itch.io

Yo okay, very interesting!

I feel like if we joined forces we could have a very interesting game huh. I recently made a game which pulled on some similar elements in a well, very different way — well, you’ll see. (Game in question)

Curious of your own thoughts

OMG I used a different version of the menu music track in my first ever jam game hahaha … though i think you mad some quite harsh audio mixing. You should probably work on that aspect

Glad you enjoyed it!!

Different enemies have different patterns. One of them shows you the whole word before you begin typing but hides it once you begin ^^

The most basic one just shows 4 letters ahead at all times.

It used to be just 2 letters for but I increased it to 4 since it proved too difficult during playtesting :D

I started with two ideas:

• QTE is typing a letter in a given timeframe
• multifunctional level design means reusing a level for multiple things

From there it kinda evolved: well words are just multiple letters, so let me do that. Then the multifunctionality was the tricky part so it just kinda started by having themed levels and the kinda baba is you inspired levels in the hub world, which led to the multi tiered secrets because I wanted to reuse the theming in as many ways as I could.

Having added that, I found out it had become too obscured through play testing and I needed a hint system, which led to the autogenerated nonograms from the level geometry (it picks a subsection of the level and you gotta solve that). And when solved you get a different hint from each level to help you progress! This allowed me another way to reuse the levels for the hints too so it worked out!

All in all i just kinda started somewhere then I had to think hard a few times to solve some problems or add layers which is how we ended up where we did.

In the end I don’t really think the platforming adds much and if I had to redo it I think I’d rethink the main gameplay loop a bit so it’s another base-game or perhaps only have it be a typing game. Though it would fit the theme less well that way I think it would be a better game for it

Seems like there is something missing? Or is it just an empty level with some parkour and you can throw out your line? I tried hitting the fish in the waterbut nothing happened

Improved a lot since round 1!

I would look to something like NOVA Drift as an inspiration for how to make meaningful progression gates (a difficult boss is stopping my progress. I better get some upgrades so i can beat it!) instead of just throwing more enemies at the player, which does not give me a goal to work towards.

As for the current theme I struggle with seeing how you applied it. There was that minigame in expeditions, which I suppose could be seen as one. But I’m not really getting multifunctional level :/

I don’t see the offline aspect currently working, as the neat part about idle and incremental games is seeing number go up (mostly your currency but also other numbers). The time aspect serves the purpose of giving the increasing number meaning. You don’t have the crucial increasing number part of the experience here, which makes it fall a bit flat in that genre (unrelated, but i wanted to give the advice anyway ^^)

I liked the power-ups but perhaps they should be less frequent :b

Also please add friction/dampening to the player

Ooooooh, I can see how that keyboard would cause issues LOL

Colors and subtext are designed to be two hard levels. I did not have time to playtest them, so the difficulty seems to be slightly off for what seems to be around 40% of people. Anyway, colors has a sorta out of the way thing to collect, which might be what you are missing!

I briefly considered keyboard layouts being a problem (I know German swaps z and y for instance) but decided it was too much scope to handle and it would be an acceptable sacrifice to make.

So I’m sorry for sacrificing you lmao

The encircling one is solved by typing each key surrounding the letter once, as laid out on a normal keyboard. I made sure to only hit a-z0-9 when doing this.

So if there’s any contradiction there to your layout that might be why it’s not working out.

Thanks very much for checking it out!

Lol 😂

I wonder if the hint about typing solve could have something to do with finding them

The art turned out amazing! But the uh UI and tutorial would have had me very confused if I had not tuned into the stream xD

In general i think this is an interesting concept for a minigame but it needs a lot of work and more ideas added to be a full game

I liked the sound design and the skeleton fights once they were sped up!

I would have loved a reset button as the first thing i did was get stuck in the door as it closed lol. Also it was easy to just push boxes against a wall which would also mess up the puzzle.

In general i would have loved to see a lot more of the puzzle space of the ability explored as it was currently only used in one or two puzzles. For instance being able to walk past skeletons while using the ability.

(though the skeletons and box pushing puzzles are a bit at odds in the design so i would cut the skeletons entirely and focus on the ability and action sokoban kinda gameplay with dodging bullets and spikes comprising the action.)

