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Thanks for playing and for the thoughtful comment! Getting to the shore as quickly as possible is definitely a meta strat for orienting yourself. We discussed something like getting exhausted by sun exposure if you move through too many shore tiles in a row, but didn't end up actually implementing it.

Re: the expert explorer scoring - the threshold is the shortest path length from player spawn location to treasure location plus a number of steps of padding to allow for determining your location. The padding number was tricky to tune properly, but we tried to account for finding your location while moving away from the treasure while still being able to get the best ending. Maybe a better version would determine that padding number more dynamically based on the map configuration and the player spawn location.

There is definitely luck in terms of the map configuration, the treasure location, and your spawn location. We tried to smooth that out by having the map generation and player spawner make some guarantees about the player's initial location (not too close to the treasure or a sudden death tile, on a shore, or on a landmark) and the map (landmarks should be reasonably evenly spaced out). But even still, some map + spawn combos are going to be way easier than others. If I had another week of jam to work on the game, I probably would have spent a lot of it on map generation and player spawning.

Thanks again!

Thanks for playing! Finding where the treasure is on the map is the whole challenge of the game :D You use the directions on the back of the map to figure out where the treasure is, and then use the map and exploration to figure out where you are. When you know those two things, you can go to the place where you think the treasure is and try to dig it up!

Thank you for playing!

Thank you! Hats off to you for beating the harder difficulties and solving the ciphers. Not to be too shameless, but if you enjoyed the ciphers, you might like our gbjam 12 entry, which is entirely solving ciphers like those (and this game is a prequel to that game in the ness/chris/ollie gbjam cinematic universe).

Spoilers:

There are three end screens for finding the treasure, depending on how many steps it takes. There are endings for digging in the wrong place and for going to a sudden death tile. Finally, there are endings for solving and failing to solve the cipher puzzle.

Thank you! We had an even harder difficulty that we removed where some real landmarks would be hidden from the map. Early playtesting indicated that it made the game virtually impossible to win, but maybe we can put it back in for you to try out :D I also wanted to have a mode where the map changes every time you look at it, but didn't have the time to implement it.

Thank you! We're lucky that we have such a talented artist to make animations like that

Thank you!

I think everything in this really worked and added up to more than the sum of its parts. I could see it leaning more into the weird fantasy elements of it with a more austere tone that the visuals and sfx imply. Made me think of Book of the New Sun. Very nice!

Really nice. I especially enjoyed spending time with Robert. I was hoping he would offer to smoke me out, but that's ok. Great atmosphere, disorienting, mysterious, freaky. Nice storytelling through the found items. Two thumbs up from this true rub lover.

Unfortunately as an old man there is an upper limit to how good I can be at a game like this. I still managed to get in the zone and get some respectable scores. Enjoyed it!

Fisherman Clive: "Jofi yunt fifi" 
Me: I know that's right!

I really enjoyed this. Even as a very dumb guy I was able to figure a bunch of stuff out. It really made me smile that you could use the existing verbs for blackjack. Nice art and a nice vibe.

No problem! I think everything I pointed out is pretty minor overall. Good work for a solo project - you have the start of a fun fishing game. Keep at it! 

Really clever! Kicking the egg and dropping the egg from midair both made sense to me, and then the A+B action to launch the egg really knocked my socks off. Great potential - I hope you keep working on this! Maybe future iterations can take inspiration from soccer keep up tricks.

Super impressive for a ten day jam, and as others have said, the style is off the charts. Loved the parrot. Would love to see the addition of ways for player skill to shine through - something that made me feel like I was mastering the coin eating - either dodging stuff, taking the smartest path through the room, etc.

Thank you! this game is dedicated to all of the cousins who are no longer with us.

Thank you! We are very lucky to have such a brilliant artist on our team

Thank you! The harder modes make my head hurt

Thanks! The random perturbations of the map are a divisive design element, but we left them in the harder modes for people who enjoy suffering.

Thank you! And a tip of the hat to you for working out one of the puzzles 

My cousin Tom got the high score on this game. It was when he was 17 at an arcade in San Pedro and he played this game for 14 hours straight. His friend Dog had got him some weed ,and he said it had so many crystals on it that when they smoked a jibber in Dog's TBird he started seeing in slow motion. And that's how he was able to get such a high score. Tom died in 2019 after getting sucked into the motor of an industrial scale pool pump at a water park. Which is I believe how he would have wanted to go. RIP big man

First and foremost, is the title a Steely Dan reference? I really enjoyed this even though I sucked at it. Eventually got into a bit of a groove switching my tools and zooming up and down trying to keep each row occupied. Obviously this would have been out of scope for a jam, and sort of goes against the design element of things ramping up more and more, but I was wishing I could buy something that could be placed and auto-shoot certain projectiles on a row, or get the ability to chain shots, so like shoot the pickaxe and that automatically shoots a cart right behind it.

