Doing something like that in only 72h, it's a miracle.
Very good entry to the jam, I give 5 stars for that. :)
But I've no chance.
I find a bug near the end, so I can't see it (I won't redo the entire game for now, I'll try later fore sure but it's too late I must sleep X) )
For your advice, the second time I try the "hard day", after cleaning all ennemies of the map I get back on the top (where there is 4 lines to clean) and I fall in a hole, but I don't die, unless I was walking under the screen. And no escape from that, I try all the map long from left to right.
Oh, and I don't find the way to close the game correctly, I must kill the process the hard way.

I'm sorry my english is pretty poor, and I'm not shure that my explanations are clear...

Thanks a lot for the feedback, LeReveur! Indeed, it was A LOT of work! About the bug, you are right, you actually managed to fall in the only hole of the entire game that leads to a dead end - how's that for bad luck! :D
We fixed it and also added an Esc shortcut to close the game; it's in the post-jam link in the description. Tks once again!

Yes yes yes. fantastic job. played it & loved it. And by the way: who is your musician! What a fantastic soundtrack!!!

Great game, very fun and interesting, many great effects simple and substantial. Nice job!

Great character, and graphics are super sweet too!

Great fun game!
Also really liked the graphics.

Beautiful game. The art and background music were both highlights in a well-crafted submission. Thanks!

Very nice story and developpement. Too bad, I wish you made the musics, so I cant rate you on that.

Simply amazing.

absolutely beautiful game that I really wanted to see more of, ruined by a combat system that on a game as promising as this is nothing short of a tragedy

Thanks everyone for the feedback! :D

***I'm posting this on all non-browser games I bring up in an attempt to encourage folks to make browser games next time around. Do not take it personally.***

When hundreds of people make non-browser games, that means that, to play all of the entries, I would need to download hundreds of games to my computer. I typically use OS X, so Windows-only entries are particularly inconvenient.

Please consider making a browser game next time.

Wow that was execellent i LOVED everything. From the music to the graphics even if it was simple it was simply amazing!

[Comments and ratings from this account come from various team members]
To the person asking about the music it's from Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com who does royalty free stuff.

I really loved the look and feel to this game and I think it is the only game that I've rated so far that really got me wanting to see more of the story. The gameplay was pretty good also, although there seemed to be some bugs in places where I fell through objects I don't think I should have. One really small gameplay aspect that stood out for some reason was that was that the heat-seeking shots from the plants lined up at a good height where you could shoot them which I thought was pretty cool. There were also a few places in the graphics that didn't really line up properly so I couldn't quite justify 5 stars there even though the rest of the graphics were completely fantastic. I loved the backgrounds, the falling particles, and the dialog boxes in particular. Great use of Kevin MacLeod's music too, very fitting tracks for all the levels. Great game all round that really got me playing right through to the end. Well done!

The game is awesome.

The enemies are not very balanced, though. And the game could have some checkpoints.

Without a doubt one of the best games in Ludum Dare 23.
I loved it all, you could have used original music though, but I understand that not everyone is a musician.
Rated 5 stars

Graphics are excellent!

Excellent graphics and smooth platforming action. Even the writing was a step up from most LD entries, and showing the next shard/stage floating behind your house was a nice touch.

Wow!! Really blown away by this! I don't think I've rated a game so well in all areas - fun (controls were just right), innovation (the passage of time and recycling the stages was brilliant!), the shards thing really fit with the theme, the graphics and audio were enjoyable, and wow at the amount of significance and story you were able to pack into the game in such a short amount of time. This could very well be my favorite so far. Outstanding work!

damn damn damn. one more game i can't play on my mac. I need to buy a machine to play these windows titles!

I love the screen shots. I would have played it if there was a Web or OSX version.

Not without problems, which were already mentioned by others, but rather lovely game. Enjoyed it. Not sure why, but ending felt underwhelming. Maybe there should be some dialogue between L and G, not just some text with rhetorical questions. Probably you didn't had time.
It was hard to see some platforms in hard world, but maybe it was by design, since it is a hard world:) But, yeah, seems like game have some balance issues.

Sooo much content :D
I love the style, but the controls are pretty hard on a german keyboard (y and z are swapped). Still managed to finish it.

Nice! I dunno if its my computer but the last stage lagged so much i couldnt finish it. Gave it a good rathing nonetheless due to it being great.

WOW!
There's nothing more to say. :)

Thank you all very much, this is all great feedback! In a next release I'll make sure to enhance support to other keyboard standards. And yeah, definitely will enhance balancing too and expand on the ending a bit, maybe even explain a bit what is really going on ;)

It's a bit difficult and some of the levels could use more checkpoints. Otherwise I enjoyed it.

