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Oooo if you have any recommendations of other game poems that you like I’d love to hear them!

Poetry in games has been rattling around my mind a surprising amount lately. Gameplay loops and poetry both share this trait of rewarding repetition and study, I’d love to explore that at some point.

This is sick!! I know I mentioned it on bluesky but the sprite stacking looks so good. Having to squash zombies to get points and making the zombies damage the car was really neat. I love how even though the map stays the same, there's this constant ebb and flow between wanting to hit the zombies and wanting to avoid them. Took me a second to figure out the drift mechanics but damn do they feel cool 😎

This is the best I've been able to do so far. One day I'll crack 100K. 

Me and my gf will often play point and click games together, voicing the different characters ourselves. I literally can't think of a better fit for that than something like this. Its such a cool idea, can't wait to see where you take it!

I really enjoyed this. Its a very potent depiction of an experience I've only had a few times in my life - being awake in the city before everyone else, and having nowhere to be. I love how at times you play the eye, wandering around the skyline, looking for something that might provoke a thought. I found it really striking that as the lights are turning on one by one throughout the game you can digest each one, but when they turn on all at once towards the end they stop communicating to you.

Really cool experience, I don't think I've played a game poem before so thank you for introducing them to me! 

Hahaha I know exactly what you mean, I really love being in spots where you have to decide whether you can intervene and fix the vibe or whether you’ve just gotta leave the situation alone.

I’m glad that you enjoyed the bad vibe meter thing! To be honest with you I feel that its one of the weaker parts of the design at the minute. The numbers get big and move slowly so it lacks an immediacy that I suspect would make the game and theme resound a bit more. It’s something I’d like to revisit after the jam!

Ty for playing! I hope the memories of your 20s were welcome ones (its about 50/50 on fun/embarrassing for me lol)

welcome to the leaderboard btw 😎

Thank you!! I’m hoping that moving through the party starts out awkward and claustrophobic and becomes a little bit more natural as you play. Something like a memoir to my gangly teenage self lol.

and the first leaderboard entry from my gf! (Lauren HS)

Here's where we're at 😎

Such a lovely game!! Its designed with a very generous touch, feels like it just wants to grab you by the hand and show you delightful things. 

Super gripping, by the second or third area I was being pulled through by no will of my own. Very direct in its writing which feels more necessary as our times become less subtle. Sorry I'm late to the party, but thank you for making this (:

This game definitely rocks, but I'm especially grateful to it for introducing me to the rest of your work. Really excited to play through some more stuff!

games rock

This is an insane thing to have achieved inside of pico8, incredible work!

The presentation is obviously wonderful, the procedural animation looks so natural. The ecosystem is really compelling to be inside, too. Being the second littlest guy is very exciting, especially once you start zipping around the map. I love how the different predators encourage different styles of play, it creates a really natural cycle in the pacing that matches the atmosphere of the game.

I know tadpoles aren't quite frogs, but as a frog lover you still get extra credit.

Thanks for making and sharing this, so cool!

Thanks for letting me know about this, looks very handy! I've been exploring pico-8 lately and might use it again for this jam, but you can never have too many tools in the belt 😎

Thank you! These look really cool, I'll dig into them this week.

Hey everyone!

This’ll be my first 7DRL challenge and I’m a little conscious that I don’t have much experience playing roguelikes (I’m mostly familiar with Qud and Michael Brough’s work). I’d love to cram a little before the exam, does anyone have recommendations for what they consider to be “essential” entries in the canon? I’d especially love to try some games from previous 7DRL challenges.

Appreciate any pointers, thank you!!

That's a great UX suggestion about clearing the sonar, a couple other people have mentioned similar issues so it'd be a big improvement. I reckon it could be squeezed into a v1.1 without too much trouble!

The procedural generation was really fun but SO token hungry! I'd love to revisit the idea in a different engine to explore more ways that the levels can overlap - obstructing some areas, giving you spaces that you can look into but not drill into, going up and down between two floors (kind of like what you suggested on bluesky!).

I really appreciate you taking the time to play the game and leave such a thoughtful comment, thank you!

Thank you! This worked for me

Have been excited to play this since I first saw it! I've only been able to get up to 2-3 so far but it's very addictive so I don't think I'll be able to put it down for very long lol. 

I was surprised at how puzzly it ended up feeling. Trying to route to the tenants without getting pinned in by the zombies was really engaging, especially as the layout of the levels got more intricate. Some of the seemingly obvious decisions have a lot of depth to them also, at some points I would spend a life over a bullet because the respawn gave me a better chance of getting where I was going for fewer resources. That tradeoff felt cool.

It goes without saying, but the presentation is just incredible. The music is gonna be stuck in my head (:

This is really firing on all cylinders, really remarkable that you were able to squeeze this out of PICO-8!

The boss design is great. The 3 bosses each felt like they were focused on different styles of combat (AOE, ranged, dueling) and yet they each also progressed some larger ideas that were woven between them (AOE attacks by Dhriti, followed by AOE attacks across little islands by Shriv). The difficulty was tuned to perfectly match the scope of the game. Each boss took me 2-3 attempts as I learnt the patterns and developed some strategies, it felt really good.

