Really fun game! I played it twice and as of this comment, have the high score!

My *only* complaint is that the player character doesn't stand out compared to the employees, and sometimes when I enter a new level, I don't realise where I am right away. Apart from that, I had a lot of fun!

Damn, that ending is sad. ;w; Very simple but fun game! It's like Pac-man, but with a bit of risk/reward. I really like the graphics, the floor-plan style you went with looks neat, and the sound effects are nice too, I like how you added bleeps when the employees talk jjdkds. Don't really have much to say, it's focused and straight-forward.

Man needs therapy, though.


@zerbu Regarding the visibillity I wholey agree. I noticed when test playing it, but seems it sneaked through still :thinking: While instinct points out the middle of the screen it drowns in the rest of the style. However, there be a mechanic built in when you go down a floor and do not directly move, the builders stay still as well. Maybe knowing that helps? It does not fix the visibillity issue still tho.
Thank you for the feedback!

@fupi He definetly needs therapy! :upside_down: Thank you for the comment! That your own drawing? :thinking:

That was cool! There were multiple things I really liked about this entry.

Firstly, the damage mechanic is really elegant and fresh. It also ties in nicely with the fiction as it resembles anxiety. Very good!

Secondly, I liked how a simple color change between levels give them completely unique mood. This is especially smart in a jam setting where you won't have time to implement tons of unique levels. Possibly here it would have been slightly easier to understand if colors would have gotten darker for each level but this is just a nitpick.

Overall, a really solid entry. Bonus points for the leaderboard - it is always nice to see those in jams!

@lizz Yes! That's supposed to be the sad engineer after the game ends. Based on the Shinji meme of course.

@nash Thank you! When testplaying it, the worse the 'anxiety level' the louder I was- Definetly know what you mean! :smile:

The graphics are beautiful. Looping levels a marvel of engineering (ok here I'm exaggerating but it show that you know your stuff). Narrowing circle a perfect picture of losing mental space. And all this in a few files of snake_case code xD

It is a sad topic that someone who is so dedicated to his work that he can literally see the floorplan projected around him is reduced to an anxious pacman figure by the carelessness of his superior.

@fupi that is awesome! Thank you for the drawing :smile: We appreciate that :heart_eyes:

@kr4ft3r great to see you here man! Thanks for the compliments! Through the years I sortof made a javascript game-engine full of snake_case_goodness indeed :smile: That way we could focus on stitching maps together in code and so on :-)

It is a sad topic indeed, we changed plans multiple times this weekend. First the circle was supposed to be a planet that kept shrinking for instance

Your field of vision being tied to the anxiety level is a neat mechanic. Good work on the game!

I absolutely love this game. I had so much fun with the premise. And I just adore the design.

Really fun loop, nice use of blueprint graphics and interesting interpretation of the theme. Feel like the creator might be drawing on some personal experiences here :joy:

The sound design paired with the FOV shrinking made me very anxious irl too, well done :thumbsup_tone1:

The sobbing game over screen is haunting me haha, that poor guy should quit !
(Super cool and polished game by the way, great job)

@logan-core thanks! Congratz on your score!

@emazuro Thanks! I'll tell @Ithebreather, who was in charge of visuals :smile:

@chrisbeck Thank you! Luckaly, we're all very happy at work! So no need to worry about us :-)

@bigal That was what we inteded, great to hear that it worked ^^"

@valentinwb Yes, its a sad ending indeed :sweat_smile: Thank you for the compliments!

Pretty fun game! Really interesting interpretation of the theme and the FOV shrinking was a really neat mechanic.

The visual design of the map is so cool!

simple yet hella fun and addictive, I enjoyed this as my first LD playthrough, the engineers feel like they have a brain of their own preferring my direction and screwing with me by moving towards the path I'm going to just to back off when I do lol, made for some trippy experience. I don't know how you coded them but they don't feel like typical pacman ghosts.

the only thing that I'd change is the tint or shape of the character, because at the start of levels I mistake him for a coin and can't find him, but this might be just me. anyway I enjoyed this, nice work overall

Great entry! I loved the construction drawing-ish artstlyle. As game art-style it seems pretty unique to me and I enjoyed inspecting the rooms and drawn furniture while walking the map. Also the heath indicator plus heartbeat was fitting very well and made it easy to notice what's going on without changing focus from the player character.

@0x-void-x0 the man himself! I feel honered that our game is the first you are playing this year :smile:

Glad you asked! The movement works like this: The map has been tiled (8X8=64), there is a big table in the sourcecode where every tile knows if there is a wall between itself and its neighbours. Every construction worker chooses a randon tile once it reached its target. When the tile is not reachable, the worker will choose another one in the next frame. Once it found a reachable tile, it sets a random point within the tile to walk to :-)

If the player is in a reachable neighbouring tile (and the player has not been hit), then that tile gets right of way. Essentially forcing the worker to walk towards the player.

