Weird and wonderful presentation, and a very creative idea! Love the short looping video clips giving little dribbles of narriative.
Excellent to get this done in four days, nice work!
Thanks for the kind words!
One of the features I wish I'd got around to was feedback about how and when you earned points. The bonus hexes work just like regular Scrabble. You only score when your word makes a loop with existing words, then you score all the connected words.
It actually tracks all the scores from each of the words behind the scenes, but I ran out of time to present this to the player.
To be fair, there's literally zero audio in this game! I just ran out of time, you know games jams right?
I wrote the multiplayer server during the jam, from scratch. It's a database and a few PHP scripts, but it's fairly solid. I haven't had to do any maintenance other than moderate a few really bad words so far. I'm calling that a win!
There's a lot of polish I wanted to do, but I had to get the core game working first.
Thanks for playing!
I was considering letter restrictions, but thought it's hard enough to find a suitable word without all that.
I wanted to add a rule that every successfully placed word had to be unique. I am tracking the words in the server's database, but didn't get time to add the restriction to the game itself. Ah well, jams and all that.
Thanks for playing and commenting!
I saw your exploit! I had intended to disallow repeated words anywhere in the game, but didn't have time to implement it.
Yes, you're also right about parallel words in regular Scrabble, but this isn't regular Scrabble. Words of length 2 are ignored anyway.
Thanks for playing for so long by the way. You discovered a bug I wasn't aware of where if you scroll far enough, the background tiling stops repeating!
I just wish I had enough time to polish this properly and get it finished. Ah well, too big and too complex for one person to build in a few days.
That's a really nice game. Initially, I was a little overwhelmed at the complexity, but I soon figured out that I didn't have to understand all the nuances to play. I also failed at 45 weeks on my first go.
I'm not convinced you could last forever. Rent is constantly increasing, but your ability to generate money is limited. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the game will always end at some point. It's nicely balanced however. I felt under pressure to make the rent each time it was due, and only once had a comfortable amount of money from the sale of a $5000+ orchid. I also got lucky with sheers and a bonsai tree which was worth around $4000 I think.
Beautifully presented with top notch art, sound and gameplay.
My main niggles are minor, but important:
Well done, a great entry!
Thanks for playing and commenting!
If you hadn't mentioned it, I would not have been able to tell English wasn't your first language.
I often overlook the fact that not everyone has English as their native language. It's definitely something I need to address more in the future. Games are for everyone, not just people like me.
Thanks, multiplayer was something I wanted to attempt for several Jams now. One of my previous games was sort of similar, Team Codebreakers MMOG was realtime multiplayer. I discovered late in the 2 days that the back-end I was using wouldn't work from a WebGL build, so that became a Windows Executable. Hence it kinda never really took off.
This time I wrote the back-end from scratch and hosted it on my own site. That way I can be certain it will work!
Thanks for playing! I think I was probably playing alongside you labout 14 hours ago. I could see new words appearing while I was playing.
There's so much other stuff missing before I could get to audio. I really wanted the in-game leaderboard, because that's critical to the concept as a whole. I got the relatively simple server side of it going, then ran out of time making a new scene to present that from the game. UI always takes me a long time.
A couple of other things I didn't get to: Realtime feedback while you are dragging your proposed word. I got that working pretty early, but it was very difficult to debug when it changed every frame. So I added a switch to turn it off and only process the new word on completion. That helped speed up development. My plan was to turn it back on for the eventual build, but somehow doing that corrupted the database. Rather than spend the time to investigate and fix that, it was easier to just restore the DB from a backup then leave it switched off. Another thing I wanted was a visual score breakdown. There's code to track it all internally - it remembers which tiles scored what so I could in theory add it fairly easily. But time, y'know...
Yes, I'm in first place currently. I've been playing it a lot to get it started.
I think you made the right decision to get the game to play in a browser. Lots of folks (me included) don't play downloadable Jam games, both because there's a security risk, and because it's a lot more hassle. It takes longer, needs to be cleaned up when finsihed, and often doesn't work because there's a file missing or something.
Mindbending concept! I love a weird topology (I've made a level on a 3D mobius strip in one of my bigger games) so I had to play this. I wasn't disappointed.
I got past the first tricky level with the switch that changes the other switch's colour, but couldn't figure out how to approach the one after. Puzzle design is so very tricky to get right. Too easy, and your players get bored. Too difficult, and your players give up. Unfortunately that little goldilocks zone is different for each individual player!
One niggle I had with your game: I thought for a while that the grassy shoots were significant in some way. They're the same green as the green switches, and very promenent. There isn't really any other decoration that stands out, so given more time I think I'd knock them back a bit.
Still, great entry, polished and complete. Nice one!
