Commenting to try this after work - screenshots are gorgeous, love the bloom on pixels; makes the game look like its coming from an old screen :)

Very exciting game! Thinking about it was really fun. The controls are simple - everything is done with the mouse, which makes the process even more enjoyable. The music is also great, it creates an atmosphere! 🎶Cool experience, I definitely recommend it! 👍

I had fun after the 5 minutes I took to figure out my character was the sparkling swarm of flies and not the bird :face_palm:

Feels like there's good potential here to add additional mechanics as well.

I would like to see a version where the bird moves occur sortof as yours occur instead of waiting, I want to go fast!

Incredibly polished :sparkles: Great build up in difficulty! A few levels in I found a tactic to avoid the birds. But the next level I was still outsmarted. Really nice! And very atmospheric music.

Really neat game, I liked the visuals, the glow and sounds. The night-day cycle was interesting although the indicator wasn't intuitive, saying 1 move until night made me think I move, enemy moves and night falls, but only I got to move.

Outrageous levels of polish for a game jam, excellent yet simple gameplay, fantastic and fitting graphics and sound design

VERY clean game, smooth and nice pixel art. Really appreciated ( but i couldnt beat lvl 4)

Love the retro look. It's impressive such a simple game mechanic can give rise to some interesting strategizing. Lot's of fun!

Loved how cohesive the whole game experience felt. Really fun!

It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize that it wasn't the bird and I didn't understand the movement. A very interesting mechanic with a very cool finish! I love the pixel art style and the music.

What an amazingly clean game! the sound effects and smooth graphics were so satisfying to play - what a gorgeous style! The birds were appropriately horrifying

Very nice game, well polished, looks real good, great sound effects. Nice entry :D

This is one of the games of the gamejam, i like the ost, artstyle, and the gameplay is kinda genius

I had an issue with the web version, it didn't register mouse input at all (tried firefox and chrome on mac). The standalone mac application worked fine. Fun little game, although sometimes hard to see where your swarm is on levels with lots of wheat.

Really nice game, very pretty and polished, and very fun. I actually lost track of time because i keep trying to beat level 8 all the time (idk if it's supposed to be easy or hard, but it was hard for me lol). Sounds (both SFX and music) were also very pleasing to listen to. Very strong and nice entry!

@jemh2k @sviborg @johnbrynte @skbadger @swaglazio @j-rara @barryrichter @david-soriano @briibot @nickhellquist @d-indie @itsaina Thank you very much for your kind words, it's very motivating to read your feedback :)

@fint I experimented with different movement but had a few problems with synchronization and the game not feeling fair. For example, when the bird moves instantly, it sometimes gets you when you move off the field it is moving to. I know a way to fix this but I was close to the deadline and this was my first project in Godot ever so I didn't try too much. Maybe in a post jam version though :)

@ellaris I wanted the day/night cycle to be as forgiving for the player as possible. So I decided to make the birds inactive the moment you take your last move before nighttime. I see how it can be confusing but I'd argue the indicator makes sense, it just works differently than you initially expected. Glad to hear you still enjoyed the game :)

@multiphonix That's very odd. I had some mouse inconsistencies with Firefox on Linux but even that was still playable. To clarify, when you said it didn't register any mouse input, does that mean you could not start the game from the main menu or could you not move around in the field? I'll look into this but I am very new to Godot so no promises :)

Good puzzle! I learned how to make ULTRA genius moves right on the bird while changing from day to night :)

If you drop the -t from Locust, you get Locus, which is the Latin word for place or lavatory. It means nothing in the context of the game, but it surprised me. And lavatories, like this game, are pretty good.

A tiny puzzle game built on a 2D grid. This is totally my type of game.

The visual and sound atmosphere is really great. That was a really nice and pleasant moment.

However, the aspect of the swarm doesn't fit with the rest. I would have made it with pixels the same size as all the other objects, and these pixels would periodically glow white/transparent, as the current swarm does.

I would have preferred the possibility to restart from the last level I lost, instead of starting from level 1 with 3 lives. In some games, it's interesting to force the player to restart from the beginning. But here, it's a puzzle game, there is no real use to make the player solve again a puzzle already solved.

I made it to level 10, maybe I will have the motivation to go further.

I quickly looked at the other things you made, and I realized the website NewGrounds still exists. This is nostalgically reassuring. I will certainly come back to it later. Thank you for this too.

@recher thanks for your feedback! To be honest, I had difficulties coming up with a design for the swarm I was happy with and as the deadline drew closer, I just decided to go for a particle cloud and call it a day. I could and should have gone for particles that use the same size as the rest of the game, but at that point sleep deprivation had set in :)

As for the restart, the levels are procedurally generated, so two runs should basically never be the same anyway. The tutorial is the only level in the game that uses a set seed. My favorite games in LD are ones where you can highscore hunt in games that take 5-10 minutes per run, so that was my approach to implement that in a puzzle game.

I'm glad I could bring Newgrounds back into your mind as well. It's a website that never really went away and that is still actively running contests and events and I doubt that I would have ever gotten into music production without it :D

Incredible entry! Extremely polished, something I really value. The art style is so beautiful and well executed. The gameplay is simple, but good and interesting. Makes up for some nice challenges. I did have a problem when one level was completely empty and I didn't know what to do, but decided to refresh the page and try again and it didn't happen again. Great job!

@crocidb damn, I knew that there was a small possibility of generating an empty level but I hoped the RNG would be kind enough so it wouldn't happen so soon :D

I'll probably update the game to fix that tomorrow, I feel like that counts as bug fixing and is okay with the compo rules. Sorry the game gave you an unwinnable run, but in a sense you've been incredibly lucky :)

Thank you for your kind words!

Nice game! Web build worked great. For quite a while, I felt like I was just doing the same thing (same opening pattern that cleaned up most of the board without danger)... which was a bit boring until the board got bigger, and I had to try something different, which got me killed. Or, it should have, but for some reason I moved right next to a bird and he moved in the opposite direction (did the bird not realize this level was bigger than the last? :laughing:). I sometimes didn't notice it was about to become day or night, some feedback (background getting brighter, perhaps? or an audio cue?) on the turn right before that happened would be nice. Difficulty curve felt just about right, I was still having fun when I ran out of lives =).


@initialposition Oh, I didn't realize the levels were procedurally generated. It's quite impressive! I wouldn't even know how to generate levels that are all guaranteed to be possible. Cool !

Pretty cool mechanic and overall very nice entry! Made it to level 8, but died a couple of times since I couldn't grasp birds will move asap it's morning :smile: But feels like a good start to a complex puzzle game. Well done!

That was a fun puzzle game. I just jumped in without reading how to play and it is so well designed that it only took a second for me to figure it out. The graphics are great. I love the day night cycle to add some strategy elements. Great overall game!