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You pick them up and then you can click on them in the bottom right corner, that changes your shape. You just have to make sure there is enough room to change your shape and that you are not colliding with for example a wall

Hahaha, love the mouse joke!

Thank you for playing + your comment!

I just added stretching and squishing and it feels amazing!

Sorry about the leaderboard not loading. This is my first time adding a leaderboard to the game, it is a bit annoying since it relies on a 3rd party service. I hope it did not ruin the fun for you

Thanks for playing and the comment. :D

Good idea, I should add stretching and squishing that would make it way more juicy!

Thanks for the feedback!

Main menu screen is beautiful, love the composition there.

You could have added some more 'juice' on the music and audio side.
- You could add a small score ticking sound while the scores are being written out.
- Some background music would also be nice.

I really like the gameplay, especially the third level where you can do multiple things to win the level, it would be cool to add even more ways to complete levels with different characters with different skills (for example a character that is able to open the stone/metal doors to take a different route to the exit) to get more emergent gameplay. I basically just runned through all the skeletons and did not kill any of them which was fun and exciting haha.

Great game, impressed with what you made in just 2 weeks!

You blew my mind by adding the [T] skip button, so clever to do that for a puzzle game in a game jam (I'm definitely going to steal that idea in the future, we should all add more cheats to our games haha).

I think you have been the most creative with your implementation of gain ground of all the entries this round! Definitely did not expect anyone to go in with a puzzle game, I was  very scared of going in with a puzzle game, that is why I broke my promise and started fresh. I'm impressed

I did not notice much performance problems, mostly the music would slightly stutter.

Love the art style. Reminds me of Yoshi's Crafted World a bit.

One thing that I would change to the gameplay loop is that when you kill all the enemies you can automatically continue to the next level with all characters, now it kinda feels like a task when you have 13 different animals that you need to slowly walk to the exit. This takes the flow out of the game play loop a bit I want to go to the next level since I'm excited to see the other characters. :D

Very good character design, so many different characters and different abilities.

Love this game, very relaxing, I played this after a long day and it was amazing, the perfect song for this type of gameplay. I continued playing for a bit too long haha.

The game start lagging a bit in the end game (are you using object pooling?)

This atmosphere is great, did not expect anyone to submit a scary game based on gain ground for this round, great execution.

Nice short experience 🌟

Haha oops, you are right it does not make sense though, I guess the original game was not logical 😅

Cool game. Nice reuse of the same level, very effective game development here.

It felt like every time I killed an enemy it would be bad in the end because at the start you say do not mess with time and the screen shake + shader effect that happens seems like it is bad. I genuinly thought there would be some kind of plot twist at the end due to the enemies I killed and that I altered the space time continuum or something haha.

Nice polish on killed characters and rescueing them.

I managed to finish the game with the wall jumping character. 😁

I managed to deadlock myself by shooting the ground here, I cannot pass through the opening and I cannot jump back out 😅 (not sure if I did forget some mechanic I cannot crawl or dash with this character I think)

This definitely feels like gain ground!

Some ideas for small quality of live improvements:

• The player movement speed is sometimes way too slow. Especially with the magic lady that throws fireballs + dynamite.
• Some of the hitboxes of the weapons are too small
• Why does the player do so little damage but the enemies take a big chunk of your health 😅

I managed to kill the rock boss without him even doing anything, I just blew him up with dynamite. It still says 2 enemies left, not sure if it a bug.

I managed to complete the game on the first take, I mostly just did escape because I'm not skilled enough to kill all enemies. I almost went game over on the level with a lot of archers in front of the escape zone / the last level before the final boss 

You implemented so many characters and levels. Very nice game 🌟
 

Very cool concept. I managed to rescue 14 worms 😁
I'm a bit worried about there being no audio, that might bring your score down for the pairing

I think this is a very original take on gain ground! 🌟

Very consistent game, consistent graphics, consistent audio. I like the single screen scope of it.

After a bunch of levels the level variety started to feel a bit repetitive where only the amount of enemies would change a bit. (Not sure if in later levels there would be more variety but I only got to the annoying shooting wasps/bees)

Just a small game design idea; it could be cool to not start with all the characters, then you can unlock some characters in some levels and you are forced to go out of your way a bit, for example you could make a character locked behind a bunch of stones you first have to dig through. Then you can gradually learn all the characters and their attacks. And that will make it feel more painful to lose them.

I think something is going wrong in your leaderboard code at start up, it does not show the scores on the main menu but when I check the network tab I see the request successful. Everything seemed to work when I went gameover so I guess that is the most important part.

