GMC jam 40 reviews

[center][b][size=7]Reviews (36 games left, over halfway through!)[/size][/b][/center]

[size=6]Comments for games I've played so far in alphabetical order:[/size]

[spoiler][b]3 Mice In A Trenchcoat[/b] by Bart, TheSnidr, Xor, Naterboy

What a beatiful game! The characters are absolutely delightful. I always love dogs even when they are the villains. There's a lot of charm in this entry for sure. 

Positives:
+ Beautiful graphics, wonderful animations. Your team continues to blow my expectations of what GMS can do completely out of the water.
+ Fun little stealthy experience
+ Music and sound were all cute and fun and fit the game really well. 

Constructive Feedback:
- Camera position can be weird and lens distortion can make me a little motion sick sometimes
- Restarting from the beginning of the game every time is an extremely harsh punishment when you have one hit kills. 
- Cages are empty so I didn't even realize I was supposed to be looking for a key until stumbling on one in my 3rd playthrough.
- There was a little mouse trapped in the floor, not sure what that was about. I also lost a mouse I think when I accidentally went down the stairs, but I might have lost it when the owl was attacking and I just didn't notice in the chaos.
- I got to the King Pug on what I think was my 6th playthrough. I couldn't figure out what to do, and thought maybe I could trap him with the trap doors, however the moment I walked on top of the doors i immediately fell down and had to start at the beginning again. That was where I threw in the towel on this one and gave up.
- The very first trap door in the game in that little alley can be pretty unforgiving. When you first encounter it, you have no idea these even exist and it will fall before you even realize what's happening. I think placing the first trap door in a straight hallway where the character will naturally be running straight forward will be a good way to teach the player that the traps exist without trapping them so they know to be careful in the future.
- Crash : 
[SPOILER="spoiler"]
___________________________________________
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Draw Event
for object obj_deferred_control:

Can't create a surface with either a width or height of 0
at gml_Script_deferred_surface
############################################################################################
gml_Script_deferred_surface (line -1)
gml_Object_obj_deferred_control_Draw_76
[/SPOILER]

[b]Barry Bear's Birthday[/b] by Richerama

Well this was an interesting one. I would love some music in the background to really round out the experience. The game is very simple it seems though the animations and physics are actually quite nice. I like the bear graphic a lot. I managed to make it to the part where you blow the candles out, so I think 4 mini games in. 

**Update** I hear music sometimes but I can't figure out what triggers it.

Positives:
+ Great movement feel for the bear, feels great to jump and to punch
+ Fun sound effects and voice over
+ Very smooth drawings that are very well done
+ Theme is implemented well

Feedback
- Not a whole lot to the game
- Catching vegetables can be very hard to see
- The blowing of the candles mini game happens a bit to suddenly to even realize what is going on the first time you see it. A few seconds to register what is happening would be a lot better, or to just tap space bar when it is at the top of the bar.

[b]Blackout[/b] by Siolfor the Jackal

Great animations, great art, great music, and I was not expecting to enjoy character shadows so much but I did. Not too much here to call it a game, but what was here almost had a Stick of Truth vibe to me. Not sure why I got that feeling but I did.

Positives:
+ Great art. I would love to see how those animations are made. Is that Spine? They look wonderful
+ Great music, loved the rocking outro. Guitar looks just like an old epiphone I used to have!
+ It's always nice to be able to use the gamepad/keyboard for the menu controls and the options that were available.

Constructive Feedback:
- Not really a lot to the game

[b]Candle[/b] by Steelegms2

I think this one definitely could have used a bit more time to cook in the oven. I really love the art and the animations of the characters are perfect. The gameplay is not great to be a little blunt. It's not all that fun to just run away from candles who you would think you're trying to light because you're the one who has the fire. Not only that but the game just throws you in with no menu, no options, no instructions, just run around and rely on game tropes to bring you to the end of the game. It's further exasperated by the fact that your 3 hearts are meant to get you to the end of the game. If there is a story here, I would love to see it in the gameplay. I think it would be rely clever to explain why these other candles can't be lit and you're the only one who can. The other problem is that you have 2 options when you see a candle in a hallway you have to go through: 1) tank the hit and keep going where you will likely take another on your way back to the entrance. 2) Wait for the candle to come out and then run in little circles until all the candles in the whole map are centered into one candle so that they can be easily avoided which removes all challenge anyway. I feel like I'm being a little harsh and I'm sorry about that, but I really think there's a lot of room for growth in an entry like this where obvious game design flaws can be corrected. 

Here are some of my thoughts on how you can really make a great game here:
1) Shrink the hit box of the player and enemies so that you don't take damage even when you visibly don't make contact with the enemy
2) Add a single screen at the beginning explaining with your beautiful art style why the candles can't be lit

**Update** I checked the GMC forum to look at your original entry and found out there is a FIRE BUTTON. Had I not actually gone to the website to look it up I wouldn't have known. As I'm thinking about it in my head now, if this was your first GMC jam, you probably wouldn't have known that we'd have a jam player and you probably thought everyone would read your post to get your game, so you surely felt you could include game instructions in that part. Let me be the first one to tell you that gamers are mostly dumb and jammers are dumber. What I mean by this actually is that we're all pretty wiped out after 96ish hours of making our own game and need everything explained to us within the game itself. Most jammers won't be bothered to even read a bunch of text inside the game, let alone track down the original post of the game to find the controls in the hopes that they might find something there.

With my updated perspective, I went back and played the game and I have a few more things to say.  Part of me wants to go back and erase my old comments here, but I think it's important as a game dev to see what was originally going through my head as I first played the game without proper instruction and why it's so important to make everything clear within the game.

I want to reiterate: you have an amazing talent for pixel art. The reason I went back to your post was to try and find the credits to see if you did this yourself or you found premade assets. The art is brilliant and the animations are wonderful. I really love the backgrounds as well. 

