itch.io

yea, i really agree with the pain points here. so uhh i did NOT code the game perfectly. as you correctly assumed, gravity is kinda screwed up: each planet has a predefined "gravity radius" that flips the player's gravity when they get into the collision box. the problem is that the radius in which you reverse gravity is unfortunately arbitrary so it can feel more or less lenient than expected sometimes. i VERY agree that a light ring around gravfields would have been an excellent visual hint (and I was considering as much, but for some reason didn't get to it). not only that, but a visual indicator as to which was moves you left-right with an arrow (sometimes left is right and right is left: even I never really got it 100%)

preserving the player's velocity vector would have been difficult on gravity flipping: the vector used for preserving speed is different from the ACTUAL vector that gets used for doing movement calculations due to the way I had to kinda work around Godot's pre-existing cartesian calculations. therefore, i did the thing that gave me the least amount of headache and just zeroed each velocity vector on flip.

regarding the super speed level: ceiling bonks are the real reason why its a bit screwed up. you transmit a lot of vertical momentum downwards when you bonk into the ceiling (-0.7x your current vertical velocity, shoulda been more like -0.5x or lower). so, actually NOT holding jump and simply mashing up 2x to jump through those inner pits allows you to not bonk your head as hard (because you have less vertical momentum).

finally: you absolutely do NOT have a skill issue (nor does anyone else whose played it). the game is very much a masocore rage game. i should have been more clear that "yes, this game is very hard and you will die a lot".

i plan to make at least one more update to this game after the jam's done, so your feedback is VERY helpful! thank you so much for checking the game out : D

this is really neat. really excellent thumbnail that grabbed my attention.

i think the forgotten, claustrophobic, uncomfortable, and polluted nature of Kowloon Walled (?) City is conveyed well (and, i assume the title is in reference to it given the "forgotten city" line?). aesthetically, really interesting, really vibed with the art.

just wish there was more of a narrative, and more gameplay use of the theme.

very glad it clicked!

I very much believe games have "souls": not literally, but oftentimes they are the ones who tell you what they should be. a reason why this game really turned out the way it did is because of the harsher aesthetic elements that I experimented with, and I found that the game wanted to be like that. so, i went all-in for better or worse.

ill prob talk about this in the post-mortem, but a big goal of mine was to make a game that placed / appealed to a larger audience. this jam skews casual and lighthearted and I knew that. i very much made a "sickos game", but even though I did the exact opposite of what I planned, im very happy with the result nonetheless.

truthfully, im not someone who really excels at curbing my design impulses to make more accessible experiences. For better or worse, i make what I would like. not that im incapable of making a difficulty curve or anything, or balancing levels, but i feel just a liiiiiitle bit of cruelty (or a lot) makes for a memorable experience. most of all, I really view the more dissonant and off-putting elements of my design tendencies as part of my artistic expression.

so, tl;dr hearing it clicked for you really made my day : )

as asked for in the discord, i'll give feedback as unfiltered, blunt, and honest as possible.
i think this game is technically quite competent. the presentation feels like a mobile game in a lot of ways. the sound design is also pretty good and appropriate for a puzzle game like this.

the main issue with this game (and why I think it falls short of being a great "infinite loop" game) is that the solutions always feel either too linear or are too overwhelming and lead to a linear result. the game literally tells you when you found a solution via the check box at the bottom right of the screen. oftentimes, it doesn't feel like I got to a solution on merit of really thinking about it, and more that i clicked a few hexagons a couple of time until the game told me "you did it, you found the loop".

the later levels are nearly impossible to comprehend as well, and it feels frustrating when the solution is a small loop that's like 1% of the map.

while i find the aesthetics of the game to be serviceable, I think that from a "i saw this game on the grid for 0.5 seconds" angle, it looks kinda generic. I've played a lot of these types of games. you REALLY have to convince me there's something special for me to play it. this didn't exceed my expectations, it just kinda met it. this was exactly the type of game I was expecting form the thumbnail (for better or worse).

i think other infinite loop games stood out to me much more. if you want an example, I would check out "Infinite Energy" by LightPotato. the premise of that game stuck out to me immediately, I thought the puzzle solutions were very clever, and there were a good set of mechanics added in as the game progressed and got harder. i really don't think this game is a bad effort at all, but I think i understood why it whiffed for me. your other games on your profile look REALLY awesome, creative, and appealing to me (Blooming Together, One Seed, etc) so I think maybe this just missed in terms of my own taste.

can confirm, this was my 14th jam and i've had a blast finding games I really clicked with. people on here are pretty awesome and I'd highly encourage checking out some of the other big / long-running jam series (Mini Jam, Major Jam, Brackeys, etc).

