itch.io

I've been game jamming for 9 years, but only as a musician and sound designer for the first 7 years. It wasn't until 2024 that I started learning programming for video games, specifically Unity. Other engines and framework are a massive blindspot for me right now.

All this experience and time, and I have never won a game jam whether as a solo dev or as part of my usual team. Winning isn't the fun part anyway, chasing an idea and feeling all giddy inside is. I'm looking forward to seeing what cool stuff or jank stuff people submit!

Hahahha damn I actually thought about Sift Heads earlier today for the first time in a long time. I never actually beat one of those games but the damn healing mechanic in I think it was Sift Heads World has been stuck on my mind for most of my life.

The ammo preservation angle went against my initial instincts of how I expect to play a game like this but knowing how it plays I can definitely see how it's "meant" to be played.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time on Stick RPG, that game and it's sequel has definitely inspired some part of my creativity. One that hasn't shined through in anything yet, but it might. Maybe. Man, the death of (flash and just in general) browser based games is so sad. XGen Studios had some really cool shit going.

I have no idea how this eluded me! I saw this on Ratios stream and the art style gripped me instantly, I had to go and play this. It was fun! It didn't run too well in my browser, but it's a classic little horde shooter. The stickman thing tickles me inside. There was a specific time in my formative years where literally everything online was stickman this, stickman that. You made it work really nice in 3D, this game looks great. Skill issue, but I found the aiming a little clunky. Running out of ammo was also never fun, as bare hands barely does anything.

Love that you've put clear thought into the EOL plan too, massive props for that.

This feels so nice! Interacting with the menu through walking and actually touching them with the characters is nice, it feels like the never actually stops. My favourite detail is definitely the fact that playing as the cat or the dog plays different music with mews and woofs depending. Art is wonderful too, love the smoke puffs as you walk.

Wow! This game looks and sounds great. The star particle parallax is beautiful, and I love how it speeds up when the dreadnought spawns. And good god the explosions are so juicy. Jamming music too! Great choice of sounds in general.

The concept is interesting. Spawning in enemies to make it harder on yourself to get more points is a classic mechanic, but not having any control over the supposed player character. At first I was confused and actually thought I was watching some kind of demo, and there was no information on the actual game page to alleviate that.

As much as I appreciate the experimentation, I can't help but feel that I'd have a lot more fun if I got to control the player myself. This could be a really satisfying shmup with a fun self-punishing mechanic, but it doesn't quite scratch the itch I'd want it to. 

Sometimes, a game will make me ask "Who's having fun here?" — the player, or the game? In this case, I think it's the latter. But I wanna play too.

This was fun! What wasn't fun was merely clinching the #5 spot on my first try, knowing that Rob in a comment down below me is better than me. I had to replay it. I'm more happy with the #2, #6 and #7 spots. Ere! I will get you! One of the few games that was bite-sized and simple enough this jam that I actually had the patience to 

The frogs and turtles annoyed me at first, but once I learned to ignore them I started appreciating them from a design perspective. Like you mentioned below, it's nice to force the player to pay attention to what you're doing. I will say that it felt a little arbitrary or unclear which fishes you could instantly tap-to-fish and which you had to do the tug of war (which felt really nice!) to catch.

I have to give massive props to your EOL plan text, it shines bright in a massive sea of "the game will remain available on itch.io" and "the source code might be released when it doesn't look fug ugly because my ego is more important than game preservation" (I am a very bitter and spiteful man). It's very clear that you put a lot of thought into it.

I'm curious about what updates you have planned, this was really nice as is and I can definitely see myself coming back to play this!

Ah that makes sense! That's what I assumed at first

I made it to Day 22 before Leftie died. Rightie followed suit 4 days later. 63 fish were fed before Papa lost everything. The detail of snow piling up on the babies when they die an utterly heartbreaking touch, along with the "Forgive Me". The music is also really nice. I kinda like that it doesn't loop, it creates such an empty hopeless feeling. I'm kinda picking up on some Dies Irae in the second voice once that kicks in, really foretells what is to come. Not even mentioning the gameplay, this game really tugs on the heartstrings.

