Ok maybe ludum should have a "pro" format too :smirk:
Really cool stuff ! :heart:

It's amazing how good you are at putting all those little details in compo games. So how was the overall feeling with Godot compared to Unity, apart from the missing web exporter? I guess you went for the version with C# support.

The OSX build crashes when you try to click any of the buttons on the main menu. Dragging the letters around on the menu works well though. I'll drop by and try it on my windows machine later.

first game I pick to review and it's gonna make everything else look like poop! top work!

Very nice, I enjoyed it. I laughed when I saw that you deduce points for ringing the bell more than once.

First game i play this jam and it's awesome

Really good work, fun and addictive 👍

@linus-lindberg That's weird. I'm on mac myself too and it does work just fine. I tried even downloading it now and using that which worked too. Are you on intel or apple chip mac? At first when exporting the final builds it kept crashing/freezing due to not being able to load the dictionary files (which I then figured out need to be included manually for the build). Don't think it's the same issue though (and obviously I fixed that too). Does the sign on main menu show an adjective other than "good" for you?

@tanis Yeah went with C# as I'm not a fan of python(ish) languages. Overall very positive about it how lightweight, stable and fast at compile times it is. As I mentioned, doing full screen shaders is miles ahead of doing the same in Unity. Some options on particles (trails, collisions etc) were what I was mostly missing from Unity. And obviously web export is a huge faux pas, not gonna be using Godot again before that is sorted out.

@antti-haavikko this time I wanted to go with UE instead of Unity but I stopped even before starting out because of the missing web export. I believe that being able to get a web build is essential for jam games. I haven't spent much time with Godot tbh. I will give it a try sooner or later.

@antti-haavikko The word on the sign changes with every startup.
It's a 2017 macbook pro with intel chip. Running Ventura 13.0.1

@tanis Yeah didn't even think that it could be missing before the final few hours and doing the builds as it's been there on ver 3 for ages. Wouldn't have tested it yet had I known otherwise. Not sure how much "missed plays" you get by not having one but from my game analytics it looks like way over 90% of the plays are in web.

@linus-lindberg Right so it doesn't have anything to do with the dictionary loading then if the word changes. I really have no idea why it crashes as the buttons (leaderboards and play) even do completely different things too. 🤔🤷‍♀️

Cool stuff, highly polished and crazy for a compo game to have stuff like a leaderboard

Lovely game! It always pleasantly surprises me how polished your games are, even when using a new game engine. I especially like the random Yoshi sound effects in the background music.

By the way, @antti-haavikko it is possible to make a web build with Godot 4, as I have managed to do (coincidentally, it is also a word game with a leaderboard). However, a few things need to be done:

- Rendering needs to be set to 'Compatible'
- You need to add a .htaccess to set CORS header, otherwise Godot will be unable to access crucial features (on itch.io you can also check Shared Array Buffer support for this, though that could break the page)
- In project settings -> Window, you need to set Stretch Mode to 'canvas_items' (otherwise the game will not scale properly with the canvas, I forgot to do this when I first exported the game :face_palm: ).

Furthermore, the game may not be playable in Safari since its WebGL 2.0 support isn't optimal. Lastly, certain small features may be buggy in different browsers.

@phoenix-fireflower Yeah I did find some mention about those but I can't even get that far.

Even though...


I'm using the C# version and found someone mentioning about that not being in it yet.

This was really cool! I always enjoy your word based games. The dragging mechanics felt good, and the amount of friction the letters have is *juuuust* right.

I wish there was a pause menu of some more. When you make a mistake in the early game, it would be nice just to restart right away instead of waiting to be fired.

Edit: oh whoops my recording didn't work out- it was all a still frame. my bad! I'll need to look at my OBS settings.

In light of my recorded gameplay not working out, allow me to add some more to my comment.

The extra long words were extremely fun to balance! There were a few times when the letters collapse, dinging the bell, and it becomes incredibly difficult to remove the letters without hitting the bell a couple extra times though... it's funny at first, but after a while, you just need to give up, as you're going to lose well over the amount of points you could possibly earn. Hence the need for a pause menu.

My cursor didn't appear in-game, which lead to a lot of trouble clicking on the buttons to select which word I'd be building. Again, that would've been shown in the video, but alas.

With that being said, great work! I had a lot of fun, and my final score was about 18,000.

@100th-coin Yeah, should have added a pause menu with quick restart and at least audio adjustments. I did have that in mind at some point but think I forgot it. The cursor is intentionally hidden in the main scene where hand is used but it should be shown back in the customer picking scene. Wonder why it doesn't. Already seen few of these weird different ways of something working on different machines, a pretty big con in making the jump from Unity to Godot.

You're quite right on the letters ringing the bell completely domino effecting an ruining your score. But you could still try to salvage it, the extra rings will only make you lose the points for that level and could still progress to next level. But it is notoriously bad when a letter gets lodged to the right of the bell. And the fact that the held letter is released on ring doesn't help. Now that I think about it, I shouldn't have made it release when held letter was the one ringing the bell but just cancel the ring countdown immediately afterwards.

