itch.io

Nice little game. I figured it was insta-fail when you saw one of the animals which didnt turn out to be the case. "Thanks for the assets Kenny!"

I got 5:30  those white things at the back of the store really eat up time. Sounds would have made a significant difference in this game. BTW, there is a bug in the game where the player still has control when they are using the machine but the time stops. This can be abused :)

This was a good entry. the music especially in the regular levels I found quite pleasant. Arrow direction was a bit awkward for me as I expected it to align somehow with the grid, but thats just me, not something I would knock you for, if you did it my way someone else would just say the opposite :) Nice work!

This was a good entry. the music especially in the regular levels I found quite pleasant. Arrow direction was a bit awkward for me as I expected it to align somehow with the grid, but thats just me, not something I would knock you for, if you did it my way someone else would just say the opposite :) Nice work!

nice. a counter on how many of the good bugs you got would have lent a bit to replayability. but its a complete entry. nice work.

Lost some of the story because the prompt seems to close on the last part of each characters message. I *think* I got the ending? but it doesnt seem I could do anything after so I just closed it down. Cool story!

damn dude, this is tough. I dont really understand the purpose of the spray if you cant kill the monsters. Also I died a lot by jumping into things that were rendered just off the top of the screen. Lots of promise just needs a bit more polish on the gameplay.  Everything else is 5s for me.

Music was good but didnt quite fit the Gameboy aesthetic. The game was great and I though tI was stuck at one point. Now take back your fire clouds! *blow*

man thats hard. I think it might have been better served with just 1 button that picks up and drops, unless theres a mechanic I missed.  Player should have had some way to move faster as well and to be able to pick up boxes without standing directly UDLR from them. Solid.

I was actually (maybe strangely) having a good time with this until I accidentally sent my top off the left side of the screen. Combining carrying the top, throwing the top, and throwing the apples was a good mix. For some reason my brain tells me a jump would have been nice.

I got through 8 waves.  I dont think I managed to kill a single snail... damn.

Im guessing there is no end to the game? I swear I cleared something like 30 rooms or so and it seemed like the rooms started repeating. Was nice to get a change of music though somewhere around halfway through that grind. Wish the sword was more useful.  Great game!

ah...  but did you find any of the spiders? :)

Thanks for the amazing feedback!

great art and music. Wish I could skip the into dialogue. Was unsure what the end goal was but ended up with like 6 monkeys chasing me around and had no way to lose them. Good game though.

Im not sure if I beat it or lost. :) I got to what I think was the boss, got behind him and blasted the heck out of him and then the game restarted?  In any case, I really liked the walking animation of the main character.  

I didnt so much mind the repetitive gameplay, but the ultra repetitive music made it tough to get all the way through. I did anyways though. Not sure how I feel about the story though.

Somehow I got lucky on the first apartment. I assumed the instructions were from the start dialog so I was trying things that looked like 10 liter bottles of oil and a bag of tools, Couldnt get through the firemans apartment. 

Not quite sure the relevance of getting the coffee cups.  Overall a pretty simple game and certainly fits the theme.

Not a bad entry here. Got a chuckle out of some of the dialog for sure. I would write more, but Im off to mime school. 

Watch out for his meatos! It took a moment to realize the penalty for just spamming the quicktime event stuff. Got both endings.

I got the true ending. Some strange situations in which things either respawned or didnt un-spawn (hearts) but an overall solid entry. 

Daamn, good dame. I made one of the best darn pies ever. I dont know if it was supposed to end on a black screen with some sick tunes going on in the background, but great game either way.  Seems there is placeholder art of "bug spray" in the living room? :)

Not a bad entry. The movement slowness when the enemies are moving threw me off, but a great entry. definitely feels like an early GB game

Got stuck on what I think was stage 3.  Not sure I fully grasped the mechanic.

Not bad.  I thought I was stuck for a minute until I realized that you could shoot the "switches". Overall a nice game  with nice graphics.

Definitely keep making submissions. A great starter effort. Doesn't quite meet the Gameboy terms since the menu has to be navigated with the mouse, but Keep at it.

Art is certainly nice. Too bad you didnt get more done before deadline.

Definitely will be keeping an eye on your stuff.

Check out Aerostat if you get a chance.

Ah, the only playable with a controller thing killed it for me. Something to think about for future jams. Make it playable by us non-controller wackos :). Initial start screen looked good.

Would love your thoughts on Aerostat.