This game is one of my favorite games so far. I wish I had made it, lol. It feels like a full game, and not the product of a 72-hour jam. Music is very good (even though you guys didn't make it), graphics are AMAZING, level design is great, with good enemy placement, and even though people complained about the combat system I found the mechanics and enemy behavious pretty consistent for a jam. Just found a few enemies kind of hard to defeat (like the carnivorous plant and the jumping slime). The enemy variety was incredible too.

I believe most players will find the second Hard Day too hard. A checkpoint in it could be nice, even if the rest of the game doesn't have this sort of thing...

I should also say that the story seems to be fantastic (my game crashed near the end of the second Harday, but maybe it was my computer's fault, it was running pretty well until then =/). I'll play it all over again so I can see the ending next time. I found the 4-days a week idea great, and also loved the names for each day =)

BTW, there's still a sentence in portuguese in the game when you check the bed, though you guys have probably already noticed it.

Oh, and speaking of that, loved the retro-style dialog boxes. Remind me of pokemon.

Congratulations!

Hi Chambers, thanks for the reply!
Can you tell me more about this crash problem? I have played this game a lot of time and this is not happen in my computer. If you play it again and the problem still occurs, please, let me know! And yes, i forgot to change the bed text hahahaha :P

Wow, this is one of the most impressive Ludum Dare jam games I've seen. The graphics are great and the music...just wow.

AMAZING GAME!

Very impressive! The particle effects were a nice touch.

Impressive, so much content, and still very polished for a jam game. That makes it the first jam game where I wish there was a save feature! You played with the theme really well, with a story that kept me playing, the gameplay is mostly working, the music is fitting, the graphics are nice... Great, great work.

I can't tell what those first enemies are, though. Some kind of jumping rasta heads? :)

A bit of nitpicking: I had a hard time figuring why my double jumps wouldn't "record" sometimes (which got pretty frustrating when you have to chain them up from platform to platform). Actually what happened is that I jumped just a few frames after dropping from a platform, thus my first jump began my only jump. Usually, platformers allow a bit of margin on that to prevent this kind of issue, so either you don't have that, or it's just tweaked too low for me.

Lorancou, you are right twice: it would be a welcome control tweak, and we don't have that! This is VERY VALUABLE feedback that we'll be able to use also in The Journey of Eko, our main game, thanks! Other than that, very glad you liked it!
To all of you guys who are giving us such good response, thank you very much! I'm really overwhelmed! :D

I don't know where to begin... Nothing short of amazing! The graphics, the tight control, the awesome world-building, the thought-provoking story... The vision of the next shard floating on the background. The evoking soundtrack. Even the names of the power-ups are perfectly chosen! Everything falls into place to create an awesome, engrossing experience :D

Is "The Journey of Eko" related, story-wise, with this game? I certainly hope so! If not, please consider the possibility to finish this game!

Congratulations on an impossibly well crafted little gem!

Well done for 72 hours. real awesome graphics and a great story. The light particles were really cool.
Defenitly one of the best games so far!

Thanks for the awesome feedback!

TenTonToon, I'll consider the possibility, thanks! If we end up finishing it, I'll post on www.pixelcows.com (I think I won't resist and will end up adding at least the most important stuff we had to cut!). :)

About the Journey of Eko, it is related in the sense of the type of theme that is explored and the slightly surreal approach to it. This was not on purpose, but on a second look, Tiny Shard is like a tiny version of Eko, but with increased surreality, I guess... And a shotgun power up! lol

This is unbelievably awesome! Unfortunately, I couldn't reach the end because on my computer the game's resolution is too tall and doesn't fit my screen making some levels impossible to play, forcing me to "guess" where the enemies and the falls are...

Quite good. The music is great. The graphics are generally good, with the highlights being the character sprites; I feel like low-res art only works when the pixels are done by hand and some of the backgrounds (especially e.g. the platforms) did not seem that way, they just seemed low-res. The grid filter is a bit overdone but probably does help the feel. The high point is the story. It's sort of obvious, so I'm glad the end didn't beat my head in with it. I did like the metaphor and slowly realizing it and it was a good one for the theme. Nice job!

Beautiful all around!

Wow-ee-wow! Very well done. I love that graphics style, and the polish you were able to put into this in 72 hours is amazing!

Great execution - eye-catching graphics (I love the pixelization effect), music that doesn't annoy, and actually adds to the mood of the game. The gameplay is a bit hard, especially on Harday. I'm not a platformer expert, so I gave up, but would love to see the ending!

Thanks for packing the music it's great! Enjoyed the game it's got really good graphics and lots of fun. Brilliant!

I loved the theme of the game, I think it fits "Tiny World" very well.
I also liked how much there's history development. You really start to care about the world (shards?) and what happened with the characters.
On the bad side, it is what they said. The enemies are unbalanced. As a personal complain, I did't liked the control scheme, shoot and jump is hard, but that's me.
Also, maybe because my computer is old, the game flicked a lot, but nothing that would mess the gameplay.