The shooting mechanic works quite well, though I wish it would hit multiple candles and not just the first one...it doesn't really make sense that it stops lighting candles after the first since there is no change in the fire's appearance. For the levels, I have to ask: is there an end? I feel like I played 14-15 of these levels and genuinely couldn't tell if I was just looping through the same 4, if there was procgen or if they were designed one after the other and I would get to the end soon. If it is an endless game, the courteous thing to do would be to make that obvious in some way within the game so people know. The same is true if it has an end - a lot more people will finish your game if they know how much further they have to go. It's also important to make changes as the levels go on so that there is some kind of progression and you feel like you're improving and playing a game instead mopping the ground in a rainstorm.

Anyway, I know this was long and I really don't mean to sound overly negative. I think there's a lot of potential here. It's an amazing feat to put out a game at all, and I hope this essay helps to guide future jam entries because I believe it's wonderful to get anything out there. Great job on getting a game out!

[b]Christmas with Uncle Tom[/b] by BluishGreenPro

Well Uncle Tom freaking sucks. What is he thinking swearing in front of the children? He would not be invited back to my Christmas dinner no sir. I did two playthroughs of the game because on the first one I refused to let Uncle Tom play with us. 

Positives:
+ dialogue system is great
+ very cool how the characters keep moving in real time even when you move from room to room. It's a small touch but it adds a lot toward making the characters feel real
+ All characters (minus Uncle Tom) are great and lovable and makes me feel like a warm Christmas dinner.

Constructive Feedback:
- Objects in room didn't appear to be layered corrently, might be worth looking into the depth = -y trick.
- Might be worth looking into a color palette for your game. Art is great but there are a few sections where the colors and shading aren't quite distinct enough and can look a little splotchy

[b]City Scuttler[/b] by Bearman_18

It took me awhile to figure out how to play this game, and I really enjoyed it for the most part. I really like the cool inventory system that probably took ages to get working. It feels like one of those old games on a floppy disk I used to play when I was a kid (why does that make me feel old??) with all the scrolling text on the side narrating what you're doing. I think that's a super cool touch. 

Positives:
+ Awesome inventory system
+ Collecting weapons, smokes, and body armor is genuinely very fun
+ Feel great when you find an arm that upgrades your inventory slots and number of moves where you can take out people with basically one turn and not take any damage

Constructve Feedback:
- Lots of things are extremely unclear. The biggest one is that I didn't realize that I needed to move into an enemy to hurt them. When I started the game I opened the controls and saw fire, so I tried to use it but I didn't have a gun. This lead me to believe I needed a gun before I could hurt anyone, but this wasn't actually the case. I spent 5-6 minutes wandering the map looping for a gun before realizing I could just run into someone and take them out, but by this point I was deep and everyone wiped me out very quickly.  The other thing that took awhile to realize was how to actually use everything. I'm still not quite sure what the sheet metal does, but I'm assuming you put it on your 'body' section and it gives you a defense buff? When I first saw Fire and Smoke, I assumed I was a magician or something and needed to have magic, and was really confused why I was finding sheet metal everywhere when it didn't look like I could craft anything (which is the typical sheet metal use I've learned from my AAA titles)
- No audio or story, but I understand running out of time can be really tough on a jam game. If I think about the game from a design perspective, the inventory system didn't seem entirely necessary. I think the same info could have been communicated with something like a buff image showing you have sheet metal to protect you (since you can only collect 1 anyway) and what guns you have for a much more streamlined system. I know would kill the overall vibe of the game so I don't mean for you to do exactly that, but I think the story of the big party taking over everything would have been amazing and really would have sold the gameplay

[b]Color Splash[/b] by EvanSki

I was really sad when I saw this one was cancelled. It's sad to see the little messages about what the game would have been. Also, it's scary how the game knew both my name AND my team color.

Positives:
+ Looked promising

Constructive Feedback:
- Finish your game please.

[b]Crazy Waiter[/b] by Gatefiz, JP, Claire Dujardin, Benfik

Top score was 17150 with 41 people disturbed. I think I'm pretty stinking good at this game

Positives:
+ Cute art style
+ Fun scoring system

Feedback:
- The customers can come into the chefs room which should be a safe space I think. There is also sometimes 2 or 3 people gathered around the exits which can make it impossible to get out without getting hit
- It also can feel cheap getting hit sometimes when clearly they were the ones who walked into me since the people can sometimes have unpredictable walking patterns.

[b]dawg the party animal[/b] by NivesStudio

My party was decent, which is more than I can say for many of my real life parties. Minigames can be kind of tough because they need to be playtested a lot to figure out what controls are natural and easy to use for most players. 

Positives:
+ Art was great, I loved all the unique characters, houses and other backgrounds. DJ Duck was amazing.
+ Different minigames are really cool and this fit the theme wonderfully.

Constructive feedback
- Often I didn't really know what to do in a minigame until it was too late. I died almost instantly on the bull run, and for the maze shooter one I just didn't really understand what the objective of it was.
- No sound hurt the party feel quite a bit since it's supposed to feel alive and animated.

[b]Dr Smiley's Brain Jam Party[/b] by Yal

Got a high score of 6692. I have to say, I am really not good at these types of games. I didn't really understand why sometimes I would get a combo from stacking vertically but not other times. Was it just because of the type of fruit? Like do they all have special abilities? I couldn't really tell. I did find myself really enjoying the wiggling of the fruits and the mechanics seemed to work really well. I could see it being a poppular mobile game for sure.

Positives:
+ Great animations and item sprites
+ Enjoyable music for the club scene
+ Love the name of the game

Feedback:
- Would like a little more direction on what did what if it turns out that certain fruits really did have different abilties. This also isn't my kind of game so I feel like I'm not judging it fairly so I'm sorry.
- The main screen is very painful on my eyes

[b]dumburk 9000[/b] by Bret Hudson, Allen Webster, Jared Cohen

I'm sorry, I really have no idea what's going on here. I couldn't for the life of me figure it out. I wish I had more to say here but I am completely lost.

