itch.io

Although many have complained about the controls, I thought having to click to move on a grid created an interesting and unique challenge. Admittedly there's a reason most people don't go for this design, but I didn't think it was out of place in this game. 

However, I think this is a great first jam submission! You did a good job fleshing out the game with the waves and upgrades. If you make any of this type of game in the future, you may want to look into increasing the wave intensity logarithmically as it will get the player to more difficult waves at a decent rate but then doesn't drown them in later levels. 

I may have encountered a but where I tried to heal but my health didn't seem to go up, or maybe it just wasn't updated.

Overall, great job, hope you can compete in the next jam!

Hey nice job! First off, is this game 3d? I didn't even realize until I finished the level and got back to the main menu. If not ignore this: but I'd encourage you to show off the 3d of the game a little more. It seems to be orthographic because you only ever see the front-facing side of everything, so it just looks like a 2d game. If you want to make the game 3d, don't throw away your extra work by making everything flat, let's see that extra dimension!

I struggled a bit with the interaction, I like the idea of having to guess the rock, paper, scissors game built in but I seemed to always alert the office members. A minor critique that may have helped a little would be to make it so that controlled office workers walk faster than the normal ones. Was sort of a pain chasing them down and not being able to catch them until they stop.

Good job overall though, congratulations on finishing the jam!

Game looks good! I had seen pictures of it when the jam concluded and have been wanting to get around to playing it. My main critique is that I didn't notice the tutorial box in the corner until several levels in. I think making it more obvious would have been beneficial and wouldn't have left me trying to figure the first few levels out on my own. A few other minor comments: I think the cards sliding up at the bottom is a cool effect, but I didn't even notice the detail at the very bottom of the cards until playing for a while. Maxing out the shifting of the cards up sooner would I think let the player appreciate the design of the cards. I also would have liked to have seen the highlighted path I chose partially visible through the obstacles of the level, sometimes it was hard to tell exactly where I would be walking. And lastly I would have liked to have gotten to play the special action cards of the people I was controlling instead of them automatically playing when it was time to. But as I said these are minor complaints and hopefully just helpful feedback for your consideration.

Really cool little puzzle game, great job!

Hey nice job! I agree the movement needed a bit more polish, but understandably that's not always an option in a jam. I think you did a good job increasing the complexity of puzzles as the levels went on, and was fun bouncing up the stairway of white blood cells! Great work, hope to see you in the next jam!

Cool little game, but I also ran into the camera issues on the first level. Overall though you did a nice job, I like the art and animations of the parasite. One thing I might suggest to make the combat feel smoother, is allow the player to move while attacking. The fact that you're locked in place during attack animations locks you into either maneuvering or attacking, but a lot of times it's beneficial to do both.

Great job!

Hey good job, this is a fun and relaxing little game. Looks very polished and has smooth gameplay. Think I reached a 12 combo. One thing I could recommend would be some indicator on the parasite that you initially select when swapping locations. Maybe just a little outline or something which I think might help confirm in your head the one you initially clicked. But that's really a minor complaint, great work!

Nice job! I also fell victim to the wall jump glitch and got softlocked, so I'll certainly revisit later to try to beat the full game! One thing that you might want to do next time is having a little bit of a grace period for wall jumping. Sometimes you press the opposite direction and the jump button at the same time (or perhaps that's the intent but the jump button comes a moment later) and you end up just falling off the wall. So essentially if the player presses jump within maybe 250 ms of pushing off of the wall, they can still wall jump.

Other than that I found this to be a well made submission, great work!

I also struggled a little with the rules on this one, as I just assumed it was normal solitaire but with the limited space and inability to move a stack it was really hard. Eventually I ran out of moves and tried some different things, and then realized I had could stack cards the other direction as well.

I think you did a nice job on the visuals (though it was a little sluggish but I'll blame that on it being a browser export), and it's certainly cool to see unexpected matchups like a parasite solitaire game. Good job!

This is a clean and nicely polished game, well done! I really like the idea to have movement and actions as a card game, but it was a little odd sharing a hand with the other player (I played in local mode). I think it would be beneficial to incorporate other card types, and maybe a way to clear your hand. Great job!

Nice job, I've always wanted to be an intellect devourer protecting myself from a virus infestation! I think you did a great job balancing the level waves, they had a reasonable increase in difficulty to make each level a little harder than the last without spiraling out of control. 

After five or six levels the game started to feel a little repetitive, so I might have liked to have seen new enemy types or maybe the opportunity for temporary powerups. 