So long story short: the movement is pretty random, until the player is in a reachable tile next to the contruction worker. Then it will go toward the player.



Thanks for your feedback! We'll think of a solution to that for a post-jam version :-)

@tankou thank you! Glad you like the visual and audio feedback :-)

@xlores-liang Thanks!!

@ex3d0 Thank you!

Nice game! The gameplay is simple but works very well, and we feel very oppressed when the sight is reduced!

I especially loved the visual style, it's really good and original! Good job on that! The music, on the other end, is... Minimalistic? :D But I enjoyed the sound effects, especially the nagging guy and the beeps :D

Good job!

I laughed when I first heard the employees bleeping at me, I whispered 'LETS GOO' through clenched teeth when I successfully dodged 3 of them in a row to get to a ladder, and ended up cursing with the employees and crying with the MC after ~6 failed runs. Until I finally managed to figure out a few glitches/tricks and secure first place

Great game, although if you play it too much you might catch a serious case of introversion from the extremely limited personal space lol

I loved the art and your take take on the theme! I also related well with the concept of the game so that was another plus.

@rolly thank you! There is no music indeed, I like how you refer to non existent music as "minimal" :laughing: We had an idea to record some construction sounds with tools laying around the house, but we ended up running out of time

@lone-wolf Cool! You got the highscore, like every year! I appreciate the time you put in every time :D I was wondering: what kinds of tricks and glitches did you come across? Personally, I did not playtest all that deep :grin:

@rankb Thank you! I'll let my teammate know, he was in full control of the design :-)

@wouter52 Haha my bad, when rating I couldn't remember if there was a music track or not (which could either mean that there is none, or that it's a perfect fit for the game :p ), so I launched it again and mistakenly took the heartbeat sfx for a really minimalistic music x). So I launched it again and played a bit more, then it became clear what it was :D

I liked how the screen got smaller when the player took damage. Also am I supposed to get down all the way to level 1 or 0 or something, because that's a pretty long way from the starting level which was over 60 or something right?

Very addictive

@vikatoria I'll take that as a compliment :grin: Glad you like it! What is your highscore? Any other feedback is appreciated! Are there things you think could have been done diffrent for instance?

@wouter52 mine is not that high, i think like 2000 :) i tried going deeper more, but it got really hard, which is alright, it makes it challenging. The only thing is that the "enemies" spawned near or inside the player when going deeper. Some simple music would really go well with the game
;)

When I first read the description, I did not quite understand but it was more intuitive when I played, since the mechanisms are easy to grasp (classical "ennemies" to dodge and coins to collects).

Honestly, rather than stressed-out engineer, I had more the impression of some mishap happening, everyone panicking and your character taking advantage of the mayhem to raid the place. Maybe it's really a stressed-out engineer, but not struggling to keep working but giving up and leaving with the most money they can find.

At my first play I was almost always going down since it seems the only way to reduce anxiety. Then I understand how many people there are downstairs and how wiser it was to clear the first floor since there are easier to dodge. Too bad I was sucked into the stairs when I tried to not go in (is it voluntary ?).

I was disturbed by the lack of sound when you collect one immediately after another. I guess it is avoid having too many noise, but it's weird to not always have the sweet sweet coin sounds.

Then I decided to go the deepest I could, discovering that no one moves if you don't after going downstairs (not something obvious since your first instinct is to rush). This is when I really understood how useful was low anxiety since you could see more.

By the way, I really like the graphics, with the drawn blueprints style: hatched walls and all the small notes of what should be here. It really conveys a building site not ready to come in fruition since everyone goes around in useless circles. (Only nitpick is how you can't always tell the things apart at first glance, but I guess it's part of the chaos.)

@vikatoria thank you! That is useful feedback :smile: I think 2000 is pretty high btw! I never got any higher than 1300 or so. I guess I suck at our own game :laughing:

@aaln thank you for your wonderful comment! That sounds like an awesome backstory too! We choose a darker theme this time ^^

The coins not always making a sound, sounds like a bug to me. I'll make sure to test those kinds of scenarios in the next LD :-)

@verttixpertti Thank you! We set an arbitrary number for the amound of floors. We liked to think that the building would be very high. Hence the big number. I think that it sets an expectation with the player that we did not intend. In theory it is possible to go to 0. Then there would be around 128+ enemies on the screen. I think it is not humanly possible to play this game anymore with so many hazards on your screen. It is also possible to go into the minus (-1, -2, etc). We did not program any checks for that. Maybe it is the underground parking? :grin:

Tips:
* You want to get as deep as possible while getting hit as little as possible, and then go on a berserk rampage grabbing as many coins as possible right before your vision is too low to find more
* When you first spawn into a level the game is frozen until you move so that you can get your bearings, take advantage of that to find the closest exit

Glitches(?):
* If you hide here enemies won't be able to get you
* By walking N/NE/NW while in this spot you can attract enemies into the boxes to the upper left and right

@lone-wolf thank you so much! That little nook was my idea, I thought it would be neat to be able to hide :grin: My friend changed the colissionmap to make that possible :smile: The concequence I did not think about, this is very useful information and I think you did a great job finding this exploit!

