itch.io

Finished with 3 seconds to go :) 

Thanks for asking in the Discord! Just for anyone else who stumbles onto this topic - yes, you're free to use any assets you have the rights to use, including shaders.

Please do include a list of asset packs in your credits, so I know which parts of the game you worked on to give you the credit you deserve too! 

Love it! I posted these in the #asset-share channel of the Discord if anyone wants to use them 🙂Thanks for sharing!

You can only win one prize per entrant.

So, if an entrant is rated third overall, they are no longer eligible to win a 'best category' award. Ex. If an entry is third place overall and also is rated as the best Metic cameo, then the best Metic cameo prize will go to second place in that category.

Entrants will receive the highest prize they are eligible for. 

Apologies for the late response! For faster response times, feel free to join the Discord. 🙂

Sorry for the late reply - didn't notice this as a child of another post. Yes, 2D games are perfectly fine. Text based games are fine too. There are no specific graphical requirements 🙂

Hi there! Thanks for joining the jam!

You're more than welcome to use screenshots from any of the YouTube videos to get some images of Metic if you'd like, or to put together your best effort of a 2D representation of Metic. 2D graphic / pixel art isn't my personal strong suit either, and I don't want anyone to feel like their abilities as a visual artist should prohibit them from making video games. "Aesthetic beauty" is intentionally NOT one of the judging categories, so even if you just go into Microsoft Paint and draw an orange triangle with a blue circle and a heart over it, that's perfectly valid for satisfying the requirement. 

So please don't be discouraged! This is a game jam, and there's no need to be a perfectionist here. The spirit of the jam is to make a game and have fun doing it 🙂

All that being said, feel free to post screenshots of your Metic and ask for feedback in the Discord if character art is something you want to practice. If it isn't, then focus your game dev time on something else - there's no wrong answers! 

You don't need to be 18 to enter the jam! Anyone is welcome to enter the game jam and submit any project they wish. (Excepting for the family friendly part - I'd appreciate if all submissions followed that requirement.)

However, in order to be eligible to win a prize, you do need to be 18 years or older.  If you would like to submit a game and excuse yourself from compensation for any reason (such as being under 18), please state "I excuse myself from compensation" anywhere on your game's itch.io page.  Please don't try and cheat the rules. No good things come from cheating. 🙂

As for why that is, there are many legal / tax / ethical / social reasons why I don't think it's a good idea to encourage financial competition between minors and adults. If you're under 18 and want to make video games - that's awesome! I'm more than happy to help you on your game dev journey, feel free to join in the fun of the jam! I just can't pay for you it yet. 

Metic is the mascot character for Meticulous, a game from Imaginary Game Studios and the sponsor of the jam. (A.k.a. me 🙂)

This is Metic! He needs to make some kind of appearance in your game jam game. Maybe he's your character, maybe he gives you a quest, or maybe he just stares at you longingly from outside of the level. It's up to you! 

In order to be eligible for a prize, you need to have Metic in your game in some way. But, games with creative and fun uses of Metic will be rated highly in the Metic Cameo scoring.

I will be providing my model for Metic as a part of the asset pack that will be made available in the Imaginary Game Studios Discord server. However, you do not need to use my model if you don't want to - you can create your own representation of Metic however you like.  If you're not artistically inclined, an orange triangle with a blue circle and a heart over it can be Metic.

I see you were able to join the server! For anyone else who needs the link, here it is:

https://discord.gg/YyDD7ECtdJ

Really fun design! Great job building such a big level in such a short time. I couldn't figure out how to get gold, and it didn't seem like the bazooka worked for me. The cup helmets on the rock soldiers were very cute. 

That Oops... though. 🤣

Really nice job! A little bit more robust ground detection or larger platforms would have gone a long way, and it seemed like maybe something funky was going on with my character rotation when I tried to flick back to hit the calculators behind me? Great use of the provided assets to design interesting levels!

This is a really fun concept! Having to trade your currency of lives to create platforms to make the game easier and solve puzzles is a really neat idea. Good job with making different levels to show off how that can be used in different ways!

A full on cutscene and boss fight?? This is great! I love the idea of chair people really just wanting to be sat on, and it's a neat idea to have falling down to the next level be the way of determining where you start. I also kind of love the way you bounce from coin to coin.