In conclusion,
Congratulation guys! Awesome game!

The dialog made me annoyed I wanted to just skip it because I read so fast. Otherwise very impressive.

Thanks guys for the feedback! We'll definitely balance these enemies and make the dialog text faster in a next release (check out at www.pixelcows.com soon), together with improved controls and maybe even some extra content that got dropped due to time constraints on the jam... Thanks!

Didn't really run via wine :( Also, where's the source?

Truly a 5-star performance.

Amazing game! Really sucked me into the story. Alos lots of details and love put into it. Only really sad thing was that the Rage is useless on a QWERTZ keyboard :( but overall: Brilliant! :)

Harday is indeed hard.

Thank you guys so much! New that the creation stress is behind us, I'm packing a 'finished' version of this game - nothing like redoing the game (there is some charm in it remaining within what is feasible to create in a short time), but tweaking the basics at least: improved controls for other keyboards, rebalanced Gentleman's Rage... Not sure if I'll post it here, but it should soon be in www.pixelcows.com

Thanks once again for all the feedback, this is being an awesome learning experience!

Great audio, graphics and use of theme. Loved the little flying particles. Struggled a bit to get out of the house but. I'll wait for the post compo version. Would've loved to see the source code though.

Awesome entry, one of the best I've seen so far! The graphics are really heartwarming, the controls are slick as butter and the music shines! I look forward to play your main project soon! Cheers!

Love the art! Brilliant guys ;)

It's an awesome entry for 72 hours of work. The graphics are decent, and the audio is awesome - kinda pity it's just some royalty-free music, available for everyone and not created especially for the game, but either way, it adds to the mood greatly.
The story was kinda obvious pretty fast, and has broken relationship issues (mom and dad divorce issues?) written all over it - on the other hand, I can appreciate the depth as it is, since it does feel polished and complete, and suits the theme quite well. Good job!

Thanks guys for the feedback!

Marudziik, thanks, it was really hard work so I'm happy you liked it! Talking to people who played, I found there are quite a few ways to read the game's meanings, which I think is a great thing. I have my own 'primary' interpretation, of course, but I have the opinion that, once the game is out there, the 'correct' interpretation is whatever you can interpret in a meaningful way to you. Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed and were able to relate to it somehow! ;)

Haha I finally played it to the end, I must say I didn't realize what the game was actually about in my first attempt a couple of weeks ago, but not I see it was pretty obvious from the start. My only complaint is still that the game is too difficult - Enemies like the skull and the slime could have less HP, and health pickups would help a lot too.

Anyway, congrats again on the game, very nice idea and well implemented. The ending was quite simple, but well, I couldn't expect a cutscene in a 72-hour jam game, right? XD

Tks Chambers! We're going to release a post-compo version adding checkpoints and increasing the ending to what we originally intended it to be like, take a look at the Journey of Eko's blog soon! www.pixelcows.com
But I'm truly honored you got back to our little game to see the ending, you got one of the strongest compo entries IMO. :)

What a cute and beautiful game! I liked what you made out of the theme. And the music!!! Wow - highclass soundtrack :D
And your platformer is the first LD 23 game that really gives me the feeling 'I' control and not quirky controls use me.

This was really pretty little game, I didn't run into any bugs, the game ran pretty well and the concept was great, even if the ending was bit lacking, hope you continue this later and give it a better conclusion.

Perhaps the Gentleman's Rage could have been a bit more powerful, it had terrible range, did very little damage and was only useful for blocking homing projectiles.

Harday is sooooooooooo hard...How do you do that pixel thing?...its so cool...

The graphics wouldn't work for me, I just saw a fading red screen. All the controls and sounds were working though. Treeday.mp3 is awesome! I love the ominous low parts, it was like being at a carnival on a boat in a sea-monster infested underground lake.

Thanks everyone for the feedback!

JesterBLUE, this problem happens because you don't have support for Pixel Shader 2.0 .
Unfortunately, support for pixel shader 2.0 is a requirement for the game, but thanks anyway for the feedback.

This was really overall enjoyable. Thanks for this wonderfull game! :) Simon

The graphics & music were great. The platformer gameplay worked very smooth as well.
In addition to enemies, you could add hazards like spikes, timed traps etc. to make gameplay more interesting. Also sometimes I was able to "cheat" by leaving the enemy out of the viewport and shooting at him while he or his projectiles didn't follow me.
Some enemy placement felt kinda "cheap" though, especially for the Skull enemies which usually were placed after a jump, not giving you enough time to react.
Finally the game could either benefit from checkpoints or health items/powerups. The later levels are pretty long and filled with enemies & projectiles which drain your health fast.
It is already an enjoyable game though.

Very great job on the music. Some of the best I've heard in any LD game. I fell down during Treeday and did not respawn properly. I was stuck under the map and could not jump. Great job for 72 hours!