Mentioning the gameplay though, the short drown time works so well to create a sense of urgency. Every part of the game design puts you in the mindset of stressed Pingu. Having to build momentum in order to leave the water was frustrating at first, especially with how floaty you move underwater, but after getting the feel for it down it felt natural. Seeing your child about to starve, realizing you don't have enough speed to leave the water, meaning it'll take a second longer to get to them. Brilliant.

Speaking of brilliant, the quick dive just feels so great. So meaty. The sounds, the subtle flash, the fish being stunned, the larger water splash. God it's good.

26 days of non-stop struggling just to fail. Imagine how mom must feel when she comes back. Luckily, a quick replay to dissect all the visual components of the quick dive juice turned into a successful run! Spring returned, 1 chick survived. Leftie died on day 22 again. Imagine how mom STILL must feel when she comes back.

Loved this game, I hope you keep making cool shit.

Second game ever! Hell yeah dude!

Damn snakes took my eggs.

Like Pamela mentioned below, some sounds would really elevate this. Just a basic jump "bwoooOOP" and a "bading!" sound for collecting eggs.

Massive props for making your own graphics. You could easily just have grabbed some pre-made snakes and chicken but you didn't. I love that. I had some issues with the snakes in this area:

The snakes are a little too wide and the jump is a little too short to pass them consistently. As seen in the top of this image, the eggs can land on the snakes and just make them impossible to collect. The first thing you see when you start the game is an egg falling. Having them be unaffected by gravity or other physics would be better, so you don't get these annoying interactions.

A very minor nitpick: the tree is baaasically the same color as the player character, which makes them blend together as you in front of it. I'd probably make the chicken brighter, more of a beige, or make the tree darker to keep the focus on the action in the foreground.

I took a look because I'm a little creeper, and noticed that you created your Itch account like a week ago. Welcome! I hope you keep making games and participating in game jams, I'd love to see some more stuff from you.

So my dad actually used to work as director of animation at RobsomeStudios, he's the guy in the episode of Sout-

Jokes aside, this was fun. The levels were short and fairly easy, which made me really eager to try and get the good ending. The choice of enemies is very subtle and off-the-nose. Speaking more on the enemies, when I started playing I kept dying by jumping on, uh, "The Second Generation Hire", but other times I would survive. I figured it was some weird inconsistent behavior. I realized what it was though: the death ferrets. They spawn above Tho- uh, The Second Generation Hire, and have their hitbox active instantly, meaning they can (reverse) spawn-kill you. Having their hitbox be disabled for a bit after spawning, or maybe even after landing, would make it a lot more fair.

As for the POTUS, the player character being centered on the screen means we don't always have time to react to him shooting away his wad of paper. They probably caused most of my deaths as well, so you're not alone there. Having the player be slightly more to the left of center when walking right, and slightly to the right of center when walking left, would allow the player to see more of the level ahead of them and having time to react. There is a tiny delay after landing that prevents you from jumping, and that shit killed me so many times, where I reacted to a wad of paper in time but just could not jump. That was probably the only thing I found really frustrating. 1inthechamber below mentioned the hitboxes being a bit too big, and I do kind of agree. Dying was annoying, but like I mentioned earlier the levels are so short that you catch up quickly.

I love the parallax effect on the sun, and the fact that the levels are themed after different times of day. It's a nice way to add an extra feeling of progression other than just the fact that we just started a new level. When I went to a lecture on level design, it was mentioned that a change of environments is a great way to signify progression. And in general, it just makes things feel more varied than only having a daytime overworld style.

The spritework in general is really nice, love the PICO-8 simplicity. Keep making cool shit!

I think I love Chase? He seems like a chill dude. All the shut-down cabinets surrounding you make the room feel really ominous. The 3D part helps us transition away from our own world and into Chase's POV, cementing the fact that we're playing a game within a game.