Those tips are very useful. Thank you for taking your time to explain :smiley:

@wouter52 Ah, I was wondering about that, it felt almost like it was intentional but I couldn't tell. It definitely added some depth to the gameplay

Very attractive, you can wander around and collect lots of coins :P

the art and color choices for this are really great - cheers!

Day 12 of rating games :)
This was almost a horror game. That game over, man.
My only complaint is that I spawned on like 6 workers and my anxiety sky rocketed, I had only 12 anxiety and I was pretty much screwed after that.
Everything else, is perfect.

@utopia you sure can! Each level the coins are worth more and more, so I like to think that the coins keep getting heavier and heavier :grin:

@mickey-sanchez thanks! I'll let my teammate know, he was in charge of visuals and graphic design :smile:

@skvader-418 thanks for the feedback mate! It sure feels very tense when anxiety levels go above 80% :sweat_smile:

Very good game - and addictive. This is more than a Pac-Man clone. The main gameplay fits with the theme. I had fun playing, trying to reach a score which could be written in the Hall Of Fame, but it's too hard for me. I will try again (my best score **1790**). I notice an annoying bug when the player respawns on an enemy. It seems to me that sometimes my anxiety decreases, passing through a level - sometimes not. Why? I like the intuitive gameplay too - no need to figure out what we are supposed to do. Simple - but a solid entry. One of my favorite entries. Well done ++

PS : a highscore panel with only eight entries is not enough. A top10 is a minimum. It's too frustrating ++

Patient: LeReveur
Cause of death: stressful environment
Account left: $2905

Coroner note:
Addictive and fun gameplay, very neat graphics, funny sounds

It happened once, that while changing level I appeared directly on a crew guy, and so got one hit without even moving
Apart that, well done!

ps : I had to test it on my work pc with Chrome, as on my home pc I have Firefox and the game didn't start after entering my nickname

bug report: after changing floor, i spawned directly next to an enemy, losing life unfairly

@geckoo1337 thank you very much for the quality feedback :smile: I agree that 8 entries is not ideal. To be honest: I ripped it from another entry and called it a day. Back then I worked with half the resolution :grin:

The decreasing of anxiety should be activated everytime you go down a level. Maybe there is a bug where a worker spawns inside the character, thus increasing it again. We had lots of problems with spawning of stuff. Somewhere some numbers got mixed up, so we botched some code in the end that verifies all hitboxes before showing the level. If the verification fails, it tries again. I think we've got a bug there

@lereveur that is a nice score! Thanks for the feedback! We're aware of the problem with the worker spawning too close :o

Ooh, firefox did not work? That is interesting... I have to look into that

@knexator thanks for the report!

To be more precise: my home PC is under Win11, and I use the last version of FF ; the nickname page, the intro page and the highscores page works, but when coming to the game, I have a blackscreen with only the game counters on the bottom-left (floor, anxiety, money)
I checked the JS console, and I have an error reported right after loading:
Uncaught TypeError: [texture_and_collisionmaps.js:103:5]
textures[TEXTURE_ID] is undefined
get_pixel_manual - texture_and_collisionmaps.js:103
handle_collision - start.js:1027
handle_collisions - start.js:1293
loop - start.js:1883

This error is reported each time I open the game page (ie. on the nickname page), and the last console logs before it are the serie of POINT x,x reports, the last one is POINT 630-630 (but sometimes I only have the error)
I reloaded, and there was another error: a 404 on "GET https://wouter52.com/PROJECTS/LD54/PLAY/textures/FFFFFF/map_overlay.png"

Nicely done! Loved the humour in this game, and the use of the theme was cool too. Having it so the higher your anxiety, the smaller your field of view was really clever, definitely added to the tension at being on low health especially when I went to the lower floors feeling confident.

I did have one experience of spawning on top of an enemy, but that's kind of the risk I took going down. Overall a really solid entry, nicely done! (high score: 1730)

At first I was thinking: "where is the limited space? this is a labyrinth, but a big one". And then I understood the limited space of view that become more and more small when the anxiety increase. I really like this idea. The movement is good and the game is simple but efficient. And I like the difference of colors from one level to another. Good job.

@lereveur ooh! that is useful information! Thank you! And sorry for the late response, I haven't been on LDjam for a week I think ^^"

@matthewdrake thanks! That is a great score!

@matootsy Thank you for the feedback! I can imagine that the usage of the theme was a bit hard to find at first, glad you found out :smile: