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This was super fun! Or engaging at least. Poor things.

First off, fuck you. I actually feel sad about loosing my units. All the bits and pieces of the village making it feel alive like the pool, the large house, the table, the units chatting with each other makes me feel almost connected to them. At the end of the game I pretty much knew all my units by name, who to put together with who and so on. I also really liked how different the classes were, with the knights only regaining motivation upon actually passing a fight, the AOE fireball throwers, and the fucking idiots that were the valkyries. Note the were. None of the them survived. On that note, the graveyard was fantastic move.

I think the group management is a bit too punishing. I think the 3 "moves" is good, but the swapping is a too random. I'd like to be able to manage my teams a bit more (on the level of selecting who to switch with), but I think the limit of times you can do it is great. You shouldn't have too much control. Also never used the kick function, don't see why you would ever use it either.

Another thing I really liked is the bouncyness of the pixelart. I'm very much a purist when it comes to pixelart. I want it to be pixel perfect. That said, I think you did a fantastic job making "modern" pixelart look good. The bounciness is as said fantastic, the juice is good and overall it's really appealing. Also banger music.

Also the demons with the whips were very hot. I would definitely end up as one of the gravestones if I was one of the heroes.

Congrats on submitting!

To be completely honest, I think a team retreat would be great for the player, but terrible for the game. For me a lot of the appeal with the game is the tension when you send out your beloved villagers. If you can instantly recall them at any time, that tension would disappear completely. Seeing one of your units have low health but high morale, and slowly getting chopped to death is absolutely horrible, but the game becomes so much better thanks to it.

Personal sponsor is a pretty good idea, and I'd love to see more management of the village itself. Maybe putting heroes behind the counter of the shops could be cool?

This was really cool! I went for the middle satan, messed it up first time but got it second. Super satisfying to play! The medusa like thingy was really powerful, and I based my main deck around them. Though, in preparation for the battle against satan I stocked up on the 17 point self sacrificing ones.

A note of feedback though; currently there is no incentive to restart other than "I want to fuckin summon satan". Into the breach has a great mechanic, when you lose, you get to pick one of your units to bring along to your next run. It gives you a bit more of a reason to start another run, and honestly selecting a unit to bring along just feels better than clicking a restart button. 

Edit: bonus note; steam users seem to like demos, and you have a playable game that could work really well as that. Could be worth thinking about.

Also, the music is incredible, and I adore the visuals. Fantastic work!

Congrats!

Also nice error. I have already killed that bug, it'll be fixed in a post jam update. Thanks for reporting it!

Thanks! 

Being able to spam like that is not fantastic. I don’t think a cooldown will do it, but I think you are onto something good. Maybe if the players mash long enough then a cooldown is initiated. 

Yea the menus are a bit cheap when it comes to the theme to be honest, I could have made something that felt more connected with the theme. 

Thanks for trying the game!

Nice game! Clicking and seeing how many you manage to catch in the explosion feels a bit random, due to how many things are bouncing around at once. I think you balanced it quite nicely though, the hearts system feels fair.

I am sobbing on the floor. I can't getfurther than the bit where you can roll off to the floor below. Like 4 pieces up. This is a super fun take on the theme though, and I really enjoyed it. Even tho it pissed me off. Great work.

This is a really cool idea! I like how distinctively different this feel from other sokoban style puzzles (I think that's what the box moving puzzlers are called, correct me if I'm wrong). Agree with audio being annoying, ripped off my headphones after fifteen seconds. I think the first two puzzles were really interesting, and 3 and 17 looked really cool too, but I couldn't manage to wrap my head around them and after a few minutes of poking around trying different things I called it quits. Difficulty curve was too steep for me, but really interesting mechanic!

The medals being hard to get is very much the intentional. I think that most players need a bit of quick progression in the start, so they get into the game. Then I can start challenging them with harder stuff, like the gold medals (or blood heart medals if you are really going for 100%). It’s a tiny bit of game design that really goes a long way, the “easy to learn hard to master” thing. Thanks for trying it!

Thank you! It’s a basic parallax, but I’m really satisfied I had time to get it into the game. Happy you like it!

Timer is a great suggestion! I’ll definitely add that if I make a post jam version. And no you are not supposed to be able to select a level after the fifth one (I’m guessing that’s what you mean), that’s my shoddy late night code doing silly stuff. I’ll fix that in post jam as well. Thanks for playing and for the feedback!

Thank you!

I find the bit about art as poison really interesting. I think Adriel Wallick said a similar thing a similar thing, but in the context that (paraphrased) “there will always be more ideas”. I think Ed Sheeran (unexpected connection there) also said something along the lines of (also paraphrased) “get the tap flowing, and at first it will be muddy but just keep going and eventually it will turn clear”. I think a good mentality is just to “get it out”, preferably as quickly as possible so you can move on to new and even more interesting ideas. A potential new challenge: make 14 games in a week, max 4 hours for each game. Kind of ridiculous, but I think one could learn a lot from it. Might try. 

Oh yea music is fairly restricted as well. The restrictions are there to protect me from things that I spend way too much time on, and the two biggest things with music are:

- noodling around with the instrument synth for hours

- noodling around with effects to make the instrument synth sound less shit for hours  

So the restrictions I put in place are to protect me from doing that:

- I’m only allowed to use soundfonts to generate sound. No straight up samples or 3xosc either.

- I have like 6 plugins that I’m allowed to use for effects, that covers 90% of what I need and everything else I’ll just have to not be bothered about.

I don’t have any restrictions on voicings or otherwise, there I can go as ham as I want. Bonus thing but I try to to use hardware to put in notes. Either my launchpad or dx7, it’s a lot more intuitive and you can improvise it out fast let than with just clicking in notes. 

It was pretty magical when it all came together, and I completely get what you mean by the pianist “leaning in”. If I don’t misremember, the top fast moving part that’s kind of like an arp but a bit more complex is a rhodes soundfonts where the louder velocity layers are a bit distorted and the lower velocity layers are super smooth. I play with the velocity throughout the track, and that’s what gives it that motion. I absolutely adore it, it’s the kind of attention I couldn’t give my notes before, but now when I’m working with soundfonts it’s just comes a lot more naturally to sit and fiddle with small velocity changes and automations. And my tracks sound a lot more alive thanks to it I think. Thank you for trying it!

Thanks for trying it! :D

Thanks for trying it! The concept is actually snatched by a mobile game I played way way back where you would draw to reshape your squad and then pew pew with color bullets to take over objectives and stuff. One of the most fun games I’ve played on mobile. Pacing was a bit slow, not too unexpected. I didn’t make time to playtest, something I’ll prioritize in the future. Thank you for trying it!

”With nicely aligned pixels” YES! I hate when pixel art doesn’t line up, and I adore the developers who take the time to make it actually render at a lower resolution and then scale it up. Which is exactly what I’m doing, with a few modifications. The height is exactly 180 pixels and doesn’t change, but the width can actually increase and decrease  to support mobile devices. The games are built to look best at 16:9, but when I built the framework it was my intention that it should work for web platforms like poki who require that the game fits the whole screen. Also yes there should be a boss! It was on the original plan, but I spent way too much time making an overly complex system for controlling the lil shooters, and ended up with only one day for actual content making. I wrote a post mortem about this. 

That's a really interesting way to put it. "Not sure what happened, but felt the weight of it". I guess we got the suble storytelling thing going on or something like that. Thanks for trying!

Funky, I’ll see if I can replicate and fix it. 

Was it immediately after you killed the boss?

Yea difficulty for this one was kind of through the roof. It was difficult for me as the developer to get through, so I should have caught that it would be near impossible for players. Lesson learned for future games!

Oh did you have an aspect ratio different than 16:9? That completely messes it up, I didn’t have time to track that bug down. 

A bit of a harsh way to put it, but noted for future projects!

Ah so it's really about the bossfights feeling a bit too slow?

The difficulty being overkill is definitely something I’ve caught by now. I forgot the age old saying “if it’s difficult for the developer, it’s impossible for a player”. So more telegraphing and a bit slower attacks would have improved things.

And absolutely there is a lack of feedback for getting a counter. I think the audio saves it a bit but it’s still not super satisfying. Something I was aware of, but time simply ran out. I wrote a whole post mortem about this. 