The addition of the dwindling lighting as you ran out of lives was a nice touch, good job!

Good job, this is a nice little game you've got here. The game design is simple enough that I understood right away how it worked, and I really liked the way the food and buttons slid up before you. My primary critique, other than me not being able to tell the difference between good and infected pizza, is that there isn't much challenge to the game. It's just "is the food good: yes or no". I think adding some sort of timer or penalty for waiting too long could make the game more challenging and keep the player engaged longer. Perhaps the food is coming flying in and so you have to quickly decide what to discard before the food reaches the person and he eats it.

Overall though I'd say this is a great first jam submission, good job!

Hey this was a fun little game, good job putting this together! The gameplay interactions felt a little clunky for me at first, but eventually I got the hang of it. It sometimes felt odd being that moving into a square was how an enemy attacked you, so took some getting used to. But once I figured out the rhythm of the game movement I enjoyed playing through the levels! Nice work!

This is a really cool little game! It took me a while to figure out how the game worked, and unfortunately I didn't manage to beat the level. However, there's some cool mechanics in here and I really liked the way you styled the characters to show their paranoia level. I think having a built-in tutorial or maybe trying to show how the game and ui elements worked would have helped me understand what was going on sooner. I had a hard time figuring out the purple bar was vs the outline around the outline, but all the animations and such looked really good. Great job! 

This is a really nice game! It took me a second to figure it out as I was expecting to be able to use the unit's abilities the moment I stepped into them, but after a few rounds I realized I had to wait for the host's turn to make them act. I would definitely play this game if it were fleshed out more, such as more levels (there's only the one, right?), being able to move the controlled units, controlling weakened enemies, and having to deal with more complex threats.

I did find out that the logic which blocks you from attacking when you run out of APs doesn't work right and you can just spam attacks on enemies until they die, but that doesn't seem like too hard of a bug to fix.

Awesome job!

This is a really unique game. I agree that a little more guidance built in would be helpful. I don't know what I was doing wrong at first, probably not typing exactly " you! " with a space on either side, but it took me a while to beat the first level. That poor woman got an earful.

I think the main drawback is you can literally type anything, but you have to try to figure out what hard-coded words the person does and doesn't want to hear. I was throwing out words as fast as I could type so didn't really know how to interpret the score or the messages at the top, especially as sometimes they were stacked on top of each other. Since I was just throwing words into a text box and didn't really understand my feedback, it was hard to know exactly how I was doing. Usually I just tried to rip out the message as fast as I could (and probably typos are what let me pull it off).

However, I really like the style of the game. It's very simple, but the sort of hand-drawn papercraft look is really charming, even if there's only 2 backdrops and 4 NPCs. I managed to figure out the old lady's favorite words and get the "can i sit down" ending. But as I said, I struggled to interpret the text at the top so just kept typing random words and "can i sit down" until it worked, then I was able to go back and refine down to the 3 words. 

All this being said, I think it's a really cool idea for a game (even if I didn't exactly see the parasite connection while playing) and look forward to seeing you in future jams!

That's so cool! I think I saw a reddit post about them a month or two ago, so once the theme was released I thought it might be a fun idea to try. Thanks for playing!

I apologize for the difficulty of the first rhino puzzle. As I've commented elsewhere, I wish I would have had some friends playtest the game, that level was inadvertently too hard too soon in the game. It is designed to teach you a technique to utilizing the rhino, but (without spoiling too much) after you figure out the first big step of the puzzle, you end up running all over with the rhino until you get to a spot that you can exit. Other than that, I think most of the later levels are decently well balanced for your progression through the game... perhaps with the exception of the cow chaos level. It was originally intended to be a joke but I ended up throwing it in there. Thanks for playing!

This is a cool little game, but I'm pretty sure I've seen a very similar game in a Heartbeast video. Whatever the case, I encourage you to try to make an original game. Certainly a lot of people will rebuild a game in their own style (like the Dr. Mario/Parasite submission), but your game here looks very similar to what I already saw and functions the same way. I think you might have added the figures that run around for you to catch, but that doesn't set your game very much apart from the original. You should definitely keep learning game development, but take a stab at a game of your own design next time. If you work hard at it and don't bite off more than you can chew, I'm sure you can put something cool together.

This is a really cool little game! First off, I had a few minor issues while playing but I don't think they'd be too hard to solve. The game doesn't scale to my window properly, so it only took up about 25% of my screen space. It is hard for me to see and took me a bit to figure out what everything was. Secondly, the controls aren't terribly clear as @Tiny Dice Studios pointed out. (For anyone reading this, you left click to select a unit and then can right click within ~5 tiles to have them relocate. You can tell where they can move by the color of the tile indicator.) I think once selecting a parasite, having the whole area highlighted where they could move would help clear things up a lot. It was tricky as I would select a unit, and then click far away and slowly start moving closer to them until I found the maximum distance they could move as I didn't notice the color of the tile selector changing until playing for a little while.

However, you've still put together a good product, especially if this is your first jam. Great job, hope you're able to join the next jam!

This is a great jam submission. The game is well polished, and has a clear gameplay loop that is a humorous take on the theme. It took me a bit to recognize what I was supposed to do, I got distracted by the population counters and tried to target the highest city with whatever natural disaster I could find near them. I think because I was immediately pressured with the task of getting rid of the parasite I didn't connect that the light bulb is what I needed to target. 

The only things I can even think to critique is I would have liked to have had some visual indication of the disasters being ready to be used. I was just flying around scribbling my mouse on the disasters near cities hoping to find one that was recharged. I also didn't really have time to pay attention to what the upgrades did. Not sure if there's anything that can be done about that, perhaps having a level up button that opens a popup to pause the game and let you pick what you wanted. But I'm just nitpicking at this point, these are minor complaints that didn't really harm my experience. 

Excellent job.

If you would have told me when I woke up this morning, "Frank, today you're going to have a fever dream where you'll eat the rankest and stankest cheese around," after telling you my name isn't Frank, I'd have told you there's no way that would ever happen.

Yet here we are.

Admittedly I think you have your cheese pungence slider set too high, because I don't think the leap from cheese to parasite is very compelling, but even if I were persuaded that wouldn't make me forget the experience I had here today. I hope that after several months of therapy I'll be able to come to term with this game.

Great work, see you next jam!

Ok first off, this game looks really good. The art is beautiful and all the idle animations are really smooth. As others mentioned, having to use the same fingers I use to move to also shoot was challenging and took away from the experience. I think the biggest thing the game could use is a little more explanation of how it all works. I don't really understand the number over my head, like I know it's my health but it seemed to go down randomly and at random rates. It also took me several deaths before I realized that you can only hop to a new host when their health is lower than yours. Certainly a cool mechanic, but it wasn't something I guessed until hopping a few times and wondering "wait why did it decide to work NOW?" I also would sometimes have the game zoom in too far while I was playing and it was hard to see enemies.

Nevertheless, you put together a pretty little game, and I think with just a bit more information for the player it would clean up a lot of the frustration I had at the start. Once I figured out was going on I enjoyed it more. Great job!

What a cool little game! As others said, would have loved to have seen this game more fleshed out. For what you were able to get done, everything came together really well. Hope you can compete (and complete!) in the next one!

I agree with the other critiques about the new player friendliness of the game, it was definitely a challenge for me to figure out. However, I will say this is an awesome idea for a game! It's fun to be able to try to power yourself up, and then go fight the baddies with your juiced up form.

I think trying to work more detail about what everything does into the UI might help the game be more accessible. Maybe having some sort of animation showing the parasites being drained into the player might have helped, or having the syringe be smaller (or labeled?) I couldn't tell what it was until I watched the tutorial. 

If possible, having somebody playtest who is totally new to the game seems to go a long way. I wish I would have done that more because there were a few times I shared my game with someone after it was completed and I regretted a few design choices because I realized it might be too hard for some players at first blush. We made our games, so we know exactly how everything works. Just because something is perfectly clear to us, doesn't mean it'll be clear to someone else.

I have to say, though, I don't know how many games you've completed outside GWJ but this is really an impressive first/early game to have made. Although it took some time to get comfortable with the mechanics, this demonstrates a lot of technical skill and I look forward to seeing you in future jams!

Hey this is a pretty cool idea for a game! Not that I necessarily consider myself a CHAD, but always happy to help a pup in need (while trying not to turn them into a hush puppy).

I ran into a few graphical errors while playing, it looks like you might need to adjust the z-index on some of the sprites. There were some times that dogs would be hidden behind the grass, so I couldn't beat the level because I kept running into them and didn't know which ones still needed to be cured. I also wasn't a big fan of the font, just because the H and K looked similar, so some words were hard to read. 

Overall, though, I'd say it's a great first submission for this jam! Keep at it and I hope to see you in the next one!