I will say though, the player's hurtbox feels way too big. It might fit the sprite's bounds perfectly but that's exactly the issue. It's commonly suggested to have the player's hurtbox be a little bit smaller than the character's visual. Any slight graze killing the player just makes the player feel frustrated because, psychologically, "there's no way that should've hit". As an example, here's a comparison of the hurtboxes of Touhou characters overlaid on top of their sprite:

This lets you not only do exciting weaves through massive fields of bullets, but every bullet that hits you actually feels like it most DEFINITELY hit you.

Huge props for making the sound yourself, and that explosion animation is just *chefs kiss*.

Also I just lost the game @everyone.

Boom! Welcome to the world of game jamming, we hope you stay and keep making cool shit. This is a nice little run-and-gunner, the sounds used are sooo juicy and work really well along with the blood splat particles.  Sometimes I'd kill a Slop and it'd give me three points which I'm unsure of why, something to do with how fast you kill them?

There are some things that could be polished to add to a nicer game feel: camera shake, text popups of how many points you got from a kill. This would make the game feel and look sicker and thicker, but it wouldn't necessarily make it a nicer feeling experience. The one thing I would suggest changing when it comes to game logic is making sure that enemies can't spawn within X units of you, there were a few times when a Slop would spawn right where I am, killing me instantly. I found that the ideal strategy was to just hug the wall. Having them spawn outside of the camera view would give the player some time to react to approaching enemies.

All that being said, this is a solid first jam entry! Keep at it!

This was really creative! We do love a little ludonarrative harmony, and the forgetful wizard angle is a great way of ensuring it. There were a few levels that could be completed without having to use all skills, in fact I don't think I ever actually had to use the Time Ability and I actually don't understand what it's supposed to do.

The levels that actually make you think are great though, and having to retry is never boring because you get to hear and read all the variations on the incantations. Tracer's ability, the Apple Girlington shout, and the unexpected deep voice for Lipsum are great. Big fan of the voiceover work in general! Super funny. The final level being hyped up as being super long and hard just to basically be a fart in the wind is great punchline.

The main thing I feel doesn't work that well is the fact that there are two different aiming systems. I see no reason to not aim with the mouse when not firing a spell, it makes Shadow Clone unnecessarily annoying to place.

In a reply below, you mentioned going back and polishing the level design by adding more time (if I read it correctly). I don't think more time is needed, some of the later levels have too much time (partly because Dash is more effective at killing enemies than Lipsum).

All in all though, this was a fun game! I hope you keep polishing it, pop out a WebGL build and you have a fun, light flash game thing.

I will second this. My opinions on this are glowing, but there were times where I jumped and got knocked by an unknown something

An alien rabbit

OH wow wow wow! I fucking hate this hahaha. In a good way, I mean. It's really good, and every loss is my fault. And I can never get as many points as I like, but I really wanna chase that high. Not just the high score, but the HIGH of barely grazing a pea, weaving through oblique saws, dashing past the Purking Friend as T h e H a n d slowly fades in underneath me. It's juicy, juicy I tell you. Fat and sweet. I like this a lot. Every time I lose it's my fault and I hate it. Love it.

What a creative take on the theme! Extremely meta which I love, a game after my own heart so to speak!

Voice acting is always fun! You did a great job as the narrator. I felt there was quite some delay between the things happening and the narrator describing them, like the events and narrations are added into a queue and doesn't interrupt the previous voice lines.

I appreciate the satire too! I've been part of a great many game jams, and visual novels and stuff shooting at you really is popular and they are pushed in every game. I thought I saw you mention in the Discord that this was your first game jam? Keep at it man, this is sick! If you can't make an amazingly polished game, you make an interesting or funny game. This is actually decently polished and interesting and funny! The trifecta. Keep jammin!

what a moron!

Where can I buy Ergonomic Gaming Pillow Pro Max? The cheapest I can find it for is $30.

I really like the idea this! Not so much the AI-generated music and art, but the meta aspect of it and the way it all is put together is really nice. All the detail put into the text messages, and just layers upon layers of satire. If nothing else, this is a brilliant piece of writing.

This was fun! And harder than you'd think at first. I never got very far. I remember a golden X falling from the sky and avoiding it, but thinking back that's probably an extra life no? When I see a big fat X my first instinct is not to collect it, but to run away from it. 