The sound effect that plays when you strike gold is very satisfying. As others have said, the main thing to work on is adding more variety and more  challenge to the game. Currently, I think it's probably impossible to lose. The sound and feel are nice. Digging itself feels good with the sound and the small animation.

I always enjoy a fishing game. Having the collection to complete is a nice touch, and I enjoyed seeing what the next catch would be.

My feedback is:

(1) It took me a couple of tries to figure out what controlling the reel meant. Because the meter for it is below the "game world" part of the screen, I didn't notice it. I had been thinking that part of the screen was a static control layout image.

(2) It's not clear if moving the pole with the dpad affects the catch or not.

(3) I think with the font, you end up with more than four colors on screen. Would just need a pixel perfect font with no filtering to fix that.

Thank you fellow vim user

I totally agree. I didn't manage to find the right way to balance the difficulty, so it's just completely random luck every game. A better version might have used a luck generation process that had some sort of progression to it, I think, and the betting would have happened at specific luck values, rather than at fixed rounds. Thank you for playing and for you feedback!

Debt is the sign of a life well lived -- they can garnish your wages but not your spirit. Stay up!

Thanks for playing! I think I should have communicated how luck affects the different minigames at the start of each minigame. For the marbles one, more luck means more time on the timer and a wider spread between the two guesses.

Thanks! The charm, tone, and cuteness are all due to our artist and musician. 

Thanks for playing! It sounds like you got really lucky with the luck meter on the marble game -- I think overall that's actually the hardest game. (The less luck you have, the shorter the timer is, and the closer the two options are for the number of marbles to guess.)

being a goblik sucks man. i'd rather be a sluglik. outstanding game.

freaky ahh game about turding out. died before I could crap

For criticism, I'd echo what Eli Haun said: I died a lot, and often I had no real reason to think I would die. I think a valuable lesson from tabletop RPGs is that you should always telegraph danger to your players when they're facing a potentially lethal choice, so that if they die, they feel like it was because of a reasonably informed decision they made, rather than the the GM just deciding to kill them. Other than that, I really like the concept of this game because it reminded me of adventuring with a TTRPG party in a hexcrawl or something and having random encounters happen. Cool ideas, and I'd like to see this or something similar with a bit more tolerance for suboptimal choices built in. Nice job!  

Definitely agree with your suggestion - lack of feedback/instruction in the puzzle screen is major missing piece of the game. Thank you for taking the time to play and leave your comments!

Thanks! Our artist is a real talent

Thanks for playing! We will definitely add some on-screen indicators of how to leave the puzzle view after the jam

Thanks for checking it out - we were very lucky to have such a talented musician on our team

thanks - it was made with godot 4.3

Why did you think this was a good comment to leave?

Thanks for checking the game out, and thank you for the feedback. I really appreciate it.

Definitely agree with your concerns about the lack of tutorial/clarity around the objectives and how to deal with bugus. We wavered back and forth on whether we wanted to leave it up to the player to discover the bugu clicking mechanic on their own or whether we should explicitly teach it. We ended up putting a blurb about it on the itch page but not the game, which is a half measure. I think adding a "how to play" screen in the game would be a nice post-jam follow up. As for the lore-appropriate justification for why you're doing what the objective is asking of you, I leave that to my co-creator since she is the brilliant mind behind gubus.

Thanks for the suggestion re: the performance issue on big selections. Each time a gubu is selected, I start a tween to beam them up and turn on their individual particle systems. In the smaller levels that's ok, but in the larger ones, the game can really slow down. I'm actually not sure if it's all the tweens, particle systems, or the combination of everything that's really killing the performance. I'll be doing some profiling to figure it out. I like your idea of batching the processing into groups, but I will admit that I'm no expert in optimizing godot games, so I'm not sure the best way to handle this sort of thing.

Thanks again for the thoughtful comment!

This is instantly fun which is a really admirable quality for a game to have in a jam. My biggest complaint is that the round ends too quickly, I wish I could keep going maybe twice as long in a round. Nice work!