itch.io

admittedly im not sure i understood what the secret was even after finding it. I just jumped around and squashed my keyboard all over. Even after replaying it several times AND solving it several times I couldn't figure out what the actual secret was. Which seems counter intuitive to the theme. "the garden HAD a secret" nuh-uh, it's still a mystery to me !

AH wait its the screenshots. I was about to complain that I thought the screenshots were nice and that I was disappointed the actual game didn't look like that, but after taking a longer look I see it was part of the solution all along. Now the garden has no secret! The end dialogue is a lot more emotionally impactful now.

Still though I was kinda excited thinking i was going into a freaking epic platforming adventure. I like the screenshot art a lot.

godot 4 web games have a tendency of being weird on mac..... IDK.

the downloadable version is for windows but it should be playable through something like wine or proton

are you on a mac? others have had the same bug but they are always on safari...

Visually this game is really nice ( i wonder if this guy likes graphics programming.... ) I really like the shine effect on the blocks especially. I do have a couple critiques in terms of the gameplay: 

• The game requires a controller. I didn't mind this as I do own the specific controller this game asks for, I even put a piece of electrical tape over the bright awful light to make this controller usable and my gaming more professional. The gameplay is simple enough though, I'm unsure of why keyboard was omitted when it would have been more convenient for most people. Honestly though, I've been meaning to dust off this controller for my own gaming purposes, so this game has helped me remember that I own one.
• It wasn't obvious to me at first that I had multiple balls, I had to read the itch description before I realized I could shoot multiple balls. Playing with just one ball is a bit challenging lol
• I wasn't expecting the timer to not restart for each level. Having only 20 seconds for the entire game is a neat idea that I quite like, but maybe it's a bit too hard... The furthest I managed to get was level 2 with ONE brick left. It's against the rules of this jam, but maybe a future version could have time pickups that give you a few extra seconds, or maybe some extra balls.

Overall though I'll always and forever be a fiend for brick breaker type games so good work with the entry, I had fun!

I'm going to end up repeating others with my critique, but I want to be thorough:

• The spikes at the bottom should kill you immediately. Once you are down there, there is no way to recover, so it not being an immediate loss is just a wasting time.
• There should be a second or two in between the player dying and the level restarting ( a space for a death animation mayhaps ). When the restart is immediate, the player doesn't have time to register that they've lost. Because of this, a lot of the time I will still be holding a direction key. So when the level restarts, my character will immediately be travelling full speed off the platform, before I have time to react.
• The volume slider on the menu doesn't change the volume in the actual game.
• The physics are a bit janky. I'm not familiar with Unity so I'm unaware of whatever method is best for making a platformer in it. I read your code and saw that you are using a rigid body, I wouldn't recommend doing this.
• I don't think this game really needs a life bar, I feel it would be better as just a one hit kill thing. All of the levels the hazards can just be ignored since you have enough hit points the just damage boost trough everything.
• That being said because of the janky collisions, it can be hard to avoid dangers at times. On the third level, it feels pretty bad to get hit by the spikes on the right edge of the platform. This would be more frustrating if it was an instant loss.
• This one is a nitpick, but I'm mentioning it because its a personal pet peeve of mine that I see from even very experienced devs: The "exit" button on the main menu only makes sense for the desktop build of the game. In a web game, this always just crashes the game and forces you to reload the page. I'm not sure how its done in Unity, but there should be some method of being able to check if you are on web or not. 
• Lastly, as Yerghaiz said, the UI scaling is funky. You can't see the first life bar properly or the coin meter unless you fullscreen the game.

Sorry if my critique is too much, please don't feel disparaged. You should still be proud of the fact that you have successfully made a game for a jam, that already makes you more accomplished than a lot of devs out there. Keep at it, and your games will only get better and better !!

this is very well crafted, i like the character a lot, and the levels are well paced. There are a couple difficulty spikes, but I found it was pretty fun trying to do trickery in order to speed up ( like blasting a charge shot backwards into a slide, was very satisfying to pull off ) I do think having to aim the gun with the same inputs as moving the character felt a little jank at times. It works in something like metroid but for something this fast paced even basic maneuvers can be pretty hard, which compounds difficulty when later levels ask you to do a lot of charge shot jumps in a row, screwing any of them up guarantees a loss. However pressing R lets you restart quicker, and the dialogue doesn't repeat, so its never a hassle to go again and again. Great job with this game, you should be proud of this one. put this sucker on newgrounds !!