Thanks for the feedback and too bad the recording didn't work. ❤️

I absolutely love that the entry is so cohesive and everything seems to be on purpose. And the ability to narrow down the main gameplay loop to something so addictive - very well done indeed. :thumbsup_tone1:

Mechanics are incredibly fine tuned and feel great. The pick up is wobbly enough to be fun and manageable, and letters just stick together a little but not too much. The ring having 2 purposes is clever. The design of the hand is fun. Music is very well made too.

I feel the scoring system could maybe have been explained at some point, it took me a few tries to get it and I could see someone not understanding something and thinking it's bugged.

Great job, incredibly complete and polished!

@yorsh What was unclear about the scoring? The "sandwichness" part I kept intentionally a bit elusive but everything else should be quite self-evident. Or at least I thought so...

@antti-haavikko Oh each one is absoloutly self evident. I meant that for the first tries, you have to make assumptions of how it works for a few things, before actually knowing. This is what worries me, as I feel that sometimes someone will stick to a wrong assumption forever, even if it's obviously wrong.

At I first I assumed the game was about fitting everything in the plate, and (as a non native english speaker) that rings were some kind of onion rings that I missed (given that it's a game about food, my mind went straight to food and not the bell thing). Once again, I figured those out quickly then, but I have PTSD of players telling me a game is bugged when it's actually just missunderstandings ahah.

@yorsh Oh right yeah, that makes sense. The only help messages that actually are there do mention "sandwich" and "ringing the bell" though. But you are indeed right and surely someone will not understand everything from the beginning just right and then proceed to not pay enough attention to figure it out from the score sheet either.

This was a lot of fun. Ran into a few bugs with letters getting stuck in odd places, but I still managed to get 23k with some practice. The music fit well and I liked the leaderboards.

The art is incredibly polished, really pleasing to look at and I like the sound and visual effects when you grab or place the letters. the music is not my thing but it fits the game, love the sounds. Gameplay is good too, I like the sticky letters I would have rage quit otherwise. Only possible complaint is sometimes the I and J get lost under the tray and you have to fish them out without seeing them. Also, the scoring takes a while should give an option to click to skip to the score summary. Only bad thing is the theme...it doesnt follow the theme at all, you are serving the food not delivering it. Yeah just an amazing game and I spent a good half hour on it.

@digitaldude555 Yeah I took the theme a bit differently and decided to approach it with as two separate words, **"deli"** and **"very"**.

I really loved this, the change in perspective it makes you have on the exact shapes of words is really fun and the kind of thing that'll come to mind when I see a random word for a long time to come. Giving the player a choice between the words they build is a great way to make them engage with the mechanic and think through how the letters will stack. The art style is very visually clear and matches the tone of the game perfectly, and the music and sound effects tie the whole thing together.

I ran into some crashes loading between levels, but they weren't common enough to stop me from getting properly into a run.

Overall this is just a great entry, and I had a lot of fun with it.

@benskca Dang, sorry about the crashes. No idea why it would behave like that (for you). These weirdnesses keep piling up which means I guess I need to stick with Unity at least for now. Crashing editor is still better than crashing final product... 🤔

Interesting concept and creativity. I think it's a fresh take on the theme, and I like how the different elements are combined and reassembled. It's a great game with good pacing.:heart:

Really cool game! I like the game mechanics. The graphics and music are great! Unfortunately the game crashed both times I played at some point (Windows). But nevertheless it was fun to play!

What a cool game! Really liked the amount of control you have with positioning the letters.

Overall, this was one of the better done games I've played so far this jam! It has a really creative idea, and great execution.

I unfortunately encountered a number of small bugs to do with letters getting stuck that took away from my overall enjoyment of the game.
First, a B from the word "Ruble" got stuck in the dish at one point. It's not visible in the screenshot, but it's jittering around in there, and resisted all efforts to be grabbed. Additionally, a letter got stuck between the bell and the screen border (second screenshot), which resulted in 14 accidental rings as I tried to get it out and eventually gave up, since I was fired at that point anyways.



Your profile says you're not any good at music, but I would disagree. The game music was fun and upbeat! The scribbling sounds added a lot to the immersion, and were a nice touch. The game was full of those little but meaningful things, actually! The bell tone could have been a bit more clear, but the audio was overall a strong point.

The scoring mechanics were clever. I actually didn't love the leaderboard, as I feel strongly about privacy and don't believe that a jam game should be uploading anything to the Internet. However, props to you, as it still worked just fine with the Internet unplugged during my testing.

The graphics fit the game nicely. The background was especially good, in my opinion. Out of everything, what stuck out the most to me was that the IK on the arm was top-notch. Well done!

The "deli" + "very" interpretation of the theme was clever, but I feel like it's a stretch, and trying a bit too hard to be unique.

I would not have guessed that this was your first time using Godot! The game had a great level of polish. You didn't try to do too much, and what you did was well done. Awesome game!

