Guys, who is joe?

Wow. Just an awesome game. Very beautiful visual style and nice soundtrack. Many animations and variations of obstacles make the game really lively. Incredible!

Very good art, the letters don't look too good with that typeface, but the game is interesting. Good concept: D

The beat gets repetitive after a while, but otherwise a really cool game. I tried seeing what happens to Joe if I fail at the coffee stand obstacle, but after several restarts I just couldn't get one. I guess that random for you. Nice work!

i liked ^^

love the pixel art!

You never fail to impress with your pixel art prowess! Love this game. It put my touch typing skills to shame though!

Very good

Very nice pixel art, and the gameplay is also fun. I do think it's a little hard to see what obstacles you are avoiding. Good game though :-)

The best part about the game is your pixel art. It's very fun to look at! Maybe you pivoted in the middle of development, but given that the game in current state is largely "on rails", I think you could have pushed the animation even further, adding longer jump anticipations, more frames of squash and stretch, and more elaborate dodges. Player characters in sidescrolling games are often constrained in their animations because the game needs to prioritize responsiveness and readability over pleasing animation. But in a game like yours that plays down direct player control, those constraints are not present, so you can be much more liberal with the animation.

Regarding the gameplay, at first I suspected that there was some correlation between the keys I was pressing and the actions I was taking, but I eventually decided that there was no correlation. It was a shame, since while I was under that illusion, I felt more connected to the character. I happen to be a touch-typist so the game was not difficult to play, but I know people who would struggle with the game because they wouldn't be able to find the keys on their keyboard fast enough. I think arrow keys and/or spacebar would have been a little more accessible, because more people can press those keys without looking. Finally, I would have liked it if the key indicator was closer to the object I was looking at. I stopped looking at Joe completely after a while and just looked at the top left corner of the screen. Ideally there could have been a correlation between the action taken and the key pressed, so the step of reading a letter from the screen could be eliminated entirely and the player could instead focus on taking actions directly.

Great job making a complete playable game!

great animations

Really liked the game and the art, but man joe is hard to keep alive. he has seariousely bad luck :P all in all laught a lot :)

Really cool game with a theme that really matches the gameplay. It does not like my non-qwerty keyboard tho

"No Coffee? *DIES*" made me laugh out loud!

Great game! The graphics are simple, but cute and I love it. One thing: You can just spam the a,s,d,q,w,e keys and you'll always secede it. What I would do is that there will be keys that you have to NOT press, and keys you HAVE to press

@slimbun I was (naive-ly) hopping no one will notice that :D But yes you are right, we had an intention to take care of that, unfortunally time flies by so fast! Thank you for playing

@adriankrawczyk @dreamerofdays @panzerr @maytch @guipererao @thaniel @oddsocks @batswinger @irene-godoy-del-pozo @conjurador @xedur @darkfire92 @fpixel - Thank you so much ya all for playing and leaving feedback!!

special thanks to @turncoda for very thorough feedback. You are certainly right in many points. to be honest I don´t think we have thought that the keys would have a corelation to the objects, but not that you are saying that, it might be actually a good think to do. The reason why we did´t think of corelation is mainly the fact, we wanted to give player a challenge and not to memorize stuff by heart. So there is a certain rondom-ness to that (however only bound to few keys, not the whole keyboard). Really thank you for amazing feedback!

Very fun experience, i'm not a fan of this kind of game but the lovely art made it very fun and interesting. At some point i figured that i could win by smashing all the key of my keyboard xD maybe it's something to fix. Anyway good job

Not gonna lie, the sudden Q and E buttons really threw me off during my first playthrough, the game led me to believe it was just wasd. Other than that though, the game gets pretty easy, feels like I can keep going forever. The art style is really nice though, and I feel like this could be a really fun mobile game if more challenge/variety was added to it. Good job!

So yeah. A deligthfull experience you created here! This pixel art is so beautiful! Really man, you nailed it! Besides, you made me smile twice, with those super cool animations = that coffe joke. The one with the rock tho! It should have a balance between seriousness and funny. I like the idea that the same object may give you different animations when you die, with this fun touch! That said, I think that what was said about adding more and more variation to the animation is a really nice and important feedback that was given. Not that it's lacking in anyway, but that it has so much potential, it can't be negleted!