I like the choice of assets, Kenney doesn't miss. Keep working on this! I'm curious to see how you'd expand on it.

Top 3 in the woooooorld! I am unstoppable! Except for Ratio and Sternchen. If I could only beat Sternchen I could beat Ratio. I gotta chase that high score, having an online leaderboard is so damn nice.

I will say that the only thing really gatekeeping high score is patience and luck rather than skill since hitting isn't very hard, which I think takes away from the chase. But I am proud to admit that I was patient and lucky enough to get the #3 spot in DA WORL!! 

Mom! Mom! Look! I'm number three! Mom!

This was really fun in it's simplicity (like soccer!). The chosen 3D models are really nice, and the sound effect playing when kicking the ball is perfect, it's got real oomf to it. Having the dictionary definition as the intro is a really nice touch, loved that.

Insanely well-designed puzzles in this game! And amazing art as always. I only wish I were smart enough to complete it.

Lovely little rabbit! Reminds me of this thing I saw once...

The score got me😣

This was fun! The first thing I reacted to was the background, it is too detailed for a game like this. The player and enemies can blend in a bit at times and be hard to react to in a pinch.

The second thing I reacted to was the time challenges that appear! I love those, and the little power-ups. Anything that deepens the High Score Chase is good. All these things are held back by the fact that you used AI to generate the sprites. I understand that there's not much time to make art with as many mechanics and enemy variations and all the cool stuff you did, but I would have enjoyed this with bad MS Paint graphics. The gameplay speaks for itself, and would not suffer because of a silly reason as the art only being little quickly drawn stickmen. As it stands, the generated sprites are inconsistent with each other. If it were stickmen warping slightly then I'd find that a bit charming, here it just looks like a mistake when the main character's face changes shape repeeatedly in the idle animation.

Multiple language support is nice, so is all the audio settings. I like how the music went faster and faster over time (or at least it felt like it did).  Achievements are super nice too, and you have 21 of them here. Talk about replayability. Keep making cool shit, this game makes apparent that you have a feel for good design.

Hahahahahaha this was a lot of fun. Admittedly I am biased when it comes to games about rushing a game jam which heavily includes hands on the screen, staring at a computer screen, making music and has a literal computer mouse. But that doesn't affect my opinion on this game here, this was really nice!.

Excellent take on the theme, the dancing animations on the ending screen is really dumb and funny,  the game in general is really dumb and funny. The game also makes ME feel dumb and funny, because good god I cannot catch more than like 6 Big Weeds. There's not much to the gameplay but the art, and how much it shines through that you guys loved making it, makes up for it.

The music is great, we love original music. The art is lovely. Posting source code and providing a download is peak EOL. Unique settings menu music? Holy shit, that's above and beyond.

The comment below me mentioned the cigarette crossing the I in HI, but I wanna shout out the C clef and the three-grouped sixteenth note in SCORE. It wasn't until writing this comment that I realized that you guys have the drug stuff in the word HI and the music stuff in the music word. If anything I've played so far deserves #1 art this jam, this is it. Excellent stuff!

Hahahaha this was brilliant. I loved the writing.

I quite liked narrowly avoiding missiles, and I really like the way the clouds looked, like a bunch of bundled up white slime blobs kinda. I did not much care for the fact that the cursor was hidden, as it obscured just how much I had to move the mouse to actually look where I wanted to look. 

The game felt a bit too easy, but not in a way meaning the game was easy to play. Let me explain what I mean: dodging shots was easy but actually hitting the enemies was tedious, mostly because of the slow turn speed. Also, you shoot with space and not by clicking even though you already use the mouse to aim. Clicking repeatedly, I was actually confused whether or not the game included any shooting or not. I had to exit out and made sure I'd read the itch page correctly, but it only says to "hold fire". It took me a minute or so to stumble onto the right button.

The players speed and slow turn speed made the optimal strategy simply running away for a long time, then going straight for an enemy plane from far away and unloading your missiles. I think a game like this deserves to be fast and intense. The enemy planes could still be slower than the player, like they are now, but maybe some rubber banding where they speed up and catch up if you escape? The high score should be exhilarating to chase. Speaking of, I love the fact that YOU are the one being chased here. It's such a nice twist on the theme, YOU're the high score.

