itch.io

Oh it's 100% rng dependent. But there's an approximate rhythm to when they attack even though the attacks themselves are rng. So you have to switch directions right before the attack might happen so that the horizontal swipes don't kill you, since those aren't reactable at all. And then you just kind of hope the ones coming directly for you are avoidable lol

yeah, it would definitely be important to have a stairway/ramp back up on the side you start from to prevent that from actually losing materials entirely

Managed to find all three endings - it wasn't super clear which endings would come from which stats, but I think the endings were good choices that all made sense, and the game does a pretty good job at hinting you towards where the creature is trending, especially given the jam's time constraints! 

Definitely some great moodiness and concept, but I think it lost some tension by virtue of running fairly long and the repetition with unskippable VO. I enjoyed discovering that the commands only cared if they contained the word "log" or "dome" and not if there was any other text, so I started entering those commands in silly ways every time. Come to think of it, maybe that's why it felt less tense... Also, there's no max character length, and if you go long enough the characters break out of the terminal screen!

Big fan of the look and feel of the game! The difficulty is pretty swingy depending on if you know where everything is, though. My first play I lost because it felt like anyone drawing on you was guaranteed damage, and wandering around for too long it ended up feeling like getting shot at was unavoidable. My second attempt, though, I knew all the objectives and where all the coins were, which meant that I was able to fly through it without anyone getting aggressive.

It was nice to have to objectives listed in the upper right, but they seemed a bit inconsistent - talking to the guy with the cigarette without any money on hand seems to dismiss the quest prompt to get a cigarette, and sometimes it seemed like objectives I'd already completed would pop up again? For example, if I don't have money to tip the piano player, and then use the phone and pick up the coin there, then use that to tip the piano player, the objective to use the phone returns. Other than that, the only thing that was unclear to me was lighting the signal - I didn't realize the signal was to light the fire, and I also didn't recognize that the fire pit was a fire pit right away. Maybe some burning embers in it or something would make that more clear?
Also when I launch the game, for some reason SteamVR opens. I have no idea why that is lol.

The models and music go craaazy! I wasn't able to throw the ball or interact unfortunately, but I do really want Nintendogs with freaky lil aliens now

This is really cool! Reminds me of Iron Nest in the kind of guided sim, analog mechanism kind of sense. I also like the spots with the weird rendering effect after the final delivery, and the slow methodical feeling of guiding this massive old ship through space

Battle mechanics were fun, but the UI seemed a bit broken for them, since I couldn't see the labels for fighting or inventory. After the 4th screen or so my character froze while walking off the right edge of the screen, unfortunately. Definitely would want to see what's past there!

I have no idea what's going on, but I feel like that's intentional. I did deliver the muffins

Fun and spooky! The perspective shifting definitely grew on me, and I liked how it gave the characters a lot more of a sense of scale, size, and general detail when interacting with them. I would have liked the movement speed to be a little higher or have a run button or something like that, especially given that a few bits of the game have you backtracking or crossing empty space.

Really interesting core mechanic - a bit difficult to understand at first, but the first ship to guide is straightforward enough to help understand. I think some additional feedback indicating where the ship is or where the ship crashed, or maybe just where the light is pointing on the map, might be helpful for players as they're figuring out that core mechanism. 

Ship 2, though, I found very confusing, and maybe a bit inconsistent at the start of guiding it. In the final section I also wasn't quite clear on where I was trying to guide the ship, either - but the delivery of the story through the one-sided radio communication was really effective and thematic!

Super striking visually! It would maybe be nice to have the camera zoomed out a little more - I liked how momentum-based the movement was, but it was too easy to overshoot and hit a wall when the camera was in so close that it was difficult to see what was coming up in front of you. Maybe lead the camera in front of the player's movement to make things more visible in that direction. The background being so vibrant and having so much motion was also a bit disorienting, though - it was difficult to tell at times what movement was my own speed vs the asteroids in the background. The designs are awesome though! Would love to see more challenging enemies or objectives, maybe some more reactive or destructible objects like asteroids in the foreground or something, and some feedback when you hit enemies. 