About the gameplay loop. In the beggining I thought that I was supposed to press the button on spot, like a guitar hero thing (so I tried to click it when the 4th bar appeared). Then I got it! I played it twice. One thing that this lacked is a little pacing. The pacing stays the same and this kinda takes away the player desire to try again and so. So, my suggestion is that, (it's a obvious thing but, I know, but...), it may get gradually intenser. How so? I really think about Wario Ware's speed up thing here. If you've played it, there's a time when the things speeds up with intenser music and so! How would it happen? When he get at, let's say 50m (or 100m? - it may not take long), he looks to the clock and he says "oh no! I may get late", and he starts waking faster. Then at 500m he looks the phone and has a message like: "Hey Joe, wasn't you coming earlier to see the project?". Then at 1500m the boss call you and say: "YOU ARE GONNA BE FIRED IF YOU GET LATE AGAIN, JOE". And things like that. It would be great that, let's say, at a certain moment he starts to run, and, in this way the obstacles may get wilder, like jumping on clifs and so on.

Also... About the thing a said earlier, there could be a separate meter system and a score system, so one may track the leveling as I said and the other the scoring. My idea to make it very enganging is to make it like as the guitar hero game I thought it was :P; how so? By making it has a system where you have to hit on time:

[ too earlier (sweetspot) too late ]

Yeah, I know it has many stuff that's like this. But the idea here is that the too late/too early would give the player less points, and the sweetspot would make it combo. So, in this combo system I made my final statement about the game: the music is a bit repetitive for a infinite game xD. But you already know that, and you had a timelimit and so on. I know. But I had to made this statement to give a suggestion on how to solve this problem. Why not that the combo system be united with the music? As you combo more and more, the music may get more complex, more enganging and more cool. With added instruments and so on, dinamically! So, initially there would be the base motif with its base, then, it adds a kind of percussion, then a second melody bellow, then a countermelody, then more drums, then some amazing violings, then some crazy arpeggios, and so on!

So it would really be a enganging and magical thing to try to combo more and more, cause everything conspirate to it be a funny thing. Beware though, it may addict the player xD. It would be really crazy good. I love those ideas, myself, specially as a composer. And also, each level up could feature a different music. Also, if the music and the game is so dynamic, the level system I mentioned, could be made more sparse, like, 500m apart, dunno.

Oh my. How much I typed. Sorry for that.

@gablue Thank you so much for such feedback! Love it and have to agree on most of the things. Truth is that most of the stuff you mention was originally planned but we have decided to cut out, due to a lack of time. For example the speed up of the game was really intended, however the way things were already implemented we really struggled to manage the speed-up system, so after few hours we had to cut it, in order to finish the rest of the stuff. This decision did the game less challenging, but from our point of view it is really not good to get stuck a feature, if basic stuff is not implemented yet.
Same goes with the music, there are actually 11 different music loops, but those are only being switched randomly and not in lets say more ´dynamic´ way, which again we wanted, but had to do at least just a basic stuff.
I really love how you think about our game, and it is really awesome. I just hope that we will be wiser for the future and be able to learn from all of that and do better planning :)
Thank you once again!

@random-thoughts thank you for playing! :)

I get strong Pac-Man 2 feels from this one, that's great haha :D The art is killer and the audio nice too. <3

The only issue i have is with the font that was hard to read for me (the fact that i didn't get the fullscreen to work on the web version didn't help for this). Maybe a more readable font and bigger size would be best for accessibility ?

Love it! The Music is sweet!

nice and simple cute game, love the gameplay mechanics using the keyboard keys (and the fact that its working with an azerty one)

Details make a great game, and what can I say:
From the moment I saw the splash screen with the super neat pixel "ludum dare" logo, I knew I was in for something special here.

Let's start with the positive feedback:
* Absolutely stunning visuals! Your pixel art style is just perfection.
* Quirkiness! The animations radiate so much attention to detail.
* Pleasant Music! Jam games often suffer from soundtracks that get terribly annoying after a minute. With the way you handle different variations of the theme, it never felt repetitive.
* Theme! You've hit the theme on spot and I really felt like it really was my duty to help Joe reach his workplace. Yet in the end, we often do not get what we strive for :(

Bugs I noticed:
* The textfield for the highscore screen didn't get unselected so when I reached the screen the next time, it was full of "asdsawsad".
* Opening the tutorial door, it weirdly shifted its position to the left.
* My absolutely 1337 score of >190 wasn't sent to the High score server correctly, it seems :(

Constructive criticism:
* The UI elements could give some more feedback to the user. Maybe have them flash once the corresponding button is pressed. This was particularly obvious for the "send score" button.
* After reaching a score of 40 to 50, you've seen everything at least once. If you keep playing for minutes after that, it would have been nice to break the repetition a bit.
* Twice when I had a decent score, I feel like Joe passing out wasn't actually my failure because I had pushed the right button. In the end this would boil down to what I said before: maybe give more precise feedback on player input.
* All in all, I think that the difficulty (i.e. the reaction time) was a bit too forgiving and it was rather simple to keep going for minutes.
* The character limit for high scores didn't let me use my full nickname

The verdict:
Keep making those beautiful games, please!