this was really awesome but have you considered a full-stack cosmetic item server with lootboxes and battle passes? my main issue with the game was not being able to insert $5 into it every 3 seconds while Gandalf tells me I can buy more wacky gems with my credit card to get a cool hat.

yea this game looks really good. i am VERY impressed with the cohesiveness of the visual presentation. the low-res 3D aesthetic works very well here. ship controls feel very tight: really does handle like a dream.

very sad there is no sound. it REALLY detracts from the immersiveness of the game to not have any.

the upgrades feel a bit unbalanced too. as a game with a big timer in the bottom-left, why would I pick anything else but speed considering the enemies seem like not a big deal for 90% of the time?

felt there could be more stakes in dying as well. i was surprised to see that dying just takes you to the start of the section you were in instead of restarting the game.

the concept and strengthening/weakening mechanics are pretty brilliant. i think the premise of this game won me over very well, and I feel the theme of the jam reflected excellently here.

like always with shmups, I have very specific pain points that I feel could have made for a better experience.

ive played a lot of bullet hell games (DDP, Garegga, Ketsui, etc.) and i feel what you're expected to do simply isn't possible at first when I strongly believe it should be "doable, but pretty much impossibly tough".

this game should really have a much smaller hitbox and faster speed. bullets are also very fast and barely leave you any gaps which makes me feel that the intended solution is to shield / facetank your way through a lot of the patterns instead of dodge them.

the player's fire rate is very piddly and weak, and the upgrades felt lopsided in practice. I wanted to select the upgrades with "make me faster and fire more bullets, make the boss not fire the spread that kills me instantly" much more over "increase the time in which the horizontal lasers take a coffee break for 0.1% longer"

you can't bullet seal chronoculus's spreads which is a bit unfortunate. getting point-blanked by the boss with no time to react is frustrating.

this would be REALLY cool, but I strongly suspect the assets are scaled-down AI-generated pictures. i found this attempt to pass off work that wasn't your own to be rather insulting and against the spirit of the jam.

it is a masocore platforming game for sickos in the same-ish category as yours -- def check it out!!! im glad i could find your game bc it really impressed me ^_^

would def not have minded an old fashioned to celebrate after my jam game instead of a coors light lmao

i won my first solitaire game but i couldn't continue for some reason after that : ( idk what happened, i clicked everywhere I could.

regarding the theme: yeah, I wish the card game being played had more of a "loop" thing going on with it. a variation on solitaire's fine, but i feel there could have been room to do something more tailored to the jam's theme. it was easy to figure out what was going on, but i def can see if some players are less familiar that they'd be more confused without a tutorial or something around those lines.

SHEESH

i think that this was the closest game to that "Flywrench-type rage game" vibe I was going for myself in my own jam game. i think you did an excellent job of saying "hey, this is a crushingly difficult game, it's going to be hard" which I wish I conveyed on my jam game a bit better.

the main mechanic was really, really well-done and the difficulty curve eased in perfectly as well. its amazingly easy to screw yourself over by making one misclick, and the fact that it was so punishing works in this game's favor really well.

normally, i'd feel that a jam game like this would need more mechanics to keep player attention, but the level design was so tight that it felt like the perfect amount of complexity for this game. probably the best-designed set of levels I played in a stage-based jam game for this jam. some levels (the four spike "platforms") made my mouth drop but turned out to be easier than expected. Others, like the final level, were like "okay, how hard can this possibly be?" and then managed to beat me to a pulp. It felt good being caught off-guard a bit by how devious the game could be : )

overall, love this game. really well executed with tight level design. a great accomplishment and a stellar entry imo

onion delivery type game lmao

out of the arcade-type games I played for this jam so far, this one's my favorite. the theming and art is all great, there's a very useful minimap (thank god), and the soundscape works well. the random events (rain, construction, vips) all add to the gameplay and keep things interesting. the difficulty curve feels like it ramps really naturally, and fast enough to hold my attention very well.

getting to choose your control scheme is very player-friendly: i felt comfortable using the mouse the most, but I can def see other players preferring keyboard input.

the letter of termination is very funny too. laughed pretty hard when I got fired lol 

the player character's animation is quite impressive, but the rest of the game is a bit rough.

combat feels strange: it felt like sometimes I could attack and sometimes I couldn't. same with the double jump. the player's state feels weird and unpredictable as a result.

some less "gamey" sounds for jumping etc. would feel like they fit the game's aesthetic a bit better.

very nice instructions sheet on the game page.

your field of view is limited: having an indicator of the closest enemy is nice, but a little minimap like Sinistar or something would have been nice to be able to react a bit better.

wasn't 100% sure what to expect but I was impressed how good the combat felt. very reminiscent of Crossed Swords, Punch-Out, and those sorts of games in a very good way. the FMV virtual hydelide-type aesthetic was charming and worked with the game well. attacks felt telegraphed enough to where I could react. overall the mechanics felt very competent, and the only pain point is that I didnt realize you had a limited amount of blocks.

lmao @ the ending, very relatable.