I love the story here. A lot of Jam games don't really do "narrative". There's not enough time to add that onto an already very difficult task. Clearly you've cut a few corners with the polish/controls to focus on making a compelling story, and it has worked! I enjoyed my time with this more than most of the game I've played so far.
Congratulations on your fine entry.
I like the concept, especially since you can actually bump into your past selves and it affects them - you haven't just made a simple recording and played it back. I've built quite a few top-down racers myself for commercial clients, and I know how tricky they can be to get to feel good.
The controls for the car are actually my least favourite part of this game. Driving should be fun, a little bit of slip, skidmarks, wheelspin, understeer and oversteer... Your car has little of those attributes, and doesn't really feel like, well, a car!
The view is also far too close to be able to see what's coming. The arrows on the road help a little, but not enough. I failed to beat my first tentative slow lap, and almost gave up when I fell too far behind. As it happened my past-self got to the end of their replay and ended the game.
I know some of that sounds harsh, but it's important to remember this is what games jams are all about: Try something quickly, see if it works. Hopefully learn from your mistakes so you don't repeat them at a bigger scale! It's enough of a challenge just to get a playable game live in 4 days, congratulations on a working game (loads of teams don't get that far).
Creative! Reminds me of those old Grow games in Flash.
It was a little bit too small to make out all the details at first, then I found the right combination of fullscreen buttons to blow it up to the full size of my monitor. Really helped to appreciate all the intricate details.
I got through a lot of the levels by random luck. I didn't really feel like I was solving carefully crafted puzzles. More playing with a fun explorational toy. I don't think I got anywhere near the end mind.
Beautifully presented, both graphics and audio blend together to make a warm fuzzy vibe. Nice!
Interesting concept. Might be better as a VR game. You could see and manipulate it all more easily.
While I enjoyed it, I only played a few levels. I found it a little cumbersome to pull the wires out and turn the cube. It felt a little too slow paced for me. I looked at all of the levels, the later ones looked daunting!
It might benefit from a perspective camera too. Orthographic seems hard to see what goes where...
Still, love how complete it is. No lack of polish on most of it. A huge accomplishment for 4 short Jam days.
This is great fun. With a few glaring flaws...
Looks great, I haven't really seen anything that has that exact art style before. Loads of juice, good feeling of speed.
Music is waaay too short, and was annoying me after a few laps. I have no idea how you stood that for 4 days of dev!
The car goes just that little bit too fast for my tastes. I keep crashing a lot, but it's super satisfying when I managed to string a few curves together. I like the simplicity of a single button to control it. I don't know how you can possibly use the speed up thing without instantly crashing however.
You can turn the car right round in places, but since you can only turn left, you can't actually drive very far. I never actually got permanently stuck though.
Pretty amazing for 4 days! Congrats!
Love the super-clean art style. I like the controls, although they're 'reversed' to the way I learned isometric games back in the day (Head Over Heels, Batman 3D, Spindizzy - yep, I'm ancient). Once I got used to them, I rather enjoyed my time with this.
I found the instant teleporters and the double-jump tiles a little bit sub-par compared to the polish of the rest of it. Still amazing to get all that done in 4 days.
Not entirely sure the puzzle design works. I think I came up with some very unintended shortcuts. The puzzles were just the right difficulty however, and when I finished the game I was left wanting more. Much better to be that way round than the other! This is the first game I've finished in this jam.
Excellent creative idea. It wouldn't be out of place as a mechanic in Braid.
Graphics, sounds, music, levels, a nice menu... You've achieved a lot in a very short time! Congrats on a solid game.
Platforming controls are a little bit janky, and I'd love to see what things do what so I can plan my actions. Maybe a zoomed out view to begin with, and visible wires going between each switch. Oh, and a fast-forward or skip-to-next-loop key woulnd't go amiss if you return to this game in the future.
I love seeing a level skip in Jam games. Lets you experience all the content really easily. With 10,000 new games, nobody has time to play them all!
I like the idea, it's a kind of faster simpler (hence more immediate) Kerbal Space Program. It's quite tricky, but after a few utter failures I was able to get to a minute and a half before crashing. I had almost full fuel, but kinda fell into the sun... Damn those intersectional orbits!
It's very complete for a jam game. You've got smooth controls, graphics, sound effects, status UI, high score table... That's great time management right there.
I'd like to be able to tune the ship. Turn speed, thrust power vs fuel usage etc. Lots of potential here.
Interesting message behind this game, we need to manage Earth's water better.
Good game design and it's very complete. Not an easy task in a games jam. To get 4 minigames with graphics, sound and upgrades is pretty special. Nice one!