Dude the music an sfx are top notch! Definitely feels great.  Im often bad at these games and wanted to see what would happen if/when I got over 6 successful stool punches but couldnt will myself to do it.

Would love your thoughts on Aerostat! :)

This came out sick! Arrow keys werent doing me any favors at first as I kept scrolling the game window off screen, but definitely a good game. I want to re-try with a controller.

If you havent already, a quick play of Aerostat would be appreciated.

Our ranking somehow went down after the recalculation. Oh well, I dont envy anyone's position in trying to manage people's expectations when it comes to these types of things. 

Congrats to everyone who participated. This was out first GMTK and while not perfect, it's got some really good things going for it. 

Everyone take away your lessons from this jam, and you can count on us competing with you all again next year. @bitdecaygames

much appreciated. You made it to the last puzzle. Well done. Our intention was an overlap of "only one shot" as well as "only one input" (for all the characters. We do often find the puzzle solving trends to drown out the theme adherence, but I call that a win :)  thanks for your rating. Btw I'm a huge fan of survival horror and all things zombie, so your game is right up my alley.

That would be super cool to get some more plugs! Ill check your game out when I get back to the homestead.
thanks for the review.

I definitely like the end result here. I'll have to check it out in action!

nice! I definitely wasnt aware of this jam but I'm definitely interested in checking out some of the games from it. Cheers!

So I am the artist of a somewhat long formed team called BitDecayGames based out of Denver.  I wanted to make this post based on some feedback we have had on our game, as well as to my own revelation when presenting the idea to the team, to give a little information about the art style used in our GMTK 2019 submission "Ka-bob"  You can try it out by clicking on the image below, or at this link. https://bitdecaygames.itch.io/ka-bob

We have been doing Jams for a number of years now and have been involved in LudumDare and Global Game Jam  events almost exclusively. But given the recent reduced cadence of the LDJams, we decided to fill our our schedule with our first Game Makers Tool Kit jam. Here is a little bit of content around  the decision, and execution of our artistic approach.

A bit of history about myself real quick to set the story... I've been dabbling in digital art ever since elementary school in the 80's.  My first experience (aside from Logo), was on the 'Apple II e' using software I cant recall, and really getting the hang of it with NeoChrome on an 'Atari ST' . Discovering Paintshop and Photoshop in the years to come changed my world, not counting 3dStudio Max, Maya, and Blender even later. Needless to say, I came up through the ranks of the ever changing  landscape of computer capabilities and the art software available. Just as an FYI, for bit graphics today, my preference is Pyxel Edit. If you havent heard of it, you really should go check them out. I especially like its animation component.

  Anyways, back to the Jam..  So with all of us being in the US and have careers,  starting the jam at 1:00 PM was just not going to work for most of us. We accepted that we weren't going to realistically be able to start until 5 or 6 PM on Friday so we were already behind the curve. So after getting the theme, I announced to the team that I wanted to restrict myself to the CGA palette for the jam.  Now, even though I'm 10 years older than most of the rest of the team, I was still quite surprised to find that most of them had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. For anyone reading this that doesn't know, there are a few CGA color variations that all use only 4 highly contrasting colors, but the most recognizable is the White, Black, Magenta, and Cyan variation. After a GIS session and talking about my own history with games in this palette, I ignorantly stated "Given that we realistically only have about 40 hours for the Jam, restricting myself to 4 colors should to allow me to churn out the art more quickly"....

The majority of our sprite sizes were 80x80px in terms of art, though characters were in a  160x160 bounding box to account for alignment and animation frames that extend beyond the 80x80px frame. This is particularly true for the main player and to account for the skewer. Again , for anyone not familiar with CGA graphics, using large(ish) sprite or image sizes and getting creative with dithering, you can actually get a pretty wide variety of shades and tones out of just 4 colors. Attached is an example. 

While end results can be very rewarding, the process of manually dithering sprites is about as far from "fast" as you can get. Maybe there are bit graphic tools out there that automate this process, but not Pyxel Edit. Oh well.. I had already started so I was in for the long haul. Here is the main character from the game.

Now I suspect many of you can guess, let me tell you... staring at a screen for hours and hours on end, nearly exclusively at a window with only 4 very highly contracting colors on it, can seriously mess with your eyes. At about 2 AM on Saturday when I stood up to finally hit the hay, that slight dizzy feeling (which is sometime normal in jams) was in FULL effect that night. 