"you'll NEVER take me alive math nerds!!! NEVER!!!!" I say as I get taken kicking and screaming into the topology dimension

the presentation is stellar, but in particular, the character design was especially charming. i really like the dialogue between all them as the knots were explained.

I found this to be fairly incomprehensible. This absolutely needed a tutorial (or at the very least, each info bullet point on its own screen with visuals).

Game terminology is fairly inconsistent and not self-explanatory: the Peacock card states "Gain 1 wind NRG if your opponent controls more cards than you" even though the wind NRG is called "air NRG" by the basic land (?) card. Also of note is "controls more cards than you": is this cards in hand? a card in the loop? in Magic at least, controlling a permanent is pretty well-defined, so the vagueness really hurt my comprehension of the game rules and deckbuilding.

Even when I said "screw it" and built a garbo deck of my own, I really had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, let alone the right ratio of lands to creatures (if a distinction like that is even important). Preset decks would have been really nice to have to learn by example.

One of the most unique games I played for this jam. I think this is the first game I've played where an entire song was written and sung for it. Really feels like something special and would love to see lyrics somewhere for the in-game track. Going from whistling to vocals on later stages is an incredible touch. The rest of the audio design is top-notch too -- it feels very immersive with all the woodland ambience and sounds.

The main frustration I had was the repeating levels and the repetitive gameplay. I simply assumed when I saw a level layout repeat and read "How many times must you die until you realize?" that the game was just going to loop repeatedly. I could understand the narrative purpose dying serves as part of the self-sacrifice theme of the game, but this doesn't make it any less exhausting to have to die 10+ times to get to the flower on each level.

I even played through the game a 2nd time to better understand the story and to see if there was anything after where I stopped. Imagine my shock when I had to play the same level not once, not twice, but three times (!!!). I do understand from other comments there is supposed to be an ending, and it makes me sad I couldn't get to it.

In terms of writing, I wish more was unsaid than said. There's a lot of context in the jam page and game page that I wish was more hinted at through gameplay and visual elements than outright stated. For how interestingly the game obliquely hints at its worldbuilding and themes through the in-game writing and mechanics, being straight up told "You play as an immortal who sacrifices themselves again and again to feed a flower, hoping to reclaim lost time" kinda feels like it gives up part of the plot too easily.

short but sweet! a little bit rough when I do a bad job at remembering the layout of a level and then am fumbling in the dark -- maybe dying should have shown you the level again (then you "forget" the level and have to prove you remembered it).

Really good looking Vampire Survivors-like game. Love the spritework.

I agree the clone idea feels a bit underbaked -- I felt like I didn't know how to really get good use out of the clone and more or less felt like it was just kinda there.

The ability to fullscreen the browser game would have been great too.

Agree that the premise is confusing enough to warrant a small in-game tutorial. It was hard to get that the enemies change color.

Love the art and vibe so much... im a sucker for this kind of redwall-esque setting and I totally got sucked into this one.

All the art in this game must have taken so long to draw. Out of the (many!) frames of animation, this may have been my favorite:

I won't spoil the solution, but once I got what to do, I was able to get the knowledge to fix the time loop. I will say, it's very stressful to try to read crucial info on a time loop, so I missed an obvious nudge for a while and was like "why can't I reach the door after looping back around?" (spoiler: NOT what you're supposed to do)

The use of a clock hand as a sword is such a nice visual touch. Speaking of the sword, combat was surprisingly satisfying. I think the only thing missing was a bit more juice (effects for enemies dying, maybe a frame for taking damage + some knockback, etc.)

Overall wonderful submission. Loved this one.

This game has an INCREDIBLE vibe to it. Heck yea a RTA speedrunning platformer where you play as a donut!

One big problem though -- the music (a cover of the Wii Shop music and a sped-up version of a yume 2kki track) is probably copyrighted material. I don't think you have the rights to use any of these tracks.

The sound design is a bit grating. The hook mechanic is interesting, but the level design didn't feel as tight as I would have hoped. Felt like there was a lot of "dead space".

