Wow! This is really fun. The feel of movement and seeing the blob fill space is really well done. There's a satisfying crunchiness to it all. Get away from me shark blob!

Super solid game @pkenney! The movement was interesting though hard to control sometimes. I did eventually get the hang of it. The game over screen did let me know about the ultimate secret move of eating the other blobs by surrounding them and that mechanic felt real good when you did it.

You're very much "Running out of space" with this one though. Very tough and hard to complete especially with the walls closing in ;D

Great job!

Hey @pkenney just finished playing your game, running from the shark was great, I shouted at it more than once, characters have character!

I really liked the game mechanics and the graphics were once again on point, congrats on one more Jam! When I could swear I finished the game after I went into a blue monster buffet in a corner of the board, but i think I got too big and ran out of space and kill myself!

Congrats!

Loved the time pause effect when the shark blob took his bites, made him feel so powerful.
Controls were a little wonky at time, but the movement is so hilarious that it doesn't even matter.
Covering and eating smaller blobs made me feel like the blob king.
Great stuff

I was ready to come here and post that there's no way you beat your own game but after a few more tries I really got the hang of rodeoing the neutral blobs around and finally got it for a super satisfying win. The game is really fun, the odd controls made it interesting trying to corral things and trap them correctly. I felt like the game was basically over if half the screen was taken up, so I had to made sure my opening was close to perfect. You really succeeded in making the pink enemy a super scary threat. Even getting mildly close to it made me really nervous and I had to make sure there were plenty of other guys for him to aggro first. All in all a really good way to take the theme to the max with the sense of claustrophobia + very tough difficulty level.

Awesome game! Simple mechanics building up to a very complex, strategic and fun to play game. That's what I want to see in a LD game! I wasn't able to win yet, but I'm getting there. I can definitely see myself getting back to it after the jam ends. I wish there were a bigger room, maybe a network of caves with different blobs? An idea for an expanded version maybe? ;D Also, that claustrophobic feeling when it's only you and a shark blob (btw, a shark blob! WOW!) left in a tiny crevice is so strong and great in its weird way, that's just great!

Nice compo piece, at first go I went all in for the shr0oms, but on my second run I tried my best to savior the nice nice meat. Didn't go super great but I got me some servings at least, you nailed the theme on this one for sure, was a bit hard to know how the blob would act, but I managed to suffocate some of the little bugs at least! :) Nice and clean graphics, and informative sounds! Great job! Cheerz!

A fun game! Really enjoyed smothering the bugs, felt very satisfying (especially when you're big enough to smother the light blue ones). Fits the theme super well!

This one could have felt too straight to the point with the theme but the appropriate uncontrollable blobbiness of the controls really adds to the uniqueness. Personally for me the smothering happened naturally as the blob got bigger, so I think the message vs mystery levels check out. The shark fin on the pink blob is a cute touch.

simple and awsome, I really enjoy the art style and the audio, Nice!

Awesome game! Mechanics are very fun. Took me a little while to understand that the light blue ones eat the terrain and why suddenly 90% of the map was gone, but after that it was way more interesting to play! It's definitely one of the LD games I've played the longest :)

The monsters are varied and interesting, each has its own unique trait. Would perhaps be even better if the shark grew with every few bites and the light blue ones grew after eating a few terrain tiles, but to be honest that seems very hard to balance :)

What I mostly love about this game is how you have an art style which I really like. Don't really know how to describe it, but perhaps "smooth" colors? Like the green of the mushroom counter or the purple of the size indicator, they fit really well against the background. It gives the game a certain vibe. Also, I love the font you used/made. Looks awesome and seems usable everywhere.

Overall, really polished, visually appealing and fun to play. This kind of games makes LD (even more) worthwhile :)

Awesome! the mechanism is simple but really funny.
That's a little bit sad that the game still go to game over scene after I make my size to 10 :(
Anyway, great job!

Great game! Never thought that I would resort to leaving food on the table for the shark just so that it leaves me alone. That pink thing... It scares me.

Very interesting mix of gameplay mechanics. It's like more 'puzzle-ish' agar.io and you are running out of space. Gameplay is pretty dynamic and pretty well explained / intuitive. There is a lot of replay value and with each try, player gets better. The art is pretty simplistic but looks neat and is 'clean' / easy to read. In overall it is a pretty solid, entertaining game!

I won... I guess? I got to size 10/10, and after eating some more, the game over screen appeared.

I love how it feels squishy even on the square grid.

The key thing to realize was that when the pink snake eats, he is immobilized for a second, leaving enough time to mobilize to the other side of the map, sneaking just under his teeth.

Yeah, I didn't figure out I could trap/eat the small ones until it told me. Nice game!

