Damn, 16.81 is an excellent time - my best is around 17.5 😂 GG!

If you're struggling for an idea, get your project set up! Make a pause menu, some volume sliders, stuff that is useful for any type of game you make 😁

Yeah totally agree, 6 weeks play and rate time is crazy long

Here's a list of tips I've built up over >100 jams! Feel free to add your own 😁

• A month-long jam is a marathon not a sprint. Realistically, you're not going to be working on your game constantly - plan for the time you have! Maybe you commit to an hour a day on weekdays, 6 on weekends - that will stop you from burning out, and it will help keep your scope reasonable
• Speaking of scope, keep it down. It's still a short time period - you've got less time than you think 😉 Focus on the first 5 minutes of gameplay, polish that and make it great, then add content if you've still got time. 
• Web games will get more plays, so if you can make one, do! Web builds from the major engines can have constraints, though, so try get something up and running quickly
• Play testing is really helpful! The earlier you can send a version for other people to play, the better. There's a community discord server that should be good for that. 
• Don't compare yourself to other people/games. Everyone has a different amount of experience, people will be using bird party assets, people will be spending more time than you. It is framed as a competition, but you don't have to treat it like one. If you manage to submit a game, you'll likely be ahead of over 90% of people who join - from previous years, submission rate is 5-10%.
• If you can't figure out what do do with the theme straight away, don't worry too much. Get some momentum going by starting a project, figuring out how git works, and making some game-agnostic systems - volume sliders, a loading screen, etc. All of that will be useful no matter what you're making 😁
• People don't read! Text tutorials don't work very well, especially with web games and doubly especially in a jam where people will be playing dozens of games back to back. It's difficult to keep all of the info in your head. If you can get away with keeping your mechanics simple, you'll score better across the board. Ideally you want your player to be able to figure out how to have fun with your game within about 10 seconds 

So the main point behind the 5 min recommendation is that once the jam is over and people are playing and rating each other's games, they will want to get through as many games as possible - that means they are unlikely to spend more than 5 mins on your game unless it is really good! Even with a long jam, I'd focus on the first 5 mins above all else, polish that and make it as fun as you can, and then add more content if you've got time ☺️

It's the full unity project. When you create a project on GitHub, you'll have the option to select a gitignore template - there is a unity one that will add a .gitignore file to the project that takes the stuff you don't need to upload out before sending it to git! 

You also need to put it on itch. "Upload new project" from the menu next to your display picture, follow the instructions there, and make it public, then come back to the GitHub Game Off jam page - when it starts, there will be a "submit your project" button. Press that and it will be added to the jam ☺️ submissions will be closed when the jam ends, so you've gotta submit before then otherwise you won't be part of the jam

I got it down to 6.4mb post-jam! I'm not sure what you mean about bubbles of different colours getting wrongfully removed though - it correctly matches the colour and plays a pop animation, then any bubbles that are no longer attached to the top fall off. That's intended, and it's how you get higher scores! 

As for the lag, it was a lazy bit of jam code and I'm really annoyed with myself for it 😭 I fixed that straight away: https://www.crazygames.com/preview/bc56318b-77bf-4646-aca9-c3f5012f4b70

okay this is the fastest I can possibly make it, firefox should have WebGPU support now so it should run for you - if not you'll have to take a look in Chrome, FF has been weird with WebGPU in my experience.

https://www.crazygames.com/preview/bc56318b-77bf-4646-aca9-c3f5012f4b70

I've just updated it to include a section about optimisation, that apparently I missed when writing it up last night 😂 thanks for the reminder! And the feedback 😁

This is great thank you, keeps all the feedback in the same place so I can refer to it later 😁 good notes, the game is currently way too easy for sure. I'll play with the input method, you're definitely right there. Hiding the cursor wood be a good first step I think!

Don't worry, that's not a bug it is just the end of the content 😂 I don't know if you followed in the discord but I had a last minute issue where the entire level was gone, so I had to do a couple more builds and didn't have time to flesh out the level or add a "you win" screen 😭

Still?? 😭 It doesn't happen to me at all, the profiler days there are no allocations and it only takes 3ms 🤔 I'll investigate further. What device and browser?

