itch.io

Thank you very much for your quick reply! I will do that for now!

I'm am trying to send links of my games to my friends and also post them on my blog. I want to add the link of the game cover photo to my blog, but if it's not an image on my game page, I can't seem to find a link for it.  For one of my games, I had to do it in a hacky way and use the game jam image (not ideal, I'd rather use a link to the game page).

Also, if I give them the straight game page itch link, there is NO CONTEXT for the game, because all the screenshots, videos, and cover images are not on the game page (i.e. some of these are missing for certain or all game formats). In particular, for html games, the page is pretty bland compared to pages for other formats, because ONLY the "run" button is shown versus the cover image of the game with a run button; the page also doesn't even have the name of the game on it at the top.  

So, if possible, PLEASE put all the cover image, screenshots, video, AND title on the actual GAME PAGE for games of ALL formats, so that direct url look-ups have more context.

It opens in a tiny window that I am unable to maximize (maximize button greyed out) nor change the size of. However, my husband recommended your game, so I asked him how to play, since I can still read the zoomed text. It's super fun! I just wish I could read it all. XD and DX.

Sorry, my monitor has a high resolution, so your game is so small! I can't really a lot of it, nor see how awesome the graphics probably are.

The card zoom is really smooth and the music is wonderful.  I just wish I knew what I was doing. It would probably be much better if I could read the tiny text. I'm kind of randomly just clicking around and hoping something works. :/ 

I couldn't figure out how to change the settings for the life of me. I'm playing on a laptop with a touchpad, so maybe that's the issue?

However, it does feel well animated. How much game experience you all have? There's so much in here OoO.

I thought of bending neon signs too! Although, I thought it more like an art program, because I thought of letting the person make their own custom sign. Imagine a whole virtual city scape of custom signs XD! 

We didn't do it for several reasons, but two of my personal major reasons were that I just started GM, so I wasn't sure I could complete the bending part in the jam time (it sounds quite complex to implement), and also, just that I didn't know how to make it actually a game that was fun. So....

I'M SO HAPPY SOMEONE WAS ABLE TO MAKE IT!

I love the background story and sound, and if this is really how signs were made, did you actually have experience making signs!? Or do crazy research on it? It seems like such an awesome skill.

Some stuff that made it difficult for me to play. 

1. I didn't realize you needed a mouse at first, but I figured that out quickly, so super minor.
2. I didn't quite get the gas part and kept doing it wrong for a while, so I wanted to go back to view the instructions again. I managed to figure it out eventually, though, so again, that's minor.
3. When I finally got to the gameplay, I put the torch down on the vertical part of the tube and kept accidentally picking it or the tube up when not desired, but maybe you want this effect?
4. During game play, I wanted to save and leave the game and didn't see a way of doing that, nor replaying levels for a better rating. However, this is a jam, so replay and saving are definitely some of the things to cut while short on time. :D

THANK YOU AGAIN FOR MAKING THIS GAME!

Wow, that's really awesome for a self-taught person using GMS2 for the first time. I saw GM1 around before, but it didn't have the capabilities that I needed and I didn't want to drop that much money for it (I also didn't really have a "message" I wanted to say yet); however, I recently resolved myself to try to make games, because I have so many ideas, and I finally realized that I shouldn't have listened to my college advisor who discouraged me from my original dream of being a game developer (like in 2005 or something like that). So I'm kind of behind everyone else, but I think my experience with programming has thankfully helped me adapt faster to catch-up.

I guess if it spawns in the same area all the time, it's like a shmup with a memorization part. I think it would be okay, if you maybe warn about that in the beginning "some squares might appear off screen" (would be part of a "how to play" section); or else we don't know why we lost. OR, put an indicator as to the direction to look. Otherwise, it's just a guessing game for first time players, and the feeling of "redoing" something feels like a "failure" for people that don't traditionally retry levels and want to do it in one go.

Wow, like THE NES?! You made a cartridge?!

I can't imagine how hard debugging was back then! I work in embedded systems, and the debug loop is so slow. :/

You have a really cute game pic. If only we could see more of it in the game!

The character customization is awesome!

I do wish that the walk speed was much higher, but maybe you want it that way to be more decisive and strategy oriented later on with more battery management with each step?

The glowing effect is really nice. How long have you been gamemaking? Did you make all the whole concept and all assets yourself? 

I like your bouncy animation; it makes for really nice game feel. Great level design; however, I couldn't figure out how to restart the level or even exit the game! I had to use task manager. PLEASE don't make it full screen if it is not obvious on how to quit. 

