itch.io

You flatter, I’m far from being an expert though, I’m definitely not that good. But as for how I got here? Spending a lot of time thinking about user oriented design, I think. Pay attention to details, make sure every interaction gives audiovisual feedback to the user. Make sure everything is very, very clear. Everything makes sense if you see it for the first time. Hesitation and tiny confusion = bad.

I suppose I copied from things I know already. The writing was inspired by Disco Elysium, the gameplay by the intro sequence of Fear & Hunger. Then mix with some Blades in the Dark and you get this. Steal like an artist!

(Most likely I make a new project for next round! That is the plan at least, I can’t fulfil the promise for a game this character creator makes about what comes after.)

Thanks for playing!

That could be a bug I didn’t catch. It should show the final stats!

Thanks!!

Very charming! Made a nice cowboy cube <3

Love the vibes so much!!!

The control scheme is a bit cooked though xD

• There is no visual feedback for two of the states (jump height and gravity) (i guess they also kinda customize a very similar thing, in a way). The “size” parameter does have a visual indicator of what state you’re in (wide vs tall), which is good
• It’s all on one hand, all the buttons, which introduces some friction

I chuckled. Good job xD

My only gripe is that it was unclear where your cursor was when hovering over parts. I would make the index finger point to where your cursor actually is ^^

Loved it beside that hahaha

No problem!

Hello!

A fellow dev here. I found you through reddit (as you probably expected from your analytics, ha!). I’m curious how well the game did/does on steam? Did the quick launch after getting popular on itch pan out?

Cheers, SQLPY

My pleasure! :)

I nabbed all my sounds off of free sound sites, which is why I could throw all that together in so little time xD I respect doing everything all properly though, kudos for that! I’d prefer doing that too but never been in a jam that had a week available for me to just make music since I’m not too good at it to do in that amound of time (or maybe too picky hahah).

I didn’t figure out how the level two input was supposed to work.

For what I did get through though I’ll give some feedback! First off, since I’m a bit of a polish nerd, there was too much screen shake and some of the sounds didn’t feel quite right. They sounded like a bad thing was happening even though you did it correctly. For future reference, check that the sounds actually sound like what you’re trying to convey. For screen shake, tone that down by like 80% maybe. It’s supposed to support the feeling you’re getting of the impact, not disorient the player. It’s easy to overdo but elevates stuff when done in moderation. For the cinematic sequence of blowing up the planet it’s fine to have a bit more, since it’s just vibes and doesn’t interfere with any gameplay.

For a simon says clone i really like the packaging of it but I would have liked a bit more focus on clear communication of what you are supposed to do when. From a game design perspective, I think level 1 overstayed its welcome a little bit. Maybe 5-10 button presses fewer in total but ramp up faster. The challenge comes when you have to remember a sequence, it’s not hard to remember which light just flashed even if it’s a fraction of a second xD

Allow skipping the intro sequence too, I missed part of it and had to rewatch the whole thing hehehe

Not your fault. I’m also on a Linux build and it worked just fine:)

I am on linux (Arch). I could run fullscreen (chromium based browser). Also yes, you should be able to run windows .exe standalones if you got Wine installed. I’m also pretty sure you can somehow through Steam Proton compatability.

I won’t be rating it cuz I won’t be able to play it with a mouse before the jam ends, but from what I am able to see you’ve hit it out of the park with this one!

You even got a full tutorial (didn’t play much further because it didn’t feel good with a touch pad lol)!

I think my only critique from what I experienced was that the music does get a bit monotone…

Keep on rocking dude:D

Oh, I wasn’t bothered by the background at all, honestly! It fit the atmosphere well, and all my focus was on the ball anyway ^^

Oh hahaha, whoops xD I guess I should have been more patient…

Don’t take my critique too harshly. It’s a very good entry, so what i give feedback on is also going to be more high level :D

I’m impressed by how much you managed to fit into this game!

