creative. You obviously put a lot of time and energy into mapping out the dialogue options - and I am seeing from other feedback that are multiple branching paths. So cool!

Your implementation of the existing font, art and dialogue manager was super seamless! I have seen plenty of ugly/janky games that cram in assets with no care at all, but you really built something thoughtful and artisti here! I would happily pay a few bucks for a longer version of this with more branching paths, characters, and a longer story. What you have here is wonderful - my favorite game of the jam so far!

Thank you for giving it a shot! We ran out of time, it would have been nice to playtest a little more to smooth out some of that complexity haha.

Thanks so much for playing! I recorded a short video playthrough, but I had not considered recording a full tutorial! This is a great suggestion.

It's so impressive that this is your first completed game, because there are basically two games here!!

You coded a small platformer metroidvania - and then you made a JRPG turn-based combat game too!

The first game was mostly just a series of lock-and-key puzzles, but I love that you found an organic way to implement it using progressively larger jumps and stategically placed speed/height power-ups. I appreciated how the lighting changed when you entered a cave. The music felt like a blend of NES tetris and the Legend of Zelda - there were some really cool triumphant fanfare-type riffs in there.

The second game was fascinating to me. There seemed to be only 1 sequence to beat each enemy, which you needed to puzzle out by referencing the stats in the pocketbook. It was like a puzzle game disguised as a grindy JRPG battle. The game did crash once for me during the third slime battle, but did not impact my overall enjoyment!

There are a few things to work on - the settings menu seems to be broken, the walk cycle it a little clunky, and it would be nice to see an implementation of coyote time for those long jumps -but overall this a MONUMENTAL achievement, Congratulations on your first game and your first full release! This was a joy to play!

The sound that plays when you collect coins as your air rapidly depletes is so ominous! It reminds me of the seatbelt indicator in a car.

This was fun! It was pretty challenging, but every death felt like my fault. I constantly wanted to push my limits and see how much gold I could bring back in a single dive. I love that the game encourages me to optimize my dives, and punishes me for being greedy. It's a good loop.

I would be interested to play a version of this where running out of air (or getting spiked) reset you at the top with a time penalty - I might be a little more willing to take big risks without the threat of a game-over.

Have you considered that they are blue because they are sad??

For the uninitiated, Adventures of Mouthman is incredible!

I totally don't know what the optimal strategy is here, but this is really fun! 35K on my second attempt

Update: this is really fun!!

Is there a known highscore for endless mode?

#DailyDoku 2024.8.20 - ★★★★★ - 31.9667s - steps: 42

This thing looks so incredible. Those big chunky sprites are so crisp! And the colors are perfect - idk how you landed on this palette, but I feel like I'm 4 in 1999 again. It's playful and nostalgic and sleek and retro-futurist. I love it.

This looks like a single-screen game mock-up you would see from a pixel artist on Twitter and think, "there is no way a game in motion would actually look like this." And you totally pulled it off.

Game is fun too, but I am bad lol.

This is my favorite Fletch game - and I own a physical copy of SPEEDCAT! The rules are very straightforward, but there is a ton of complexity. I really love that the flight paths are locked in once you create them. I am constantly stressed playing games like Mini Metro because it feels like you are constantly encouraged to re-optimize the roads. I like that you are only ever adding new pieces to the puzzle, never rebuilding the whole puzzle from scratch.

Would you be willing to add swipe controls? The game would be much easier to control on Android if I could swipe up/down/left/right anywhere onscreen to move instead of having to press the digital buttons!

#DailyDoku 2024.8.6 - ★★★★★ - 29.6667s - steps: 30

What a wonderful little puzzle game. Nice work!!

What detailed analysis! Thank you!

As far as I am concerned, those blue crabs are lobsters at heart!

This rules! How is it even possible you made something this gorgeous-looking in 2 hours?!? Incredible.

🦀🦀🦀
ビデオは素晴らしいですよ。プレイしていただきありがとうございます！

This is cool! A very solid lost-vikings-style puzzle game with alternate dimensions, The red/blue color schemes are a great way to keep track of the two different characters.

I was impressed with the way you gradually rolled out new mechanics. It was not immediately obvious how some of the new moving parts worked, but the most obvious tests were a surefire way expose the underlying behavior - which I'm sure was not easy to design!

The story was interesting, but I wish there was a way to jump immediately into the action. I was excited to play this because it was a jam entry, but I might be turned off by a webgame frontloaded with a few minutes of reading if I encountered it in the wild.

This is a riot! It's so funny that you spent so much time and energy making juicy visual and audio feedback for crashes, in a game where you are expected to handle customer cars with "exceptional care." I'm not sure if the game is loaded with slapstick comedy by design, but I had a big stupid grin on my face for most of my playtime.

The feature support here is also insane - this is playable with 6 people?! On multiple levels, with adjustable difficulty? It is ridiculous that your team basically created an entire commercial product from scratch in a single week.

As far as raw ideas go, this might be the best jam entry I have seen! What an incredible take on the theme!

I love that you throw the player right into the action, and the game is immediately accessible and engaging. I would love to play a full length game with this idea, adding different movements types and button layouts on subsequent stages. There is so much potential here, and what you have already is just so fun.

It made me chuckle that the player's eyes follow the mouse, even though there is no mouse control in the game.

I can't imagine how long it must have taken to create a fully-voiced cutscne with so many different shots and unique assets! What an intro!

I am very impressed that you wrote logic for a CPU-controlled second player. It fell right in line with the jam theme, and made the race feel much more urgent when you could see your rival racking up points to your immediate right.

It was interesting that you could use the rocks to slow your descent. I felt like I was constantly weighing the benefit of moving downward faster vs. slowing myself so it was easier to grab gems. 

This was wonderful!

I loved how the whole game was built around overlapping physical pieces. It would have been easy to render simple text boxes over puzzle screens, but tying the story to brochures, letters, etc. alongside the star map really connected me to the story. And it was so rewarding to see a zoomed-out view of the entire table once the map was completely reconstructed.

The constellation reconstruction puzzles were really cool and unique! I wish the criteria for "solving" a section was a little more strict - I accidentally locked in a few matches while I was rearranging the negatives in the play area as I prepared to work on a different part of the map. But the process of actually filling in the gaps was very satisfying when I did finally identify the overlapping stars.

I also managed to soft lock myself on the first puzzle by placing a photo directly on the top of the journal. I could not move it again because of the dialogue, and needed to reload the page to liberate my puzzle piece!

The music was appropriately soothing, and the art was incredible. I am not an artist, but the "fuzzy lines" and color choices made the game feel very thoughful and welcoming. It is so impressive that your team was able to work together on such a cohesive package in such a short amount of time. Well done!

Nice job! Very impressive game for an 11-year-old - I can't wait to see your future projects!

This was pretty challenging, it reminded me a little bit of the fishing mini game in Stardew valley. It would be nice if there was a quick animation or sound to show the truck was about to drop an obstacle. It seems like it is nearly impossible to avoid the rotten lettuce and spikes if you are directly alongside the truck when they spawn. But I guess that is also a strategic decision - is it worth it to keep pace with the red snail, or is it better to lose out on a few points to stay out of the danger zone?