Your visuals are really pleasant to look at. Did you make the art, music, and puzzles yourself?! It must have taken a lot of time crafting all these well -thought -out levels!

I wish I could redo a previous level restarting the whole game, because I missed a dot. 

Awesome, your optical illusions are  really cool. The moving background gives a sense of actual space movement. I love the music and the llama is cute!

At first I didn't know what to do though, but thankfully the restart is very fast, so I figured it out eventually.

Did you make everything yourself!? Those squares are awesome! I like how you show the ones that are coming so you have some preplanning to get there because you fly so slow. Very tactical.

Saving is awesome too!

The only hard part I had was sometimes I would fly to far and the coming square is off-screen.

I think you did a great job considering it has a lot of firsts and you did a good portion of it by yourself!  :)

Wow! Did you make all the art, music, code, and concept all in just these few weeks from theme announcement?! It feels incredibly polished! How long have you been gamemaking? O-o

Your in-game tutorial signs are great! Although, I don't know if you wanted the player to figure out how to use ws on the first ladder (it didn't have a sign prompt). I do like your rewards for doing the challenging route versus the easy route.

Your moving background layers are amazing! I like your art style, and the music is fitting! You even make a cute little game icon. :D

Your game balance feels spot on and the introductions to new interactions are done VERY well. Slowly introducing new challenges that use the same mechanic logic is GREAT LEVEL DESIGN! Even the health placements are tactically placed well. The placement of the sleeping enemy before the moving enemy for the introduction to vertical lasers was great to help with getting use to the spacing between columns to handle shot recoil!

Even the jump arc, recoil arc, enemy collision reactions, etc. feel great! The controls take some getting used to for me, since I usually use arrow keys, but that I didn't mean it was unplayable or bad; just took some getting used to (which, I generally did and got beyond the first level!). Wow, more LEVELS! And carefully crafted ones at that! 

I don't particularly have a problem with either the recoil or the enemies requiring a few hits. I think it's because it's a shooter, so that makes it forgiving, but the recoil makes it thoughtful. If it were a melee type for just blazing through, like Sonic or Mario, then maybe the recoil and multi enemy hits isn't really good. So I guess it depends on the type of feel you are going for.

Oh haha, with respect to graphics, I didn't have the same problem as others, but then I realized I was playing with my computer in NIGHT MODE. Yeah, non-night mode is quite bright, but I guess that's the hard part with the theme being "neon".

P.S. I played the Windows version.

P.P.S. Hurray! I finally made it to the end. I think it is a great challenge for the people who are platform-challenged like me! The boss' angry face hinting is great! The preparation of skills until this point were great and the health drop just before is perfectly timed, because you are guaranteed to get smashed at least once on the first try since you don't know the boss behaviour yet (unless you show a falling smash animation).

WOW, it's definitely Switch material! I want to play it with my husband :D. It's just that our controller setup isn't really good at the moment. A co-op game is WONDERFUL. There aren't that many of them that really have this level of non-violent cooperation, so I look forward to the balance tweak! 

Wow, 20 years! I didn't even realize GM was that old! Your ability to create all that in 3 work days is astounding! I hope that I can get that good someday! I do some low-level programming for a living, but I'm new to gamemaking, so the graphics and sounds are my weakest area. Our game definitely wouldn't have been as good if it weren't BOTH my husband and me, so you doing it solo is definitely amazing!

Yeah, I can't really think of how to deal with the corners other than to make them curved looking and when you have an access to the analog stick, use that. Or speed through the corners; like it just shoots it around the corner, so nothing is ever in a corner during the "still" time (like have a accelerated tile). It could also just be left there as a strategy element, once the rest of it becomes a little more balanced.

Technically, if you are a good programmer, you SHOULD be reusing code. Haha. ;D

The fact that you are still using stuff that is that old is really saying a lot to the re-usability quality. You've basically made your own application framework on top of GM! It must mean you have good comments / documentation. ;)

Though, I just started gamemaking a month or so ago, I actually program in C for a living (although for much simpler systems than a game), so I'm not just making this up. ;D 

Yeah, sorry about that. I've been trying to be careful about that, but I think it happens when the browser warns about leaving the page without saving my rating, but I attempt to post the comment. Thanks for pointing it out so I could remove it. :)

Hmm, I thought maybe the smileys would show it, but yeah, I really liked it, other than the immediately high difficulty curve! ;) But, the fact that you can do all actions by clicking something VISIBLE on the screen pretty much negates that. EVENTUALLY, if a person just experiments, they can figure it out. That's an awesome attention to detail. :)

Sorry if the part about the text and levels sounded like a negative thing. I should have mentioned that you might have thought of them already, because I completely agree that they should be the first thing to cut when on a time constraint. ;)

YOUR CORE MECHANIC WORKS GREAT! So your polish there is definitely seen and appreciated!