Neat little game! It gets chaotic quickly with how the asteroids fracture. I would have appreciated increasing bullet penetration as your charge meter goes up, but otherwise it's a fun mechanic to have to survive for 10 seconds to be able to take out the big baddies. Thanks for making it playable in browser 😄

This is really great! Awesome work with making a flight controller, and really great use of the theme. Very nice work putting together such a pretty UI in addition to making a fun game. My only complaint is that the progression feels pretty demanding - I thought maybe increasing my level or going through enough loops would give me a combo or something to help me get more coins / kills, but otherwise getting hundreds of kills and coins seems like it would take a really long time. Other than that, I really like this one! 🔥

Very nice! You did a great job getting a lot of mileage out of your assets and your mechanics. My only tiny minor complaint is that moving felt a bit sticky (it would have been nice to be able to hold the key down instead of having to time it / spam it). I really like your use of the theme, and the length and complexity of each level felt perfect for the time limit. Very cute to look at, too.🔥

As a fellow developer of the only other ninja game submitted for the jam, I came here to pay my respects. I really like the movement system, but I wish the meeple's deceleration increased as its speed decreased. Otherwise, having to ricochet yourself around corners and time backstabs on enemy characters is a neat little mechanic. Though, I have to admit, I didn't feel too much like a ninja by slamming my face into walls repeatedly. Lol.

Wow, this is incredible, I really, really love the concept behind this. I can absolutely see this becoming its own genre. Obviously, there's a bit of tuning that needs to be done with how the abilities explode the screen perpetually, but I can't say it wasn't a lot of fun to watch the whole world explode for 10 minutes. I would have appreciated a little bit more info about the new spells being generated, or maybe a little bit slower of a progression curve. If there was a big pile of XP crystals on the ground, it was very easy to gain a few levels in a second and not get to experience the full generational AI concept by testing out all of your different abilities at each step. Really great work! The effects, though excessive, look awesome. Also, great job with the music.

This is far and away the strangest game I've played for this game jam. I am going to remember pieces of it a year from now and have no choice but to think it was all a part of some crazy fever dream. I have no idea what could have possibly inspired this creation, like using the water pressure from a clogged toilet to explode the boundaries of your prison cell or carving a key out of a gigantic cookie, but one thing is certain. I will never stop looking for the end. 

P.S. Your main character looks like Family Guy pasted on top of bodybuilder Ryan Reynolds in Free Guy.

It seems like maybe I'm not alone in getting stuck on the laptop. I appreciate the Kung Fury reference, though 😁

Really love Dillard, he's the best video game fly I've ever seen. It's a neat concept to have to guide your partner around without accidentally squishing them, but it did end up getting a bit tedious at times. Unfortunately, I was not able to beat the level with the wasps, because of how beeg they were, and Dillard's apparent inability to navigate the smol tunnels in the center. I wasn't sure if there was something I could do with the shield-looking object in the center, but even if I was able to make it through the tunnels, I couldn't deduce a way to lure the wasp guarding the lever to go somewhere else. Good job with the music and the art!

Love the dialogue, love the concept, love the name! It was a little bit painful from time to time when Steve would get stuck running in the opposite direction for a while, and I would get halted to a standstill for periods of time. The menu implies that there is music, but I couldn't hear any (SFX worked just fine). But on the whole, very cute little game. Good work putting together those kinds of levels in such a short time! 

This is a fascinating sort of submission, certainly not the kind of thing I would expect to see for a 3 day game jam. It's really impressive, and I love the concept. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to fully figure out how to work everything, but the reason for that is less about learning JavaScript, and more about the lack of tutorialization. I would have loved to see a clearer breakdown of your objectives than immediately going from level 1 "you're programming an AI to farm better" to level 100 "here's a more efficient starting program of some 300 lines of code". 

Knowing what it means for your robot to get better at farming, what the different tiles are about, how the tools work, and what are some examples of small changes you can make to the starter code all would have been great, and I think there's a way to communicate that kind of tutorial outside of a wiki page in the description.

Very nice work, and I would like to see the YouTube shorts version of what it looks like to be really good at this game.

Okay. The fact that the player character is controlled with WASD, using your left hand, and occupies the right side of the screen, while the AI character is controlled with the mouse, using your right hand, and occupies the left side of the screen takes the difficulty of this game up to 11. It's like the first time you tried rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time as a child. The simple switch of the AI doing combat and the player collecting coins would have made this much, much easier to get into. I don't hate the idea of forcing you to learn weird, difficult controls, but it felt out of place for an otherwise pretty straightforward little shmup kind of game.

Overall, really good work, but dang, this messed with my brain more than I expected it to. Lol.

Really great work with the  art and the music! Unfortunately, I think I beat the game by summoning my bird friend and not moving. I didn't really understand the objective or what I was trying to accomplish, but I think the intention is for enemies to only move when you move, and you can't kill enemies; you have to rely on your bird friend to do that for you. It's a neat concept, but otherwise requires some third system to incentivize the player to run around.

Nitpicks:

• Controllll to sprinttttT????? Y no shift?
• More obvious button highlights for the menu would be nice

I like the concept here, and you've got a cute little character with a robot on their head that I really like. I couldn't quite figure out how to work this one, unfortunately. I have the sneaking suspicion that some of the UI was getting cut-off, but I can't say for sure. It would have been good to know how much health I had left, how much time / how many enemies I needed to kill to progress, and what the different upgrade chips represented. In the second wave, my robot friend decided to stop using his attack, and I couldn't quite understand why.