Gorgeous graphics. The gameplay was a bit limited but nice game nonetheless.

The W was super hard to read. I loved the graphics style though.

Some of the letters were hard to read. The graphics are amazing on this, genuinely top notch. It was enjoyable to play, I would definitely play another from you guys in the future.

Oh wow this game is super pretty! Great work. That being said, there is no penalty for pressing the wrong button, os if you just roll across Q W E A S D as much as possible you can go on forever.

Hello hello! I loved your game, i think it's strong points are its art for sure. Just a heads up, im sure it's already been mentioned above, but theres nothing stopping me from jamming all of the buttons to proceed without ever looking at my screen. Another issue is that i don't really know what i'm dodging in some of these cases, it just said to press A, which forces me to stare at the prompts instead of the environment.

Very catchy music and impressive pixel art! The game is fun until you realize that you can just button mash to win...but still really nice to look at and listen to ;-)

Such a great artwork and pixel animations! I wanted to see every animation on every trap so sometimes I just did't press the right button haha! That was so enjoyable. A strong entry and I wish you good luck!

Great work! 😃
Wery smooth animations and easy gameplay! I like it!
And one small bug ☺.
If you keyboard can handle 6 key together, you just invulnerable 😁

Very well done. Art and animations are top-notch. Great job! :clap:

Gorgeous pixel art and music! And I love your interpretation of the theme. It's so easy to relate with Joe :D Countless times I went to work in the morning as sleepy as him.

Ah this is great! I love it, amazing art and animations. Super well done :D

Absolutely stunning pixel art and animation, really incredible stuff there. A suggestion would be to add some penalty for mashing the keys, as you can just mash all the keys down repeatedly and pass all the challenges. Other than that, it's a great game with wonderful graphics. Amazing submission!

Very nice. Good graphics, good music, good game. Well done

Really nice graphics and that falling on his face animation with the banana is awesom. XD Good job!

I liked this game lot, as the pixel art is quite awesome and I can totally relate to Joe. But (as someone else mentioned) it seems you don't punish wrong inputs and it might lack some variation (but I guess that's due to time constraints)

I really enjoyed it. I really enjoy the different animations you can get when dodging joe's demise. I feel like the prompt should be placed on top of or above where the threat is because at the moment you aren't encouraged to look around but instead look in this one small area really intently to get the right button press. Overall great entry!

good game

Good Game !

Such a great little game! There's definitely a few ways to make it more challenging, like punishing people for pressing the wrong key by accident, but even as it stands it was surprisingly challenging. Excellent work considering the time constraints, and the pixel art was awesome.

Great game and the art was super nice! Maybe add some punishment for not pressing the right button? So the player cant spam keyboard q,w,e,a,s,d.

First of all, veery nice pixel art. I love the graphic mood. The game system is not original and not much in the theme, but very pleasant to play, to see the different obstacles to avoid. And the character's animation are great. Good job, you two!

Very nice pixel art with lots of cute little details!

On one of the playthroughs something weird happened and I was only asked to press S, no other keys... I did that for more than a minute.

This is a really cute game - I love the pastel colors and thep pixel art. And I've been humming the melody even some time after closing the game :)

As for gameplay, it felt like an infinite quick-time event. I'm not a fan of those in games, but that's fine. What I missed here was some kind of tension building and a difficulty curve. The time to press the key is long enough, and even though the events become a bit more frequent over time, it was still quite easy (and I found it harder to press the right key than anything). I think making the times shorter (by making the movement faster) would increase the tension without a lot of effort, and it would make the player feel like they have to work hard for their score.

I also missed some visual feedback for the pressed keys - some of them make Joe jump, but otherwise it feels like nothing is happening (e.g. when the birds drop the nest, it still looks like it falls on Joe's head). Adding some "animation" like dashing forward/backwards (i.e. just moving the sprite without any additional animation frames) would provide a nice visual feedback that Joe actually avoided the threat, and it wouldn't take a lot of effort to do. In a similar spirit, for some of the threats I didn't even see what I was supposed to avoid - making the objects/threats more visible would definitely help.

And last from my wish list - the music is really rhythmical. It would be really awesome if the events would be synchronized with the music, with additional score for precision. It doesn't have to be an outright rhythm/music game, but something like the fighting system in Karateka remaster.