The game lags a ton, not sure why

nice game! however i got stuck between 2 blocks beacuse i didn't get the logic of a level and i couldn't get out, i was just stuck there. i just had to reset the game. But overall, it's great!

This game was great! Really solid mechanic and challenging puzzles. I definitely think the difficulty ramped up too fast, consider adding a few more introductory levels to get the player acclimated to the feel and mechanics.

Really great work!

Oh, I loved this. It felt like a lost flash game from about 10 years back. I did use the backspace teleport a bit to complete puzzles, which may have been cheating, but I had fun with it. That last puzzle was a right pain in the arse, I had to spend a fair amount of time replacing my clones with slightly more efficient ones to get through the door in time. Wonderful stuff. Other than that, beautiful graphics, good sound design, great mechanics, good work all round.

This game was a lot of fun, and it had a really tight art style. I had a lot of fun learning the mechanics and solving the puzzles!

Wow, really well done! The detail of the sound effects and the character animation made the game feel really smooth.

Great game. Good difficulty between puzzle solving and execution! Really like the music as well.

Always been a fan of the clockwork aesthetic. Big reason I like Steampunk. Gears have always fascinated me. Game played well. Controls were simple and felt good. Graphics were some of the most polished I've seen. Puzzle difficulty progression was well designed.

What a beautiful game, it was amazing to go through the level
the level design is clever, the music is fiting and doesn't get annoying, i have really nothing bad to say about your game, and it's so clean for a game jam project, good work !

Having trouble getting past the main menu. Mouse is hidden, keyboard doesn't seem to work...

Really cool concept and puzzles! Plus the art is just gorgeous! My only complaint is that there should be a way to reset the level if you manage to get yourself stuck somewhere.

Ooooooohhhh, not often I feel controller vibration in a jam game. ;) Very nice touch.

I'm super impressed with this one. It seems super polished, looks fantastic, and the puzzles are all really clever.

I will say though that the puzzles probably ramp up in difficult too fast. There were some levels where I had to discover and apply a lot of new concepts all at once, all while figuring out how to layout my recording timeline, which left me stuck more often than not. Solving those puzzles was super satisfying, but I can see a lot of people getting turned off in frustration due to the pacing.

That being said, I don't expect that level of balance in a jam game. The fact that y'all were able to come up with these tricky puzzles in such a short amount of time is commendable in itself. Fantastic work!

Thank you all for the feedback, I'm glad so many people are enjoying this!

Addressing a few of the issues people have had:

@delender1100 Not sure why the game might be lagging, sorry about that.

@aaronflippo If you're stuck on the main menu, you press the spacebar to start on keyboard or the A button on controller (I'll update that in the description). If your keyboard doesn't seem to respond, is it possible you have a controller plugged in? It will default to that. (this issue has been fixed)

@bongard22 If you end up getting stuck in a wall or a softlock, you can press backspace if using keyboard or select if using a controller to reset your position back to where you spawn. I may put in a bugfix to have it do that automatically. (done)

@firebelley @coleslaughter I agree that it does ramp up pretty quick. :sweat_smile: We had all these ideas for mechanics we wanted to introduce but only enough time to make a handful of levels, so we had to compromise a bit (we even have a bunch of unused sprites/code for falling platforms, teleporters, stuff like that). If we end up expanding on this we'd definitely introduce new things more gradually. Thank you for powering through and leaving feedback!

@tristan-mansfield Hey, no problem. It might be my computer. But I'll try again.

The Graphics are on Point and the Audio is pretty good aswell. I would make the controls simpler and make just one Button for Picking up and Throwing. liked it! :smile:

Very good and beautiful game! Great job!

I'm reeeaaaally bad at platformer games, and it seems that the game is quite hard. So I did'nt finish it. But from what i've seen, it's very polished, with a nice art (graphical AND audio), with cute animation, a beautiful UI, and the controls responds really well. I really don't know what to give for advices.

And everybody should love clockworks.

this game is really interesting and deep, but its pretty hard. its enough just to get the gear into the machine let alone get through the door on one cycle. this is a nicely polished game though and really interesting mechanic! impressive stuff

I love it! I really enjoyed the twist on the theme with "In the loop" working on two levels (that being the resetting clock and your replaying puppet). The graphics and animation are really polished and the platforming feels good.

Only caveat might be that the controls felt a bit complicated. I felt like the game could have used less buttons (e.g. ame button for picking up, throwing as was already said before). Also, the jumps and timings felt really tight. But I'm nitpicking

Great brain-teaser game. All around great job on the aesthetic and audio design. It was great when it finally clicked. And you guys did a good job gradually teaching mechanics through play.

One small suggestion would be a way to restart the level because it's possible to get stuck. Here for example, where my time puppet couldn't reach the button without me anymore:

But the game is great all around and on theme as well! Great work! :v:

@m-trigo, thank you for playing! You can respawn at the start with backspace if you get stuck.

Great game.. I love the weightiness of the player and good mechanic.. Lots of ways you can go with this! OH and A+ Artwork :)

Hey, you played my game yesterday on stream, I for sure came to see yours because it has a beautiful art and seemed fun.

The game is very good. The gameplay of The Company of Myself is not so innovative, but you knew how to use it properly, have a proper theme for the game and a very good concept.
I was not expecting to use my controller, and I had to go through comments to see why normal keyboard keys were not working. So a suggestion is for sure support both keyboard and joystick (I have my joystick connected to PC the whole time), or show some simple UI that points out that joystick is being used for input.

