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Extremely well executed.

Art was great, sound design was solid enough to support everything else. Very cohesive and felt complete (except for the obvious placeholders like the truck explosion, which was hilarious). I think the minigame worked well as a fairly chill experience before things kicked off.

Best entry I've seen so far by a mile.

My critiques:

I'm playing on a trackpad, so I found the aiming controls to be a little annoying during the shooting minigame. The click targets for the buttons seemed slightly messed up. I do think the gameplay/upgrades centered more around the storm than the calm before the storm.

This was great. I think it was a little hard to get set up with resource production for every resource, which meant it was pretty easy to death spiral. I also couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get Farms, so eventually my runs ended in starvation. I assume there's some farm terrain that's different from grass, but I never encountered it.

The art is amazing, and the gameplay felt a bit like a solitaire version of Catan, which was great. Lots of potential here, and good execution in the time you had.

I think maybe intermediate objectives with rewards, or some sort of 3:1 trading mechanic would have fixed the early game for me.

Nice little Tower Defense, and congrats on getting a finished game submitted. I thought the graphics were cute!

I think this needed something extra to differentiate it. The inability to upgrade towers was frustrating, but could have been the basis for something if you'd leaned into it?

I'll be continuing work on my GMTK 2024 Game, Burndown.

My primary goal is to respond to the GMTK Jam comments, which I've broken down into the following categories and deliverables.

Confusion Over Objectives

Many players didn't understand what to do at first.

• Introduce a tutorial.
• Introduce clear goals for each stage (e.g. Features Delivered: 2/5, Bugs Fixed: 1/7)
  • Consider actually implementing a burndown chart? How does over-achieving work?
• Refine Headlines Hinting System, add tooltips?

Fix Boring Gameplay

Many players suggested that gameplay lacked depth, some liked the tradeoffs introduced by the Outage. Introduce more tradeoffs to consider when assigning tasks.

• Introduce Tech Debt system / Tech Debt Reduction Tasks.
• Introduce Research (TODO: Brainstorm what effects Research Has?)
• Experiment with Task Affinity system? Reasons to assign a particular task to a particular person.

UI and Text Issues

I missed some obvious UI problems.

• Fix hDPI settings, test on retina displays.
• Improve UI Contrast

Repetitive Ticker Content

The Ticker was overall well received as an idea, but was to repetitive to pay attention to.

• Improve graphical appearance to draw attention better.
• Rework headline generation system (headlines as resources)
• 3 or more headlines per scenario being hinted.
• Debounce each headline to avoid repetition.

Schedule Confusion

• Indicate schedule uncertainty in UI, rather than having blocks popping out randomly.
• Improve re-ordering experience.

I loved it. Great polish for a jam game, great concept, and good execution.

This is brilliant. I would never have thought to make snake into a puzzle game, but it works so well. Short and sweet. I also think the sound design works super well.

My only suggestion is that I wish the graphics were a little better, but for a game jam game it's totally expected. I love the style of the title/end screen art, wish the game itself looked like that.

I would love to see a longer version of this! I think you took some great simple mechanics and made them work well together.

Absolutely! Already started making one, will add it post jam. Thank you for playing my game.

Amazing concept, execution, and level design. I didn't get to play all the way to the end, but I loved the first 8 levels.

Controls took a sec to figure out, but once I understood them, I was hooked. Great progression curve. Loved the graphics and sound.

I think the only thing that would have improved this for me was if the different objects had different sprites at each size to keep the pixel size consistent.

Also didn't realize you could manipulate things after the initial shot until reading comments, so the rest of  my review is based on that.

This is a really solid game, especially for a solo programming team. I love the peglin vibes, I think the concept is really solid.

I think the stages need more variation.  It would be nice to have some reason to make lower than full power shots, or vary the (first) shot direction.

Over all, one of my favorite entries in this jam. Great job.

Great art, solid concept and execution. The difficulty curve felt a little off to me, with a rapid increase in difficultly, but I would love to play a polished version of this!

Liked this! Good concept, good execution. Art and music was good.

I did feel this could have benefited from a bit more polish in the movement, sometimes I felt like I was getting "stuck" on various things.

The core build / demolish mechanic was solid, the controls could have been communicated in game a bit better, but once I figured it out, I could get it to do what I wanted. Nice job!

Great concept for the theme, and overall good execution.

The controls were frustrating. I understand the idea was to provide an indirect way to move the bots, but especially once the lag started and I was trying to keep multiple clumps from forming, it became difficult to manage,

I really liked the beeping sound effect, did a great job setting the theme, producing a sense of urgency, and communicating status all at the same time.

I like the concept a lot. Sound design was excellent, and I love the aesthetic.

I found the platforming a little frustrating at times, especially because it was easy to get stuck under things.

Glad you enjoyed! I'll definitely be polishing post jam.

Nice simple concept, pretty good execution.

Pros: I really liked the sound and graphics, which were simple but effective at communicating the feel. Polish was pretty good. I felt this was a good length, short and sweet.

Cons: I felt that the lack of an option to rotate the pebbles was jarring. Especially since the pebbles could be permanently rotated as they fell if grabbed again, and there was no good way to reset them. I don't know why, but sometimes as I was dragging a pebble would just freeze in place and then get dropped, which was frustrating, possibly a problem with my computer lagging?

Definitely valid. :-) I think there's a lot of balance work to be done to make something interesting, and I agree that after the first 1-2 checkpoints, it seems to be impossible to loose. Lessons for next time! Really appreciate the feedback and you taking the time to play.

Thank you! I'll definitely spend some time post jam to polish, add the basic features I had to cut, and improve the UI. Stay tuned :-)

Wonderful entry. Would also have totally fit last year's theme, with the player controlling the level, but clearly based on this years theme.

The story and ambiance was cute, but not distracting. All the different mechanics interacted in interesting ways, and were reasonably intuitive.

I was initially confused by how things worked. I figured it out a bit, but I think one more, even simpler level where the only thing to do was move the wall or floor could have introduced things smoother.

Very polished, overall, highly enjoyed.

Ah, good point! I wanted to add some variation and uncertainty to things, so you had to keep paying attention, but I should have indicated that somewhere in the UI...

Thanks for playing and reviewing!

Appreciate the review! Glad the polish came through (minus the retina display bug I missed...). I'll definitely put more focus into the game loop next time around.

Thank you for playing! Yes, definitely making a more engaging game loop is something I will need to focus on earlier next time.

In theory, I wanted to make it important to prioritize different tasks at different times, but I never found a good way to do that in the time I had. Ironic for a project management game, lol.

I like where this is going! I think the idea to control a swarm indirectly is great, I think the upgrades and gameplay were still a bit too simplistic. Definite potential here though!

Great concept!

Thank you! I'll look into how to do that better! As you may be able to tell, I wanted to learn about how to do UI in Godot, but I've definitely mostly learned how much I don't know. :-)

Thank you for the review!

This is an awesome twist on the theme! I really liked the sorting aspect and the simple gameplay. I imagine making all the art for the different levels took a while!

Very satisfying.

The art is great, and I think this is a solid solo entry. I think the fact that the optimal strategy is spam-clicking somewhat undercuts the game for me -- I would prefer if I have to time my shots, or maybe if there was a height bonus for hitting multiple shots in a row, or something like that.

I think this might be broken... I can't enter fullscreen, and I can't seem to do anything except get a semi-transparent frog to jump... I'd love to rate this, but without knowing how to play, all I can say is that the art is cute?

I like the concept and had fun playing. Unfortunately, the mouse controls were not intuitive and very frustrating.

Thanks! Yeah, definitely needs a better tutorial and help page, I'll make sure that's a focus during post-jam development.

I got stuck at "beyond the bounds of letters",  which I'm guessing is fairly early in the game.

With that in mind, I enjoyed the palette and graphic design.

 I like the idea of having to identify the right character and solve riddles, but I do wish there was some mechanism to get further hints, or in the most extreme case pick from a list of options. I didn't like having to tab out to find the answer to the second level.

This absolutely could change, but I also feel like the connection to the theme was somewhat weak. I would not have guessed this game had anything to do with scale unless I was aware of the context.

Still, I enjoyed the concept, it looks clean and professional, and I fully admit the fact I got stuck early is coloring my review.

Great game!

Makes excellent use of the theme. Good level design and progression, overall super solid entry that I enjoyed.

A few pieces of (constructive, I hope!) feedback.

* There's a bug where hitting the flag multiple times opens multiple next level windows. This can cause levels to be skipped -- I executed this on level 2, which opened levels 3 and 4, then solved 3, which opened 4a. I closed 4a, played the original 4, and then it skipped me to level 6.

* It's perhaps intended, but the graphics look a little wonky when they're scaled off aspect ratio. I think the sharp edges of pixel art might be a bad fit, and perhaps vector or more stylized graphics would be a better fit.

* I'm playing on a slightly smaller screen, and sometimes I had a lot of trouble changing the size of the window enough to complete things. Not sure how to fix this without breaking the core concept, but perhaps some sort of emergency way to change the scale if at full screen?

Really fun concept and reinterpretation of 2048, and great execution. Feels like a complete game.

Balance wise -- I think the game is a little hard to approach -- it took me several tries to scale past 2x2. I don't know if tile spawns are completely random or not -- regardless I would suggest adding a mechanism that gives the player what they need more often.

I seemed to always be getting stuck with a ton of rocks an no way to deal with them. Especially in the mid game (which is about as far as I got), nothing but paper removes rocks, and everything seems to remove paper.

Theme match is OK -- I like the scaling board, I would have preferred if the game somehow leaned into that a bit more. Maybe by having tiles of different sizes as things scaled?

Overall, the quality here is high, and I really enjoyed it. Very solid entry.

Thanks! Yeah, I definitely want to revisit the help page and style a bit more. Also, as you note -- I basically had to cut all of the progression based features for time. Still glad you enjoyed it, and definitely will revisit to polish after the Jam.

I liked it! Good core mechanic, cute art, feels complete!

Sometimes platform placement was a little frustrating, might have preferred an option to click to place, although I do appreciate the minimal controls.

It was a little hard to figure out how composting worked. I also felt like watering was perhaps too weak at least without upgrades. It seems like it's almost never worth it to water except at the very beginning because after that you're too busy and compost works better / it won't last long enough to matter.

I didn't yet have time to play out how things feel in the end game.

Amazing Graphics and Good Sound design! I love this way of doing the art, super creative.

I had a little trouble understanding the mechanics at first, and I think the core mechanic lacks a little depth, but really solid game. I love the style.

A incremental clicker game based around industry / inspiration of mortals seems like it might be cool. Might try my (very novice) hands at that.