I managed to get to the top of the leaderboard for now but I'm sure someone else will beat me as I did not even make it through all the levels. I had fun playing your game. 🌟 (Please let me know when someone overtakes me so I can retry 😅)

• Menu is amazing! This intro is amazing! You are so good at the story telling. The flavor text is funny. 🌟
• Great music score.
• Sometimes there is one enemy left and you have to find them.
• Small 'bug'/inconvencience enemies can go off screen, especially the jumping enemy
• Great characters, they are interesting, some of the special abilities felt like they could be buffed at bit.
• I wish I could recover characters when they die. 😅
• In terms of game design. Not a big fan of the health bar since it makes it kinda random when you die, I feel hearts might be better. So the player knows better what to expect.
• Love the time puzzles where you have to stand on the button and work together with your ancestors and descendents.
• Great game

Nice intro and nice main menu!

I think this definitely gives a lot of gain grounds vibes, I really like that you gave it a spin to be in your game universe, really cool.

One bug I found, when you kill all the enemies it does not rescue the characters that are following you. This made it so I lost some of the actually good characters and I ended up just with Violet in the end.

Good audio, good UI, besides the bug I think everything was very polished, I had fun. 🌟

• Score: 700
• Deaths: 31
• Continues: 14

Wow this felt very juicy.

You jump scared me a bit the first time I accidentally clicked the left mouse button and I swung a sword. 😅

I managed to complete the game without any of my characters getting killed. So, I went back and got a character killed on purpose, just to see what would happen. You cannot rescue your previous character when you die, it would be cool to implement that.

The game was a bit short though, I would have liked to see more. The character abilities were much a like and their sprites could use a bit more variance. Cute little experience I want more! 🌟

Thanks for the compliment, I can implement a undo button, will need to refactor the code a bit though to make that possible. 👍

Haha nice, this is a good excuse for me to pickup some linguistic puzzle book I recently found

Oh no, this is a bug, thanks for reporting!
I'll try to find why this is happening.

In the meantime you can press [R] to restart and return to the last checkpoint 

Which part specifically? I can give you some hints!

Any suggestions for a sense of completion? Should I make collecting the shapes the means of completion or should I introduce something else?

What do you think of having the in-game manual? You did not mention anything about it in your review. I'm hesitant whether I should keep the manual and whether I should just fully focus on the metroidvania mechanics

Thanks for playing. Feedback noted, I think I need to add fast travel between the checkpoints 👍

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Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I definitely took some risks, experimentation is good for the game so I can find what works and what does not work. Were you mostly struggling with the difficulty of reading the manual and figuring out the mechanics? If that is the case I might drop the manual in favour of making the game more fun and playable.

Thanks a lot, do you think I should keep the handbook/manual or should I get rid of it? It might be more effective to just focus on the metroidvania type gameplay instead of also focusing on the manual.

Thanks a lot! I think I will make the full game eventually. Still figuring some things out, do you think I should keep the manual or should I drop it and focus more on the metroidvania type gameplay?

Do you think it would be fun to translate the manual, I could potentially add some kind of meaning to it.

I really have to start working on adding more traditional ending screens, I did not learn from my past mistakes 😅

Thanks so much for playing. I love the path you drew on the map! Can I use it in a video? What would you change to the projectiles? Why do you think they not fit? Just trying to find out so I can improve the game.

Thanks for playing!

What did you not like specifically about the projectiles? Was it the need to go back and forth a lot to shoot, I want to improve this feature. I could make it so you shoot one projectile that breaks all the blocks in one go instead of needing to shoot 10 projectiles to break some of the paths.

Thanks a lot! You can use the projectiles on the blocks that have the strike through, these are the breakable blocks, that is how you enter the location on the screenshot. So from the start immediately go to the left and there should be a row of breakable blocks in the wall exactly at the position where there is a line on the map. You have to position yourself correctly on the right step of the staircase to make sure you aim correctly. And then you should be able to get in the hole by using the L-shape and the flat shape.

Loved the mechanics, loved the story, I had to restart 3 times to get to ending B.

Loved this game, I think you are going to take 1st place.

I could not move anymore after the cutscene where I gave clothing to the (old) man. After restarting the game that did not happen anymore, so maybe some control buffering issue going on.

Not sure if changing the cat gun did anything actually. I'm on mac so when I press the ctrl button and click the arrow keys it switches between different windows. I could only shoot the 8-cat so I did not manage to get past the level with the blue yarn.

I chilled on the bench for a bit, cute little addition to the game. Nice intro, very good voice acting. 

Short but strong little experience

I was already expecting something weird would be going on with the duck after seeing the whole level and nothing suspicious. The game forced me to kill them 

Nice game but no projectile :sad-duck: