First off, the anibuns are absolutely adorable!

When I was playing with the keyboard, the guard button didn't seem to be working. Refreshing seemed to have fixed it for a little while and then it stopped working again. I looked through the source code a little bit and it seems that having a controller connected causes the guard keyboard control to stop working. (I think the problem line is line 170 in KeyState.hx btw)

But other than that, very nice!

@xfinktion ooo my friend was running into that issue too but I couldn't figure it out. Thanks for the catch! may do a quick fix.

Nice! The graphics are amazing, gameplay is good, though a bit slow. I don't know if I was doing it wrong or not, but it just felt like there was a lot of waiting/looking for those shadows.

The anibuns are very very cute. the whole art style is fantastic.

The game plays very nicely and was fun to play! I really liked dashing around, felt a little like playing Celeste.

Absolutely love the super cute art and the music was great too. I love that you made each Anibun unique. I think it could transition into a multiplayer game quite easily, and playing co-op with friends would be a blast. Awesome work!

I like how you designed each anibun to have different powers! I feel like the game could pause when the player's reading a book -- the font wasn't exactly the easiest to read off. But other than that, great work!

i love love love the art! just such a great vibe, would love to see more of this

Love the overlay look, feel and gameplay, but is there an actual plot there? i went with all anibuns to get all books but couldn't figure out how to get to next level. Nicely done overall.

Loved the cute style, but wasn't really sure what was going on. I think all my anibuns were dead on the final wave (the red bar was empty) but the wisps kept bashing into them and I somehow won the level.
Definitely agree with the multiplayer suggestions that other people have made; would make a good co-op game.

Love the idea 💜 and Anibuns are so cute. I would love to play it multiplayer

@balgorode Thanks! Yah, the wisps are pretty slow at first, since I wanted players to explore and test the controls with the different anibuns. There is a counter on the bottom for how many wisps are left. Ideally there would have been different enemy types.

@criggles I spent awhile making the dash feel good so thanks! It is most fun dashing on the Jumpy Anibun (the albino one). :)

@nate954 Thanks! Maybe I can add it as an option for a post jam version. I thought about local multiplayer but I would have to rejigger how the controls are currently handled and would need to add additional UI to it's more clear who's who.

@brian-teng Thanks, I had the system of varying attributes in mind first for the different powers. They are based on Empathy (Helper) vs Hardiness (Endurer) and Experience (Veteran) vs Motivation (Jumpy). They aren't exactly opposing attributes, but it made it easier to figure out where each anibun's strengths and weaknesses were.

Pausing the game would probably help. I'm currently reusing a base code for displaying text that I'd like to update sometime so it's not a pixel font and more readable.

@james-kusardi thanks a lot!

@kwaku There's not so much a plot as it is about figuring which anibuns are good at what and using them to survive. There are 5 different waves, but I ran out of time to add when the next wave is starting. Each wave the wisps are faster and spawn faster.

@amkingtrp I may have ran out of time to add a game over if all the anibuns die :sweat_smile:. They are just crying though so I guess they made it through and just had a very bad day. I will have to see about multiplayer post jam, thanks!

@ladycerberus thanks! you can see thoughts above about multiplayer.

That was adorable and the art was so on point. I love the atmosphere, effects, and smoothness to everything. Though in its current state it's not all that fun yet. This has the potential to be a very fun game with more work put into varying the anibun's abilities and keeping them all together as a cohesive group with better AI.

Great art and very relaxing mood. The gameplay was a bit slow though, but overall I enjoyed the game and adding some AI to the anibuns was a great surprise

The graphics are great, and impressive for a gamejam. The atmosphere is nice.
What it lacks currently is captivating gameplay. I'm not sure what the different attacks and abilities do, so in the end I just used the force bubble of each animal to fend off the enemies.

Really like your games and this one is not different, it's really cool. Very good art and user interface! Absolutely love the dialog box and the effect on the letters typing. Something that bothered me a little bit was the fact that when you're moving up or down, the character gets too close to the edge of the screen in a way that makes difficult to see what's coming from that side. Maybe it would be better to make character fixed at the center of the camera or something, I don't know. It's a amazing game! Well done!

Neat strategy game. Given the "offensive" maneuver is to shield as often as possible, it looked like the most optimal strategy was to stick close together and rhythmically press the guard button when appropriate. This made the dash button a bit less useful: even if it was meant to escape from tight corners. The ability seemed only appropriate at the very end, and even then, I didn't end up using it.

Also, while I've done my best to read as many manuals scattered in the world as possible, I didn't feel like I was given enough time to utilize the knowledge each one game. I didn't know the name of each animus were, so I did struggle to associate their default abilities with what each book had to say. Not to mention the slow scroll of text and ever approaching wisps meant I couldn't stand still and appreciate the text. That's too bad, since each of them provided how to revive the other characters, but I couldn't read fast enough to grasp how.

Experience wise, controlling the group felt like herding cats, which while frustrating, did feel like was the point of the game and the charm of it. I definitely would have felt more bored if the characters stood still, and I stuck to the strategy of gathering them into a single location, and spammed guard; occasionally swapping characters when the current one hits their cool-downs, and repeat the process again.

Like @ck656 I would have appreciated a better camera: the look-ahead was poor enough I couldn't really see the Willows coming over in advance quite often. I couldn't tell if the stun animation provided temporary invincibility, but especially towards the later parts of the game, I felt I had a lot less movement control with each character as the wisps overwhelmed everyone. As such, I felt I won the game, not through skill, but shear luck.

Phew, that was long. I hope I didn't come off as too harsh.

@lambdanaut Thanks! I think there's a couple directions this can go, but my main goal at the very least was to get most of the main systems in - I agree the fun still has to be tuned!

