itch.io

I didn't have time for an ending, but that's the end 😅

Damn this is incredible for just 9 hours

I think I hit the maximum limit for enemy scaling but my upgrades ended up being able to overwhelm them around the 4-5 minute mark. It was a super fun game and surprisingly addicting for how simple it is! I feel like scale could have been integrated into the concept better, because it isn't uncommon for games alraedy to present with bigger and badder enemies over time. The enemies did get bigger but it felt like it didn't change much about the gameplay other than them being harder to defeat and avoid, so scale as a mechanic wasn't too nuanced (edit: forgot that the enemies scale down as you shoot them, my bad. I think it presents a little bit more strategy because I actually ended up shooting them to make them smaller and easier to evade).

I know it wasn't intended to be played like this but I had to split my brain into two to control both robots simultaneously and it was extremely challenging but also extremely fun. I probably can't speak for everybody because I played through by myself but I feel like the timer is a tad bit too short. Maybe 15-20 seconds would be better especiall for the levels where some crates are placed out of the way. Anyways it was pretty fun and actually a creative idea that I haven't seen yet in the jam.

I would recommend updating the description of the submission page if you can with a short description of the control scheme because I had to figure it out on my own and it was especially hard to figure out that s and the down arrow pick up the box. I pressed it accidentally on numerous occasions and thought the boxes were glitching out and disappearing and reappearing randomly!

This is a very cool take on scaling object puzzle games! I like the amount of control you have with the blocks being able to both reposition and scale them freely. The artstyle was also simple but really clean, and I think is nice how the simplicity and greyboxing fits in with the theme of being in debug mode. One thing that really confused me was the grey blocks that the character passes through but the boxes collide with. It was cool as a puzzle mechanic but it was really confusing to me because of the two different "physics" of the player and the boxes. Even when I understood it I kept confusing it. Maybe there is some better way to communicate the behavior visually but it seems tricky so it's understandable. Otherwise the game was fun!

Interesting game. I was able to beat it at day 10 with 89 people! I think it had a really interesting vibe and the gameplay was pretty fun when I got the hang of it. It's pretty fun to strategize how to get the people of the same group together without blocking the others. The main thing that I would say it needs is some polishing.

For example the tutorial slide at the beginning only used pictures and not text, which is kind of a double edged sword in terms of communicating stuff. I ended up confused and not clearly understanding the mechanics until I jumped in the game and got context by placing a couple rooms, but from there I was ok and understood how it worked. Additionally in the bunker scene it's hard to tell at first what the boundaries are (only 3 rooms wide but it looks like more could be fit) because the same dirt texture is used, which again confused me until I placed a couple of rooms. The queue cam was probably the most important thing to have and I was glad to see it was there because it was super helpful!

I loved the puzzle design in this game! I think it made good use of the ability to scale objects, especially with details such as only being able to throw the cube when it is shrunken and not fully sized and heavy. Some of the levels were a bit hard to read because of the greyboxing but that's understandable. I thought the lighting was really good though and the little dithered background shader was also a good touch.

Thank you!

Sorry.... I ate the cheese.... and the black hole...

Thank you for the kind words! This game alone is actually such a huge achievement for me. If you don't mind me talking about myself a bit pridefully (I'm just really excited about this success). Rather than making a game with the goal of learning like usual, I wanted to use this jam as a chance to prove the skills that I already know and I ended up exceeding my expectations by a landslide. This is not only my best game in terms of quality by far, but it also had the shortest development time of 36 hours within the span of 3 days (not counting ideation on first day), which is so good that it doesn't even make sense. I didn't even know I had it in me to work so hard on a game so skillfully, but everything came together almost perfectly. Additionally I made a good change of plans for when I realized I wouldn't have time for gameplay content (at the beginning of day 3 I didn't even have enemies or turret code), and I ended up pulling everything together so it could at least be an enjoyable experience without the tower defense strategy.

And to top it all of I'm getting so much positive feedback from people who say that they really like the idea and would like to see it expanded upon! I'm incredibly proud of myself and would never have thought I could make something that catches people's eyes anytime soon. I'll definitely be expanding on the game, but it might come slow since I've got college starting soon. I'm worried about what direction I'll take it in terms of gameplay and balancing, but I'm sure I'll figure something out.