Thank you for trying it out! 

Noise is intentional, but I didn’t realize it might irritate some players. I’ll try to add some volume controls in the future. 

More specifically for the parries, what is it that you’re missing? Would you like a button you can mash to constantly deal damage, or something more sophisticated? Or is it that the parry is not super satisfying currently?

Also yes parries are delayed with 0.05 seconds from when the enemy strikes, I’m impressed you can hear that. 

“SID MEIER: One of the responsibilities I think
we have as designers is to protect the player from themselves” - from gmtk

I think we are doing something like that with out limitations. Lower resolutions, quite 8bitty / similar music and sfx. But I think we both want that unlimited code, to be able to barf out as much content as we want to. Because that is what we think is enjoyable. Pretty funny that the developers develop the development process to make it more difficult to do things that are unfun. Maybe we were just designers all along.

I don’t think I mentioned any of the platforms I was looking at in the devlog, but there they are;

• Kongregate
• Crazygames
• Armor games
• Poki
• Game distribution (distributes to a lot of places)
• Y8

There are also two others I’ve seen floating around:

• Addicting games (not using this because they seem to be hooked on games that players just can’t stop playing, not a fan of that)
• Yandex games (has a bit too many connections with a certain not too appreciated country at the moment)

Ye I'm aiming to improve telegraphing in future games, it could have been a lot better. Thanks for trying it!

Second boss was actually a lot more fun to play! Judging distance is really difficult, but when I figured out that the gun and missiles are completely useless and the only way to actually do damage is by using the super mega ultra beam thing it was actually not too bad.

I really really really want to like this. It's a arcade jet sim, I fucking love games like this. I think I spent 30 minutes trying to beat the first boss, the first 10 was figuring out that you could actually damage the boss, you just needed to be super close. Then I spend 10 minutes slowly getting his hp down, picking at the eyes one after another. And then I got to the part where you were supposed to finish him, and after 5 minutes of just trying to figure out where the hell the head was, and actually try to catch up to it, I gave up. For me, this was insanely frustrating.

That said, the visuals and presentation is absolutely top notch. The music is packing, the visuals are sparkling and it's hella juicy. In prep for BRJ I tried Jeremys idea of capitalism, and I had very similar qualms about it. It's a super well polished game, looks amazing, sounds amazing, but I just don't think the it's fun. 

All in all, I love to see some different genres poking in here, flight sim isn't what to expect at a boss rush jam. Great work!

This has a lot of potential! Having to close the distance to regain ammo and health is well designed and does force you to move around. The gunplay is not that interesting though, but it's on it's way there. The bee boss just felt like a test of endurance. I'd rather have a shorter and more difficult bossfight that I'd have to retry a few times, than one which I'm wishing it's over at the end. Graphics and audio? Perfect for the game, loved it. It's very close to really hitting the spot for me, and I did really enjoy this. It would just have needed an extra push to really really hit it. Great work!

This game looks absolute amazing. It does miss the gameplay part of gaming though. To me, there is currently no challenge in the game. I'd recommend checking out this video video link yayyyy to get an idea of how you can think of gameplay! I'd really love to see what you could create with some really good gameplay and this artstyle. Keep at it!

So very roughly I'd say there are two parts to making a game; the idea and the polish. Let me try a cooking analogy: the idea is like your ingredients and very rough instructions like "heat it" or "kneed it". Polish is figuring out the right temperature, the right time in the over, the optimal size of the portions. But fundamentally, those ingredients are the core. Everything else is just making the best that you can with those ingredients. 

What I can help you with is the polish part, not the idea part. I think that the game lacks a (from a player perspective) compelling way of interaction. Like what is the fantasy of this game? What am I doing? That core interaction is the core of the game. It's often connected to a test of skill. Celeste is at it's core a game about timing button presses, and a bit problem solving. Sekiro is a game about remebering patterns and timing button presses. Factorio is about understanding systems connecting together, and handle the changes that come with upscaling.

Meat arena is about pressing W while looking towards an object, then pressing a button to pick it up, looking at the boss and then pressing a button to throw the object. That's the fundamental gameplay. That's the ingredients that Meat arena brings.