Fun Missile Command-like! It would have been good to have some controls/instructions prompt in-game, though. My first attempt through I only was clicking and didn't understand the cooldown since there was no visual indicator for that, either, but I still survived through wave 3. The difficulty is pretty low overall - it doesn't seem like the player is punished all that much for leaving enemies alive, especially since there's only three waves, and enemies can target cities that are already destroyed. 

I think hit effects and sound fx would make a big difference! Having that extra feedback when damaging enemies I think would do a lot to make the action even more satisfying, since getting a good missile hit (especially on multiple enemies) already feels great

This was a lot of fun once I understood what was going on, but it definitely took a while to understand what was going on! And to be honest, even after beating the game I'm still not clear on a few things, like how or when the mothership takes damage. The tutorial video can help explain things, but 7 minutes is a *long* time to listen to an explanation for a game that might only take 5-7 minutes to play through. I think at that point most people (myself included) are more liable to just stumble their way through the game themselves.

There's a lot of information that would be really useful to have on the UI that's missing. It's unclear, for example, why and how many times a city will rebuild. I know it's 3 from the video, but that doesn't actually help all that much in the middle of the game when I'm attacking multiple cities at once - I'm probably not counting every time a particular city has been destroyed. It would also be useful to have some more information always onscreen. I always want to know how many resources I have, so it would nice for that to be on screen at all times, instead of just when I click the mothership, which I don't often have a reason to do otherwise. There's already an icon attached to each city for if they're hostile to my ships, but for the vast majority of the game, it's just a given that they're hostile, and it's clear when they become hostile visually because they're shooting back. I'd much rather see a lives counter for them, or have a visual indicator for whether they're marked for mining vs attacking for my own ships instead of needing to click into them for that information. There's other UI stuff that might be useful too, like health bars for my ships, ammo indicators for ships, etc

Without all that info it can make it harder to figure out how the game works - it's not overly-complicated at the end of the day, but there's often not enough information put in front of the player to make things clear from the outset. That said, all of that is not really difficult to fix, either - it's just a matter of putting the right information in front of the player for that clarity, and I think reducing that friction is all it needs

Would be interested to see where you take this with more time! The visuals look great, and I can definitely see a path forward with the window's view reflecting your location, the alien on the planet causing problems, and needing to juggle moving around the planet with the repairs.

Great audio especially! Not totally sure if I followed the plot in terms of how the star and the nightmares were connected or why, but the nightmare sections were fun, though I did feel a bit overpowered through most of it. The sword was particularly strong, since it could oneshot all the standard enemies, which lets you easily stack up ammo on whatever gun you like best for the bosses.

This was a neat one! The concept is especially intriguing, and I like the presentation as a more classic text-based dungeon crawler. I maybe would have liked the effects to be a bit less strong, as it did make the text a little more difficult to read, which of course makes the whole experience a little rougher in this case. I enjoyed the writing, but I found the creature killing mechanics to get in the way more than anything. It felt mostly like it was there to kill me once or twice before I understood the controls, and then after that to just make things take longer as it pulled me away from reading the text, but it didn't provide much in the way of challenge or variety. I really just wanted to read the text, which felt like the actual meat of the game, but the creatures just made me want to rush through and I ended up skimming a lot more than I would've liked. The text and storytelling are strong, so I don't think you should shy away from just leaning on that more wholeheartedly!

Amazingly tense atmosphere! A little undercut by the enemy portal thing, but the lighting and audio really sold the creepiness and tension of the ship. Like others have said though, it was pretty difficult to navigate. I think the flight manual would have been a great spot to explain a few of the mechanics, like the visor with F, how the energy system works, etc, instead of that being in another tab on the computer. It took me a good while to find those notes and start using the visor, which meant a lot of things were difficult to find. Some of the doors were confusing since at one point they said "malfunction" and so I didn't go back to them right away once I had keycard access. The low lighting is great for the atmosphere, but I think the clarity of things ends up suffering a little as a result - the CO2 leak in the galley would have been impossible to find without the visor, and even with the visor on it took me quite a while to realize what the game wanted me to interact with.

This is great, such a moody atmosphere, especially in the underwater section with the anglerfish and the accompanying danger music. I think maybe the lore delivery could have been a bit cleaner, but it's hard to complain about that in a jam, especially in 3D with so many different environments and challenges.

I agree with the other commenter that there shouldn't be a life system - I managed to finish the game with 2 extra lives, but I was definitely worried I'd have to replay a bunch of the game if I died too many times. Especially given that some deaths feel kind of unavoidable on the first playthrough, that would have been rough. The rising green goop section in particular feels like it's difficult to get through on the first try, since you're looking around, reading the signs, getting familiar. It might help if the "double jump, keep moving" sign was shown at the beginning or before entering the room, or the goop didn't start rising until after that first button was pressed or something like that.

That all said, I do like  the way that the lives counter adds tension to the game. Honestly, I would keep the counter and just secretly let the player die as many times as they need. Let the lives count go negative. That way you maintain that degree of tension, but then players get some relief if they need those extra lives and realize they're not actually going to be punished. Just lie to em!

A fun concept, and the controls were interesting while still giving enough info with the preview line so as to not be frustrating or unpredictable! I think it could do with showing the line a bit sooner though - there was a large delay between launches that definitely messed with how I wanted to play it, just launching myself repeatedly from place to place, which slowed the game down a lot. I also wasn't sure how gross was gross enough - was it enough to jump into just one gross spot, all of them, a few of them? I tried to jump into all of them for most of the levels, but on the final one I decided to only hit 2/3 of the gross spots and still was able to win.

Very fun, scratches that Pokemon Ranger itch lol. Like others have said I'd love to play this on a tablet/touchscreen. Maybe I should find my old osu tablet... I think getting a significantly higher score would be a lot easier that way! I love all the personalities and the simulated chat, especially that you can contribute to chat yourself!

My only complaint is my 100k+ score run got ended after clearing a map! I cleared it and somehow died right after the map reset.

The sound and art are compelling (though some of the contrast on the art is pretty low, which can make things a bit difficult to discern), but I also couldn't figure out how the game works, even after reading through the itch page. This is what my play space looks like currently, I think I have accidentally broken something as I have -68 actions left. This also happened one cycle later on my next run

I think it would be helpful to have more explanation in-game, rather than on the itch page, but it also doesn't feel like the game is explained fully on that page. What is a Soul Fragment and how do I get it? I've started a Great Feast but still don't have that box checked. If I Collect with 0 cards in the upper left deck, cards still get played. Where are those coming from? Are they being shuffled from the other pile? It's not clear that one is my deck and the other is a discard. And if that's the case, where am I drawing cards from into my hand? Where do those cards come from?

The lanes also aren't immediately clear - there's the indicator on the left, but I can click on the Meat symbol while in the Coins lane and the dot will show it selected despite still being in the coins lane according to the rest of the visuals.

It's also awkward that I don't seem to be able to gain boons? hearts? from multiple lanes per cycle, even when I fulfill the requirements for them. Is there a way to choose which lane I get that for, or does it choose for me? It's also confusing that there are four gods, but three lanes, and none of the gods seem to be named directly anywhere, especially since we're warned that they can change lanes. I can have 2/3 favor with Gan'th, but I have no idea which of the four that is.

I can see some interesting resource management and prioritizations going on here, but right now it's pretty opaque, and that makes is really difficult to understand what my goals are as the player.

I never played Party Pooper 1 but now it looks like I have to

A neat concept to have a kind of reverse-platformer where pressing a button causes you to fall downwards instead of go upwards! I was a bit unclear on the lightning bolt pickups, though. I'm not sure what they were for, maybe for making your headlamp light brighter? That didn't seem to make much of a difference though, if it was getting brighter I didn't notice, but also all of the things that can hurt you glow, so the headlamp only really served to get a better sense of the terrain.

The gravity boots also felt a little inconsistent at times - I found myself mostly either holding it all the time to move along the floor as if I was playing a platformer, or tapping it to float in place, which felt kind of tenuous. Holding the grav boots accelerates very quickly, which could feel unpredictable at times.

The red jellies near the end were a good addition to provide some tension, since through the rest of the map, it's mostly about staying patient and moving carefully, but the red jellies force you to keep moving and potentially take some risks

Super foreboding and atmospheric, and imo does a great job of communicating the goals of the game without explicitly laying out anything at all, which works very much in the game's favor. The visuals, the sound, the music, all come together really well. However, once I grasped the goal, it was really just a matter of repeating one strategy: get a symbol in sight, and the corresponding astronaut will inevitably approach. Back up while strafing back and forth to keep the astronaut and symbol in view while kiting them away from all the others, then, when the symbol is low enough, circle around them. Then repeat until the end. 