I like the concept here, and you've got a cute little character with a robot on their head that I really like. I couldn't quite figure out how to work this one, unfortunately. I have the sneaking suspicion that some of the UI was getting cut-off, but I can't say for sure. It would have been good to know how much health I had left, how much time / how many enemies I needed to kill to progress, and what the different upgrade chips represented. In the second wave, my robot friend decided to stop using his attack, and I couldn't quite understand why.

Really nice work! There's a lot of mechanics going on in here, from navigation, to inventory, to crafting, to survival mechanics, to combat, to AI. Great job building all of that out for such a short game jam. The art style is easy on the eyes, and the audio works well. The difficulty curve is rough, and forcing the player to start over on death is a bit much for a game jam game where you have to spend the first half of the game running around and picking stuff up. The main difficulty of the game comes from needing to run two instances of it side by side, one for playing, and one for referencing the tutorial to know how to use everything.

Nitpicks:

• Environmental hitboxes are had to read
• I expected the bed to heal me, not equip me with a laser gun

Really like this entry, it's a lot of fun! I would be super curious to see what someone who doesn't have any programming experience would do with a game like this. I can imagine it would be a very different kind of experience for them. I really like the art style, it reminds me of Spoopy's House of Jumpscares, and the music kicking up a beat when the robot is in motion is a chef's kiss kind of touch. There's a couple things that hold this back from a perfect score in my book, mainly the difficulty of understand the distinction between check in front and check below, and what properties each of the different tiles accounts for (e.g. is tiled floor metal? can a crate be a wall?). Also, the break statement is broken. lol. All in all, really great entry! Good work!

Nitpicks:

• Semi-Automatic Shipping Company is not a funny acronym 
• In the second level, I might put the glass window in the first couple of rooms so that if and when someone gets their algorithm wrong, they can see why it went wrong; by the time they've made it to the next few rooms, they've already figured out what to do

Like my rating suggests, I really like every little bit of this game. Cute little story, pretty Newgrounds-esque little characters, fun mechanic, and well-paced. The game is just challenging enough and it doesn't overstay its welcome. Very fun! 

Nitpicks

• For dummies who are bad at reading tutorials like me, it can be good if the tutorial requires you to do the lesson to progress (putting a pit or laser where you have to control the robot to get past, etc.)
• I would have loved if a couple more things were visible in the darkness, like the enemy pings or projectiles, or maybe just expanding the radius of the robot's light source in combat.

I really like this concept! It's actually quite challenging, more than you would expect just to look at it. You've done a great job with the visuals and the sound, and it's a really creative core mechanic. I would have liked to see a bit more exploration of the mechanic in the level design; I never quite felt like I got a good feeling rhythm down, but I can imagine that a level perfectly timed to automatic jumps and dashes would feel pretty incredible. Good work!

Nitpicks:

• This would have made for a really great rage game if you were so inclined....
• I wish that the robot acknowledged when I pushed The End over the edge 😆

This one caught me by surprise. The audio was harsh, and I ended up having to take my headphones off. The visuals are a bit simplistic, but they are easy to understand and do a good job of conveying the action. I was taken off-guard at how quickly it transformed from a resource management type strategy game into an idle clicker type game, but I didn't mind that one bit once I got a feel for the pace. It could use a bit of work on the balancing end, but it's a really fun concept, and I easily could have spent more time playing it with a smoother challenge curve.

Nitpicks:

• Filtering out the top-end frequencies of the SFX (like, everything over 10k Hz) would have made this much easier on the ears
• There's gotta be some kind of free Europa imagery courtesy of NASA or some space telescope you can throw in here to fit the narrative, maybe?

Wow, this one is a ton of fun! It's so close to being insanely addicting, with a couple of key things holding it back for me. The AI placing good tiles in bad places / placing bad tiles in good places happens just a bit too frequently to the point where winning feels a tad bit overly random. It would be great if either the AI were a bit smarter, or you could make limited suggestions to him, or if you had more control / visibility into the deck of tiles to know which ones you were going to get to place vs. which ones he would get to place (e.g. if you play the grass / lawn route, you can set up a perfect cross for a lawn, and then Albert decides to stick your last lawn tile in a corner. Sad times. 

Also, really love that you can customize your playstyle with the different deck choices, but I wish that you were incentivized to mix and match between the different tile categories rather than being required to stick with the same type every time.

Nitpicks:

• I wish you could highlight the tile on the field to see its description
• I wish you could see what the next tile to be placed by A.I. was

(This might sound like a negative review, but this is really great, one of the best I've played for the jam so far - really great work!)

Thank you for checking the game out, glad you enjoyed it! Much appreciated!

Thank you for playing! Glad you enjoyed it! 🔥

Thank you! Sorry to hear about the mouse sensitivity; I've got an updated version of the game that allows you to select your mouse sensitivity in the menu, but I won't be able to upload it until after the review period of the game jam. If you're interested, come back in a few days and give it a try! Otherwise, thank you very much for playing!