[b]Emmy And Sal[/b] by Mercerenies

Great puzzler! The game is so simple to understand and gradually builds until you have to tackle some really complex puzzles near the end. I really enjoyed the little story going on behind the scenes as well as the intro to each puzzle. It's an extra touch that didn't need to be there, but I appreciate it.

Positives:
+ Loved the puzzles. Extremely well thought out and well done. There was only one of them that I was able to solve without using all of the pieces. If you had a room number somewhere in the game, I could tell you which one it was with a screenshot in case you ever wanted to release the game with optimized solutions.
+ Fun story, nice and fairly wholesome portrayal of theft  ;)
+ Puzzles are never overly difficult and can usually be solved in a relatively short period of time
+ Gradual introduction of puzzle elements keeps things fresh
+ Tutorial is very well paced
+ Cute little characters

Constructive Feedback:
- The game is just a tad bit long for a jam game. I think I exited around 22-23 puzzles to see how far in I was, so that would probably be a good length if you wanted to cut out 4-5 puzzles
- It wasn't always clear how far out each of my objects would reach. I think an easy way to provide some player feedback here would be to show how far out it reached with a transparent indicated once the object is picked up. It would take out a lot of the guess work of placing things down.

[b]Escape of the Clowns[/b] by kburkhart84

Well, there's a lot to talk about here. It's clear you know what you're doing because implementing a 3D character in GMS2 is not something for the  feint of heart. I think with some direction this game could have really been great, and so I'm going to be spending a long time breaking this down. I do want to say that there are some things I really like, and I'm going to talk a bit about those as well, but for the most part I believe this game misses a lot of the potential that it could have.

Positives:
+ Use 3d in side scrolling games is rare to see in game jams so that was really cool
+ Music was neat and fit your scary clown game really well
+ Additional complexity added as the game went on was nice
+ Crane AI works well
+ Intro texts explaining the situation is a great way to make the levels feel like they have some narrative weight. As a personal touch it might have been fun to add a name to each clown (more of an extra touch, not something I would rate the game on)
+ Scene transitions are cool

Constructive Feedback:
- A few poor game design choices really set this back. Speaking broadly, any form of waiting in a game is considered poor game design. It looks like thought was taken for this since you included a speed up button for the box falling, but it should also be possible to speed up the whole thing if that's going to be a large part of the game. Even skipping past the waiting with a speed up button would be less preferable than giving the player something to do during the waiting. For example, I can see a version of this game where you had to fight off enemies in between the boxes dropping. Because there's not a great deal of difficulty in avoiding the blocks, you can pretty much remove the platforming element all together if you really wanted and just make an automated game where you manually placed the blocks instead and the clown had to make his way up the path. If you wanted to keep the platforming, you could make this something more akin to a megaman stage where you are fighting bad guys while the level builds itself it a way that allows you to escape at the end. In it's current design, it encourages you to wait and wait and wait. 
- Platforming mechanics that look like they are bugs should not be relied upon for puzzle solutions. Sure, this can work in a few cheeky puzzle games where the entire point is that the game has bugs for you to exploit, but it's pretty balsy to require a player to dangle off of a ledge and require that they do so in order to solve the puzzles. 
- No complexity to the puzzles. I touched upon this a little bit, but because the blocks move so slow, there's no actual complexity in avoiding the blocks, which means this is actually more of a puzzle game than a platformer, and not really a puzzle platformer since once the blocks are in place there is no tricky timing or fancy traversal options to get you to the end like if you were playing super meat boy or celeste. That means that the puzzles have to engage a certain part of the brain that makes you think in a different way than you're used to for them to be successful, and there's simply none of that here. Granted, it is INCREDIBLY difficult to come up with a good idea for a puzzle game that hasn't been done a million times and even harder to make good puzzles if you have. I've made 3 or 4 really bad puzzle games and what I believe to be 1 really good puzzle game, and I think there really is no between. Either you're forced to think outside the box for solutions, or you're not. Here's where I think you have the solid beginnings of a puzzle game: your box layering system. If this were to be a fully realized puzzle game, I think this is how it would look. You would have a limited number of boxes per room (not unlimited and not random). You would have to place these boxes in a certain order in order to escape the room. There would also need to be a new type of box, something like an acid box that would not destroy cardboard, but also destroy metal so that the solution wasn't always simply to place the metal boxes on the bottom. You would need something like hot boxes where boxes could be set on them but the player couldn't walk on them, so they had to be nested below something else. You could have something like a cracked box where unless you had 2 of them stacked, they would break underneath the player and you wouldn't be able to escape. This would all require that the room be easily restartable and that the solutions could be quickly implemented - i.e. no waiting around for the crane arm. As cool as the crane AI is, it simply does not aid the game design in it's current slow iteration.
- UI and text is horribly bad. This is something that I think you need to be told once and then you hopefully won't ever do it again. Red font is hideously ugly to look at, especially if it isn't on a completely solid background. You almost always want a solid background or almost solid anytime you are writing text on something. If it is not solid, you will need very large font and it will need to contrast the background colors very well. If you want to go for the carnival aesthetic and you want people not to stab their eyes out reading your font, you can go on google images and do a search for carnival advertisement. Find some of the more pleasing to your eye and use those as a template for your UI, at least until you're able to get a better feel for graphic design and user interface experience. This stuff is incredibly hard to pull off, and there's a reason people get degrees in this. I don't even consider myself to know much about graphic design, but I can definitely recognize when something hurts my eyeballs and one look at it makes me want to immediately shut off the game. It will go a long way towards making the experience palettable.
- I would look into basic platformer controls and how to make one feel good. This is a smaller item, but the character feels very blocky when he goes from a verticle speed to a negative verticle speed. This can be really easy to rectify if you're just using something basic like the "gravity" keyword in GML, but if you really wanted to make something good there are some really great tutorials online. I really enjoy this one I found recently that helps you make a super great feeling platformer: https://www.yoyogames.com/blog/544/flynn-advanced-jump-mechanics

[b]Extinction Tea Party[/b] by Moon Goat

Fun! Everything looks smooth and polished, and the easing on the animations is juicy and wonderful. I managed to get a top scope of 98.3, anyone here done better?