Certainly unfinished, but a cool little start to a game. Could become an interesting game if you're ever able to revisit and build it out.

If you do, here's a few things that are in the prototype that you might want to address:

- I really don't like how the first press of a movement key would turn the player in that direction, and then subsequent presses in that direction would move them. Not sure if that is used in any other games, but I can't recall any I've played, and I think it would get pretty annoying in a full game.

- I noticed after reaching the innermost room of the castle-looking building, the intermediate room doesn't place the player correctly. When entering the intermediate room from the topmost room, the player is placed at the bottom of the intermediate room near the exit, instead of at the top near the room you just came from. Might just be a bug, but will be something to work out before you add a lot more rooms and then have to go back and fix them all.

I understand the struggle of motivation in these games. It takes a lot of hours and I found that when I was like 80% of the way through the project I had done most of the "fun" stuff and sort of was just ready for it to be over. I think trying to manage your expectations for the game, and be sure you don't over-scope. Most likely, the time it took someone to make your most favorite games isn't measured in weeks, it's measured in months or years. Sometimes you have to cut features and make tweaks along the way to make sure you can finish. Making a prototype project like this is certainly good practice, but if you think of this as a competition, you want to be able to make a finished(ish) game, even if that game isn't as fancy or broad as your original idea.

I made a puzzle game and had a lot of big ideas for extra puzzle aspects and wanted more levels, but those had to be left behind so I could get the game actually working. For me, I want to try to make sure I build more of the game horizontally before I try to go too vertical. Once the shell and main gameplay loop are in place, then you can start to fill it out with your remaining time.

Sorry if this is a little long-winded, I hope you'll be back for the next one and I'm sure if you work at it and can work out a well-scoped game, you can finish a game you can be proud of. Good luck!

I really liked the art direction/graphics of this game as well as the background animations during the fight scenes. The overworld grid movement was also really cool and I liked the thematic overall. I would say that the controls were a little difficult for me to get a grasp on. It would be nice when a body part was selected if the action would remember that instead of having to click it every time. Overall, you have a really cool idea here and I would like to see a polished version, congrats!

Wow I loved this game! You did a great job rolling the story into the game mechanics, and I have to say having an interesting story in a simple puzzle game is impressive to pull off. The puzzles seemed daunting but were all reasonably solvable, and I definitely chuckled a few times at the dialogue.

Not sure if it was intentional, but on a few levels I was able to solve the puzzles using less of the rocks and tunnels than it seemed I was supposed to. Didn't necessarily hurt my experience, just made me like I was puzzlin' good.

Great job, an exceptional first jam submission! Look forward to seeing what you put together in future jams! 

Thanks for the submission to the wild jam! The idea of being an officer baton'ing parasites is fun! There did not seem to be an indication that I was receiving damage. Something that I would really like to see is maybe different parasites having different death animations. Good job on the 3d modeling of everything. I look forward to future work!

Vampire Survivor's is a favorite game of mine so I was excited to play this. I really think your idea of grabbing scientists and making them fight for you is a very neat idea. Implementing biomass as a way to level up is fun and rewarding. The difficulty seems intense from the get go, and one thing I would like to see is better cursor visuals for aiming attacks. Thanks for the game!

Great job finishing the jam! This is actually the first 3d game I've played in this jam, so good on you for tackling an extra dimension! I think this is a really cool idea for a game. I enjoyed trying to be efficient in how I managed my parasites while trying to grow as quickly as possible. Having skills to level up is an impressive feat as well.

A few points of constructive criticism: some of the UI was confusing and required trial and error to figure out. My first time I played (and lost) I didn't understand why there were two progress bars on the page for an infected, and some of the toggle button behavior didn't seem to work right on the skills page. One thing I'm learning is communicating to the player the things that you as a developer take for granted because you're the one that built them. Things like having people playtest your game, and really trying to think through what a first-time player will experience and understand can help to make a game more accessible.

Overall though, great job, especially for your first time in this jam! Hope to see you again in the next one!

The art direction in this game is really good. I had a fun time playing this game, but agree with another comment that the difficulty got intense quickly. When the player character was struck, it seemed like there was some jarring in the frame rate. Overall a fun game, thanks for the submission!

Thanks for putting this game out there. The art style is really nice and I'd like to see more of that. I will also say the end boss is pretty difficult, but it seems appropriate for the final boss. 