Really cool mechanic. I saw your WIP post during the competition and was really curious where it was going, but also wondering how the mechanic works. Is it something like, check for spaces in the direction you're trying to go, pathfind a cell near the front edge of the blob that direction, then remove a cell on the back edge? The way this plays reminds me a bit of one of my favorite old DOS multiplayer games, Liquid War, which has a kinda similar "blob pathfinding/physics" feel. If you're up for it I'd love to read a little postmortem post about how movement works.

I was a bit confused why I had to WASD instead of arrow keys when there aren't any other controls, and I had to restart a couple times to get the first popup to show for me (I think it was clearing 'cause I was holding a button?). I also didn't manage to figure out that I could smother small blobs the first time through (though I did accidentally kill a couple anyway). I think I still don't really understand what triggers the arena getting smaller - is it just time based? Generally the mechanical things all felt natural enough though that I had no problem discovering them as I went along - that organic discovery is up my alley anyway.

In the later stages of the game the claustrophobic feel is neat, though sometimes I get pinched in by the monster blob and don't feel I have many options left to me. Trying to sneak past it through a small funnel though, or trying to maneuver such that it goes for one of the other blobs, just feels really awesome and strategic. Like most of your games this one manages to set its hook in with little complexities and strategies that I want to try out later. Really enjoyable gameplay, and nice pacing too, as it ramps up quickly enough that I don't feel any fatigue starting over and over again; probably that rhythm is part of what makes your stuff so compelling .

Oh, love the faces too, particularly the munching face on the pink monster blob. Man that thing is terrifying, hah! There's a lot of fluid movement evoked with just a few animations, and everything goes ticking along without a hitch.

Overall, super solid, and really fun. Nicely done!

The blob mechanic is brilliant! I love the way the blob moves and the snake-with-a-twist mechanics, with different rivals. I did have to read the instructions a second time to learn I could also eat enemies.

It was interesting that mushrooms had diminishing returns to increase size, forcing you to smother and play aggressively on a shrinking world with the pink guy lurking around. Speaking of which, in some cases as soon as it found me I couldn't do anything else but wait for the end and play again, which felt a bit frustrating.

Really solid entry, specially for a compo game. Great job!

Thanks everybody for the feedback!

To @peachtreeoath @goldranger @boltkey - Wow, I'm super impressed you were able to beat it, that is NOT easy. I owe you an apology because the game had a disgusting bug sending you to the game over screen instead of the victory screen. So disappointing. I was wiring up those scene transitions in the final five minutes and I screwed it up completely. I'll put my shame on record, here is the total blunder I made in my haste:

void Update()
{
if (youWin && Time.time > transitionAt)
{
SceneManager.LoadScene(LoseSceneName);
}
else if (youLose && Time.time > transitionAt)
{
SceneManager.LoadScene(LoseSceneName);
}
}

It's a stupid copy-paste error, as I had coded and tested the you lose path first, and then added the win condition.

You deserved better for your effort. I have put up a "politeness" update on the itch page which changes nothing about gameplay, but fixes this bug. It also allows the arrow keys in additional to WASD, and an undocumented feature where the user can press R to quick restart, because I agree with @ithildin that it's frustrating to wait for the end when you know you've lost.

It's not the same at all, but here is the screen you deserved to see: https://imgur.com/7xgNKCd

@justinmullin thanks for the in-depth feedback. The algo for moving was something I had to thrash on a bit, so if I can find some time to remember and write down the journey, that post-mort could be fun. The sections of the map disappear when they are inaccessible and you could never get there again.

@winnie33 the color choices are 1 part art but 3 parts math. The trick I used after I had one color I liked was to use HSL instead of RGB in the picker, and keep the saturation and lightness the same, but change the hue. I also changed Hue in mathematical ways: for example taking one color I liked and making two "buddy colors" by adding 50 to the Hue and subtracting 50 from the Hue to move in two different directions by an equal distance. Another trick is to go "halfway" by adding 256/2. Read up on palettes and you can easily start making such "smooth" color sets for your own games!

Thanks again everyone - I've played most of your games, but if I haven't got to you yet I'm on my way.

Ah, interesting! The pixel tool I use only has RGB but it sounds very handy. It completely escaped me that there was an entire science behind color picking. Initially I read some things about it but after that forgot about it and just picked randomly -- the result of which is pretty clear, haha.

But your method seems smart, picking "complementary" colors (I believe that is the correct term). I'll experiment some with it, thanks for explaining! :)

I Loved the movement of this game. I was half expecting to die right away on enemy contact but thankfully i just lost size. This was a great way to keep the game fun while still challenging. It was easy to get trapped after a while but that is the whole point of the theme. So this is a great project overall.

An interesting game, the mechanics are quite easy to understand, but its quite hard to learn how to achieve a good mark, I just miss a way to win the game (maybe it has one, but I'm bad playing on it and on the tutorial doesn't tell you if it has or not)