Positives:
+ Really juicy animations and drawings
+ Love the bullet hell vibe and all the fun enemy AI, they were full of surprises! That cake at the bottom wiped me out on his second pass though

Constructive feedback:
- Didn't hear any audio
- Not a lot to the game

[b]Fantasy Strategy Clicker[/b] by Julien, Hyomoto

Sorry I really just couldn't figure out how to play this one. The fact that I could only use one of the 6 characters at a time didn't really feel like a clicker game to me. I'm used to clicking everything on the screen and clicking more stuff before the other stuff runs out. This one in turn just felt like a lot of waiting. An instruction manual or even better, an in game tutorial would be great I think for this. I can tell there's a lot going on with the army tab, the town tab and the threat tab, but I just couldn't figure out how everything worked together.

Positives:
+ Blending a clicker game with a fantasy strategy where you have to manage resources and your party is a fantastic concept and I would love to see what a fully realized version of this would look like. I really love clicker games and I'm sad I couldn't figure this one out.
+ Art is great and fits well the theme of the game

Constructive Feedback
- I couldn't figure out what I was doing. I didn't understand why sometimes I could click something and sometimes I couldn't. The threat screen seemed not to do anything at all, and I didn't understand what the town people section did. The only reliable way I found to get gold was selling food and weapons, but the problem was I had to sell them all 1 at a time and some stuff gets built for 75 gold, so it's a whole lot of clicking. Having a buy 10 or buy 100 option might be really good
- The page says that the game is winnable, but there's nothing in the game that indicates to me what the objective is or how to win it

[b]Fiesta Down[/b] by VinylFly

Cute! Beat the game with each character just to be sure I didn't miss anything. Love the cute little graphics and sound design that really did a lot to add to what is otherwise a very small experience.

Positives:
+ Loved the art and the sound design
+ Cute little story with the moles and I won't spoil the ending but also very cute
+ Great little cutscene to start the game off
+ Gameplay is pretty fun, I'm sure this would be a blast to play with a friend.
+ AI does it's job fairly well
+ Game is nice and short

Constructve Feedback:
- The double jump ability is basically useless...that mole is the wors.  Stomp ability is so over powered. There's no reason to ever be anyone else
- Pressing alt-enter to fullscreen skips your cutscene at the intro (not factored into my voting, just wanted to make you aware)

[b]Fiesta Fist[/b] by Cristobal, MatthewPattel

I have to get this off my chest to start off with. What gives you the right to make 'T' your melee button? 

Once you get past that though, this is a fun little brawler with some really cute characters. I especially loved the final boss and the cute crab and alligator costumes. I don't know why everyone wants to keep this guy away from the party so bad, but he must be a real party animal, pun intended. 

Positives:
+ really cute characters. Loved the main character, the crab, the boss and the dogs especially. I felt a little bad beating up what looked like a bunch of working class joes though.
+ final boss is always great
+ 8bit music suited the game well
+ unique pounce mechanic
+ health packs were generous enough that I felt an incentive to keep going after my first death, especially on the final boss

Constructive feedback:
Mostly nitpicks but I want to mention them
- 'T' is not an acceptable button. For anything really, but especially not for a melee attack and especially when there's nothing telling you what to press. I pressed almost every button on the keyboard before I got to this, including I think the 'G' button which brought me to the ending of the game and I was tempted to end the game there because I assumed there was no button to progress on the menu. I realize as I write this that the reason is probably to allow for 2 players on either side of the keyboard, but you need to tell the player what buttons to use if this is the case.
-  Melee attacks are a little bit weird feeling, like the hitbox is maybe too big and the whole melee is a bit unreliable. I think this could be fixed with a little extra animation to sell the impact of the hit
- Terminator box got stuck on the corner of the map which led to me just cheesing the whole fight.

[b]Final Battle[/b] by Kahrabaa

I really love the presentation of this one. The graphics are really cute and everything just blends together so well. I also felt literal dread every time the small militias would approach and I would scramble to get out of the way. It's got a really fun way of leveling up where your party just keeps getting bigger and bigger until you're basically invincible. 

Positives: 
- Great graphics
- Great presentation
- Controls work perfectly
- AI controls suprisingly well for a jam game!
- Tension is high when militias come by
- The tutorial in this was perfect. 

Constructive Feedback:
- Was there an end to this game? If there was I couldn't find it and I wasnt sure what the number on the bottom right was. I got to lvl 50 on the bottom though with 110+ party members. I think a little direction/story would have helped here a ton.
- It didnt seem like jumping did anything important. Probably could have been ommitted since it didnt have a use.

[b]Florida Man[/b] by BreakfastBoy

Got 72 oranges, final score of 4220. Fun platformer with a strange alligator boomerang mechanic! Seems like a typical day in florida.

Positives:
+ Fun and unique action platformer fighting mechanic
+ Fun beach aesthetic with some cool beach music
+ Art is nice with really cute pixel art characters and orange slices. Love the big jocks and volleyball girls. 

Constructive feedback:
- It might be worth looking into coyote time and jump buffering to make the platforming feel a lot better. I found myself not jumping when I wanted to simply because I couldn't quite distinguish where the invisible hitbox of the character was, which is usually not considered great game design

[b]Forty or the Modern Big Brother[/b] by SoapSud39

I'll have to come back to this game a little bit later, because I wasn't able to finish it currently and my save file got deleted. Here are some of my thoughts currently though:

1) I really love the presentation. The whole big brother thing is extremely well done and the way you edit documents is both creepy and fun. I did find myself just randomly hitting words though when I got to a certain point and couldn't think of anything else to change. 