I found the minigames pretty hard, and also not much fun. But I'm a grumpy old man who's just finished a 4 day intensive games jam, and I'm playing with a trackball. Good for productivity, not so good for mouse games!
Interesting concept, but I found it a quite incomprehensible if I'm honest. I suspect there's a good game in there, but it has gotten a bit lost somewhere along the way. I could appreciate the hand-painted art, but that was let down by the standard Unity UI controls that also had a few bugs (I think - I'm not really sure I was able to see what everything should be doing).
Good effort still. Turning out any working project in 4 days is a huge challenge! Ask me how I know... My own entry was very incomplete.
Well, that makes a lot more sense now! I really enjoyed my second playthrough of that! Inventive level design. I think I've seen a similar mechanic to that somewhere before, but I can't remember where.
I found the speedy controls a little too fast for my aging reflexes, but I can't argue that it was fun and a full complete polished game. Congratulations!
Love the concept! Love the checkpoints. Love the way the scaling works. Fits the theme perfectly.
It's a little dizzying when the scale suddenly jumps up faster than normal, but I got used to it fairly easily. Could use a tiny bit of Coyote Time when falling off ledges, as it's not super clear where the hitbox for the bunny's sprite is. Also the music gets a bit repetetive, although it's totally appropriate for the cutsy style. But other than those minor niggles, it's great!
Thanks for the kind words. I'm surprised but really pleased you got your own things working. Did you manage to get a controllable rocket?
Agreed, there could be a mini-map, that would be a great improvement. But it's not even on the list of improvements ranked by importance to the game! In an ideal world, with unlimited time, maybe, just maybe that might be possible. But in the real world, in a tight 96 hours, that sort of luxury just wasn't doable. Thanks for the suggestion anyway.
That's fantastic! It's by far the easiest contraption to get to the top with, but by no means "easy"! Glad I put something up there now, even if it's a little sparse and not very rewarding...
I totally understand that building your own contraption would be very intimidating. I didn't get time to make instructions, and it's kinda the opposite of intuitive!
I love the presentation, music, graphics, sound, character movement. But I can't seem to get the gun to fire! I tried for about 5 minutes before giving up. If you can help, I'll take another look and give you some better feedback. As it stands, it's hard to rate (except for style, which is an easy 5 stars from me).
Thanks for playing! I know it's a little bit rough around the edges. Ok, quite a lot rough around the edges. Maybe 80 grit sandpaper.
You seem to understand what I was going for, which is a big credit to you. I wish I had time to add the sharing features, and lots of built in contraptions, and sounds and music and better, well, everything. But you know games jams...
Interesting game! Nice take on the theme, good mechanics. Music gets repetitive pretty fast as the loop is quite short. An option to turn that off would have been welcome!
The axe mechanic is also fairly novel, I haven't seen anything quite like it before. I like how you can only double jump when not carrying the axe, and that you can retrieve it from wherever it ends up quickly. I also like how flexible it is - you can throw it downwards from a jump to make a springboard. You can throw it diagonally up to kill enemies above you etc.
I didn't like going all the way back to the start when I died however, and I gave up after falling to the start area from a tricky tall platform above it. I was wondering if checkpoints would have helped, but I can tell you're trying to ape Getting Over It with it's non-failure failure modes! You just lose a load of progress. It mostly works in that game, but I'm not so sure about a games jam where nobody is as invested in getting to the top.
I'm probably too old to be able to play this well. I couldn't get used to the controls enough to react to the twitchy movement, although it is very well done. It's just not for me, but that doesn't harm my rating of it. Overall, great effort!
Nice! Interesting puzzles. I played to level 8 before running out of time, but the puzzles were pretty decent.
Main comments are that it's hard to tell what the blocks will do in your inventory before placing them. Also, once placed you can't move them other than to hit the undo button at the top. That's kinda the same thing, so why not just allow more flexible drags to edit blocks. You could click one of the expanded tiles to undo the grow and return the multiplier to your inventory.
Most annoying thing is failing near the end of a lengthy puzzle because of a misplaced block, then retry removes all your work. Now I've finished playing I wonder if I should have been pressing UNDO rather than RETRY, but it didn't occur to me while I was actually in the game.
Anyhow, very solid game. Well done!
Thanks for your honest and kind words. I'm very aware how hard the game is to get into, and I'd have loved to make that a bit easier. But you know games jams, you never get the time! The only nod to onboarding is that I insert a few example builds into your saves to start off, and I only added that in the final hour before I hit submit.
You might see that I submitted it several hours before the deadline, but in reality I was so exhausted I absolutely had to sleep. Anyway, I can make excuses all day, in the end it's the initial decision to go with this crazy big idea that's really to blame. That's entirely on me too, of course.