There was some weird frame rate issues sometimes. If your ship was destroyed, and you restarted the game with 'R', it seemed like the lower frames would persist into a new game until you jumped ship.

Otherwise solid entry!

This was a very fun game through and through. I thought the puzzles were fun and well put together. Definitely had a difficulty spike the last few levels, but felt appropriate. I will say that it was a little hard to read some of the pixel instructions, but otherwise the graphics were fine. Great job!

Hey nice job! I only managed to beat level 6 it's certainly a skill issue. I think what the game could use is a few extra lives. Even if I just had 3 chances total to get as far as I could, it would make the game a little more forgiving. One mistake sends you back to the beginning, so that can be frustrating for a player. I also noticed that your blue circle was jittering around the target location, I'd guess because it was bouncing back and forth across the target position without ever reaching it. I recently learned about the "move_toward" function, which allows you to pass in the target location and the rate at which the position (or single number) should be adjusted toward that position. What makes it so useful is that once the position reaches the target, it will be exactly at that place, so you won't get jittering and you can check more easily if it has reached the target position.

Great job, congratulations on competing in your first jam! Hope to see you again in the next one!

Wow what an interesting game! First off, I really dig the style of the game. The art and the sort of internal monologue between levels is really cool. I think the game could have used more of a tutorial or something to ease the player in, though. I played through the game twice because after I finished the first time I still hadn't figured out how the ghost interactions worked (and I wondered if I could have done something else to get a different ending!)

This feels like a big game that's delivered in a small package. Understandably that's the challenge of a game jam, you can't really make something big. I didn't get to experience as much of the story as I wanted to, and there were quite a bit of UI elements that I didn't understand what they meant even after the second playthrough. I think given an opportunity to present more of the story and how the whole time control and ghost controlling aspects work, you could produce the bigger game which is currently hiding inside our 9-day time limit. 

Overall great job, hope to see you at the next one!

Really cool game! Maybe I'm a little dense but admittedly I was kinda just guessing by the later levels. I also couldn't get past level 15. I would just run the simulation and watch how it played out and try to adjust my walls and infections accordingly. 

One thing that I think might have helped me internalize how the game worked would have been the ability to pause and "step" the growth of the parasites. I was sort of able to achieve this by turning the speed slider all the way down and then moving it up and back down to make them advance a cycle. This is something I learned with my game--when you've made it, you're very accustomed to how it works so it is a lot easier for you to understand how a level might play out. Next time I'll try to have more friends playtest so I can get a better feel for how a noob experiences the game.

Nevertheless, everything game together well into a nice puzzle game, great job!

Very cool! I must admit I have never played Plants vs Zombies, so perhaps that made it a little harder for me to catch on. I sort of had to find some things out the hard way, like what does it mean for a human to "see" a parasite, before I understood how it worked. However, was still a fun game and I managed to beat it without too much difficulty once I got the hang of it. I enjoy games where you have to balance on offense vs support, so nice job implementing the different parasite types. I had fun trying to stack as many rows of the green guys as I could while still maintaining enough firepower to ward off those pesky humans. Great job!

Nice idea for a game! Not too much feedback that hasn't already been stated, the earlier levels were more fun but I found the last level very challenging. I did manage to beat it but it felt largely luck based. I hard a hard time understanding how the enemies would move, it seemed that they would move the direction you moved, but only sometimes. I guess that is what makes a challenging opponent!

My main point of feedback would be making sure you have the game's scaling nailed down, the window was very large but the game board was very small for me, so it was hard to see what was going on.

All that being said, great job getting the game together, hope to see you in the next jam!

I tried diving in without the tutorial--big mistake. A lot of people died that day. After going back to medical school, I still didn't really know what I was doing, and a lot of people still died, but at least I have crushing school loans.

This was a really cool idea, sort of like operation except you have a chance to drain the green fluids when you mess up. I would have liked to have seen a little more level variety, like perhaps needing to reuse the opener tool a few times to get the parasite out, or even multiple parasites in one brain. 

My main criticism is how hard it was to figure out. Once I figured out I needed to pry open a door in the arteries and drag the bug out, it wasn't too hard to do, but I think integrating the tutorial into gameplay would have helped a lot with that. After killing a few patients and then reading the tutorial, I still didn't really understand how the tools worked due to their complexity. Left click + right click + shift + scroll wheel?  Isn't brain surgery is supposed to be easy?!

Nevertheless, still was a fun little game and I laughed out loud a few times while playing. A great first GWJ entry in my book, hope to see you at the next one!