2) Connections to real life characters are fun. I don't know Dan or Mark all that well but I'm sure they enjoyed seeing the wonderful pixel art of themselves. This is definitely something to be more appreciated by those well established in the GMC community.

[SPOILER="#3 CONTAINS SPOILERS"]
3) I ended up having some issues around the password section and stopped playing around there. I went into the local app data following the instructions and found the password, and my thought was that I had to put it in the game and that something would pop up. It didn't do that when I went in and I kept getting the same pop up. I fiddled around a bit and tried a few more things and kept trying to start and stop the game to get to a place to enter the password. At some point I think I hit the button to not load the save because I was trying out what I could. I'm assuming this deletes the save file because just after this I realized I probably needed to enter the password in the save data file and the save data was now completely gone. So I guess I would say the directions should be a little more clear that you have to enter it in the save file would be option number one, but if you don't want to spoil that mystery, I don't think the player should have the option to delete the save file at this point of the game. 

[/SPOILER]

Normally I would try to come back to this again but with 70+ entries it will have to be near the end of the jam period.  Overall though, this was an extremely polished and well done entry. I have no idea how you get these games (this one and your last one) done in such a short time. They seem like they should take weeks. Great job!

[b]GMC Fruit Salad Surfer[/b] by Yal

Final score 11519
What a weird, psychadelic game! Very cool idea and pulled of great. Love the use of the old CRTV monitor shader. I have no idea how you made this but you did a great job. 

Positives:
+ Very cool style to the game, has kind of an old ren and stimpy vibe to it where things are almost intentionally ugly
+ No idea how you got this whole thing to work

Feedback:
- Diving into the water doesn't always work how you think it will. Sometimes you can be coming from a super high jump and only go like a couple inches into the water which can get you killed by the monsters. 
- Style makes it so I can't play this longer than a few minutes or my eyes and stomach start to hurt.
- I don't super understand the relation with the theme

[b]Goin' All Nite[/b] by Dadio

Ok, wow. Um so I fed the lemon a bunch of pills. Are those drugs? This is a bit disturbing, and I would highly advise anyone to not make this full screen for the sake of keeping your lunch down. I suppose the lemon was pretty fun though and the song was catchy. That's quite the party there!

[b]GreymoorHall[/b] by Ninety

This is such a cool premise for a game. I really dug the atmosphere and the music really was spot on for the vibe of the game. Love the chess pieces look. I also really enjoyed how the characters were all RNG based, though it lead to more than one game where the NPCs basically all had the same personality and portraits.

[SPOILER="Gameplay/Story spoilers"]
My only real feedback for the game was that everything is pretty surface level, which is what you would expect from a jam game.  The strategy ultimately boils down to this: pick a character and see what their personality is and how the know the victim. Then find the item hidden, then kill the guy when no one is looking. I'm sure more complexity was scrapped due to time, but I think randomizing the questions asked would be a goood way to do this. 
[/SPOILER]

Great job!

[b]Hero Horde[/b] by PinesOfChaos

This was a really cute and fun game! I got to the final boss and started attacking and immediately a 5 second timer started which obviously got me killed. Guess I shouldn't have spent so long grinding? 

Positives:
- Very tangible feedback for progression. Loved seeing the improvements of the characters. It basically acts like a clicker game (which I love) except you get to move around with little warriors which is a blast.
- Lots of fun monsters
- Cool and epic final boss

Constructive Feedback:
- Timer didn't really make sense to me. It's hard to get all the way to the end and you suddenly find out you only have 5 seconds left. Maybe it was showing the time to me the whole time but I wasn't really aware of it. Even so, I wouldn't have known what time to look for during the game or judge my progress of how far I'd gotten because until you've gotten to the final boss you don't know how far you even have to go.
- Would love if there was a little town of people near the final boss to restock on characters. At this point I had like 30k and nothing to buy and I didn't have the time to go back to the shop
-FULLSCREEN PLEASE. It is really hard to click on these tiny little monsters, which is the main reason I'm not going back for playthrough number 2 despite how much fun I had. At least enable the Alt-Enter in the preferences so that we can choose.

[b]Hero Huddle[/b] by ThinGinger

Very cool concept! I beat the game with a final party size of 87. I am genuinely curious what the layers of strategy are to this. My initial thought is that there isn't much, it's basically just point at all the objects and because you're a massive blob you can't really dodge anything, but maybe there's a strategy that I've missed? 

Positives:
+ Visuals are great, stuck to a palette that works wonderfully. 
+ Epic final boss with some crazy attacks that work really well with the game design
+ You feel super cool flinging around shield arrows and swords

Constructive Feedback:
- Not a lot of strategy to it that I can see at the moment
- Different soldiers are not super distinctive
- No music, minimal sound

[b]Jaguar Pogo Party[/b] by TotallyAverageGamez

This is a really cute game! I really love the character and the overall mood. Music is great and the character and animations are wonderful. I love the unique little presents too. I ultimately have some problems with the game, but I'll get into those in a little bit. There is some fun personality to this game and that is certainly it's strength. I would love to see that shine through with more of a story in the future.

Positives:
+ Credits are awesome
+ Character is super fun and quirky

Constructive Feedback:
- Please allow an exit for the credits as clicking on the before starting the game turned out to be a huge mistake, as nice as they are.
- Main title screen is super ugly
- There's often no indication of what you can jump on and what you can't. Walls will sometimes just be solid where you can't jump through them. Game design tip is that if the character is going to collide with something, it should be consistent throughout the game. Otherwise you end up with moments where we try to make a jump thinking we'll pass through the ceiling and get blocked which causes us to lose all progress for something that isn't the players fault. If you want to have the character jump through the bottom of the platform, make sure they can consistently do that on all identical platforms.
- Character should probably face the direction he's bouncing in. **Update** I'm noticing now that the character faces the mouse which is a really bizarre choice since the mouse doesn't actually do anything in this game from what I can tell
- There's no indication of what to do once you have collected all 12 presents

[b]matoset[/b] by Poizen

Got an error both times I tried to launch this :( I'll have to put it at the bottom of my ranking for that reason to be fair to the rest of the jammers, but I downloaded the new version from your Itch page so I could give some proper feedback.