Also for constructive feedback I have some points.
1) since it's a timing game, it's good to have time markers on the clock so you can have a better time syncing. I had to decide some points, like 1/4 or 1/2 or 3/4 of a full rotation to know when I had to do something.
2) physics is not perfect, so avoiding tight gaps would be good. I simply gave up at the 3 clones level (I don't know if you have more after that). I had 3 clones stacked and the 3rd one was jumping and getting inside the gap, but it took me 5 to 10 tries to fit him into the gap (holding right doesn't automatically puts him into the gap, which in most games would), so after setting everything up I saw I had one clone in a wrong location at the end and had to redo the gap jump. After 3 times having to redo I had to give up :/
3) I think this is totally okay because it's a 72h jam, but the clone's replay are not deterministic haha sometimes they just missed their jump and I had to wait for one cycle or two to try again. Actually a good suggestion would be to have a button to restart the cycle with the same clones.
4) controls did not completely match. I don't know if it's because I'm using a DS4, but start just closed the game and reset did nothing. When I got stuck like the image above I had to lose some cycles to get back to a useful position. It was okay because I only softlock like the image above, if I had to restart from beginning more times would be frustrating.

Anyway, beautiful art, nice design, nice music. Hope I can see stumble on your work next jams :D

Oh wow, nice art style, satisfying mechanics, good job :thumbsup:

@kogyblack, thank you for your feedback and for sharing your game with me on stream! The game will default to keyboard and mouse if there's no controller plugged in when it initializes.

I agree with the point about the clock having notches, when I've been playing, I just watch the individual pixels to time things better. In the 3 clone level, you don't need to squeeze into any 1-high gaps. I'm assuming you're referring to the gear on the gate? The button right above that clears it so the gear can fall. If you're referring to the 3 gate jump on the top right, that's just a timing puzzle so there should always be a wall that you can bump into so you don't get stuck. The clones aren't deterministic, since they only record your inputs, so if you're jumping beneath them when they're making a jump they can sometimes sit to your head if you intersect, slightly changing their locations (just as an example, I'm not saying this is exactly what happened in your case but it can happen with very minor changes in each cycle so I can understand the frustration). The timing can be reset with enter on the keyboard or Options on the DS4 controller, which will restart the timer for only your clones and the gears so they can start at the beginning again. The PS button will reset both the player positions and the timer. I can't get any of my DS4 buttons to close the game, though, so I'm not sure what that's about, but we do already have both of those features in the game. There's only one 3 person level in this, so good job on getting that far! We had to last-second make it more difficult, since it was possible to do it with only 2 clones. Even now, it's still doable with 2 but it's much harder.

Thanks again for the feedback! I hope this helps, sorry you had issues with the controller.

The game looks very polished! Love the graphics and sounds :) The menu is beautiful too!
Unfortunately, I couldn't get past second level, had a lot of struggle with throwing :( And the time felt a little too fast for me.
Overall, great entry! Keep up the good work!

@kogyblack I can address a few of your points from a programmer's perspective. You're actually correct that it's not technically deterministic. If the game runs at 60fps 100% of the time then it *should* be, but if there are any frame drops at all the puppets will miss inputs from those frames which can throw off timings. It's as close as I could get for a game jam. :wink:

Good suggestion for the fitting into a gap thing, I'll have to see if I can figure out how to implement that in the future.

And as for the controller issue, I did hear of some issues with folks using non-xinput controllers. Unfortunately not all controllers deliver input the same exact way, and the only way around it is to create a controller re-mapping screen or something of the like (which is a bit daunting when you only have 3 days). I guess I'll need to create one that I can just drop into any future projects.

Thanks for the feedback!

Amazing game! Excelent job dudes!

@cyphyrgriffon haha I had a way worse setup for the 3 clone level haha It would work, even though it was not necessary, I feel that if it was easy to get into the gap easier I wouldn't be frustrated haha I think it's a good game design improvement to think about if you guys plan to develop some game having the possibility of getting into 1-high gaps (so player has more options and if they don't see a better solution they don't get frustrated by the physics not being so friendly).

I think my DS4 controller maybe was configured with Steam control settings, I'll retry your game later and disable Steam control settings. Now I need to get through the 3 clone level xD

Thanks for the game!

I actually love it. It it very interesting as idea, the levels are giving you a reason to think before passing them by. The art style is also very nice and cool. Overall one of the best games I've played so far. So take my respect with this one.

really fun game, nice art style and concept

This was a fun game. It definitely was difficult to figure out sometimes. I think once I got to the second clone it was harder to figure out how to use them effectively. But that is the way a puzzle game is supposed to be. All in all good job!

The artwork works great, and the music is lovely! Very nice job creating a time-loop engine that's just the perfect level of complexity and perfectly clear to the player, down to the "stuff resets at midnight" at was a master's touch.

I quit the game after a while and lost my progress, and the game being quite hard, I didn't have the resolve to work back to where I was. A level-select would be nice. :)

Really nice puzzle game.
I only managed to find one puzzle that seemed to have an unintended shortcut, which is pretty impressive considering they were all designed in such a short time frame.
The art was also really nice, and the whole thing just shined with polish.
Well done.

This was cool! Thanks for submitting to the stream.

This feels like a very complete vision all around! The controls feel great, the beautiful artstyle has this radiant aura of polish I haven't
seen in any other title this jam. From a level design standpoint, progression feels very natural and the learning curve isn't too steep.
A wonderful entry all around!