The puzzle pacing could have used some work, I feel like there were a few redundant puzzles that didn’t add much to the experience since you already knew what the solution would be because you knew the mechanics. I stopped playing a bit after the second layer was introduced but that’s just because I’ve played with my share of LEGO gears already xD

Amazing entry overall though, you can be proud:D

If you’re interested in puzzle design, I highly recommend this lecture series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCHciE9CYfA

Looks amazing. Love the vibes lol

Good job with the camera movement too btw ;)

Clearly you know what you are doing but just didn’t have time for more. The visuals are definetely strong, there’s good contrast, good separation of gameplay space and non-gameplay space, etc. I think you could have spent 10 minutes on some nicer UI though :b

But nice job for your first godot project!

Ooh, well done having so many things on screen without lag:D

Decently polished as well. I think my most major critique would be mismatching pixel art and some things that are perfectly sized single pixels and others which are nearest neighbours scaled sprites that aren’t 2x2 like the buttons (which is fine!) but like some of the text or menu selection things don’t look as nice as the little guys.

Good job:)

The sound design could use some love and there were no interesting decisions to make. (which is where the depth of idle/clicker games comes from). You simply max out your coin gain and then your era gain because it goes so slow there is no other strategy and it just becomes a chore. I would keep this in mind for these kind of games.

And a godot specific thing: Be aware of focus on buttons, it usually is best to just disable focus entirely, otherwise it just highlights something that doesn’t function as a selection.

The art did not feel super coherent and there are some sprite/scaling issues but besides that I enjoyed it for a bit. I agree that there are difficulty issues and maybe there should be some better guidance in game. Having the whole map rotate as well was a fun discovery:D

Great entry!

I think it would have good potential for some expansion on its gameplay and visuals to make it a fully fledged arcade game:D

Got to 1900:)

I could not get past the second jump, and I tried for roughly five minutes. So I’m just going to give some advice instead of commenting much on the actual game.

My best advice is to play the good platformers out there as well as the good rage games. They always make it so you feel like it’s your fault you messed up, not the game’s fault.

That means generally:

• Be generous with hit-boxes (favor the player). This makes the player feel like they messed up, not blaming the game.
• Do no hide mechanics required for progress.
• Ease the player in. Make difficulty progress throughout.

As for other feedback: The cat was cute and the ground sprite was decent. The rest could use some work, and your game page should use a different and larger font. It’s difficult to read. Getting stuck on the walls was not something I enjoyed, not was the slippery player controller in a precision jumping game. The main menu looked good and I enjoyed the aspect ratio not being 16:9. It fits the pixel art style.

I like thinking of games as the same as good user interface design, you want to reduce the mental friction as much as possible anywhere it’s not an intended part of the design (in 99% of cases you want less friction).

The theme was loosely integrated into the main mechanic.

The game was definetely fun. The choice of main mechanic was good and skill based with good audiovisual feedback.

The art was all over the place but in a consistent way. It kind of reminded me of Nubby’s Number Factory. Could still use some polish to be more uniformly weird. Just some general pixel art do’s and don’t would benefit. Like a consistent (or smaller) colour palette to give it that cohesion.

I did not really feel like there was currently a good reason for the overworld/map existing. I think it would have been a tighter experience if you could simply choose a difficulty to fight.

The cheering sound did not do it for me. But the sound design for the combo gameplay was solid. Perhaps an accelerating tune that follows the acceleration of the ball would make it even better.

Check for typos. You had one in the tutorial. I also think there was no need for a tutorial beyond maybe a flashing space-bar in the first fight since it’s quite self-explanatory.

Overall I think you did a good job!

Very intuitive, and good looking!

I think the main gameplay could use a supporting mechanic or some other thing to make it a bit more engaging. Maybe it would already become more fun if you didn’t snap to the location instantly, but the tongue was elastic and could get tangled up in the meteorites, something like that perhaps would give it more replayability because just messing around with the main mechanic is fun.