There you go, I changed it to dotted for you 😂

The border is not in the game, it is CSS on the game page! The shape limitation was in-game only 😜

Ooo this is really good feedback thank you, I definitely noticed a bit of this but put it down to the fact that I've popped these same bubbles over and over again for an hour at least. Not sure I'll go with your proposed solution but it is definitely something to consider, I bet there's a way for me to make that interaction meaningful 

That lag was my own laziness - I fixed it here: https://api.wayfarer.games/bubble 😂 I'd appreciate if you could give it a quick go and check it did actually fix the issue 🙏 

"allocations won't matter here" (narrator: they did matter)

So the original vision for this was something like a deck builder. Those three to choose from are your "hand", which gets discarded at the end of the turn. To start with you can only play one, but upgrades and things would change that. Alas, I had too much fun with the architecture and forgot to make a game 😂

There were a few too many jitters, I lost once because a planet popped out randomly, and sometimes collisions were a bit less accurate than I expected - two things that were clearly touching didn't merge

it was the third or fourth time I think!

I mean I started the game and it immediately won, zero moves for a success

I love the concept, you really deeply integrated the shape limitation into the gameplay which is very cool, and it works really well - it is a unique twist on the arcade shooter.

One of the main ways you can increase the "fun" in a game is to focus on the decisions the player has to make. In this game, I don't really feel like I make many decisions at all. I would've liked to see different enemy types - that is one of the more fun decisions in a game like this! Smaller/larger circles with different health, a filled circle that moves in a different way, that way I have to prioritize what I'm shooting at. 

Your colours could also do with a little bit of work I think - they are very saturated, which hurts my eyes a little bit after a long time, plus it's a little difficult to see the blue on the black background.

Hey, I tried running the project and I couldn't figure out what was going on, the cursor was massive and covered the majority of the screen and I couldn't really interact with anything. Sucks you had to deal with bugs in Unity 6 - I've found it to be pretty stable, so it must've been frustrating to have to deal with that!

Visually this looks great, the style is off the charts - though I do have to dock one point for your two primary colours being red and green! It's the most common type of colourblindness - 8/100 men have it, so choosing different colours is one of the best things you can do for accessibility :) 

Gameplay-wise, it's pretty good - rail shooters are a lot of fun, but I think this one probably needs a little bit of balancing. Other people have said the same so I won't hammer the point too hard, but I did also end up just spam clicking to get rid of the red missiles.

Dynamic soundtrack puts you on 5/5 for audio, great job there - I played on web so it wasn't really synced, but it is very difficult to do that on web so you get a pass there lol. Good job :)

One of the more interesting takes on the theme, and you did well to make so many varied buildings while sticking to the letter of the restriction! It's a pretty standard incremental game, and like a lot of the others this jam I think it suffers from a really long startup time. I want to be able to be doing things quite quickly, even if that isn't necessarily progress towards a main goal. In the future, try get people testing early - it helps so much with games like this!

I did find the camera rotation controls were not particularly intuitive, click & drag to rotate the planet would probably have been a better option there I think. 

Visually it is ok, the sun in the background is very distracting - too much glow on too dark a background, and you might want to use a site like https://mycolor.space to pick a colour palette that works well together :)

It looks so good, I particularly love the style of the UFO and the animations - you'd put in a ton of effort there and it shows. The death animation is excellent, it feels so weighty, and the diagetic UI is 👌

I think the ship controls could do with some work, I want to move faster and heal faster - you can balance this with other parts of the game (smaller bubble, longer time to wait to activate a pyramid for example) but I felt like it was just a little bit too sluggish to feel "fun" for me. There's a really neat core there, though, good job 😁

Nice! I think with the limited shapes constraint, colour is actually really important and the colours in your game are quite harsh - you want a little bit less contrast, and less saturation. I find that picking one colour and using https://mycolor.space can really help with that!

The gameplay is surprisingly well balanced for having only two input methods - I like the upgrades and I like that I don't have much control over the character but it is still possible to avoid things. There's a nice "easy to learn, difficult to master" type flow here - well done.

Nice - very simple, you had an idea and executed it well! I got third on the leaderboard :) the presentation is lovely, you've chosen your colours and fonts well. there's not too much to say here, it's light, it's fun, it has all the features I'd expect, and it looks great! Theme implementation is a little bit shaky, the shape limitation is implemented well but it doesn't really feel like you thought about "limited space" too hard. Not a major complaint, though :) one other minor nitpick is that it would be nice to have a satisfying animation for shape switching - morphing between the two shapes, or maybe one shrinks as the other expands, rotations, anything like that to transition between the states would improve the game feel!

Merge games work really well for this theme, and I love the concept - but I think the VFX really took away from the experience. The yellow sun in particular was quite difficult to look at, and it was on the screen for aaaages! The lighting also made some colours quite difficult to see, which made it a little frustrating to match things at times. I liked the quality of life features like the indicator for where it will drop, and the ability to rotate the play space. It felt like a good twist on the genre :) physics felt a little strange though, it wasn't particularly consistent and some interactions felt strange. I assume you used unity's built-in physics for it, but off-the-shelf solutions like that don't really work great when the game relies on physics so much!

A neat little idle game with some INCREDIBLY satisfying turret shots, I could definitely feel each one 😁 it took a little bit too long to ramp up for my liking, I would've liked to have been able to start with enough money for a turret and an upgrade perhaps. That's not the end of the world though, idle games need a LOT of testing and fine-tuning. 

I will agree with the others, though, it definitely needs some more upgrades and more of an overarching goal. That gives players something to aim for, which will keep them playing longer 😊

Wow you managed to squeeze a lot out of the shapes limitation - the VFX are great but the web build really suffers for it (I'm on a macbook so I can only play on web). Your choice of colours are excellent, and the whole thing feels very cohesive, which not many other people have managed! Fog effects in particular work super well here.

As others have noted, the ball is really tough to control. I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing, it does contribute to the overall feel, but perhaps a little bit of testing and tuning is needed :)

Nice little spacial reasoning puzzle game. My notes said "probably too easy if I can do it" but then it really got going 😂 nice use of the theme and limited shapes, the art style is excellent - really has a unique style that makes it instantly recognizable. So much content for a jam game, I'm impressed- did you make a level editor or something? 

Fantastic use of the theme, having the corpses pile up and limit the space even further was inspired. It looks great, especially the fire-y level. The sheer quantity of content here is impressive for a jam, and I can see how much further you can take this post-jam! I do love a little arcade-y top down shooter, if I had the time I'd crack the top scores on all of them 😉

It's a really simple concept and I love the inclusion of multiplayer - it gives the game a really competitive aspect. Against the computer, though, the winning tactic is basically just to avoid the bot and let it kill itself, which isn't particularly fun 😭 

I would like to see a lot more content here. I am imagining powerups that spawn randomly in the arena - speed boosts, a "pulse" ability that knocks back the other player, that sort of thing. I think this game really wants to be about controlling the space, and some extra objectives would work well for that I think. It looks fine, I appreciate that you went with red and blue instead of red and green, which makes it readable for people with the most common type of colourblindness :) 

Okay this is very very clever, excellent use of the theme and the shapes. Merge games naturally fit the "limited space" theme perfectly - but I thought there were too few shapes for it to work! I was proven wrong 😂

Unfortunately I suck at planning ahead, but I could see my self playing this over and over again. Visually it is super polished and really satisfying to work with - my one complaint would be the black and white colours are too intense compared to the rest of the game!

I just could not work this game out at all, sorry! I ended up just clicking randomly, and sometimes things would happen. I think a clear goal and some instructions somewhere in-game - maybe an interactive tutorial?- would go a long way to making this playable. It does have a fantastic name, though 😂

I'm not really a fan of puzzles and this one really confused me! I think your instructions need a little bit of work, it took quite a lot of effort to work out what I was doing.

Visually it is fine - though you used a forbidden rectangle so I have to knock a point off! I do love that you came up with a puzzle that only works with the pentagons, so I'll add that point back on for creativity there 😂 the radial gradients feel a bit dated, but it works well enough and the pentagon outlines in the background are a nice touch, though I would like them to move - it would add a bit more life.

Also, minor bug - this one autocompleted itself 😁 I'm never going to beat 0 ;) 

Great job on submitting :) it was a nice idea, but I think a little too slow to really get going. Generally in a game jam you want to be aiming for 5-10 minutes of play time  and you want to really hook people at the start. It feels quite aimless at the start before you get a feel for how you can affect the game, and by the time you understand everything properly it becomes quite easy. I can't complain too much though, it's a jam game and you won't have had much time for testing :)

Visually, it looks pretty good, though all of the colours are too saturated! I think you need to tone it down a little bit. https://mycolor.space is pretty good for picking a cohesive colour palette.

Nice job 😁 I see the vision and it works well - for the most part. As other people have said, the sensitivity is waaayyyyy too high, it would've benefited from a round of testing during development. One of the big things you'll learn is that your game is definitely too difficult, making it easier will make you feel like it is too easy- you've got to remember you have played for hours and the average player will play for less than 10 minutes!

Visually it is ok - I think the background doesn't really fit the style, but I love the cel shading! Your colours could also do with a little bit of work, though it could well be the background that is making it look too saturated. I highly recommend https://mycolor.space for picking colours that work well together. For the background, a simple gradient would work a lot better I think 🤔

You get 25 points for every bubble in a match and 50 for every one that drops! You get higher score for dropping them 😁

Time got away from me unfortunately, I spent too long on the architecture - I intended to make it a roguelike deck builder, something like balatro with crazy combos and effects!