@sodap thanks! I didn't know if I would have time for AI, but ended up doing a quick thing where every 1-2 sec they choose a random action or move in a direction of the current player.

@jefvel thanks! I didn't have time to properly introduce the systems in the game and didn't have much time for balance, but using guard is the most straightforward way currently.

@ck656 That's good feedback on the camera follow! I didn't want the camera to follow directly as I wanted the player to see distance with the dash, but I also didn't tweak it as much.

@omiya-games not too harsh, I think it's good feedback. You address a lot of the things I basically ran out of time for haha.

I spent a long time on the dash but it's actually probably underpowered while the guard is overpowered. Technically you can dash past a wisp to get away from it, but this is really only possible with the white (jumpy) anibun (animus/anima was the root word I was thinking of). The dash probably needs something else like invincibility frames or may work better against other enemies (if I come back to this).

With the manuals, I realized I was not going to have enough time to cover the systems I had planned in the game that the player would understand it, so I added the manuals to try and hint the players with experimenting with the controls and figuring out how things where different. This is sort of possible if you experiment at first and just avoid the wisps, as killing the wisps currently progresses the wave. Originally I was thinking of having a character select screen and having more of an intro, but that's a lot of UI work that didn't make the cut haha. Another idea is to have a tutorial stage where I run through the different moves, but again that also made the cut.

The AI is pretty simple where the characters just choose a random action every 1-2 secs, though when they move, they will also move in a direction of one of the anibuns (though they usually move past). I think strategy of using guard is probably the most straightforward one as of now.

For the camera, I did experiment with it zoomed out more, but decided to keep it to add to the frantic-ness, though yeah could use better look-ahead. The stun currently does not provide invincibility, so it is possible to get overwhelmed and the wisps can lock up a character until they cry (or even after they cry haha).

As for the design, the intent was more for a feeling of "making it through" versus "winning," but this was my first attempt at making a strategy-like game with several things to balance, so wasn't sure how much I was going to get through as there were a lot of interacting systems that wasn't sure would work out. At first I wanted it so you had to depend on the other characters to survive, but I didn't really plan for making a full fledged AI so instead let you control the different characters with simple AI, so I'm glad you made it out! Thanks!

I really love the anibuns :) things eventually got pretty hectic and my anibuns would get stun locked but I really loved the dash ability (especially with Jumpy). I'd love to see the anibuns return in your future work :)

I agree with everyone else -- the amibuns are adorable! I agree that the zoomed in camera helps keep it frantic, and I spent a lot of the game trying to find all of the manuals (which made it a bit of a game in itself). Good job!

@01010111 thanks! I think this was a good experiment with strategy, there's probably some more tweaking I can do just to see where it goes.

@ordineu Thanks! I was hoping the manuals would provide a bit more interest in the characters and some insight into the design, as well as give the player a reason to explore the map a bit.

Super cute! I'm an Anibun fan now :laughing: Simple but attractive game, I think controlling multiple characters worked pretty nicely and the game feel was spot on.

SO CUTE. I liked how each one had a pretty unique "class" that described them (especially Veteran). The AI was really solid and made it feel like these are real creatures. The books definitely helped to make you explore around in the beginning, but towards the end you had to stick together to survive. There didn't end up being too much strategy overall though. When you're all together, you can overlap the shields and the different anibuns don't make too much of a difference. Would love to see a full adventure game where the different strengths could be used more.

I like the art - the anibuns and enemies are cute, and the visuals are pretty clear!

I wasn't really sure what I should be doing - for most of the game there were so few enemies that there was no threat. I went exploring and found books about 3 of the anibuns. Dunno where the last book was.
When the final wave arrived I was luckily pretty grouped up, so managed to do ok mostly button mashing (trying to swap and guard). I survived, but with very low health.

Some minor feedback:
- When I was exploring, the camera didnt move until I was really close to the edge of the screen so I sometimes thought it was the end of the map, and I wasnt able to see what I was walking into.
(larger screen in general would help with seeing approaching enemies and nearby allies)
- When I was reading I tried pushing buttons like Z and C to make the text continue and I would dash or swap away from the book.

I love the Anibuns! Their characterizations and animations are so cute. I love the different 'personalities' of the AI, like a more sophisticated version of the Pac-Man ghosts. Even though the tutorial is really simple, I thought it was smart to scatter it across the map to encourage exploration. I never got the hang of dashing correctly but clustering with the other Anibuns in the center and shielding each other turned out to be the move. The music and sound effects are understated but nice. The typeface and UI are really pretty as well. Keep making cute games! :rabbit2:

@arzi Thanks!

@foolmoron yeah I agree, thanks for the feedback!

@almost Yah, there's not super clear direction and some of it is still in a sandbox-y state. That progression was more intentional though to let players explore a bit and then figure out the controls. Thanks for the feedback! I'll probably need to experiment with the zoom level or camera deadzones more. For text, I actually changed it to be up/down arrow keys to progress, but I didn't really make that clear either. Thanks!

@ruthiepee Thanks!

Super cute designs, presentation, and ideas!

The different traits of each Anibun really stuck out to me and it was interesting learning about each of their strengths and forming strategies!

Awesome art! It reminds me of some gba games. Nice job!

Dang, you always do an amazing job! Cool ideas, and great work on the graphics!

The pixel art of this game is very cool!Welldone!

This art is really cute and I love the atmosphere! I could not really figure out how to play properly so i spent alot of the time switching between the characters and trying to help them out with shields but wasn't entirely sure if i was having an effect.
I really liked having allies, it's not something I have seen in any of the other games I've played, and I enjoyed being in their company! Beautiful entry!

Super cute :) 5 for gfx!