itch.io

Puffer Fish devs unite!
I played around a little, and was about to quit, until I realized I could go deeper. I proceeded to spend the next hour or so farming the abyss. It gets addicting to constantly improve the pufferfish. I am proud to say I got every single upgrade by the end, and went on to collect 80 scales more before letting myself get eaten. Aside from the collision with the red fish being finnicky, the game works well. The feeling of gradually becoming the king of the pond is addicting.

I couldn't start the game on the browser version as the continue button goes beyond the screen.

The game is very creative. I like the idea of gradually building a single structure instead of placing many structures as is the norm in tower defense games. 

The uniform size of the bricks as well as the little pre built tower in the beginning, guides the player into creating their own carefully crafted fort. However, the physics aren't fine tuned to allow for this. I tried quite long trying to stack the bricks, but one brick would eventually glitch out of place and bring the whole tower down. If the intention was to make the game more chaotic, I'd advise to make the shapes more irregular, so people can't try to neatly stack them together. Maybe instead of bricks, it can be misshapen rocks?

Neat concept. Reminds me of pokemon, how you weaken an enemy so that you can "capture" them. In this case with your mouth. Great job finishing the project on time, it definitely has room for growth going forward!

Beautiful art! Simple yet well executed concept. I love that we have a finite amount of size changing, that we can apply to both ourselves and the environment. 

I don't know if this was intentional, but I solved the last room by shrinking the bottom box, pushing it all the way to the right, and then riding it up. The water started to submerge the box completely, but it didn't kill the character.

Would love to see where the game goes past jam!

It goes without saying that the presentation is top notch. Love the look and sound of the game. The idea is very creative; having the ability to resize both the "character" as well as the environment is very fun.

I think most problems with the gameplay can be ironed out by giving the player more time to react. As there is barely any, we are forced to rely on trial and error or follow the prompts on screen. I fear the mechanics weren't given enough room to breathe. If you zoom out the camera, and place the dinosaur at the very back, you would give the player more room to venture forward and re-size the environment in preparation. This may also increase the challenge by creating more distance between the scientist and the dinosaurs.

Such elegant design! Both you and the enemies share the same ruleset, making the game very easy to digest. Love how the reduced size helps in making you a smaller target, but your enemies also benefit from getting shot as a result. I also really appreciate the economical approach to the visual design, while still conveying a charming theme. Great work!

Almost everything about this game is perfect to me: The theming, the presentation, overall feel and the concept. I think just a few tweaks would help to make the game feel less tedious. The upgrades are clearly meant to help, but they barely offset the increased distance needed to travel as the game progresses, especially with the resources getting harder and harder to find.

Congrats on finishing the game as best as you could! Fantastic presentation, and the game is completable. I almost gave up on the game at the first level, as the reset function didn't work and I hadn't figures out that you had limited shrinking power. The idea of scaling the camera with the slime works well to emphasize the change in scale, but being small and not being able to see the level is frustrating as you can't afford to change your size to check.

Superb presentation, captures the look and feel of Overcooked! perfectly. 
It is difficult to look through the ingredients under a time limit. If fleshed out, it'd be nice to have an Overcooked! style progression, where you learn which food satisfies which craving. I wasn't able to intuit a lot of the requirements, such as steak and lemons not satisfying the "lemon" symbol.

Very fun idea. I had trouble with the way the boxes slide around when you're trying to push them with precision. I think the concept would work better if things were built to more snugly fit in a tile system. The way the boxes can get pushed a tad too far and land in an unreachable place, or slide off of the buttons is a bit annoying.

Very funny concept. I broke out my drawing tablet for it, but couldn't consume the universe.

Copying from the itch.io page:
"Got the carrot!

Charming, simple yet so effective. The visual style is such a great choice for the jam, allowing you to create something fast yet with complete polish. The puzzles had the perfect quality of looking obvious at first, leading you to a dead end, and then giving you that "aha" moment. 

One thing I'd change is to say "stretch" the boxes instead of "pull" the boxes. I didn't realize you can compress the boxes down until the very last puzzle."

Got the carrot!