the music is bumpin'. I do wish the game had a faster way to restart, having the wait 20 seconds to read the losing dialogue, and then 20 seconds of the intro dialogue before you can try again is pretty brutal. i liked the third phase the most, the sprite work was fun

some people on newgrounds were having a similar bug. are you on safari ?

lol, I thought this game was very funny. the best score I managed to get was 98 % ( although my best scoring one wasn't very funny so here's the elephant )

the critique i have: 

• I wish the timer didn't start until I started drawing. I always end up spending the first few seconds just figuring out which color matches what I saw.
• This is the 20 second jam, so i understand its part of the rules, but I think this game would be better with a longer timer, 40 seconds or a minute maybe. I feel like with just slightly more time I could get funnier results, but i always get cut short. It might even be good with no timer at all.
• I do wish there was some sound ! Some whiteboard ee oo ee oo as you draw would be good. maybe some funny mysterious crime music. 

It looks nice, but it is not very fun. I'm all for "experience" type games, but this just seemed pointless. It didn't made me think about anything, it was just loud and hurt my ears. I also think it's shady to release a game for 1 dollar and then just have it on 100% sale. Why? Jam games are supposed to be for fun and learning.

the art in this is REAL nice. Extra points for making the web page look really nice, I think its cool when little jam games get that treatment. The sound in this game is really nice too, it fits perfectly and expresses the action well. The gameplay I'm not so sure on, but let me be clear that I am VERY bad at rhythm / quick time type games, so I am probably not the best judge of this game's gameplay lol. I did manage to get 10/10 on the first stage though !

i can't believe im late to this instant classic .....

the character runs a lot faster than i expected and it made me chuckle a bit lol. I was left feeling like there should have been more to it. It's entirely RNG based, so once I found the button the first time, I had no real interest in trying to get a faster run.

Congrats on making your first published project !

the math is for sure the one people find the hardest lol. You're right that the font isn't the best, I might update it and change it to something bigger and more readable

the best score I was able to get was 1. I think this game has potential, but I have a few critiques:

• Firstly, the drawing mechanic doesn't function the best. Drawing a path too slowly will cause you to make a really janky paths with weird bumps on them that the ball gets stuck on. Draw too fast, and there are gaps, which the ball can get stuck in or just fall through entirely.
• It feels weird for my score to be punished for going fast. In order to get my high score of 1, i just collected a couple stars and then slowly and tediously moved the ball into the goal. It's much more fun ( to me at least ) to flick and kick the ball around in a panic, trying to get as many stars as fast as possible, but the game punishes you for playing in this way. I feel like the timer should either have no bearing on the score, or add your remaining seconds to the score. perhaps something like 'score = (stars * 5) + time remaining'
• Another player said an eraser would be good, I could agree to that
• Flicking the ball is inconsistent, and seems basically impossible to kick it in any specific direction. I avoided using  the mechanic because it only caused trouble. ( playing again it might be entirely random ? )
• The first time I played, I didn't get to read the instructions because I clicked on the game window ( habit to make sure my computer has it focused ) but clicking on the instructions anywhere closes them immediately. It should have a PLAY button somewhere that you have to specifically press
• SOUND. Sound is half of a game, and this game is entirely missing sound !

I think the game has potential, and I think the art is real cute. Sorry if i come across as mean, I just like analyzing the games I play. keep up the good work !

my highscore is 102! fun simple little game. Feels very clean and polished too with no outstanding issues. The only real thing that bothered me is I wish there was a little more feedback when you make the coffee. Right now it only plays a sound, that's really short and quiet and very easy to miss. I wish there was something visual, maybe a particle or even showing our little bird guy holding a cup.

i tried to add accessibility to the color puzzle, it will tell you the answer within the last second, so colorblind people can still do it so long as they have quick reflexes. It's not a perfect solution, its too tight of a window, but having it any bigger meant non-colorblind people would just wait and not even try to actually solve it. color as a mechanic is certainly hard to work with

u got this

Feels pretty good once you get used to it. I beat it on the DIABOLICAL mode. The art is cute and the sound is funny. Some critique that I have:

• Since the mouse is never used in the actual gameplay, its annoying to be forced to use it to restart. It's annoying that it gets captured too.
• There isn't too much difference between the 3 levels, it would have been a good opportunity to make something wildly different for each one.
• This is mostly my fault but I did not realize there was a dash until I had already struggled on diabolical mode for a while. I guess some in world UI telling you the controls would have been more obvious.
• A specific gripe I see in a TON of web games but the "Exit" button on web just crashes the game. In godot, you can use "if OS.has_feature("web"):" to check if the game is running on the web or not, which can be used to enable / disable the quit button. This is not a big deal I just notice it all the time
• The camera sometimes doesn't shift down far enough to see what's below your player, it can be difficult to line up the jumps on the couple of times you use the jump pad that's just above the bottom of the map

Overall though I liked it, and it felt good to finally beat the DIABOLICAL mode

i liked the art, but this game has a lot of jank that needs to be polished. Everything I noticed:

• The light shadow casting is buggy, and none of the levels look right or cast shadows in the way you'd expect
• Falling off the platform in Level 2 restarts from the tutorial
• The light mechanic is slow and inconsistent ( the best strategy was just to ignore the mechanic entirely and move as fast as possible )
• There's no pause in between levels. After beating level 1, i'm still going to be holding right, which makes you fall off and die immediately into level 2 ( which as stated restarts the entire game instead of the singular level )
• Level 5 there is a second duck for some reason, feels like 2 player objects were spawned, with only 1 being the real player.
• There's a duck hover mechanic, but none of the levels make use of it.
• Instant restart when you lose feels jarring ( should play a sound and wait a second or two )
• The music restarting every time the level changes / is reloaded is very jarring too ( in godot i recommend using an autoload to hold the music players so that scene changes don't disrupt them
• the background doesn't bother me personally but i can understand why the other people here find it uncomfortable to look at

I don't mean to be rude by giving all these complaints, just hoping to give critique so that your future games can be better and better !

i liked it, its very simple but it really forces you to optimize your route  to win. I like that there are a couple bonus levels too.

you’re sick…

added the fullscreen button! although ill admit im against adding the ability to type i think it would make that minigame too easy

no

you should have probably started with that, that's an entirely different question. I don't know much about chromebook (i wasn't even aware chromeOS was linux based until i looked it up just now) but if you can figure out how to run the linux x86_64 from the download page it might be able to open https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/l5l9q2/how_do_i_run_a_x86_64_file/

chromebooks are generally very locked down though so even if you manage to get the program to run I have no guarantees the software will function correctly

if u can add video sources using this "lightstream" then it should work the same as obs. if not, you should probably just use obs tbh

thank you! glad u enjoyed :)

marble i dont remember 

stone bricks can be crafted from stone at the furnace

i dont have any plans of adding anything else to the game. its made in Godot 4.2 with C++ handling the heavier scripts

you can set the blink state on any sprite, it looks like this

set it to the X and it won't blink

the open eye means the sprite will only appear when the character isnt blinking

the second closed eye means the sprite will only appear when the character IS blinking

i knew you would be here and i will never ever do this. sacrilege to the platformer genre to do this. foolish demand. 

really cool little experience, however i did get a nasty game crash and lost all my progress, so i haven't beaten it. the game crashed after i accidentally pressed z twice getting into the ship. it flies fine, but once you try to land it will attempt to land 2 ships at once which causes the crash. i wished this game could save ur place !

egg is pretty cool. i did think the combat sections were a little annoying and were distracting from the puzzles. i also think the egg being able to float should maybe be informed to the player a little better, i beat the second level by abusing the pickup hitbox jank to go around the corner in the broken bridge room. also in the last room (with the black spikes that turn into enemies) it wasn't totally obvious that I should have brought the egg there, making the entire level a little confusing since I never knew what the "goal" was and just had to guess. pretty cool game overall tho

waxweaver does NOT have the MIT license, they are both missing licenses (which means I should probably add one). For both of them though, you're allowed to play with it and reference them when creating your own project. If you make a game using the code as a starting point however, just made sure by the end its significantly different and that it gives proper credit. I'm also not comfortable with anybody using it for commercial purposes, so don't do that

ye, you can always message me wherever !

lol i love little squishy white ball characters, im glad i was able to inspire you ! waxweaver's source code is available on github, if you were curious and wanted to poke around (some portions are a little messy however)

"wax" was already established as one of the first items you get in the game, and personally I just think the word "weaver" is cool. The game is about creating, so you are the "weaver". And putting wax and weaver together for the title just sounded cool.

