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Air Traffic Uncontrollable's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #335 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Presentation | #336 | 3.563 | 3.563 |
| Overall | #405 | 3.313 | 3.313 |
| Fun | #511 | 2.875 | 2.875 |
Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Preferred Name
BurgerWithCheese and Narwhalnut
Newbie?
Experienced
Nope - I've completed at least one game jam before.
How does your game fit the theme?
It's your first day as an Air Traffic Controller, and the job looks super complicated. To overcome that, the first thing to do is to just get started!
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Comments
Hello! I played and rated your game during Shovel Jam 2025, and it actually inspired me in parts to make my entry, Elevator Operator, in GMTK 2025.
Hope you check it out and let me know what you think!
That's awesome! I'm going to go play it now, it looks cool!
I also made a game for GMTK 2025, called Filmore Grain in... The Unending Loop! No worries if you can't, but if you get a chance to check it out, I'd love some feedback!
Haha I liked this one, did not perform too well though (more crashed than saved planes... whoops). The twist with USB sticks having to be flipped twice before fitting was also quite funny
Thank you! I think I've only had one run where I have more saved than crashed planes - we made this game very difficult!
Love the overall theme and art style! The perfect job to just be thrown into and told to get started.haha. Would have loved a tutorial or a bit more of an explanation on what the buttons do though, took me a while to figure out what was going on. Nice submission
Thank you! We are planning a small post-jam update, and we have some ideas to make a couple things more intuitive, that we hope will help with the learning curve!
Really nice concept of being a a new employee at a air traffic controller just getting started loved the gameplay how you can tweak the elevation of each aircraft depending on its colors loved the art simple yet beautiful loved the difficulty scale slowly introducing new aircraft color making it harder to control multiple at a time also the 8 bit sound effects were nice too really well done, also if you dont mind you can give my game a shot too.
Thank you so much! Your game looks so cool, I'll for sure play it today!
Really cool vibe and an interesting concept to do air traffic control
Could maybe use a tutorial at the start, as I wasn't really sure what I was doing. I had a general sense from the colors and the buttons, but there was a bit of trial and error, especially with the keys(?)
Maybe a lil more feedback would help make it clear which plane is being controlled (in the case where there's multiples of the same color plane)
Thank you! By the keys, do you mean the toggle switches that flip left-to-right? If so, I agree that they are pretty unintuitive; I want to experiment with adding a custom mouse cursor, that I hope will better indicate how to actually interact with them (as well as every other interactable object). Please let me know if you were referring to something else, though!
Also, we are going to experiment with adding a glowing effect to planes that are currently being controlled!
Yeah, was mainly referring to the switches! It's always tricky when experimenting with a new control scheme, but I appreciate the creativity
Thanks, hopefully our changes will make them a bit more intuitive!
I really liked the aesthetic and art style, it reminds me of tic80! the sound design is very good, especially the buttons. Though i was a bit confused at first about what to do, I do enjoy the gameplay, but I do think it would be easier to managed if each panel was managed by different key inputs. I'd also think it would add to the experience if the music got a bit more chaotic with each new plane introduced, like it has an audio channel introduced with it. Great work!
Thank you, I'm glad you liked the art style (especially since your game has such a great art style)! I also really like that adaptive music idea; I've heard some great adaptive music from some games in this jam, which has made me want to learn how to implement that!
This is a very unique concept and I think it could be fun with more polish. I love the aesthetics of the pixel art.
As it stands I think it's a little bit too hard and chaotic to manage all of them together. Maybe it can be fine for a later level or something but as a first level I think it feels too daunting.
I also thought at first the up/down buttons supposed to be clicked repeatedly before I find out that you can hold it down with your mouse, so I thought it could somehow be communicated better.
Thank you, this feedback is very helpful! When we were planning this game, we aimed to achieve a sense of chaos that still felt fun.
Based on your, and other players', feedback, it seems that the game feels unfair or frustrating because it is almost impossible to get less than 50 crashes, let alone 0 crashes. Would you say the frustration comes from the most chaotic moments, when it feels like you're 'losing,' due to it being almost impossible to avoid crashes?
Our intention was for the goal of the game to be minimizing crashes, not necessarily avoiding all of them, since the level of chaos we wanted would make that impossible. But, I think we missed the mark on communicating that; since there is no feedback of whether the player is doing good or bad, every crash feels like you are losing the game. Please correct me if I am misunderstanding the source of the frustration, though!
I've thought of a new scoring system that could give a better sense of progression, and give the player a better idea of how they are doing, with a score that's balanced to be fair for the chaos of the game. I'm thinking of something like the Guitar Hero health bar, where plane crashes decrease health and saved planes increase health.
Thanks again for the feedback! Also, based on another player's feedback, we are planning on adding stronger visuals when pressing a button, that I think might better communicate that they should be held down!
I couldn't tell you for sure how I would design it differently. What I can say is that it is my understanding that most people have a loss-aversion tendency that overpowers their wanting-of-gains tendency (I'm not using the correct scientific term for sure haha).