Charming, simple yet so effective. The visual style is such a great choice for the jam, allowing you to create something fast yet with complete polish. The puzzles had the perfect quality of looking obvious at first, leading you to a dead end, and then giving you that "aha" moment. 

One thing I'd change is to say "stretch" the boxes instead of "pull" the boxes. I didn't realize you can compress the boxes down until the very last puzzle.

Very fun! The art and music is very nice as well.

My record so far is 6.9 meters. I found the following strategy to work well:
 Since the farmer's approval rating increases with maximum height, rapidly growing vertically (and strengthening stems) while producing little to no fruit helps early on. When I reach 6 or so meters, with mostly leaves and little to no fruit to use up energy, I start branching out the very bottom of the plant to add tomatoes. Past this point, it's a game of trying to balance the plant as much as possible, adding fruit to to counter act the balance. When the plant swings from one side to the other, I'll try to add a branch just to go over the max height and gain more approval. With a strong stem, breaking the plant becomes pretty much a non-issue, but the weaker top can break off.

It's really fun! Spent a few more hours just now playing the game.

Top notch presentation, very creative design and fun to play. Although measuring the walls can be considered part of the challenge, I found it to be more confusing than it has to be. Having a glowing marker over the corresponding tiles to the one you are currently on, could help make the game easier to read without making it too easy. With a little bit more polish and more levels, this feels ready to ship!

What a lovely, well packaged experience. I think the relation to the theme is a little lacking. Would have been more fitting for the "breaking genre tropes" prompt. Without the "press space to jump" message (which isn't a "reversal" of roles, but rather playing with player expectations) the game is just a platformer with a cool movement mechanic. That said, it is a really fun and clever platformer that I enjoyed until the end.

As the purpose of the game is to stay above the rising water, having no straightforward way of climbing is a deal breaker. There is a grid system for picking where to put the elements, but otherwise the game relies on physics interactions for placing down the objects and interacting with them. Even when I randomly get the stairs I'm looking for, the character has a hard time climbing it. Relying less on physics, and putting more elements into a grid system could help make the game more playable. The block selection can be random, but the player must see what they are about to get. This way, the challenge would be about trying to form a proper set of platforms with the random blocks  received.

This is very neat! Piecing together a story based on the answers is more difficult than it may first appear, as hints from other branches effect each other in unexpected ways. Ultimately it is a bit of a niche experience. If set up as some sort of multiplayer game, akin to some of Jackbox's games, it could be a very fun social experience where one player writes a story based on predetermined branching choices, others play it and then you create the next chapter starting from where the players ended up on the branches... Neat proof of concept and very creative!

What a gem! Until a crash caused by two squids running into each other over a spike pit, I had no intention of stopping until the end. Messing around with the editor to slowly figure out the puzzle is very enjoyable. Brilliant!

This is amazing! I was legitimately hooked and had a hard time putting the game down. Growing (as) the plant and organically (no pun intended) increasing the enjoyment and the challenge with each added elements is very satisfying. I need to see how large I can make the plant! I found the controls and mechanics intuitive. You quickly understand the the role of the fruit, leaves etc. just from real world knowledge alone. The presentation is fittingly cozy and highly polished.

Great concept and the art is picked/implemented tastefully. The level design could have been built more deliberately, as it is too easy to just jump to the right and clear the level without really engaging with the main mechanic. The levels end up playing more like a traditional chase scenario and the real challenge ends up being about the low visibility instead of trying to guide the protagonist. With levels designed to force the protagonist into bad situations, we could get more out of the "guiding" mechanic. great proof of concept!

Top notch presentation! As this type of game relies so heavily on content (a lengthy/complex story to dive into, environmental puzzles, dialogue etc.) It'd be near impossible to create a satisfying experience within such a short time, so kudos on what was achieved so far. I found the time spent transitioning between rooms a bit too lengthy, and having to wait for the arrows to appear added to the frustration. I had to read the description to get the relation to the theme. Maybe more emphasis on the detective character would help, as without the context of the conventional hero, playing as the ghost feels less novel. 

Took me a bit to understand the game, but the concept is solid. I like the idea of turning a space shoot-em-up into a survival defense game. Giving the attackers free movement while forcing the player into a grid feels a bit unfair. With some tweaks, it can be made much more strategic.