Oh yeah and the title splash art and capsule art for the game are very grainy, which was a bit offputting as a first impression (looks like it was made from downscaling an image without cleaning up the art?)

I had to make a firework for a kid and even though i totally messed it up (crackle) he still loved it <3

I found it quite fitting in difficulty maybe slightly too hard for the relaxing vibe the game otherwise has.

I think my biggest critique is the lack of what i would consider multifunctional level design, as every element in the level only served a single function. And the visual polish of the fireworks for a game about fireworks could use a bit of love ^^

I will be skipping rating this as I am on Linux and as you say, the web build is laggy ^^

I don’t think i encountered anything i would call a quick time event. Though i guess it was “quick” and “time” and “event”… so i suppose that warrants at least some points for creativity of interpretation :b

I was entertained enough to play through the game but stopped playing on the boss as it was not really that fun to me waiting for the bomb physics to randomly work in my favor.

I would suggest paying more attention to puzzle design and general polish, the puzzle where you have to hover a box on a fan then switch power to the other fan was a good one and i’d have loved to see more of those as the rest did not really require me to think that much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85mAmP4k1Co

^ Here is a really good course/set of lectures on the principles of puzzle design that might be useful!

That said i did find the level design to be decent and for sure more interesting that some other entries this round. Good job:)

I also ended up doing the map yeet. Should have read these comments before playing lol

Oh for sure! It just looked a bit like my game from 2 and a half years ago where the visuals could kinda remind you a bit of that lol

Oh also i thought the tutorial of the wordle was the gameplay for like 5 minutes so i was really confused. Having two X buttons was cause for confusion. And also i was expecting real words, which also caused me to lose a few times trying to figure out what it was supposed to be spelling XD

I found a place where the navgrid was broken so i could walk back and forth and the guys would never attack me LOL

And i also found it funny you could walk away from the sound reciever xD

I tried a few times but couldn’t get past the milk carton:(

I’m kinda invested in skeleton morning routine though. Also very funny it’s milk for that calcium :b

I really like the concept. I think it does need some more polish though to be truly enjoyable

Solid entry! Would have loved for it to be longer. My favorite part was the moving platform:D

I was missing a bit of cayote time. That would have been really nice for some of these precision sections. Especially for an unforgiving ending sequence.

This was very well put together! I found the typing variation a very interesting addition. Clever use of paths!

Got around 9300 points. Judging from the other games i lost on the last round i think lol.

For future reference, animate UI elements by setting the pivot to 0.5, 0.5 (possible in godot 4.6+), which makes them a lot nicer than animated from the top left:D

Also i got a lot of deja vu to my first jam game from the first screenshot LOL (a bubble on a procedual noise background) XD

I enjoyed myself for a solid half an hour!

In the end my strategy was just to reset every time the phone rang because i found it impossible to recover back to a state that was good enough to finish the wordle. I appreciated all the elements except the phone, which was hilarious the first time around but then just turned into “lose 15 seconds” (or however long that is)

Did you figure out what typing SOLVE does?

SPOILERS!

(writing this weirdly so it’s more difficult to read at a glace as itch does not support spoiler tags)

kEePgOiNgLeFtThRoUgHtHeWaLltOgEtaHiNt

Woah this was great! Very action packed!

I think weirdly it was the quick time events that were multifunctional instead of the level design xD Idk what to say? Task failed succesfully? I had a blast!

I thænk thæs æs æ prætti græt æntry. You are wælcåme in scandinævia æni time!

Anyway…

Dude the animations were great. And a very clean style! I found it pretty smooth cruising but an indicator of where the acceptable is could have been great. And the screwing could have probably benefittet from a smidge more time because it became a bit too much of a dexterity check xD Also the opposite moving countdown and rotating animations made it confusing which way you needed to turn something.

But i guess that’s the intended ikea experience :b Probably my favorite entry in terms of theming!

I found a strategy quickly and wasn’t really challenged since i just maxed out attack. So i think it would have benefitted from QTE’s which were part of combat for this jam prompt as the main hordes were not posing a challenge.