Very cute game! The online leaderboard is a super nice touch, though it looks like I'm the first one from the jam who has gotten on it from what I can see.

Positives:
+ Great art style
+ Solid movement mechanics. Worm is really fun to move around and angle properly to get good trajectory across the map. 
+ Online leaderboard is great
+ Game is suprisingly difficult

Constructive Feedback:
- Turning for the worm is perhaps a little too sensitive
- Not sure why eating the same apple would give me different scores each time. It didn't appear to be a combo system because it wasn't always the later fruits that gave me the higher scores. Oh well.

[b]Me pARRty[/b] by ghandpivot

This was super fun! The 3D in this one is just simple and easy to look at. Music is nice and relaxing, and I was able to make my crew happy everytime they ate a dead crewmate which warmed my heart.

Positives:
- Excellent visuals, cute and simple and easy to look at. Great with the 3D!
- Fun concept, really loved how easily and without consequence the crew resorts to cannabilism. 
- Models are all really fun with really unique locations and statues that were fun to visit. I think I got everywhere by my 2nd playthrough.

Constructive feedback:
- As you said in the game itself, it's not quite done so I'm not going to state any of the obvious except a quick list here (collisions, locations not doing anything, money doesn't do anything, etc.)
- The hunger timer is a bit too strict. There's really no way to fill up on food fast enough to ever not run out of hunger.
- I think the game title could have used a bit more time in the oven lol

Overall I think this was a really fun game, and I applaud the use of 3D!

[b]One Big Party[/b] by Gizmo199, shortbread

Wow, this game looks absolutely amazing. I could see this releasing on something like the Switch as a family party game without a doubt. Some of the games are certainly stronger than others. I would say the fruit stacking tower was a lot of fun and I really loved that the fruit stack got higher and higher as you went on. The chicken game was a total stinker in my opinion...not fun in any way at all. I didn't like it in Zelda and if they can't get it right, I don't think anyone else should try. I think the one where you punch people off the edge was a lot of fun and the pool one blew my mind. I have no idea how you all did any of this, but it's great work. It was also pretty much bug free, so wonderful job making something so polished so fast! Sounds like most of the assets were premade and they work really well for the style of your game.

Positives:
+ Game looks and feels great
+ Lots of fun minigames
+ 3D is magical in gamemaker

Feedback
- Chicken game sucks butt

[b]Party Guardians[/b] by StarDreamIX

So I have some problems with this entry, and I'll get into them in just a second. The one thing I will say before is that making a game is hard and it is very difficult to make art and music for a game. Any sort of game is an accomplishment and takes a lot of work, so great job!

However, when art and music is not yours you have to disclose that to the voters on the forum. The different sprites and background clearly come from different art sets and were made by different artists. I wouldn't have been 100% certain except for I recognize that skeleton sprite from a few online resources. Your use of them is fine as long as you let everyone know that they both are not yours and were not created during the jam period (provided you have the rights to use them)

Here are the credits you should probably include on your Itch page and the very least (per the rules of the jam): 
Archer - https://astrobob.itch.io/arcane-archer
Axe guy - https://uilleaggodwin.itch.io/roguelike-dungeon-asset-bundle/comments
And some other ones I wasn't able to find.

Positives:
+ Defending the cake is a solid  premise for a game

Constructive feedback:
- Biggest problem that resulted in my placing this at the bottom of my voting so far is the use of assets by other artists and musicians without proper credit. I would recommending adding the proper credits to the jam page or the itch page per the rules of the jam.
- Characters keep moving when you go in a certain direction. 
- When using a premade art pack, you typically want to use only one style unless you have a very clear direction that involves multiple styles (something like Mario Odyssey switching back and forth between 8 bit and 3D is a good example). When you have the 2 main character sprites in completely different pixel resolutions, the enemy in another, the cake in another, and the main title screen in another, it is really jarring to look at.

[b]Party Parade[/b] by Tristan

Well I finally closed the game with a final score of 350. Not a lot to the game and the game can be easily broken with button mashing. The little marching dudes were cute and the buildings in the background were a lot of fun!

Positives:
+ Background details were fun
+ Marching idea was really cool
+ Everything works well

Feedback
- Some of the background art was really poorly scaled and looked a bit ugly
- No consequence for button mashing makes the game trivial to play

[b]Party Pooper[/b] by Lukan

I'm noticing that the party pooper is always the darkest person of the bunch. Not sure how I feel about that. 

Positives:
+ Fast, easy to learn

Constructive feedback:
- Not a lot to the game
- Sometimes bugs as there are more and more non party poopers where you will click the wrong hit box and have no way of knowing it. Easy fix would be to make the hitboxes on the non-party poopers really small and the party poopers much larger. You would also want to make it so that the party pooper doesn't overlap with the other characters.

[b]Plague Rats[/b] by Nocturne

There is some really amazing stuff here. I love the animations and characters you've put into this world with some beautifully realized pixel art. The effects are wonderful with great use of shaders and sprite animations. And those transitions are absolutely incredible! My experience was a little soured by the bugs which ended my game 3 times. Finally managed to get through it bug free on playthrough number 5 with 23 rats total!

Positives:
+ Screen transitions are SUPER cool. Love the burning away effect
+ Shader effects are amazing, feels great to attack the zombies once you've got a solid crew
+ Splash screens are awesome
+ Great story! Not incredibly detailed or anything but just perfect for a game jam.