The writing was great too. There's only a handful of lines but they manage to imbue the world and the characters with a lot of substance, and the ending is very cathartic. The sparseness that is required for a PICO-8 game is turned into a strength of the storytelling.

Really really enjoyed this, thank you for making it.

Tysm!! Really admire your work so that means a lot :) 

I really love this!

The theming of building the constellations is super comfy, I can't believe how much heavy lifting the background stars do in portraying the night sky lol.

The system is great too. The early puzzles have such a limited range of choices that you pick up the rules really quickly, and then all of the more interesting properties unfold nice and naturally over the course of the game. The subtle restrictions around line of sight, jump distance, and intersecting lines build up to some fun surprises that you surface really well in the puzzles. I especially like the puzzles that iterate on the same constellation but move the green stars around.

It has that magic property where you can build intuition with the system just by messing around, and then the intuition eventually drops a solution in your lap. Feels so good!

Really cool game!!

Link to Adam's talk!

This is so sick!! I'm not much of a shoot-em-up player so I haven't been able to beat it yet but its so much fun that I'm determined to try.

The enemy variety is great, especially when they start combining their movement patterns in interesting ways. Great work on the presentation too, the clouds are really pretty :)

Great game, I love how much agency the design gives you. Balancing the risk reward of basically every tile at once is super addictive, and its so cool how the objective slowly tips from "maximise the score of every blue" to "don't get boxed in by the reds" without the rules ever changing.

Tysm!

It's a little unintuitive at first, but the cursor can only move around the border of the grid. That might've been the problem you were bumping into!

Thanks for the heads up, I'll see if there's anything I can do to improve the UX.  

Thanks bossman!

Latching on at the sides was a pretty late addition but it opened up waaaay more puzzles, really happy I stumbled across it.

That's interesting about level 9! I think it asks you to compose like 3-4 ideas in a row, which is a much bigger ask than any of the others before it. Specifically, visualising a structure in one location that you have to build in another is a big step up.

It still takes me like 10 mins to solve the last level lol.

Congrats, thats so exciting! I'll be sure to check it out :)

Thank you for all of these kind words!!

Really great feedback too. Will definitely include a visual indicator and do some thinking about giving more player agency over upgrade placement :)

Thanks for sharing the vod! That was a lot of fun, and really helpful to see someone’s first impressions. I’ll make sure to visit the stream in the future!

You have a great memory! That helps a lot, thank you. I'll track those down to fix after the jam.

Great point on the dice feedback to! Especially in contrast to the feedback from hovering over the dice its not very noticeable. Definitely worth improving :)

WHAT. A. BANGER. It is satisfying to move, its satisfying to shoot, somehow its even satisfying to get hit. I love the take on the theme too, attaching attacks to movement makes the game so frenetic and showing the whole thing on a big loop lets you strategise about position and timing. Those worked together to keep me locked in 100% of the time. The loop feels like it has so much combo potential, I would love to see where you guys take it if you ever continue development!

Really cool entry, polished to perfection. Thank you for making it!!

Such a cool entry!! "staying in the loop" with gossip is a really clever take on theme and there were a lot of unique ideas that I haven't really seen in a game before. Jarbling the text based on how close you were was a great way to simulate eavesdropping, and it made it very fun and challenging to try and pull out the details I needed. Perfectly captured that feeling of snooping around!

Thank you for making it!

Woah, this is an incredible entry!! The presentation is obviously gorgeous and the level and game design just blew me away. It was really clever to just keep pairs of levels that you have to solve, each one is a really compelling and deep puzzle that wouldn't have worked if they were all together. The way that the mechanics are taught in the first handful of levels, by letting fail, retry, and improve felt so much more satisfying than a regular tutorial. I'm struggling to imaging the galaxy brain it must have taken to design the level lol.

Such a cool entry, thank you for making it!!

Woah, this is gorgeous!! I haven't seen that kind of angular line art in a game before and it works so well! Really striking. The theme and the world are really distinct - I love how all of the characters have likes and dislikes, how you're trying to save your camel instead of getting the most money, and how you slowly progress through the loop while the wistful music plays. It gives such a unique to the experience. The take on the concept is clever too, going around the loop lets you get invested into the world and rewards you for paying attention!

Relentry, thank you for making it!!

Very cool entry! Having the movement be turn based makes this a an interesting take on theme. Ensuring that you are timed up with your past selves becomes more of a puzzle than a flurry of execution and it gives the game a relaxing and thoughtful vibe.  The art is gorgeous too, you manage to get so much texture out of the 1 bit style, its really impressive.

Great entry, thanks for making it!!

Really cool entry! Thats the first time I've seen the top down view that rotates with the player and once I got used to it it was very sick, makes the whole game feel really dynamic and impactful. The attention to detail really sells it too, the way the camera zooms in and out based on speed, and how the bike noises respond to player input. I'm also gonna have to keep it in my bookmarks so I have instant access to the wilhelm scream button lol. Great entry, thanks for making it!

Thank you for playing and for taking the time to leave some kind words! If you're able to remember what the bugs were I'd love to hear em, it'll help me get them fixed after the jam :)