I did wait opening the chest, blasting away at the dragon. Then i opened it late, and the horde was approaching. So i really started to sweat because i was locked into the chest opening animation xD

The QTE’s were very solid and it was a pleasant surprise when the bomb was actually a really long sequence. Good you didn’t hold back with the difficulty there. Well done! Unfortunately i had a bunch of ghost object lingering between levels making it difficult to know where to go. I lost the car all the time due to the low contrast, so i’d change the police car to be a lot more visually high contrast so you can catch them crimes ;)

I played all the way to the end. It was quite enjoyable, however the fire goblet section could have been more difficult (maybe 3 goblets instead of 2).

Otherwise here’s some dev-to-dev feedback ;)

Bugs:

• It seems like it is possible to click a tile before an enemy spawns there.
• It seems possible to waste a click on an already dead enemy!

Meta progress:

• The chances should be written in %, as that is the norm.
• Meta progress upgrades related to difficult sections could be fun (reduce the number of obstacles in worlds by 1, 2, 3). So that way you can start the goblets out at 4, for instance, and the frost crystals go 2->1, goblets 4->3. Which would make this a significant upgrade.

QOL:

• Meta progress, show somehow how many upgrades something can take visually (or if it’s maxed out would suffice too)
• Meta progress, show (blacked out) the next upgrades unlocked by picking an upgrade. This makes players curious what’s hidden behind an upgrade even if you don’t particularly want that upgrade.
• Round completed, add the “upgrade available” to the return to chapel button so you can make the decision there if you wanna play another round or check out the upgrade. Perhaps even the number of upgrades available instead of just a “+”.

Suggestions:

• Something special for clearing out a level completely for the first time.
• Meta progression upgrade that unlocks “looping” each level. Each time you full clear it 4x’s the cost of clearing tiles and 100x’s enemy HP, and ups the difficulty of the level quirk (i.e. +2 crystals, +2 goblets) or something like that.
• Change the click sound to something less harsh. It is a bit strong compared to the rest of the sound design imo. Also add a hover sound that “foreshadows” what the clicking sound will be by being a very mild version of it, but with similar timbre and sound quality.

I think a short text on the game page could substitute well for now ;)

It took me two whole minutes to realize those drawer handles were something to interact with lol. I was about to give up but the fact that the thumbnail is not the default firework made me try to click all buttons on my keyboard and spam on the screen.

I think a visual diagram of what each part is and does would help a lot. I was just pressing random things not knowing what they’d do. So I think by aiding the player in getting a mental model of the thing works you make it a lot more fun, and it also affords the ability to plan, which is a big part of fun (in hindsight it’s a crucial failing of my own entry too lol). That said i really enjoy the concept!

That the full-screen button exit key is the same you use to exit menus was quite an annoyance though love the take on it though

I would have liked a bit more time spent on UI, as that would have helped make the customization feel better! :)

I think it’s a fun exercise! I gave it some more thought and I think it’s actually even smaller, since what choices you’re presented with is actually not important. Only the possible choices, so the origin choice is only ×8, not ×(8 choose 4).

Yes so only 3.849.120

You probably full-screened during a transition, I know that makes it break but didn’t have time to fix it :b

Lmao no shot you calculate this each time xD.

Upper bound for name generator is like… 1 letter from the alphabet the first choice, then 1, 2 or 3 (ordered) letters from the alphabet each subsequent choice. The last choice has just +1 option for skipping. BUT it’s not like that since uuuuuuuu is not a valid name for instance lol. So… Yeah can’t say what the upper bound is.

But it’s probably a way smaller number just for the choices in the scenarios. Roughly 2^8 * 10 choose 8 I think, as scenario order does not really matter. It kinda does since you can lose, but assuming you survive, it doesn’t, as they don’t affect what appears down the line.

So I’d say:

• 4 (from background choice)
• 8 choose 4 (origin choice)
• 12 choose 8 (scenarios)
• 3^5 (name, let’s just say it’s s lower bound of 3 choices per)

= 78.382.080

The upper bound for name generator is somewhere around 1.4e14 … I think (up to 10 letters long, so 26^10)

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.)