Near the end, I was just remarking at how I kept learning more and more as I fumbled around = I tried to play it more and more because I started to survive for longer even though I kind of suck. I feel like that really is saying a lot. It is DEFINITELY not an easy feat to get a person that sucks at something to want to keep playing it to get better. And it's like MULTIPLE TIMES more difficult than that to have them  feel accomplished WHEN they get good at it. In some games it isn't a WHEN, but an IF.  Making a turn-based strategy game definitely helps with that WHEN; and I think because the grid is small, it makes it  both manageable  and challenging for new players. I can see the grid getting bigger for high level players.

I'd probably keep playing this if I didn't have more games to rate!

Wow, did you really make this all with assets, music, and gameplay in just ~two weeks?! It's quite polished! How long have you been working on GM games?!

The simple arrows plus spacebar mechanics are WONDERFUL! This is probably the game that I enjoyed the most so far in the sense of the ease of understanding how to interact with everything. Very intuitive for me. 

Haven't tried co-op, but I take it it would be much easier to  handle, because the conveyor just moves way too fast to be able to move from one side of the room to the other. It is like an action-memory game. I seriously just started throwing stuff on the ground to keep it from going out! 

I think it would work just as well without the rat and if the blueprints didn't move and were just on a separate table.  I have a hard time at the corners (i.e. standing around with an item waiting for two turns to get the blueprint out of the corner) and timing it correctly to put the item on the blueprint, but maybe that's what you want.

Otherwise, the tutorial was great! And the boss's sarcasm is super funny!

Either the game balance needs better tweaking, or if you like it this way, I'm just bad at it! Haha. Still quite fun and interesting. Is this how they really make neon signs?! If so, I learned something new!

My computer resolution is too high, so your text is super tiny and hard to read. I think the overall concept is really cool, once I figure out how it worked.

I don't think you need as much text if you make some simpler levels in the beginning, like do a level with just the heart and energy. Then have just one enemy.  Or you could make a video BETWEEN levels.

Music is and aesthetic is nice and simple and fits the computer vibe well. Did you make this whole concept with music and art in just these few weeks?! O-o

The puzzle system is quite complex, and I kind of suck at it, because I cannot predict the enemy pathing (plus they move multiple squares when I only move a few). 

I don't see any "bugs" so far as I can tell.  It feels pretty solid, other than maybe some balancing with health, energy, blocks, and enemies. :)

Oh what, I just discovered by the end of this post that you can rotate the packet before you send it! Haha! 

Oh what, the enemy can shoot away the blocks!

Thank you so much for uploading the zip file.!

HOLEY MOLEY I feel like your game is greatness in the making! (At least from my own perspective.) You said you don't really have programmers on your team, but you guys did GREAT!

Yes, it is buggy to the ends of the earth BUT, let me just say you have accomplished quite amazing things and paid attention to many details that create a great game. I have a background in C-programming, and just started GM (and gamemaking in general) in the last month or so. Even I haven't learned to do so many of the things you've implemented.

The Twitter link, the loading screen, the tutorial section, different sounds, and background music (did you make the music too?), several different enemies, several types of attacks, idle animations, dash animations. Once you polish everything, MOST of it will be great per my personal opinion (which you are free to ignore, because it is your game after all :) ). The only thing that makes it really hard for me to want to play this game, even if everything were perfectly polished, would be the control scheme.

Is there a different type of control scheme that you envisioned? I'm actually playing on a laptop and I understand that makes it harder just for me, but I think that having movement and action select on wasdqe is pretty difficult if your game gets more intense skill-swapping requirements. (I only have 4 fingers and a thumb. ;) ) It feels like you are going sort of like a Diablo-esque kind of play style.  Or maybe you plan on adding controller support and swapping skills with the bumper buttons?

Anyway, if this if your first ever game, I think you did a wonderful job!

PLEASE upload a zip file if possible. Microsoft Edge just flat out refuses to download .exes. It looks BEAUTIFUL, but the zip file would be best since it avoids requiring administrator's access to install.

I understand that you are new to programming. This, even more so, means you SHOULD use the zip file at all costs to minimize possibly harming a person's computer unintentionally. The zip file does not require admin access to play. 

However, despite not being able to play it, I would say GREAT JOB making a game! Programming is not an easy thing to just haphazardly pick up, and GAME programming, even more so.

How long have you guys been making art?! Just from the screenshots; it's beautiful! Did you guys make EVERYTHING from scratch during the few weeks?! O_o It's awesome that your art is cohesive for a team effort!