The planes looked cool and having challenges like those pictured is a nice addition, kinda makes me wanna try for an Untouchable at some point. I'm guessing Close Call is winning with very little HP left? Keep making cool shit!

Nice little Alien character! Reminds me a bit of cat_6s rabbit a few comments down

Goddamniiiiiit!! 🤯🔫

Mine is like a minute long, so its easy to sneak into any stream: https://itch.io/jam/skg-jam-2026/rate/4805839

The Chuk games enjoy you too!

Smell ya later GAR!

This is the perfect distillation of the Jam Theme. First you chase the high score, then GAR chases you! That ending was a lot of fun, and I love the Gar's little dialogue. 

This was really good! Love the sounds and the music, sick job!

A hearty hoohoo heehee!

Oh damn this game gets really fast really quick. I like the menu music, some BGM is sorely missed in the actual gameplay. The main menu in general is super nice, and the enemy sprites are sick. 

I had fun! Pretty fine with my score. 

Big fan of the art here, I went for a similar vibe with my game. Did you make the music yourself? Because that was nice too, especially the part where the bass starts going super fast. Sounds like some FL stock stuff, 3xOsc for the synth, BoobAss for the bass?  Love those, you don't need fancy fucking Sytrus and Massive or whatever. I might just be Boss Baby-ing though, as I don't have experience with any other DAW.

I think I understand how to lose the minigames. Don't let the ball fall, don't fish the red fish, don't mine the bombs. I avoid doing those things, but I don't seem to actually get any points? It seems like I lose points no matter what I do. I ran into a bug of sorts when retrying the game, the ball game doesn't seem to start. I'm sure you're aware of that though.

From one stick figure minigame game to another, keep making games!

I'm a bit saddened by the fact that this (as of right now) only has a single digit amount of ratings, the platforming feels pretty damn polished and the level doesn't have any typical ProcGen jank. You really should keep working on this, it's super nice and I'd love to see more; especially since I couldn't even beat the boss or make it to level 3 hahaha.

As soon as RNG gets involved there's more to getting points than just pure skill, in the case of this game I'm of course talking about the procedural generation. If I got a level where more green slimes and fewer flying enemies, I could get points much faster, level up, and beat the boss. For a High Score Chaser like this I'd prefer more intentional level design, but that's a matter of taste.

 I played with a mouse, which made me want the sword to always attack in the direction of the cursor. Obviously you also offered attack with J so that's not possible, having to quick tap the opposite direction key before attacking an enemy behind me was annoying. 

Another thing that frustrated me a bit was the fact that flying enemies could be knocked through walls, as this meant a lot of going down and back up through stalactites, resulting in a lost combo. Luckily the dash is really sick, and lets you go fast enough to catch up most of the time.

God this turned into a bunch of paragraphs on things I had issues with, probably because I really enjoy this and want it to be as good as possible. Big fan of the enemy variety, and the boss was a lot of fun despite my lack of skill. Great job on the art and music as wel! We love game jam games with original music, and the sword slash is really satisfying. Keep making cool shit!

Hahahahaha holy shit it was Morshu all along. Thank you for playing!

Wait this is actually fucking brilliant. Like, seriously really good. I sadly died on stage 3, but not before falling head over heels in love with this.

The polarity mechanic is obviously brilliant in it's simplicity, touching color when that color == good. It's such a minor thing that adds infinite depth to the High Score Chase. People could lose hours or even days trying to find the optimal route here, and that's not even the only extra mechanic. Big fan of the color chain feature, which feels like it was taken straight out of Undefined Fantastic Object. It's another tiny thing that adds scoring depth. That's where I feel this game excels

Bosses? In a Jam game? And relatively engaging ones at that? Insanely impressive! As is the music! The subtle tempo increase in the beginning of the Stage 1 theme is such a lovely little piece of ear candy. I have to finish this. You won me over instantly with this game, I can't wait to see what else you do in any future jams (or just in general), this is absolutely fantastic.