Great game. Nice mechanics. I like the stacking thing. idc i just enjoyed trying to get a good stack. haha! xD

@technoporg Well, I wrote that profile at least few years ago and I've been stubbornly trying to do music for my jam games (bound to be dozens) since. Of course I've improved there too but it's easily my weakest department in game making in my opinion at least. Didn't like the bell sound either but had to settle for something. Couldn't find a real bell or anything with a good tone to record with, it's just a metal bowl and a spoon.

The privacy concerns are understandable. But why rule out jam games in comparison to anything else? And it's not really saving/showing anything actually personal. Unless of course you write something personal there. Just a name you give yourself and a flag for the country. Hardly something to pinpoint an individual really. I think having online leaderboards gives a game so much more replay value as there is some real competition and incentive to do better. And having the flags there somehow helps too, adding some weird camaraderie and competitiveness. A feature which I've been constantly getting positive feedback (and queries on how it's done) on on every since I started adding them. And yes, the score submission is fire and forget, if it doesn't manage to save it, it just goes on with its life.

And yes, had to get creative with the theme. I think "delivery" is way too one dimensional of a theme. Probably one of the most boring jam themes I've ever seen. The only other interpretation besides the cookie cutter package/letter delivery is the giving birth one, which I've yet to seen anyone take it as.

I like the hand too. First it was just a floating hand, a big cursor really. Then I had a sudden idea of adding that IK arm there too and it immediately made it feel so much more dynamic and fun even though it has zero impact on the gameplay. Same as the background elements that react to physics too which most people probably don't even fully notice.

Really nice and polished game. Really grabbed me and I wanted to keep trying to best my score but I had some issues on windows with crashes also, 3 similar crashes at the start: finished first level, crashed after picking second word, finished first 2 levels and crashed after picking third word and same after first 3 levels. After that I could play for a while until a crash again...

Really like the added arm and the interactive background elements as well.

I'm not sure if the I has proper center of gravity, I couldn't get it to stand upright once :D

A little annoying detail I noticed was the cursor showing when the mouse is moved to the bottom (on top the "table") and the hand stays behind, then you have to move the mouse back up to the table level for the hand to move up again, occasionally made it a bit awkward doing fast moves.

@kuggenhoffen Yeah I drew the letter colliders by hand on top of the letter sprites so it is very likely that both ends of "I" are a bit off and therefore can't really be balanced to sit straight.

The hand stopping at table level and cursor appearing was just to help press the continue button (and also the buttons on start menu). There isn't really any reason to try dragging letters there so I guess it's not a huge issue though. But I guess I should have just enabled that limiting on start menu and when the level is finished.

Super bummed about the crashes and I have no clue whatsoever what could be causing them. My best current guess is that there are some words in the dictionary that somehow cause the crash by maybe having some accented letters or something. I'm pretty sure I added out of bounds safeguards against such but no better guesses either. 🤷‍♀️

Guess you can't remember the words you picked before the crashes?

@antti-haavikko I can't remember the words, went back to try a couple more times and now the crashes happened after clicking continue on the score screen, can't remember if that was how it crashed before as well to be honest. Btw, dictionary might not be kid friendly as I got "meth wrap" and "pedophile burger" :sweat_smile:

@kuggenhoffen Oh yes it definitely isn't! 😅 Cause you know, it's a dictionary and as such has (almost) all the words in the English language.

@antti-haavikko Upon further reflection about the privacy thing, I realize your game isn't more likely than any of the others that I've played to be doing unwanted things with my data, so I apologize for my irrational and petty remark.

I mentioned jam games specifically because they come from a less reliable source. For example, Hollow Knight has cloud saves, and, no offense to you, I trust Team Cherry and their professionally published product more than your unsigned jam binary. For the most part, people mean well, though, and if not, that's what an antivirus is for, I hope.

I wish you the best of luck in the rest of the jam!

Fun stacking gameplay! Grabbing and stacking the letters felt very satisfying overall (a few letters felt like they had some unexpected collisions).

Getting to choose between multiple customers/words was also a nice touch, especially given that the words seemed relatively random (and at a few occasions even somewhat vulgar :D ) At one point, the letters spawned in a way so that three letters fell down and got stuck on the bell before I had a chance to start the puzzle, I'm guessing the physics were a bit unlucky.

The art was good, and the background music had enough variety to not become annoying even if the loop was a bit short. I liked the sound effects as well, they added a nice feel to the word-sandwich building. The "sandwichness" scoring parameter was a fun addition, I hadn't realized the meaning of the word colors before seeing that.

I also liked the small touches, such as the arm also extending on the title screen, blurred backgrounds and animated customer models - it made the game feel extra polished.

Nice gameplay loop, very clear to follow and play. The robot arm was spot on! Good player feedback in the form of the score sheet, although I kept wondering if some customer comments could make it a little more fun (but that's also extra work, and maybe doesn't fit within this specific game).
I managed to accidentally throw around the letters so they hit the bell 12 times. At least that's what the following score sheet said, while also letting me know I was fired. Damnit! :)