SO TRUE!!!!

Thank you so much! I'm glad to know that you see potential the game!

I actually wasn't sure if my idea of having a tower defense with a growing tower was unique or not. Could you tell me what other games also explore this concept?

Yeah my initial plan was to have different tower types and upgrades, and much more enemy types in order to make it more of a strategy/tower defense game. Unfortunately I was running short on time and had to figure out how to still make the game as fun as possible with only one tower available. It's funny though because it ended up feeling like an idle game completely unintentionally.

This is probably the best and most creative game I've played in the jam so far! The level design is very creative, especially when it gives you control of multiple vines and you have to find a way to get them watered to control them. All of the puzzles were extremely fun and felt like they were in the perfect order.

One criticism I have is that sometimes I want to put the shiny down somewhere to stop controlling the vine and pan the camera to view the level ahead, but usually there aren't many good spots to do so. To rephrase it, whenever I want to the vine to stop moving for whatever reason it's hard to make that happen, especially when the shiny is still active even if dropped.

I think the concept of the game was interesting but personally I didn't enjoy it so much. Because small turrets cant attack the largest enemies and big turrets can't attack the smallest, I found myself keeping medium turrets and scaling any enemies to medium size.

Scaling turret to a larger size is annoying sometimes because there is often not enough room to do so. It could be nice to have a feature where if the turret has no room to expand then it will change it's placement to make room (if possible).

Also I really don't like the part where the camera zoom out because the first time I got there the enemies blitzed me before I had time to place down turrets there. If there was more time to react and potentially some marker to tell you what path the enemies are coming from for any wave I think it would have been great.

I really enjoyed the overall vibes of the game art and music though!

I really love the arcade vibes! Operating the crane was really difficult but I guess that goes for any crane game. I ended up also using the car to push the objects into the right position since placing them was hard.

Thank you!

At the beginning it was hard to tell what was going on due to lack of tutorial but it was easy to figure out after some trial and error. All in all though, this is an incredibly well done game! The voice acting really helped to nail the style, and you guys even managed to make a short trailer! How did you manage to coordinate so well with so many people on the team and so little time?

The game was short but it was a super cool and highly polished concept! I really like the ending where you fight the white worm and fuse with it since it was kicking my ass earlier. It's also cool how you start off microscopic and quickly scale to universe breaking sizes.

This game is super high quality! First of all there is so much attention to detail, such as the robot sleeping and having a wake up animation when powered back up, and stuff like the crates being pushed from walls so you don't get stuck and have to restart the puzzle.

In addition, the level design is good and takes almost full advantage of the unique mechanics, the only thing I have to complain is that the beginning levels should have slowly introduced the power window better. I remember particularly that room 3 and 6 were really hard for me despite being the first time having to use the window in a puzzle.

Also the sound design is really good. Usually having the character constantly play a noise while walking can be super annoying to me but this one was satisfying to listen to.

Unfortunately I got stuck on level 16. I assume you have to stack two boxes on the platform to have them hit the right buttons but the platform would carry them both. Maybe there was another solution I missed but I couldn't think of one.

NO WAY, thank you so much! That is the most impactful 8 word sentence I've read since starting gamedev. It will be a long while before I actually reach a quality level where I can even hope to make money, but I'm glad to know that my games are approaching the point where people can imagine themselves enjoying it to that extent. Based on all of the positive feedbacks I'm feeling really inspired to keep working on it if only to add more turrets and enemies. I will probably still keep the scope small (like a 10-25 minute game) since making even this simple demo took everything I had.

This was really fun! I was able to make it all the way to the top after getting the hang of the controls. It reminded me of GIRP by Bennet Foddy but with a rhythm aspect. 

This game is so simple yet so fun. It's like where's waldo but you have to find waldo every 10 seconds or you die. My high score was about 7000

Holy crap that's a great idea. I considered having the ability to upgrade/purchase different floor types when brainstorming but I couldn't think of anything much plus I had to scope down the initial idea to fit the jam. This one is really cool because it makes special use of the towers being individual segments! thanks!