Teams definitely have their own challenges!

PLEASE don't make your game full screen if there is no way to exit it. I couldn't understand the game mechanic, so I was completely stuck and tried to hit ESCAPE and that did nothing. I ended up having to use the Task Manager with a forced task shutdown.

Wonderful music and I can see the beginnings of a great art direction! The mechanics are a fun concept, but I don't know how it fits with the game style nor do I get what the objective is. I think this is a great proof of concept of the scarf line tracking, but it seems like a strange thing to have when the movement is limited . Is there an advantage to placing two versus one tower?

Could tower be thrown past and allow teleport through the wall to avoid enemies? 

I think I understand that you are trying to do a sort of Bomberman-like game; however, I guess I'm not sure if you are trying to make a Bomberman clone or just haven't figured out how to build more upon your unique mechanic to differentiate yourself from it yet.

How long did it take you to create this from concept to now? Did you create all the art and music? Did you have any previous programming experience? 

As a beginning GM dev, I just am wondering how long it would take to get this far.

Interesting MarioKart clone. I totally stuck at Rainbow Road though, so this was way too hard for me XP.  3D in GameMaker is crazy! 

It's kind of hard to tell the difference between the fields by the names, but maybe it's because I died too early and gave up before I hit the interesting features.

Also, maybe I would have done better with a controller. 

How long did it take you to make the complete game from concept and to this point? Did you create all the art and music yourself? Are you a solo dev?! Are you a self-taught programmer?

As a starting GM dev, I'm just wondering how long it took you to learn all of this., especially since you are dealing with 3D. O_O

As you probably already know, if you stand on the spawning point, you immediately die. You can stand there before anything spawns and it looks like the game just constantly restarts. For example, I keep jumping on to the second platform before anything spawns and am taken back to the start screen without seeing any zombies. 

However, this means you got the basic loop of collisions and death room return down. You also got bullet creation and destruction down.

It's weird to use the mouse to start the game, but have the keyboard as the game controls; however, I'm guessing you must have pushed yourself to try to handle different types of user input. Nice.

The sprites also properly hit the walls, stand on platforms, and change facing direction.

The sprites are also very detailed, so if you drew all of that from scratch, great job!

Also, music, great job if you made it from scratch! Getting it to play, also great job.

If this is your first game, and you are new to programming logic, I think you must have grown a lot with this project. :) Also, great for a solo dev.

As you probably already know, if you stand on the spawning point, you immediately die. You can stand there before anything spawns and looks like the game just constantly restarts. For example, I keep jumping on to the second platform before anything spawns and am taken back to the start screen without seeing any zombies. 

However, this means you got the basic loop of collisions and death room return down.

It's weird to use the mouse to start the game, but have the keyboard as the game controls; however, I'm guessing you must have pushed yourself to try to handle different types of user input. Nice.

The sprites also properly hit the walls, stand on platforms, and change facing direction.

The sprites are also very detailed, so if you drew all of that from scratch, great job!

Also, music, great job if you made it from scratch! Getting it to play, also great job.

If this is your first game, and you are new to programming logic, I think you must have grown a lot with this project. :) Also, great for a solo dev.

As you probably already know, if you stand on the spawning point, you immediately die. You can stand there before anything spawns and looks like the game just constantly restarts. For example, I keep jumping on to the second platform before anything spawns and am taken back to the start screen without seeing any zombies. 

However, this means you got the basic loop of collisions and death room return down.

It's weird to use the mouse to start the game, but have the keyboard as the game controls; however, I'm guessing you must have pushed yourself to try to handle different types of user input. Nice.

The sprites also properly hit the walls, stand on platforms, and change facing direction.

The sprites are also very detailed, so if you drew all of that from scratch, great job!

Also, music, great job if you made it from scratch! Getting it to play, also great job.

If this is your first game, and you are new to programming logic, I think you must have grown a lot with this project. :) Also, great for a solo dev.

Thank you! I think it is this FORTHRIGHT HONESTY that a lot of us newcomers seek. If someone doesn't explain this, then we think you've done everything in the jam time here, and it is INCREDIBLY discouraging for those who want to make a living off of games and are using the jam as place to build up their self-esteem. "If this person can make this whole game (concept to polished finish) in this amount of time; how will I ever make it in this industry?" Those kinds of dream-crushing thoughts come to mind. 

It's kind of like wanting to be a singer, and then seeing someone on X's Got Talent. Are you better than them? Of course not! The difference is night and day. Does that make you not want to be a singer? Not necessarily; however, it may cause you to think that it would be a waste of everyone's (yourself, the network's, audience, etc.) time if you tried to audition for X's Got Talent (~ enter a jam with voting).