So I don't really have a suggestion, I think my suggestions would be a new idea, or new ingredients if you will. 

Takeaway: think about what the player is actually doing. The button presses. What makes those button presses interesting?

Hold my fucking tea, there is a piano in this game. That's a first for you I think? Oh and 3d. Pretty wacky if you ask me. Alright wall of text time.

So I was not expecting to have tears in my eyes during this jam, but here we are. I think I know where this story comes from, and it hits very close to home. Especially when that story is told by someone I've stuck around for a very long time. Fragment jam was more than 4 years ago you know. Having struggled my way through quite a few artforms at this point, I still feel terrible at all of them. To me the idea of battlescars as signs of strength is really encouraging, and I'll try to get that into my own head. 

On a completely different note, designwise: the exchange mechanic is currently close to meaningless. I sometimes just bashed my way through the melee attacks just to get to fire off three of those guaranteed hit magical missiles. Tormentor X punisher did an interesting thing; to use your gooder weapon (pew pew pew) you have to get a kill with the shotgut (kaboom, shitty range) so you were constantly switching between the weapons. Maybe something along the lines of that could have been slipped in, to make the gameplay more intentional. Honestly button mashing was the best method to deal damage, which wasn't that massively fun. 

Dodging attacks though? Hella fun. The attacks are paced just right so you have time to slip out of their reach before they get you. Overall this is kind of a slow moving game (as slow as these kinda games get), and I liked how the slower pace got me out of jumping around like a lizard to actually observing and using my frontal lobe to get out of the way of the attacks. From my perspective, this game (like most of yours) is ultimately about dodging, and the dodging was really fun.

The game has a bit of first time jank. Fullscreening the game doesn't scale it up so you have to zoom in to get it right, animations are a bit clunky, colors are a bit all over the place. Considering you wrote the bones thing for animation, and just figured out how to 3d in general, I think this is fantastic. The camera switch when you finally get a boss? Made me smile like an idiot. I don't know if you are planning on doing more 3d things, but it's definitely an interesting direction, and I'm intrigued by what you will cook up with that.

Also pico8 fonts for the win.

Awesome work!

Eyyy another game with a parry mechanic. To me what was interesting about this game was the way that each boss had a different attack pattern that you really had to learn on the run. To me the exchange mechanic felt a bit tacked on, and I'd felt a bit like I was missing a goal in the game. Why should I keep going? Massive bonus points to you for juice, the game felt really really good to play, and the length of the bosses is perfect to make it easy to just keep on trying. Great work!

To be completely honest, I don't think more weapons would have solved it. It's a fundamental design issue, and you'd have to dig into the design of the second to second gameplay. It's about making the player do things that are interesting to them. A bit of a more full explaination: link to not clog with massive video embed

Using game jams for reach is not the way you are supposed to be using them. If you are interested in reaching a larger audience, I'd recommend reading this article: https://abhisundu.com/posts/marketing-free-games/

That was quite fun! The synergies was what made this interesting to play, but you seem to have noticed that already. 

Some nitpicks: You have to replay the tutorial if you lose. That's acceptable the first time, but I would have given up if I had to do it again. The dialogue comes off as a bit filler, and I would rather have that time spent on polish instead of the dialogue system. The games does lack a bit of just that, polish. UI is a touch janky, unskippable tutorial, some actions like progressing to the next round is a bit unclear. So it might have been worth to cut a boss to have time for just polishing the heck out of this.

Absolute love the art though, and the synergies really tickled my brain in a nice way. Great work!

That was quite fun! The synergies was what made this interesting to play, but you seem to have noticed that already. 

Some nitpicks: You have to replay the tutorial if you lose. That's acceptable the first time, but I would have given up if I had to do it again. The dialogue comes off as a bit filler, and I would rather have that time spent on polish instead of the dialogue system. The games does lack a bit of just that, polish. UI is a touch janky, unskippable tutorial, some actions like progressing to the next round is a bit unclear. So it might have been worth to cut a boss to have time for just polishing the heck out of this.

Absolute love the art though, and the synergies really tickled my brain in a nice way. Great work!