This game is really interesting in terms of puzzle mechanics. I was only able to make it to level 8 and then got stuck, but I think I have some good feedback to share. Firstly is that I felt like the objects where too far off to the sides of the screen, sometimes they would even clip off screen because of the movement. Second is that when the objects float around on the screen, it kind of messes me up when I'm trying to precisely scale them since there is some movement that slight bit of movement that happens without my input. Other than that the game and the aesthetic were really creative!

Oh shoot so I must have stopped just a couple fo rounds before the game was going to end. It was starting to get laggy with all of the cars (playing in browser) so I thought it wasn't intended to play that far

This game is really well made! The aesthetics are super nice, such as the 3D appearance of the cars, the grass moving, and the day and night cycle is a really good touch. The gameplay is nice but I couldn't find out what my score was. The description seems to suggest there is a score for building the road better but I couldn't find it. I also couldn't tell when the game was supposed to end but it just kept going until nearly the entire grid was filled with houses.

One last thing that is probably personal preference is that it might have been convenient to highlight the houses that aren't connected to roads or show a warning when you try to start the day without having connected all the houses.

(edit: just realized I sound nitpicky in the comment but I just wanted to give constructive feedback)

Yoo our games have almost the same name!

This game was fun. I like the idea of building out tower that you scale in tetris mode. It was really interesting especially how you can aim for the blue rooms. One thing that felt off was performing the wall jump because I don't think there was any coyote time on it. Many times when I tried to wall jump I accidentally slid off the wall first and jumped just a moment after.

I feel like I'm building a nuclear reactor

This game was pretty interesting! I liike how the towers scale and get bigger over time, but it felt unintuitive that the bigger turrets could not attack the small enemies, especially when all of your turrets will eventually become big. Over time you might run out of space to place small turrets. Also it would be nice to have price tags on the towers. It's quick to figure out that they are all 100 but initially you are confused.

The bug vibes are immaculate. I really like the combination of a grapplemechanic with the gun. It created a really interesting sense of control to be able to grapple and then use the gun to maneuver quickly. I feel like the scale part of the game took a backseat compared to everything else but it was still really cool to supersize and crush everything.

I don't know why my game gives off idle/incremental game vibes. I didn't intend it but I really like how it turned out

This game was pretty cool! I intro was nice and the feeling of evolving to a bigger size was cool. The only thing I think could have been done better was to polish it and make it more obvious what the mechanics are. For example I didn't realize evolution existed until I did a second run of the game and was curioius about what the second bar was and looked in the descripton of the itch page. Also for the holdable abilities, there should be a way to indicate when you should stop holding (maybe like a bar filling up) because it felt very awkward not knowing how long to hold.

That's good to hear because I literally did all the sound effects In the morning after I woke up and had only 4 hours left to submit. I just used jsfxr to generate some pixel noises that I thought sounded good and I'm glad I was right because I didn't have time to pick and choose!

This game is really interesting idea! I like the feeling of desperately trying to crack a long while a monster is slowly creeping up behind you. I think there is a lot of potential behind it. 

I think there is a bug where if you die in the second phase of hacking (entering the code from output), then when the game restarts you are still locked in that mode and can't do anything. I ran into this a bit and hard to restart the page.

Oh I forgot to talk about those lol. There was a bit of iffy things.

Firstly: I had the resolution problem where the window shows up but I have to use the scrollbars to see everything, but it was ok since I entered fullscreen.

Second: After I placed the blocks and pressed enter there was an awkward delay before the physics actually activated

Third: In the last level I messed up the block placement and misses the wall button, but then I realized that I didn't know how to restart the level. Idk if you can do that or not but I couldn't figure it out and I don't remember the tutorial guy telling me it.

Another thing which might be just preference is that it would be nice if pressing enter before the text completes will immediately show the whole dialogue, and THEN the second press is what moves you to the next dialogue. I'm the type of person who likes to reads the dialogue quickly without waiting for the text to completely reveal itself.

I hope that helps!

This is a fun game! I really like the concept of picking up the turrets/peashooter looking guys and attaching them to your body. The giant snake boss at the end surprised me and reminded be of dr zomboss from plants vs zombies

This is an interesting concept! I like how it neatly integrates the jam theme into the puzzle mechanics. By any chance were the artstyle and music inspired by Celeste? because I was getting the same vibes and thought it was cool.