For example, if you come up to people and tell them if you flip a coin, heads they get $10 and tails they gain nothing, everyone will take that bet. However, if you tell them heads they get $20, but tails they lose $10, a large portion of people will then not want to take that bet, even if the expected value is the same, because they value the $10 they already have more than the potential $20 they stand to gain.
Applied in your game, I reckon most players feel like the pain of crashing 2 planes is disproportionately worse more than the joy they feel when they pilot the air traffic expertly. If it's still the design you want to keep, I think there's a lot of feedback you need to design into the UI so that the players get rewards much more often, or disproportionately bigger than the crashes to counteract this emotion.
Thank you so much for the detailed reply! That is genuinely so helpful - thank you.
I completely agree; in its current state, the game gives no feedback for a successfully piloted plane, but gives very noticeable feedback for a crashed plane! I'm hoping that the health bar, since it adds tangible stakes to the game, will help with the problems you discussed. Since there would be a concrete losing condition, crashing 2 planes is no longer the worst single event that can happen in the game - losing is! A crash should still be painful, but saving enough planes will 'heal' back the damage taken from the crash, which I hope will make individual crashes feel much less discouraging, while also providing more value and satisfaction from successfully piloted planes.
I think crashes should build a feeling of tension and chaos, but not build a feeling of defeat.
The concept of this game is so nice i hoped there was one of these as a simulator on steam , the VFX and how you can interact with the buttons are very pleasant to the ear and to the eye. Though i would prefer to have some sort of points or something to have the rewarding feeling when progressing through the game.
Thank you so much! We did have a couple ideas we ran out of time for; if we ever decide to make a large update to flesh out the game, we could upload it to Steam! There will be a small update on Itch sometime after the jam, where we make some small changes based on the great feedback we've been getting. There's plenty of empty space on the desk left, so we should have room to add a point system!
Check out our game. I think we're on similar wavelengths, but maybe yours is on a bigger scale.
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That said, music was appropriate and not annoying, which is perfect for this. I had a minor gripe about the knob control vs the arrow control. Arrows were easy to use, but the knob had weird detection. Also +5 USB drives for needing the mythical 3 times to plug in. Very good.
Thank you, we're happy you liked the music! I completely agree on the toggle switch being a little awkward to use; the way I set up the collisions to detect a flip of the switch was a little weird, and makes it difficult to place the switch back in the center position. I have an idea of how I can make this a bit smoother, so I'll try to implement that in a post-jam patch.
Also, I'll go play your game right now, it looks cool!
There needs to be more feedback of something happening when you press a button other than just a click noise. Other than that, an interesting game..
Thank you for playing, and for the feedback! In our post-jam patch, we might add/update some sound effects. We could add a different sound for interacting with buttons/switches that are not currently linked to controlling a plane color. We could also add some plane sounds whenever a plane is moving. Or do you think there should be stronger visual feedback when pressing a button?
I think stronger visual feedback would be the best option. With as many planes as you get it could get a bit overwhelming sound wise.
Okay cool, thank you! We could experiment with adding a light glowing effect on planes when they move, to give immediate visual feedback.
I loved the pixel art style for this game, the controls were a little unintuitive at first and I never really figured out how the arrows in the top left worked. Overall I tried 3 runs to see if I could get hired but I failed :( I kept running into the sun and I was bad at mini games lol
Thank you, I'm glad you like the art style! We wanted to make the controls somewhat unintuitive, to mimic the feeling of sitting down at a complicated air traffic controller desk on your first day, but I think we didn't progress the game in a way that gave the player enough time to learn each of the mechanics before things get too hectic!
And thank you for the feedback on the arrows at the top left! We definitely made it a bit too ambiguous, but the arrows indicate that the light next to it is an 'Invert Light,' meaning that when that light turns a certain color, all planes of that color have their controls reversed. We were trying to find a good balance of ambiguity that can be deciphered as the game progresses, but it seems that the planes ramp up in difficulty a bit too quickly to ever give the player a chance to learn some of the mechanics. We might include some reworks to the overall pacing of the game in our post-jam patch!
I really like the game! it is very hard though! many people died today... the hard sun appeared right as a plain was in it. also it took me a moment to realize what to do
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Thank you, I'm glad you like the game! I've seen that happen a couple times with the sun; after the jam judging window ends, we'll make a small update that telegraphs that a bit in advance.
Really interesting game. I caused 88 plane crashes and get fired :D. Love all the minigames. and the art looks great!
Thank you! I've done a couple runs with over 100 crashes...
Was pretty confusing at first and could use a tutorial, the game looks nice and there's a lot of charm
Thank you! Our goal was to make the start of the game a bit daunting, with all the different lights and inputs on the desk, but we might have introduced each mechanic too quickly. Thanks for the feedback!
I got fired and honestly I can understand why. Very fun and charming game, the gameplay is chaotic, the different planes being introduced slowly makes it for a very compelling difficulty curve and the animations are cute. The usb minigame made me laugh out loud. Very good game overall, good job!
Thank you, we're so happy that you laughed at the usb!
Pretty fun game, I didn't understand the controls at first but once I did I immediately saw the charm, also the crash animation is funny enough it doesn't make me feel bad for crashing the air planes :)
Thanks, I'm glad you like the crash animation!