Feedback:
- Few bugs:
1) First playthrough my rats ran through the closed door in the second area so I didn't realize that the switches needed to be pressed and took me awhile to see that I needed to do that for the 2 switches
2) In the upper right corner in room 2, the switches didn't open the door like they were supposed to. Ultimately led to a soft lock.
3) Ran into the inifinite loop glitch in room 2 just after opening the door on my third playthrough
4) Ran into the infinite loop glitch again in the sewers in playthrough 4. I think that's where I'm going to call an end to the playthrough. 

[b]Snake Dance[/b] by Greenblizzard

Super cool game! I love the presentation here. It looks incredible what you've done with the simple art style. 

Positives:
+ Love the presentation
+ Difficulty ramps up in a slow and easy to grasp way so you're not hit with a sudden dificulty spike
+ extremely easy to understand and just get going with the game.

Constructive feedback (mostly nitpicks)
- Personal preference - I would have rather had the arrow keys be an arrow pressed rather than an arrow check. The reason being is it becomes too easy to overshoot your shape and then you're screwed and it doesn't always feel like it's the players fault since you may have just held it a frame too long. Arrow pressed might feel button mashy sometimes, but I would have liked it better myself.
- Not sure of the relation to the theme

[b]The Annual GMC Party[/b] by O_stogden

Very cool fun narrative driven game! I would love to one day murder all the members of the GMC, but I suppose I'm not quite popular enough for that yet. I have to say though, as someone who isn't really familiar with who any of these people are aside from recent chats in discord and twitch, I didn't really understand what was going on for a lot of this. 

Positives:
+ Fun premise, love the use of the members of the GMC for the murder mystery

Feedback
- Around murder 3 it becomes harder to tell who the murderer is based on clues alone. You really are just making blind guesses since there are 2 or 3 people with some sort of motive. 

[b]The Retrieval[/b] by Dr Wolf

Oh man, these RTS games are not for me. I will 100% admit that I wouldn't know the first thing about coding a game like this so I can definitely appreciate the skill and smarts. I just have a really hard time getting into something with such a steep learning curve where everything has to be read through manuals. I'm basically the kind of guy where if youtube wasn't around, I would not be making games right now because I rely so heavily on well edited videos to teach me in 3rd grade speak what I need to do. I ended up doing 3 playthroughs of this with 2 of them ending in crashes. I was never able to really figure out how to get metat. It seemed I got 1 per turn but I think a little more would be great since I couldn't buy anything at all without it. I also wasn't sure how to get more crew members. 

Positives:
+ Artwork is brilliant. I love the pencil drawn world and how much detail you've included in each of the blocks
+ Different difficulties are a great addition.
+ UI framework is great and works well
+ Music and sound effects fit the game really well.
+ As someone who creates game dev assets, it warms my heart to see such detailed credits in the readme. 
+ Pixel perfect zooming is great 

Constructive Feedback:
- PLEASE consider adding an in-game tutorial. Leaving me with a 6 page instruction manual on how to play is an almost guaranteed way of getting me not to even start the game.
- I got into a battle with my scout against about 35 enemies in a little screen and none of them fought back, so I basically had to sit and wait even on the fastest speed for minutes and minutes before my guy slowly wiped everyone out. The ship started out really really slow firing and gradually got faster and faster, and it took about 10 minutes to fully clear everyone out on that screen. From what I could tell there was no way to skip that section. I also don't think I was supposed to be able to wipe that section out with my lowly scout.
- Controls were not immediately obvious. Since I'm not a regular (maybe this is common knowledge to more RTS players) I didn't realize  you have to select the ship sprite, then select the sprite again from the left side menu, then right click on the map to wherever you want to go. Even though I would never argue for the 6 page tutorial to be longer, I also need some explanation of controls somewhere. A step by step tutorial would work best (though I know this takes a huge amount of time to code). What ultimately ends up happening though is I spend the majority of my time with your game frustrated that I don't know how to play when I could have been enjoying myself. I would almost recommend implementing the tutorial before adding the layers of complexity that the game looks to have.
- I also didn't quite get the relation to the theme aside from the text dialogue. It seemed a weak implementation at best since this basically just looked like a Starcraft type RTS.

- Crash when I bought 5 missle launchers and hit next turn :
[SPOILER="In spoiler for long crash text"]
___________________________________________
############################################################################################
FATAL ERROR in
action number 1
of  Step Event0
for object obj_combat_master:

point_distance argument 3 incorrect type (undefined) expecting a Number (YYGF)
############################################################################################
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
called from - gml_Script_weapon_get_target (line 10)
called from - gml_Script_ship_do_combat_turn (line 119)
called from - gml_Object_obj_combat_master_Step_0 (line 31)
[/SPOILER]

- Crash 2 happened when I got in a carrier v carrier fight and came up right when mine died:
[SPOILER="In spoiler for long crash text"]
___________________________________________
############################################################################################
FATAL ERROR in
action number 1
of  Step Eventmtd_gui_element_draw
for object obj_guilib_framebutton:

ds_list_size argument 1 incorrect type (undefined) expecting a Number (YYGI32)
############################################################################################
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
called from - gml_Script_fleet_displayed_move_points (line 5)
called from - gml_Script_flagship_button_show_info (line 14)
called from - gml_Script_guilib_run_scripts (line 5)
called from - gml_Object_obj_guilib_framebutton_Collision_1 (line 76)
called from - gml_Object_obj_guilib_manager_scrolllist_Draw_64 (line 124)

[/SPOILER]

[b]The Scattered Army[/b] by Sirham

I had a lot of fun with this entry despite a few problems. I ultimately did 3 playthroughs before finally stopping. The first one I had no idea what was going on and got decimated by the wizard. The second one I realized you had to complete these bosses in a certain order (an order that is unknown) and if you accidentally hit one in the wrong order, you pretty much have to restart the game because there is no way to heal (that I've found at least). The third time I was having a lot of fun as I was figuring out the order, but then I ran into a bug where the stone wouldn't move out of the way even though I had 10 in my party (it had previously moved when I had I think 8-10) and then all of my attacks stopped doing damage. Not sure why this happened. 

