itch.io

Very interesting combination of precision and Tower Defense, love this fresh new genre! The repeating piano notes hurt my ears after some time, but only because I was continuously being drawn in by the gameplay for such a long time ^^

That is some very positive feedback, I appreciate it a lot! :D

Thank you so much for the kind words and I'm glad you enioyed this experience so much!

• I like the music very much myself, so credit again to the Pixabay artists who made it.
• The health circle was an idea I had to avoid health bars not fitting with the whole visual vibe ^^
• An exponential curve would definitely help and fit nicely with the clear incremental theme. But there wasn't enough time for me to fine tune the balance to that degree. I'm happy that I at least managed to make upgrades feel good, those had a lot of iterations...
• The seriousness of this game only reaches its full extent once your doctor diagnoses you with carpal tunnel syndrome for playing too much ;)

I see what you did there :D and I'm glad you tried and enjoyed it!

These two stuck with me becaus with their setting, artstyle and audio, they're quite emotional!

Maply's Adventure: https://itch.io/jam/theveryseriousjuniperdevgamejam/rate/4715613
Short and sweet, beautiful immersive journey

Rumpel Spinning: https://itch.io/jam/theveryseriousjuniperdevgamejam/rate/4711685
Tense and challenging minigame, beautiful ending

In comparison, I made a silly serious visual stim game: https://itch.io/jam/theveryseriousjuniperdevgamejam/rate/4716498

Thank you for playing the game!
I would agree, there's a lot of parameters involved in the overall difficulty, and combined together it's a little bit too hard...

That is very understandable, a lot of players have that same experience. But thanks a lot for playing it!

This being my first game jam, I learned that I really enjoy the spaghetti-code minigames I get to make and signed up for two mor game jams in the future :D

I read documentation about Godot nodes to change details that I never learned about in tutorials. Also I realized that playtest feedback is very valuable to catch problems of any kind and I should spend some more time in testing than I did here. And finally, I learned to engage with game feedback in a healthy way - not taking it personal and letting it affect my feelings, but instead as a way for other people to constructively make my game better!

I let my little sister playtest my game on mobile and she was very drawn in, maybe it's something for you as well? I can definitely recommend the mobile browser a lot, it makes the rapid spinning more comfortable than with a mouse :)

https://itch.io/jam/theveryseriousjuniperdevgamejam/rate/4716498

[Contains stylized depictions of explosions and spike traps as seen in the screenshots, but no blood or violence of any kind. If that's not something you want to share with your kids, I totally respect that!]

I thought changing the description is ok? I updated the description on my game just today and it's fine, it even said the jam submission locks new file uploads on the edit page, but nothing else was highlighted.
But it's probably best to be on the safe side and leave it for after the jam either way ^^

The graphics were really good, no clash at all with the UI, but the map felt very unresponsive to player interaction. Adding a visual "Death count" for disasters or human cities being destroyed visually would have made for a much more interactive and enjoyable experience.

While I like the idea of a creative and experimental menu, I couldn't figure out how to start the game, so I'm not able to rate it :(

What a nice highscore in the preview, be a shame if someone destroyed it ... (feel free to use this one :D)

The amount of buildings whas quite overwhelming. At the start it was fun to pay attention to, in the end it became less strategic and more "Hovering the tile around the island, looking for green numbers". I honestly think that half the amount of buildings would make for more careful and enjoyable gameplay! Or implementing tile 'rarity' so that some buildings give much higher scores but have a low chance of appearing.
But as you can tell from my screenshot, none of these factors stopped me from enjoying your lovely game in the slightest <3

The controls felt very responsive and the Kraken quick-time-events felt just the right amount of challenging! It took me a while to figure out where to do orders, but I enjoyed that time a lot ^^

I made it to the end, really liked the save feature here! Also the non-linear path unlocking more ammunition and heals along the way. Ammunition felt very unforgiving, as it was very sparse, so you basically had to headshot everybody. Some way to reload (slower) on 0 bullets would have been nice to prevent guaranteed death. The reloading is quite intense, especially when being chased, but I liked that rush a lot!

I made it to #2 in the leaderboard on my first try :D
It was interesting to feel how difficult the different puzzles were. Color you could pick out instantly, Words were not as easy in comparison and rotation was super hard! I think changing the font might help, or using some kind of symbols instead of text. I really had so much fun with this, very cool puzzle game!

The gameplay loop felt very intuitive and good and the progression was really well done! The sound from asteroid waves hurt my ears, but I liked the "space-y" background music :)

Very simple game loop but very well executed :) I would physically feel tense when I made an error and Rumpel made another step into the room, that was really immersive! I would have liked to see a "This item has the correct shape, but wrong color"-modifier later on as well.
The victory music was beautiful, closing the short and sweet experience in a great way!!

Very cool control and game flow!
It's a bit fast for my taste, I can barely kill any enemy and without the dropped loot, I can't open chests. And when I did try to kill enemies, they'd deal a lot of damage in return, killing me early in a run.
But besides the pacing, the visuals are simplistic but nice and colorful and the music is really fitting the vibe!

I had an enemy spawn on top of me and push me into the edge, ending my 700 score run :(
The boundaries could be another color to indicate danger. Maybe something like spikes for a strong visual effect?
Overall, it was quite addicting, I think it'd benefit from enemy variants (stronger/faster)!