That said, the process is still pretty satisfying and doesn't overstay its welcome! I enjoy the thematic choice between pacifying vs increasing health, and it feels like an intentional misdirect to have the player consume one of those first stars for health, kind of leading them to want to collect the other stars themselves instead of matching them to the astronauts, which ended up feeling like a better choice as the player.

Great work, and I really like your inclusion of the process materials! It's fun to get a peek into the inspirations and brainstorming behind the scenes

A fantastic little pikmin-lite - satisfying, adorable, and pretty well-paced.

Honestly my biggest gripe with the game is that there are I think 103 little guys available in total, when clearly there should be exactly 100 little guys.

This is very minor, but I'd also love to see the gap that you bridge allow you to fall into it instead of having invisible walls, with may be a little staircase up back to the side you start from. I think it would feel a little more natural that way, but would also allow you to do a silly sequence break. Same in the start - the breakable crystal has a huge invisible wall attached to it to prevent you from passing it early. But if it weren't for the invisible wall, you could do a jump from further back and use multiple midair egg lays to get up above it early and progress past it. I like being able to get away with that sort of thing, especially when it doesn't really break anything major like in these cases.

Great work with this, really good use of the theme, and I enjoy the core concept of reality TV alien horror driving the story, which flowed really well!

Similar to the other commenters so far, I did run into some friction with the UI being a bit unclear at times - especially the X-ray machine code not being very clear that I was supposed to enter a code there. I was confused for a while on how I was supposed to activate the machine.

Some of this friction I think worked pretty well though - it took me a second to realize I could examine my arm, for example, and that was a good payoff. There was one alien prompt that confused me a bit, the one where they ask for techy wear and torn up clothing. It was a little unclear that I couldn't just wear techy clothing and tear up some of it, but that I had to tear up non-tech clothing and wear that alongside tech clothing.

Overall, great job, I love this as a dark twist on dress-up games!

You can't go wrong with a little rat on a scooter! The map works great, it's somewhat confusing without being too punishing or feeling unfair at all, a great balance of challenge where intentionally trying to learn the map pays off really well, in my opinion. At first I didn't like how the steering worked, since I wanted to be able to rotate at a standstill, but playing more quickly changed my mind: I think the controls are just right. 

Good times/scores are fairly RNG-dependent though, since it seems like the next destination is random, so there's big variance on how far you need to drive. I spent a few attempts after getting a bit of a better grip on the controls and the map just trying to get a luckier attempt, and after a few tries got 57 seconds, but other attempts felt like I couldn't have possibly gotten faster than like 70 or 80 seconds. It definitely got me to do a few more runs than I might have otherwise tried!

I like the concept - especially hitting the eye of the tornado to wipe them out an less damage when you hit it outside that range - but it felt quite difficult to hit that range with accuracy, and I didn't immediately understand that as the goal. It was also a bit unclear how much charge I needed or how much charge was preserved, since sometimes it seemed like the laser stayed charged after destroying a hurricane. The spawns were also a little inconsistent - one of them spawned quite close and was moving fast enough that I couldn't even get my cursor over it before it hit the coast! But I think it overall works well to need to plan your shots ahead with the movement speed lowering while charging, and it means you really have to watch the whole field so you can know what's coming.

definitely one of the biggest challenges was trying to minimize the frustration of being turned around when you don't want and avoid too many long accidental backtracks. Glad we managed to strike a decent balance there!

Great idea and subversion of the theme! And also some wacky mechanics that I ended up really enjoying. You did a great job of having it be replayable by virtue of having lots of little bits and pieces to explore and experiment with to figure out what everything does and how to get a lower time.

I was a bit confused at first when it asked me for my initials and the leaderboard didn't change, but it made sense once I actually tried a couple times and got a better score. I ended up getting 4.56 which was very satisfying! Music and sound also work so well for this

Great-feeling shmup! I think I reached a kill screen after about 5 and a half minutes though lol - if you get rainbow bullets and upgrade past that it crashes the game, it looks like.