Now, if someone says that they started this as their first game one year ago at their first game jam, then maybe, a newcomer will think, "WOW, can I actually BECOME this good after that amount of time too?" It's a much different aura than someone parroting "It's in the rules", because that doesn't imply any understanding of why people might be hurt or even caring that people are hurt. In EVERY SITUATION, even outside of gaming, a hurt person mainly wants to be understood and empathized with more than anything else.

Thank you for considering us all like humans that have hearts and NOT just a robot that must output "the best" to avoid being put out of service.

That marathon example is a great analogy! This is my first real game jam that we were able to finish a game in the "allotted time"*. However, semantically, I joined the game jam thinking the "spirit of a jam" was meant to foster camaraderie, build new relationships, promote innovative ideas, and inspire people to make games as a community.

Allowing veterans to be considered "better" than others via an actual monetary worth doesn't seem like it supports these values. That mindset seems more attuned to the word "CONTEST", where the majority of the participants are competing in a cut-throat unsportsmanlike fashion. I think contests are okay, but I don't think a contest should ever be called a jam. (Just an opinion; so, of course, others are free to see otherwise.) Jam rules that allow for reskinning create a situation and vibe that is hardly different from https://www.yoyogames.com/en/blog/gamemaker-award-2020-vote-for-best-game.

Originally, I thought "If I see any more 'jams' that are really 'contests', I'm not going to join them", because the competitiveness is depressing and I could be spending my precious time on all my other game ideas. However, the one IMPORTANT thing that makes me reconsider are the comments that we have received.  Someone actually played our game and liked it enough to comment. This game we tried to make in this small amount of time was interesting enough. Would these same people have done so for a game we took a year to make and merely posted online outside of a jam / contest? 

Maybe, at the very least, we could have the Clay Aiken effect. You don't have to win American Idol for the people who appreciate your talent to get connected to you. In the end, I feel like game developers, like any other human being, just want to be able to connect to people that understand them, and their method of communication is a game.

I don't think it is necessarily the "losing" (to a veteran's reskin) that feels uncomfortable, but that the "winners" may put in less effort than the "losers", and come out "on top". It's a a strange time problem, because the veteran technically HAS put in the effort; it's just that the effort was put in before the jam, and not many people can "unlearn" something they've gotten good at. 

Maybe future jams could be split into experience levels (in addition to team count limits); like "no experience", "1-4 months", etc. . Lower experience can still decide to try to enter the ones with more if they choose. Itch could semi-enforce this if needed, because they would know how many jams you've entered previously.

* Allotted time - What was the allotted time? It wasn't clear to begin with. Was it the submission period, or was it the time since the topic was announced? If it was just the submission period, then how do you ensure that what was done prior to the submission period "wasn't development"? Personally, I believe development includes the concept and design. In fact, in a lot of industries, a great portion of the work IS the design.

I'm amazed this was made in Game Maker! Unfortunately, I get sick from playing first person games, so I had to stop playing, but it was pretty interesting for the length of time I managed to play.

I like how you could speed up the text.  Nice polish. :)

To be honest, I never played a mystery game in my life, so I can't really say how good it is with respect to the genre.  What I can say is that your menuing system is awesome. :)

This isn't a negative comment, just a comment in general. It's really hard to play this game on a laptop without a mouse. :( 

It sounds interesting; however, it's kind of hard to figure out what to do before the level gets chaotic (i.e. for a player trying to use an touchpad, maybe it just isn't registering how it would with a mouse, so it might just be my set up). 

The tutorial isn't much of a tutorial as opposed to a screen that tells you what the controls are. Maybe it would be better to use the phrase "How To Play"?  It would help a lot if there was a screenshot of that "tutorial" screen on your game site, so that I could see the relationship between the words on that screen with the game play screen.

The lines are very interesting concept to make sure you know who is homing to who. I'm sure I would have had a more enjoyable time if I had a proper mouse. 

What is the idea behind auto mode?

Nice work anyway. The tracking feels really smooth. Nice music. :)

This game is harder than it looks! The fact that the enemies and bullets can pass through the box and wall makes it more like a puzzle game, so it's great that you can retry so quickly. I got to the level with the double walls, but I gave up, because it was too hard for me; however, it is quite fun to play for such a seemingly simple concept. The box disappeared on the double wall level at one point, but that's okay, since you can just replay the level quickly. 

It's a little hard to get the box to go in the direction that I want it. Maybe it has a default push to the right direction, so trying to push the box up was difficult in the double wall level.