its good that ur tryin something smaller, I like the fish character. i will say: actually being able to finish a project is a completely separate skill and by far the most important one. And the only way to practice it is to finish games! It doesn't matter if it looks like crap or if its filled with spaghetti code, or if its not even that fun of a game. So long as you're able to at least finish the project, your skills will develop. I say all this because I looked at your youtube channel and it reminds me a lot of myself 5ish years ago, when I just created one little dinky prototype after another, none of which ever got past the "everything is the default godot icon" stage. While I got a lot of good coding practice in doing it that way, I feel like I only truly started learning how to game dev after I managed to finish a game. I couldn't have made waxweaver without the project management skills i learned from all the released games prior.

sorry if the advice is a bit unsolicited lol. i hope to see fish world adventure coming soon to itch.io and newgrounds perhaps

hi! sorry, I'm a bit late replying to this as this post got auto-flagged for spam and I didn't see it.

I got the idea for the gravity mechanics a long time ago probably 2017ish. At the time I had zero idea how to actually make games, so it was just idea guy nonsense. It came from wanting a space terraria type game ( i really didn't like starbound ) and for it to have a more immersive world. It's impossible to create a block based game on a circular gravity planet without doing some trickery, so I had the idea to just make the planet square and have the gravity be rigid instead.

in 2021, I tried making a version of the idea, when I didn't know godot very well. This one used tilemaps, and its pretty ass. Tile maps are mostly bad for sandbox games because Godot doesn't have the option to not redraw after changing a single tile, so generating a world that's for example 100 by 100 blocks means 10,000 draw calls which is extremely laggy. If you can chunk things out and draw them separately you can generate huge worlds with one 1 draw call per chunk on the screen.

To actually answer ur second question tho, while I used tilemaps for the 2021 original project, I had learned not to use them by the time the 2024 version came around. Waxweaver just has every block texture loaded in memory at all times, and whenever the world is updated, it redraws the effected chunks. It does this by generating a 64 by 64 blank image (8x8 blocks), reading the data of the world, and then stamps the corresponding block textures onto it.

Most of the intensive scripts in waxweaver ( chunk drawing, world generation, lightmap drawing, chunk simulation, world saving ) are done in C++ rather than godot's gdscript. GDScript is an awesome and easy to use language, but its very slow when its comes to big for loops. Originally the game didn't using C++, and it ran decently well,  but I wanted to make this game run on web, and the web performance was NOT good. C++ speeds up things by a huge margin, it still chugs on web a bit but it leagues better. I had never used C++, so it was pretty challenging for me to get everything working (especially on web GOD)

honestly, it's probably a good idea to avoid using a premade engine for these types of games, they are pretty intensive and require a good amount of gamer knowledge to pull off well.  as for design things you should avoid, I really have no idea! There's so many things you can do it's hard for me to point at any specific thing to avoid, other that stuff that just applies to any game, like avoiding overscope or taking too much control away from the player.

I'm going to answer both of the next questions simultaneously: YES and YES. I guess that's what you should avoid, DON'T MAKE GAMES ABOUT SPACE!! The original 2017 idea was square planets that you could travel between, not by menu, but by getting in a ship and flying there. For waxweaver, I scoped it down to just 1 solar system, then eventually again to just the 1 singular planet. Doing multiple planets was just too ambitious, it took so long to just do the one singular planet. Also, it just wasn't as fun as it sounds to fly a ship to a nearby planet. There was nothing to do in space, flying between planets was janky since the game is 2D ( flying was really just staring at a map menu it sucked ) So as much as I wanted to make the ambitious space game, I found it just ended up being a more fun experience without it. ( technically, the planets kind of merged. There was gonna be a forest, desert, and snow planet. But I just merged them into one for a more interesting world overall )

the main menu theme was made in 2022 for a unrelated project that I just reused to waxweaver, I believe most of the synths used are from a totally legal copy of the AX73 vst. The main menu theme is the only song in the game made by me, the rest of the soundtrack can be found here.

your base is pretty sick, i like the armor stand pedestals and the cool bonsai tree lookin' thing

iron was added in v0.13 bro

played this last night with my partner ( but they fell asleep before i found all the animals and saw the ending )

the vibe and presentation is just immaculate and silly. and the lil speech when you first talk to Shape really spoke to me. ive been kinda struggling with my creativity lately and it was just the thing i needed to hear and just the little game i needed to play. thanks for making this :D