Oh that's easy, I managed it by praying and barely testing ... no but for real, Godot was suprisingly chill with the amount of projectiles added! It slows down on low performance-devices like mobile with a lot of coins and spikes, but otherwise works.

And  the selection was mentioned to me from a mobile tester as well, unfortunately I didn't have the time to add an Input Buffer of some kind, sorry about that!

Spinning the axe needed some getting used to, especially after the length upgrade, but it was a great feeling to slash through a group of enemies in a single strike :D
The damage seemed to always be 5, regardless of the speed? I might have missed an upgrade, but the damage increasing with the speed by default would be cool.  The arena was quite large for the amount of enemies, I had to search for the cyclops a long time...
Very nice mechanic and enjoyable game loop!

Very addictive incremental game :D Also the 3D bar graphics were really good! But I played for a while and still would lose on Levels 2 and 3 with a lot of luck, so that made me lose motivation in the end.

Very fitting audio for the entire experience!
The choices often felt very similar and with no ability to influence the drops to match the strategy, it felt very random at times. But the feeling of "numbers go up" was great nonetheless!

I liked the XP bar, the spawn animation and the "weapon" sprite :D
But losing health felt very punishing, because you couldn't telegraph enemy hits very well and I didn't see any healing options in my shop, so damage was permanent and I died quickly.
Very fun and addictive gameloop!

I didn't look at the description before playing and found myself in the middle of a serious overstimulation manager :D It was a good kind of stressful because it made me switch between tasks efficiently and training my focus over time. I even made #4 on my first attempt, because the game loop was just that satisfying!

The visuals are great, the enemy death effect looks cool and upgrades feel so empowering!
Unfortunately there are some audio issues once the orange enemies show up :( I enjoyed it a lot.
Overall, this is seriously dopamine-inducing and I didn't want to stop playing the whole time!

Double XP? WOOHOO!!
Enjoyed every second of it, truly a great stim-game :D

I still have an earworm of the music from when I played the game yesterday :D
Came back just to listen to it again and beat my head against level 4, which I finally beat! Such a great puzzle with very creative controls!

There were some bugs with the lasers - Specifically, lasers that were removed from the scene and reloaded with the "Undo"/"Redo" buttons will consistently behave incorrect (Loaded in a wrong rotation and more). Also rotating 2 stacked cats would result in a floating cat sometimes...

This is so immersive and beautiful!! The gameplay was intuitive and fast-paced, the music calm but emotional and the background was just serene!

Sometimes when I wanted to think about potentially altering the result of a roll, it would resolve before. This felt a little frustrating, maybe the game could prompt the player to manipulate/pass somehow and wait for the response?
I really liked the vibes and the fitting music!

I had enough determination for the last official level, but that demon level took my soul :)
Music feels hypnotizing and didn't quite fit the vibe for my taste.
As for mechanics, I liked the bounce when spinning the level quickly. Personally, I'd love to see some kind of "bounce pad" to deal with some obstacles in levels. Overall it was a nice precision puzzle that felt very rewarding to beat!

Thanks for that feedback! I didn't prioritize the menu enough and now I've learned from several people that these UI elements are very important to them, so I'll do that in the future ^^

"Carpal Tunnel Simulator" :D I love it!!
Organizing UI elements into a menu would have been the next step, but I got so carried away with upgrades and enemies instead ... will likely do some update about that in the future. (At least this way, it's available on mobile! Quite fun as well and your mouse will thank you)
And I'm really happy that the game is enjoyable for such a long time and you had such fun with it ^^

I made it to the end of the level! Without checkpoints, it felt a little bit grindy, but in that time I got a way better feel for the spin and even discovered a lot of little shortcuts on the way! It feels very speedrun-able ^^
The fullscreen sadly did not work so I had a smaller window and the tutorial confused me, because when flying upwards into the spikes, it took a long time to understand what was going on. Maybe reducing the acceleration slightly could help with that initial learning.

The visuals are so good! And the Ferris elements even have physics when you spin the wheel around violently!! :D
Hope you can design some cool towers and enemies in the future ^^

I can tell a lot of emotion went into this game from the setting and the description page. I'd like to experience more of it, but I'm just not able to get past the Bat room - the jump height keeps bugging out and I can't get to a next platform. I've figured out I can use the bat attack bump to "glitch" myself higher, but I never survive long enough with that. I wonder if anyone else experiences that?

The speedup seems to only trigger once you hold one direction for a certain time and then switching to the other. I initially assumed that I would accelerate at all times while spinning (I interpreted the arrows that way) and so it was difficult to get into it. Later on as I gained more of a feeling of the mechanic, I found edges quite punishing as I lost all my built up progress instantly (... then again. I'm bad at racing games in general). Just wanted to give you this perspective, feel free to do with it what you want ^^ I'm really impressed with the thumbnail art btw!

Thanks for the great feedback, it's really appreciated!! <3

I agree that the wave system and difficulty curve would benefit a lot from finetuning, and if I had more time I'd focus on that next.

For the health bars, I could probably add a red pulsating animation for low health. The slow healing is kind of intentional, I'd rather change enemy pacing and difficulty than increase healing.

The menu would be a good QoL addition, I kind of tunnel-visioned on the minimalist approach too long...

That being said, I'm very happy that you enjoyed my silly serious game already, "fun and chaotic" is exactly what I was going for :D