Drawings look very MS Paint which isn't a bad thing necessarily, I think there was a lot of charm in the animations, specifically the dragon wings were really fun. It was also fun to see small versions of the enemies you would fight and then larger versions of them. I also really like the combat system for the most part. Simple and fun, and very clear steps of progression since you're more powerful with more party members and they all follow you around. I think the game would benefit from some indication of what boss you need to fight (either a boss level or something like that). For example, the dragon looks far scarier than the lake lady, but is actually a bit of a pushover. 

Anyway, lots of fun. You get a nice long review because it's my first one and I haven't gotten exhausted from these yet :)

[b]The Way Back To The Party[/b] by Noodlehead

Well this was an interesting one. I appreciate the nostalgia you're going for with the old timey point and click adventure games. I had an indiana jones game that was pretty similar to this I think growing up, though I honestly don't remember it too well. It's tough to make a game with branching paths also have meaningful choices and I have respect for anyone who tries it during a game jam. That being said, I didn't really have a ton of fun with this one since the story was more of a facade of a story.

Positives:
+ Art was cool and branching paths are always cool
+ Music fit the vibe of the game really well.
+ Hints of what could have been a really cool little short story 

Constructive feedback:
-For a branching path game to be fun, the choices have to be somewhat meaningful and whether it was for time reasons I don't know, but this didn't really have that. I'm going to put the rest in spoilers to not spoil anything for other players.
[SPOILER="Spoiler for gameplay/story"]
- I really loved the moments where I would walk into a bar or a casino and there would be some visual change to show that something was happening and I was inching closer to the story being uncovered. However, most times I entered somewhere I would basically get a "you entered the bar and looked around" and then get kicked back out. So I didn't really learn anything about the story. There was the guard at the end which I think would have been a really great opportunity to use the lock and key part of the game. What I mean by this is what if you went to the bar and the woman there told you a passcode, or the name of a mob boss, or something that when you said it to the guard he would let you pass. Or maybe you went into the alley and you found a crowbar you could use to beat up the guard at the end. As it is now, you walk up to the guard and for most players, you're going to die before you can even finish reading what it says because it's a story driven game (which is what happened to me) and then you're sent back to the beginning. In a way, you're encouraging the player to just mash through the story by always hitting the enter button and discouraging diving further into your story, which isn't great game design. When you finally get in the room and find out who you are, that's literally all it says, that you find out who you are. Basically it's a big middle finger to anyone who was trying to get invested in the story because heck, I still don't know who you are. Maybe the character does, but none of us do and we're the people who are along for the journey here. I think it would have been so easy here just to say something like "you see a hot lady, she tells you about how you used to work for the CIA but you uncovered too many details about the secret military operation code name"ONE BIG PARTY" and your memory had to be wiped...TO BE CONTINUED!  Not that I'm trying to write the game for you, just wanted to show an example of how you can easily provide some payoff (as cliche as it might be), adhere to the theme, and further show off the noir/nostalgic vibe your game is insprired by. Sorry I know this was very long, but that's because I let myself get drawn into the dark mysterious atmosphere where the payoff was that I got beaten up in an alley
- Not much adherance to the theme at all. Yeah there's a line at the end...but it seemed a bit out of place to begin with. 
[/SPOILER]

[b]Wastoid Rodney[/b] by Cloaked Games, JosephEllis, BlakeNorth

As I said before I would totally pay to see this movie, and I really dig the video game. I could totally see this being one of those 90's licensed games for Bill and Ted where they couldn't figure out how to make it a game so they just threw in a bunch of robots and a magical weapon and called it good. That sounds like a negative when I say it like that, but it hit the nostalgia vibes hard for that reason. 

Positives: 
- I really loved the style of it. Nailed the retro 80's look
- Story was fun, definitely borrowed from it's inspiration a lot which is just fine for a jam game. No one wants to go to military school!
- Powerups were great and were really satisfying
- I love it when boss fights are included at the end of games and this one was really great.

Constructive feedback (these are mostly nitpicks in a game I very much enjoyed)
- Biggest complaint I have would be the camera which was just a bit to slow to catch up to you and lead to me running into red laser things a lot
- Not sure why this happened, but the dash wouldn't always go where I wanted it to, which made it unreliable for me for the rest of the game. I was playing on a controller, so maybe it was picking up feedback from the mouse? Or maybe it just always goes up if you're standing still
- I died on the boss the first time, just kept getting ganged up on by robots that would spawn right on top of me. The second time I killed the boss in like 10 seconds because I just got good RNG I guess. A little bit of invicibility after a hit in this game I think would go a long way. 

Great job!

[b]Wham Bam Dan Jam Slam[/b] by GameDevDan

How did you possibly make this in the time frame of the game jam?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Seriously though, there's so much polish here. Wonderful little gem. I love the sprite stacking effect. I love the huge roster of characters you had as well. I have no idea how you possibly made this in time and I'm going to tell myself that you cheated just to feel better about my own entry, but I'm sure it's mostly because you were able to choose the theme with a game in mind. It's actually worked well with the 40th anniversary and this whole thing has been a blast, so I hope I don't sound liike I'm complaining. I will say though, the ranged attacks are mostly useless, though there are one of two characters that are way OP. I managed to win most of my games with Dan (not sure if there's a bias there) and I found the ranged attack of the potato and the girl in the white clothes to be mostly useless. Excited to come back to this game and see what else there is though! By the way, I think the ideal way to play is the second mode because you get to see so many more of the cute characters. I would prefer that as the main game mode (more of a preference thing and doesn't have any impact on my rating or anything)[/spoiler]