itch.io

4 maps - there could be more but my main focus is only on four and only these 4 maps will have unique mechanics and story.

I read that TikTok is the way to go now, but since it mainly accepts videos, I've not done it yet.

Thanks for letting me know, there is an error when copying on Web it seems. I'll look into it, sorry about that!

And thanks for the tip for Steam! The storepage takes awhile to approve and set up and I'm super anxious to just get it up asap!

I've decided to keep them! I think it's also easily balanced since the research has a max level, and as more content gets introduced it can even be further increased :)

Thank you for the kind comment Jake! Am still working hard and doing my best to make it better! 😅

just pushed out a fix for collectibles not disappearing. No more infinite wood bug! haha. left the main comment on your video! really appreciate you taking a video of your playthrough and sharing it :DD

OMG I love watching playtests! Will be going through it for sure! And of course yes, please do leave me any feedback as I'm actively working to improve the game every day!

OMG It's Brackeys! Thanks for sharing this!

Ah, I believe I've responded to you in Discord! Thanks for reporting this and for anyone who encounters bugs do let me know about them (for anyone reading, this was resolved in v0.30.1!)

Is that for the blueprint cost? I will increase the blueprint cost from 100 tooth  to 200 if so.

Also I wonder if the turret itself should cost 100 tooth just like the other epic buildings. For now I didn't add that to the build cost as it does have a high teriyaki cost.

Thank you! There'll be more trader researches being cooked up! Some ideas (will add to this post):

1. Get friendship by donating items of higher value - every 1% friendship decrease 0.5% tax (-50% tax at max friendship)
2. Decrease blueprint and epic building tooth cost by 4/8/12/16/20%
3. Permanent epic blueprints (ultra rare and expensive)

I also want to double the number of researches with a new set of research tree branches with all the new mechanics added recently!

Haha Penguin 007 is probably retired from his missions, but maybe he'll return if there's another game jam!

I really like the ideas here! Especially awarding of a bridge style based on the map and the journal unlocks!

Also love the idea of having ice shards instead of lightning on the ice map!

Looks like the game might get a story mode in the end at this rate haha

Ah I see, that's awesome to hear, thanks for letting me know! :)

"The level of it felt good" <- can I know what you mean by level?

Also good idea to add the discord as I hadn't shared its presence officially!

I'm looking forward to adding them! Hoping to give the Home Island play a bigger part in the game too in terms of usefulness too as for now the island is just a visual thing to see your pets roam around haha.

I like the idea of spawning a weak storm to show what it does! That's pretty cool honestly, and solves the problem of people not knowing what the storm does and having to wait 6 minutes to find out. I am weighing between a separate tutorial versus the current in-game tutorial style that lets you continue organically.

Pros of a standalone tutorial like you suggested is the player doesn't feel the need to rush. They can take the time to explore without consequences!

The cons is that people prefer to jump into the main game and a tutorial that forces you to do certain actions just to go through motion and get to the real game can be off-putting. Hmm

You scared me, I thought this was a hate comment from the first sentence HAHA.

This is the first time I've read someone play for 5 hours, this is just crazy wow! if you have anything you want to see in this game - ideas, improvements, feedback. Please let me know as I am working on the game every day and pushing out daily updates to make it better and add more content.

haha whoops, probably will add a tooltip to indicate that the storm never comes on Peaceful difficulty

Thank you Mathur!!

Hey! Just wanted to say congratulations on getting top 20 and even top in audio! Your game is amazing and I recognized it instantly when I saw it, I'm so glad I got to have tried it out :)

Thank you for playing the game and glad to hear all that brainstorming paid off...word play intended! XD

YA I am super surprised and in disbelief lol. I've never won first in anything of this kind before so this is just crazy HAHA

Thank you and glad to have had the opportunity to see you play!!

Cool, watching your stream now and look forward to it! :)

I liked the vibes and music. The fish swimming animation is top notch and I like how the fish's mouth opens in anticipation of the pellet going in, and you even see the pellet going through his body. Very immersive animations.

Also loved the description: You are a fish. You eat pellets. Life is easy. simple haha. Being able to see the storm would be nice but I understand it was scrapped. Nonetheless it ended up being a peaceful relaxing game which is not a bad thing.

Hey there! If you have the time to, it would be awesome if I could see you play my game: https://yyz.itch.io/stormbridge

Rating is optional as at this point I just want to see how others play my game as it is something I don't get to do with online game jams. And I want to learn how to improve from watching playthroughs!

It's a pretty challenging building game, thought I'd warn you haha.

Thank you for the kind comment Justin! Also good job on your game too :)

Hey, thanks for the kind comment and for the feedback! Did you manage to unlock and build the wood farms? Those will give you constant generation of wood, although I heard that since it is a random card-unlockable, I wonder if it's too punishing if you don't get it. I thought I had been quite generous with the amount of wood given by cards but I wonder if I am mistaken?

Haha the storm is meant to be brutal but I am getting mixed comments. Some find it way too easy and build so far ahead of the storm, while others think it's too difficult! I'm going to have a hell of a time balancing this game XD. For now my solution is sorta to provide roguelike permanent upgrades to help each subsequent run. But I do wonder if there are better ways to improve it, like dynamic difficulty, or even the ability to summon the storm at your own pacing.

