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Thanks for the response! I will look into all of this, I should be able to make it work better. I'm sorry it didn't work out, but your experience is really valuable for us and I really appreciate the time you've taken to explain 😁 

Ah I'm sorry you had issues with it. What were the issues? I was active on Discord answering everyone's questions - that's your first place to go when you're struggling with something! 

This jam requires a web build

Thank you! 😁 I think there's a bunch of room to expand, it feels a bit like a "toy" rather than a game at the minute, but I enjoyed writing - it's not something I do very often 😂

Yeah I think it was a fun little toy, in it's current state I don't think I'd call it a game 😂 to expand, I'll be making it a mobile app and using on-device ML - that way you don't need an internet connection. I think it needs a proper branching narrative with multiple endings. A few different ways to use the AI, e.g. "you need to convince your neighbour that you're not doing anything untoward". I could switch that over to a text message type view, which would mean there's a few different "sections", adding to the variety a little bit. Maybe even incorporate some map based AR stuff e.g. "you need to do this ritual in a park". Maybe you get a "text message" notification with something new to do after a couple of days, that sort of thing!

Thank you, I really appreciate the kind words! The bugs actually happen due to the Google Gemini API request timing out, I'm exploring ways to do it on-device with no external request at all. Better for the environment, faster, probably a little more consistent too 😁 

Congrats on submitting! The music is quite nice and chill, and the core concept of circular Pong is interesting. The controls were intuitive and felt pretty good. I also liked that the score is displayed in the middle of the screen, that's exactly where my eyes are most of the time. Well done for not taking the usual option and dumping it out to a corner!

There are a few things that could be improved, however. Initially, I found it quite difficult to see what was going on, and the lack of an automatic reset after losing was frustrating. The checkerboard background pattern was a bit hard on the eyes, and the background change at 20 points was a bit jarring and threw me off. The power-up didn't actually end up adding all that much to it, because I found that I just ignored any extra balls 🫠

Overall, it's a decent effort for a game jam, and with a few tweaks it could be even more enjoyable!

Thanks for the kind words! I think animated text adds quite a lot to this style of game, it adds a bit of juice that you wouldn't usually get.

I did forget to set it to loop, such a silly mistake but I didn't play it for long enough with the sound on to notice!

I would really love to add some sort of sharing mechanic, or maybe even something like a "playground" mode where you can tweak the wording slightly and see what difference it makes.

Thank you! 😁 That's a good bug to catch actually, I always just pressed the right letters 😂 definitely taking it further, I have so many more ideas for it, and I quite enjoyed the creative writing challenge! The development was so much more chaotic than you'd think, I basically only worked on the code on the last day of the jam 😬

ha, thank you! I tried to keep the AI use absolutely minimal, it only generates the "strange powerup" and gives you a creative score. Everything else was written by me! So it's not like AI actually did anything for me, it wasn't used to generate assets or code or anything (because it is very bad at that).

I'm sorry it took so long before it ran properly, the gemini api request sometimes just takes AGES. It will eventually timeout and let you try again, but it's something I'm looking into.

Oh no, I forgot to set the music to loop 😭 didn't appear in my testing of course 😂

Thanks for playing! 

I made a silly little text adventure that uses AI to take your natural language and turn it into a score and gives you a nice little "Strange Powerup" (which was the theme of the jam). I think it worked pretty well! AI is, naturally, terrible at everything it does - so there's a lot of jank in the responses. This is the only way I can see it being used "creatively" in a game lmao.

https://wayfarergames.itch.io/abominable-butlers

I can't see any analytics for any game jams I've hosted. Is there something wrong on Itch's side? I am experiencing the same with different accounts, and other people I know that have hosted jams are having the same issue. 

That's intentional, that's where the challenge is!

That's all done with Spine! https://esotericsoftware.com/

It was the intention to reset them on death, but time got the better of us 😂 there were a bunch of things that came up last minute that we were scrabbling to add, change and fix as the deadline came around!

sprite change between skeletons

That's a pretty good solution, yeah! 😁 so long as you make it super obvious.

we're planning to add an undo button

I probably wouldn't ever use an undo button tbh, and definitely didn't stop to think about what I'd done. I just dive in and try things, but I'm certainly not the target market here - I don't ever play this sort of game xD

 It's a stylistic choice.

Ah I assumed the sprite was just because jam time got away from you, if it's a stylistic choice that's fine. Again, more target market/actual player mismatch xD 

We chatted on stream about my thoughts, but I'll post what I remember here so you've got it written down!

Generally love the style of gameplay, and the high score chasing feels great. Getting those big combos is 👌

Broadly, I don't think I'd have had as much fun if you weren't there talking about the design. I assumed the aim was to make myself as big as possible, and got a little frustrated by the slow movement speed when I was big. I hadn't really grokked that there was a tradeoff between being big and being small, and that a lot of my actions could make me smaller and more nimble. I like that in theory, but I think some warmup "levels" where you really make that clear to the player would be useful. 

Once I did understand that, though, boy did I get going. I've revisited it a couple of times since playing on stream, and I can't express how much I love the feeling of eating 10 slimes that I've carefully positioned into a big row, using all the mechanics I have available for changing size/speed/etc. I think that works really well, and if you were to revisit it, you should push that mechanic far more. Tell the player, make sure they're doing that right from the beginning. Maybe after 20-30 seconds of gameplay to get used to the controls, you might always spawn a bunch in a row, so the player gets that satisfaction early? I feel like that's the "core" fun of the game tbh, it's awesome.