I had like 15 seconds at one point where I was just floating in space with no meterorites flying by in the direction I needed to go, which was a bit frustrating I guess.

For art I think the background could have benefit from being more muted in some way as it is higher contrast and more busy than the elements in the foreground.

I enjoyed the choice of music though, it was quite fitting to the experience like a relaxed space-walk!

Lmao. Fair. And you know what … Actually, as long as you enjoyed it I’m happy xD

Ayo, that’s a nice score!!

Thanks for playing:D

Mine is a potato too. I don’t know why it decided to lag out in the web build. Something about whenever something appears on screen for the first time there’s a lag spike I think…

Should be good after that I believe though lol

Thanks for playing!

I would definitely have rebalanced the game around them. The current difficulty was mathed for what kind of obstacles currently exist hahaha. Adding on top would have made it way harder, I agree!

The year is a timer, but 1683 is a decent time to complete it in! I tried to make around 1500 a normal time for me when play testing since I believe that’s roughly when heliocentrism got accepted.

My lack of subject matter research is quite bad I have to admit, but I think people won’t take it as an educational resource anyway xD

Thanks! Yeah that was initial idea I build the game on. Morphing from geocentrism to heliocentrism:D

To be honest, that was a lazy moment on my part. I could definitely have added a tiny tutorial button for the spacebar but it would have taken like 30 minutes so I went to bed instead… lol

Thanks for the kind words!! (despite my lackluster spacebar tutorial)

<3

I realized that the top and such was distracting, so I added the lighting to guide the focus towards the bottom. I maybe should have added in some lulls in the action so people could appreciate what is going on though. Good reminder to break up the action and pacing!

Thanks!!

Yeah, I thought it was a preloaded scene so don’t know why it doesn’t do shader ahead of time sigh. Oh well. Thanks for playing:)

Yes. It’s quite relaxed rules, as long as you have the legal right to use something, you may use it.

I also want to praise the art!!

Like everyoen else I think a good tweak would be choosing weapons that lend themselves better to a rock paper scissor matchup visually and intuitively.

And then despite seeing how the theme is incorporated I also think it gets a bit lost because there is no real gameplaly difference between “you, the knight” switching weapons and you handing him a different weapon.

Awesome job for a first completed project, I really dig the stylistic choices. I think you could have leaned even harder into the cardboard-y thing and it would probably be even better as a small puppet play kind of thing which is the vibe i got

Thank you!

I mean luckily it kinda was humerous to have the bed and stuff in the game. It was not originally meant like that, those are actually just our internal communications we didn’t have time to remove lmao. Just an artifact of it being a jam game.

I did not have time to investigate why the fairy room was laggy, though I suspect it has to do with each wisp/fairy thingy being light source since something weird is going on there and they also turn on and off for some reason. Or it could be something to do with poor instancing on my end and I ended up duplicating assets a bunch … It didn’t break the game on my own potato laptop so it stayed xD

Oh if you fell through the floor of one of the bookshelf that was intentional but probably poorly communicated. The idea is that you get pushed off the shelf by the book that is going out. The bottom floor does a check and will never push out a book where the cat is to prevent falling out of the map ^^

Oh please don’t think of it as super harsh, definitely one of the games I enjoyed the most reviewing yesterday! Maybe I should have put a positive note at the beginning, I guess I was kinda in a complaining mood…

But yeah level design is tricky for sure, we also messed that up on our game lmao (I did most of it 😅). I just wanted to give you a list of everything I would like to have seen improved!

As for the final level I was not sure what the goal was, maybe I just needed to press the other red switch? I just did things that were possible, not really with intent if that makes sense.

After I accidentally closed a door I had unlocked on myself I stopped playing since I felt like I had experienced what the gameplay was like and it would be more of the same

You can click to advance the text at the beginning. It was a last minute change I upped the duration because you could not read it in time and I did not know it would affect every sentence change lmao since I did not implement it. Oops xD