As for my development process, I'll do a more detailed writeup sometime but you can look at my ideation process here and devlogs if you want to which mention some shortcuts and tricks I used to optimize my effort and re-direct time on areas I wanted to improve on. For this jam, my goal is to focus more on polish and game design, so I had help from external assets. It's also the reason why my iteration style is to upload a playable v0.1 as early as possible. I used that to get initial feedback and then proceeded to iterate on the remaining days to really polish it till v0.5. So while I uploaded the first version after 4 days, I continued to update and iterate on the game every day until the last day. I was also surprisingly invested in the idea so I worked extremely hard on it. It helped that this jam is longer than others. I think I seriously maximized the full week lol. Probably the hardest jam I worked on and I think the results surprised even myself.

Also wanted to add that I'm perhaps on the slightly more experienced side so it's perhaps not fair to compare. I've worked in gamedev but also have animation and extensive 3D background so not only can I put together stuff really quickly, I'm very comfortable working with 3D, lighting, post processing and FX to make a scene pop, making cinematics with Cinemachine and Timeline rapidly, etc, so I have an advantage there. I've also been told that I excel in rapid prototyping, a skillset which seems to come in really handy in scenarios like game jams. 

Lastly, I was lucky to have a very clear vision of my direction which I think helped me plan my time a lot better. Thus, my bottleneck is less of programming and art, but more of game design. I focused on what I felt were high impact features. There were a lot more stuff I wanted but I had to cut them, but I will be gradually adding them into the game after the jam rating period is over, with the first update to put out later today!

Oops sorry I typed so much. I think I get super passionate discussing games and processes and I just went a little ham there X_X

Thank you for the support Jorava!

Right! I'm pretty pumped right now and I'm gonna go for Steam! I'll keep working on it for a couple months I think.  I actually don't know how long I should give myself for this game haha, and probably the hard question will be when  to stop and just launch it on Steam. Hopefully this post ages well :D

Ah I see! In the first option, the storm will need to circle back to the beginning. Currently the storm doesn't do that and only advances, it cannot go back to chase after the buildings that survived, but I wonder if it should. I think only then will the first option be viable.

As for the second option, I think taking more time to destroy the turret just means the storm is stuck there longer as it's like giving it more HP right? It just slightly reduces the reliance on a shield, but it won't be able to shoot behind as it will always get destroyed.

And yep! Tomorrow I will be uploading v0.6, a new version of the game containing Storm HP, new defense buildings, a dash ability (via research), some new research related to the storm, the first island scenario, as well as a lot of rebalancing by making the storm come earlier, and arrive faster each time! I look forward to finally be able to update it! In fact, I'm already working on v0.7 which will release storages :)

Oooh, my impression was Steam players like longer games. 

Also omg thanks for sharing that list, that's actually super duper motivational to push for Steam! I'm checking those games out right now! Clickyland looks like a game I'd even wanna play as I love building and defense!

You're correct!!

Hmm, if I may ask, what do you mean by a weak shield? If the storm strikes their shield and then moves on, does that mean they're technically invincible to destruction? Would that be too strong? Or do you have another idea in mind?

I do really want turrets to shoot both ways if possible as I think it's visually cooler and slightly more sensible.

Ah! Let me try to explain. I'll edit the post to make it clearer too! Right now turrets can only shoot to the left, and not behind them (on the right).  The dilemma was whether turrets should have the ability to also face right and shoot at the storm when they are successfully shielded and the storm has passed by them.

The concern was less about people spamming shields, but more of "oh my god, these turrets will be half as effective if I don't shield them, so I need to shield them or else they only shoot half the time and get destroyed, wasting my resources spent on turrets!"

This possibly creates a mentality where the player may feel they aren't playing efficiently if they don't spam shields. And if the game encourages spamming shields too much, I think it becomes an obligation rather than fun. So it's more of trying to not make the game feel like shields are a mandatory.

Possibly I might be overthinking it haha.

HOWEVER, I must say I like your idea of capping shields and increasing the limit with each storm. I really like what you proposed because this can tie in to upgrades in the research tree, or even in-game's island scenarios or random card draws where players can choose to increase the shield limit further and make choices of whether to do that or pick something else!

And thank you so much for embracing me with this lovely game! :D

Very quirky, humorous, and super creative interpretation on the theme!!! I really loved it! Half the time I didn't know what was going on but that just added to the humour and chaos of everything as I spam clicked on everything!

The sound effects are superb. Instant 5/5. The way the music just keeps escalating along with the tension is just icing on a cake...or a cake that's about to collapse and leave a black splat on everyones' faces, which was what happened on my run! XD

Oh my god. This is the most encouraging thing I've read all week. I think my heart just melted reading your comment HAHA. Thank you so much for playing it and this is super encouraging to read because a few days ago, I sat down and had a long think about the vision for this game and with everyone's feedback, made me decide I want to try to push this game as far as possible!

I would really like to put this on Steam although I'm not sure how much content is needed to get there. Stormbridge feels like such a short game and I definitely need to gather a lot more ideas on how to expand it further beyond just a jam game. Nonetheless, the encouraging words by everyone makes me want to try and I hope you'll get to play it once I roll out the updates sequentially!

Noted on the lag! I have applied some optimizations and gave the storm a health bar and combat variety which I'll release tomorrow after the rating period concludes!

Also just tried your game! Very quirky, humorous, glorious sound effects, and the escalating music and tension is just *chef kiss*.

I couldn't see the link but I saw the stream on your twitch and wow your stream was very insightful! Really appreciate you narrating your decisions and your thought process so I know how to improve! Thanks so much for giving the game a go!

Just heard your reply - thanks so much for that and glad to hear you recorded! If you can let me know where it'll be, I'll definitely want to check out your playthrough (either on Youtube or twitch)!

AH! I'm so sorry I just missed it! :( Any chance I can still view the past stream? >.<