It's also important to note that I never paid attention to my health 🙃 not even a little bit. Often when I died I thought "argh, my health must've been low but I had no idea". I usually like to put the health somewhere near the player themselves, because that's where they are focusing their attention. One to think about for future jams!

Overall this is great, and I just hope enough people figured out that being small is also desirable, so they engage with all of the mechanics that are there.

so this took the "player changes size" mechanic and made it... really fucking clever, wow. Puzzle challenge was perfect for a jam game - I could feel my brain cells getting a workout without ever really getting properly stuck - I'd die a few times and then have the "aha" moment pretty quickly, which made me keep playing!

I have a few minor issues:

• being off-beat wasn't particularly intuitive, and I felt like that sort of puzzle was mostly solved by accident or because I just used the potions in the correct order by chance, rather than feeling like I had solved it.
• manual reset gets a little tiring, I'm not too sure why it's included but it may be a genre thing that I don't have experience with 😂
• always forward-facing character feels a bit jank

To be clear these are very minor nitpicks that would be expected from a jam game it's... it's just that the game is so good that they are the only thing I really have to talk about!

This isn't necessarily my favourite type of game, I'm not good at the thinky stuff, but I can see that people that enjoy this sort of thing would have a great time with it. It's a really polished entry, great job!

Yeah this was incredibly creative. Why can't I have ideas this good 😂 love the "scale = balancing scales" takes on the theme, and this was certainly the funniest I've played so far.

I would love to see the scales be made more prominent - I understand why they are where they are, but I found myself focusing on the problem queue text rather than the scales, when I wasn't reading the problems!

The problems themselves worked really well as random generation. There's a bit of jank, but that only adds to the experience! Plus, the push/pull between having to read the problems and respond to them quickly enough creates some really interesting gameplay - I did not think I'd be playing a game that tested me on my reading speed ;) 

Great job, loved it. I didn't mention the framing yet, which is arguably the best part of the game - being assigned as the judge of all things via email is excellent!

Really impressed that this is your first game! It oozes style, the art and music work really well together to give exactly the vibe you're going for I think. 

The gameplay is lots of fun, I adore physics-y type gameplay, and the inertia and bouncing gives just the right amount of challenge in controls for it to be fun for me. The difficulty curve is a little all over the place, it gets harder and easier seemingly at random - but that sort of thing comes with experience to be honest, and it's not a deal-breaker. 

Looking forward to seeing things you make in the future, I've given you both a follow on itch. 

Thanks for playing, and thank you for all the kind feedback! This crash actually happens right at the end of the game, the only thing you're missing is a cool credits sequence 😂 we can't figure out why it's happening though 🫠

It's such a bummer the CDN expired on this, leaving it unplayable and disqualified. It is a completely different pace to most of the other games I've place, it's slow and chilled and lovely. The presentation is stellar, the art style perfectly fits the style of gameplay. Same with the music.

It's a unique and creative take on the theme, too, which makes it even more of a shame! Most people (including us) just make the player change scale and call it a day... 

Another banger from team arcy/yollie/slowbro! This was a lot of fun, though it's incredibly difficult to play with a trackpad so I didn't actually get past the first level ;) sorry... It was the triple click to make it permanent, in your position I'd remove that option and design around smaller gaps.

The scale mechanic is really well integrated tbh, and the context of the game is witty. Was that prox I heard on the intro? That's a real GDB dream team there!

I don't really have much else to say, there's not a lot to complain about here. There's so much style here, and the momentum feels great. Good job

Requires a command to get working on macOS - chmod +x /path/to/Mac.app/Contents/MacOS/TheShrinkingPlanet

Really fun to play with, the movement was difficult to get used to, but I did work out how to control it in the end. I think that fast paced frenetic nature really sells the game well, it felt so smooth to control and there weren't any issues. The art style worked pretty well, it was clear to see what was going on which is good. I reckon you could squeeze a few more mechanics out of this and have a really fun little arcade game. Good job 😁

This was so creative, such a great take on the theme in a way that wasn't just "the player changes size" 😂 it's really well executed, too. There's a lot of polish here, even down to the fact that the menu teaches you how to play the game lmao - though I will admit to nearly being defeated by the menu... 

Thank you so much!

No, unreal engine 5 removed web builds. Sorry!

Hey! Just a quick note to remind everyone that submission is done through the discord server for this jam. 

Your game won't be played by the judges and you won't be eligible for prizes if you haven't joined the discord and followed the instructions there. 

You have to submit your hyplay game's app id, not your user token. There are a few people who have joined and submitted their user token or access token! 

Ah, if that happens again in the future, we can generate a late submission link and add the right project to the jam for you!

Because the whole point of a game jam is that it is a creative challenge with a deadline. Everyone else in the jam has followed these rules, so it's not fair to allow games that have had longer. 

You published it 45 days ago, with devlogs. Devlogs about the game that you say you didn't make until the jam started... You even submitted it to jams in April  😂 come on man, all this info is public and very easy to find.

Thank you! It's an impressive intro for sure, but yeah nobody reads descriptions unfortunately 🫠

Hey, there are people as young as 13 joining this jam - please can you put [NSFW] in front of the game's name to make it clear that younger participants shouldn't play? Thank you!

Doing God's work finding submissions to disqualify 🫡 I'll give this a go later but wanted to thank you!

Clearly wasn't made for the jam. Disqualified.

Clearly wasn't made for the jam. Disqualified.