Now I can usually go through a 48 or 72 hour jam without my eyes screaming at me too badly, but this jam I had to take breaks fairly consistently so as to not emulate the slow insertion of red hot pokers into my ocular skull sockets. It was literally painful at times. I really don't know how they did it back in the day.  But overall I would say that I'm very pleased at the self restriction, and this is something we do often try to impose on ourselves in some way shape or form when developing (theme willing). It allows me as an artist specifically to get out of my comfort zone and try things that I wouldn't normally, and as such, I thank Game Jams for the individual growth that I take away from each and every one as a result.

Verdict:: If you have never tried it, give the CGA color palette some love! just, know what you're getting yourself into, and keep asprin, and eye drops on deck.

I'm sure that many of you have similar stories and would love to hear about ways that you and your teams have restricted yourselves in some way.

So I am the artist of a somewhat long formed team called BitDecayGames based out of Denver.  I wanted to make this post based on some feedback we have had on our game, as well as to my own revelation when presenting the idea to the team, to give a little information about the art style used in our GMTK 2019 submission "Ka-bob" 

We have been doing Jams for a number of years now and have been involved in LudumDare and Global Game Jam  events almost exclusively. But given the recent reduced cadence of the LDJams, we decided to fill our our schedule with our first Game Makers Tool Kit jam. Here is a little bit of content around  the decision, and execution of our artistic approach.

A bit of history about myself real quick to set the story... I've been dabbling in digital art ever since elementary school in the 80's.  My first experience (aside from Logo), was on the 'Apple II e' using software I cant recall, and really getting the hang of it with NeoChrome on an 'Atari ST' . Discovering Paintshop and Photoshop in the years to come changed my world, not counting 3dStudio Max, Maya, and Blender even later. Needless to say, I came up through the ranks of the ever changing  landscape of computer capabilities and the art software available. Just as an FYI, for bit graphics today, my preference is Pyxel Edit. If you havent heard of it, you really should go check them out. I especially like its animation component.

 
Anyways, back to the Jam..
So with all of us being in the US and have careers,  starting the jam at 1:00 PM was just not going to work for most of us. We accepted that we weren't going to realistically be able to start until 5 or 6 PM on Friday so we were already behind the curve. So after getting the theme, I announced to the team that I wanted to restrict myself to the CGA palette for the jam.
Now, even though I'm 10 years older than most of the rest of the team, I was still quite surprised to find that most of them had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. For anyone reading this that doesn't know, there are a few CGA color variations that all use only 4 highly contrasting colors, but the most recognizable is the White, Black, Magenta, and Cyan variation. After a GIS session and talking about my own history with games in this palette, I ignorantly stated "Given that we realistically only have about 40 hours for the Jam, restricting myself to 4 colors should to allow me to churn out the art more quickly"....

The majority of our sprite sizes were 80x80px in terms of art, though characters were in a  160x160 bounding box to account for alignment and animation frames that extend beyond the 80x80px frame. This is particularly true for the main player and to account for the skewer. Again , for anyone not familiar with CGA graphics, using large(ish) sprite or image sizes and getting creative with dithering, you can actually get a pretty wide variety of shades and tones out of just 4 colors. Attached is an example. 

While end results can be very rewarding, the process of manually dithering sprites is about as far from "fast" as you can get. Maybe there are bit graphic tools out there that automate this process, but not Pyxel Edit. Oh well.. I had already started so I was in for the long haul.
Here is the main character from the game.

Now I suspect many of you can guess, let me tell you... staring at a screen for hours and hours on end, nearly exclusively at a window with only 4 very highly contracting colors on it, can seriously mess with your eyes. At about 2 AM on Saturday when I stood up to finally hit the hay, that slight dizzy feeling (which is sometime normal in jams) was in FULL effect that night. 

Now I can usually go through a 48 or 72 hour jam without my eyes screaming at me too badly, but this jam I had to take breaks fairly consistently so as to not emulate the slow insertion of red hot pokers into my ocular skull sockets. It was literally painful at times.
I really don't know how they did it back in the day. 
But overall I would say that I'm very pleased at the self restriction, and this is something we do often try to impose on ourselves in some way shape or form when developing (theme willing). It allows me as an artist specifically to get out of my comfort zone and try things that I wouldn't normally, and as such, I thank Game Jams for the individual growth that I take away from each and every one as a result.

Verdict::
If you have never tried it, give the CGA color palette some love! just, know what you're getting yourself into, and keep asprin, and eye drops on deck.

I'm sure that many of you have similar stories and would love to hear about ways that you and your teams have restricted yourselves in some way.