The subversion is really clever. A puzzle game where the joke is "lmao time loop puzzlers are going to be overdone, aren't they" is pretty funny lmao

The genre (puzzle, mystery) is very much a breath of fresh air. After playing quite a few platformers and puzzle games, this felt really novel and unique. really amazing premise

I have some mixed feelings about the puzzles. I feel the winning solution is pretty creative. However, I feel like the game's biggest flaw is it often tells you what to do constantly which, to me, is very frustrating for a puzzle game (click on this! go here! don't forget to open this app! etc.)  Giving the player some breathing room to figure out the mechanics and solutions for themselves would have been appreciated.

i regret taking out the in-game double-jump instruction at the last minute to make the first planet a bit less visually cluttered. thanks for playing! the game is indeed quite hard

Pretty interesting mechanically. Very reminiscent of Motherlode (as another commentator said).

I like the gameplay loop, but it does feel very bad in the early game to get bottlenecked by hitting storage capacity from useless dirt.  The balance feels like it could have been tipped towards giving less moves, but more storage capacity at the start of the game.

Making moves also feels VERY slow which contributes to the early game feeling like a slog. Wish the game let you make moves a lot faster.

I was slightly disappointed to see how much of the signposts were information that I could have otherwise figured out from gameplay, like a sign that says "this is a box that gives you ore!" next to a box that gives you ore. A bit more "show, don't tell" would have gone a long way, I feel.

a visual indicator that an enemy is about to spawn off-screen would have been helpful!

i absolutely ADORE this entry omg. one of the most charming jam (heh) games I've played in a while.

at first i was panicking a bit bc i thought "oh no there HAS to be a timer in the background!!!" for requests but I was very, very relieved that you could take all the time you want to fiddle with your instruments and pedals. figuring out how the lo/hipass filters worked was a huge "a-ha!" moment.

my only feedback is I wish there was a shortcut to play the game, and I felt info dialogue boxes were too easy to accidentally skip. really small stuff. you all absolutely hit it out of the park, i loved this game

The character design was pretty cool for this one!

That being said, there were a lot of pain points for this game for me:

• Melee attack felt weak and unsatisfying to use... a bit more range and animation would have gone a long way
  • More hitsounds would have been great as well (some metal scraping or 'plinks' for damaging the boss?)
• It was very hard to tell what's an attack animation or not for the boss
  • Hurtboxes didn't feel telegraphed enough, and there weren't enough hit effects (sounds, animations, knockback, crumple stun, etc) to tell that I got clipped by an attack
• The boomerang is incredibly overpowered and pretty much trivialized the game for me: all I had to do was circlestrafe the boss and chip it out until it died
• The controls in the pause menu told me I could dash and throw boomerangs when I didn't have the upgrades, and I was very confused that I couldn't do either of those things

Very cute drawing at the end!

Premise, mechanic, and concept are all solid. My biggest points of feedback were:

A.) I didn't know there was an airdash until I read the description (oops). I do appreciate the dialogue nudge you get if you fail that jump too many times though, that was well-done.

B.) Wish there were more unique mechanics! The door switch, sun zones, and spikes felt a bit generic as a totality of mechanics.

C.) A few more frames of animation for actions like falling, jumping, and dashing would have gone a long way I feel.

D.) Being able to skip the intro would have been great (I played it in web and then switched to the windows executable).

Shame the card mechanics are a bit underbaked as-is, but there's a cool vibe to it!

Creative premise!

style on this game is really awesome. lotta juice!!! the animations are hilarious and the game overall feels great.

i do agree with other commentators that it does get a bit repetitive, and I'd imagine ideal high-score play encourages you to play kinda lame. overall though, this is an incredible entry

shame there wasn't more content! love a good pico-8

lol

Overall, the style and polish on this feels very, very professional. Excellent job! The boomerangs feel very satisfying to throw, and everything from UI design to hit effects to that sick-as-hell death animation are all really awesome. Feels very much like a game I could play on the app store etc.

The "loop" mechanic of playing through the stage layouts over again is well-done. I will say that I feel the game feels a bit slow for my tastes -- the boomerang charge feels like it takes forever, and you're forced to use it to kill the shield enemies (which I was frustrated that I couldn't hit from behind... felt very counterintuitive). 

I really didn't like having to CTRL-ALT-DELETE to close the game due to it being in fullscreen exclusive mode on Windows (unless there was a button I didn't mash that closes it).

The premise is interesting, but I agree with others that I'm not entirely sure why you wouldn't just pick your strongest piece repeatedly. It would be nice to skip the wait time for piece selection as well.

Also, not sure how this relates to the theme entirely.

The poster in the first room appears to be AI generated?