I really like the onion attack vs the asteroid attack forcing you to deal with them differently, it creates a great dynamic even very early on. Though, I think momentum is super important, since killing enemies early on and getting as many attack upgrades as possible is really what lets you stay ahead of the curve. At a certain point, the difficulty levels off since your attack power is high enough to almost instantly shred anything onscreen, and once you're shredding all those enemies, you get enough shield and health upgrades to not need to worry about taking damage nearly as much either. Oh, and at that point, the sound effects get a little overwhelming and crunchy as so many damage sounds stack up on top of one another at the same tiem.

Good patterns, hitboxes felt very fair, definitely hit that flow state! The music also fits the vibe great and helps ease into the flow effectively for me.

Great first jam game!! Hope to see more from y'all in the future. The aesthetics are wild and the music is perfectly tense and frantic. And I love the godlike king rats at the peak! I was a bit confused about the warning sounds, but I couldn't look around easily which might have been a part of it. I think the big issue is that the mouse wasn't being captured.

In Unity I think you should be able to fix that by including something like

Cursor.lockState = CursorLockMode.Locked

which locks the cursor to the center of the game view and hides it, after Enter is pressed to start the game. Then you can set it to CursorLockMode.None after the game ends so the player can click around again in the menus.

Currently it does work better in fullscreen, but full screen isn't a total fix, especially for users who have multiple monitors! If you have another monitor, you can move the cursor right out of the game window which can make it easy to accidentally click out of the game entirely.

okay really though this slaps and brings me back to my warioware touched! days when I was a kid. Feels like it would be perfect on a Nintendo DS 

I like the no ketchup joke but the sfx when you throw away the ketchup is a little confusing because it sounds like you screwed up or something (especially if you're trying to go fast and just happen to hit the right input for the ketchup as it comes in), but I love the variety of stuff to chop and all the customers!

also the music was like crackly for me? I thought my audio card was freaking out for a sec

i cant believe they censored george bush out of this game

I love these kinds of split brain type games, especially in jams, and the visuals for the days passing in the background works very well! The chimes were a little bit loud compared to the music for me but my ears are kind of sensitive to that. I do wish it got a little faster/more difficult at the end, though! Extra points for higher precision (and higher risk!) is great though and gives it a higher difficulty ceiling overall.

Got 38.99 after a few attempts which felt like a pretty good time! I enjoyed the feeling of building speed while hopping around and needing to maintain smooth turning to not lose speed, but it did feel counterintuitive that doing a bunnyhop input ended up slowing me down, it seemed. Whenever I timed the jump press, I'd get a big cut to me speed down towards the base speed, in exchange for some height. Eventually it just never felt worth it to lose all that speed. Initially I was trying to time that button press every time since I assumed it would make me go faster.

Great shmup! I did play with both, but it definitely felt like it paid off to eventually sacrifice one and just focus on the other. I like the powerup system, too - it seemed like the more valuable upgrades were positioned towards the top where it was more dangerous, and that works just great. The grazing mechanic was also a lot of fun, and feels very natural coming out of other shmups.

So much fun, I enjoy that the game so clearly feels like it wants for you to choose to go way too fast and just pray you don't hit anything. I guess you could be sensible and only do that when you have a boost, but I can't help myself. The pixel art is also so sharp

THOUGH that strategy did lead me to figure out how to displace myself out of reality. If you hit an obstacle and come out of your damage invincibility right when you're on top of a second obstacle, the game doesn't know how to handle it, and you get pushed backwards by the prop until it despawns, at which point you're behind where the road spawns - so you can no longer hit anything, but the game still knows you're moving. At this point, you can just hold full throttle until the end! This means the optimal strategy is actually to go way too fast and pray you *do* hit things which I think is also great tbh

Looks great, sounds great, plays great! Similar to Scrumbo I wasn't fully clear on the spin vs going on the ceiling. Those two inputs would probably be my only gripes - they weren't very intuitive and not the most consistent. And the starting menu doesn't seem to differentiate between them. Sometimes pressing both keys at the same time would make me spin, but sometimes I'd just go up on the side. Going on the ceiling was a relatively consistent input, but was also a bit slow to do.

but this does a great job of keeping things readable at high speeds and low resolution, which is no mean feat!

my favorite is the screaming guy