Well that game definitely fit the theme, it crashed after I changed too many things and wouldn't start up again. I applaud you for trying to make something so weird and original, good job!

I don't understand the idea, it says change file rNesigur.json, but to what? I have just tried to change the file name to something random, but that did not do anything.

quite the cool experiment! I can imagine designing a bigger game around a mechanic like this would be hard if you can just set your coordinates to wherever etc

Very original and the graphics / audio fit perfectly ! Good job

Really interesting, excellent graphics nice work.

WTF is this game, i liked how experimental and meta this game is, and the graphics were really cute

worth a try! Very original, I had never seen a game that was played inside the desktop and folders haha. It is a very good idea for jam... i think thee control is a bit clunky, but very funny characters!

This was a great submission. Lots of fun to play around with. Great job!

It's cool! I was surprised to see my folder in background ahah x) Didn't know Godot was able to do that ahah x)

The idea is really interesting too and the music is quite short, but it's well done.

Great work!

I have no idea what this game even was, but it's probably the most unique game I've played here so far lol.

Good stuff.

Haha I never saw someone make a transparent application, had fun with it but not sure what to say XD.

Super unique game. Sadly it doesn't always work quite right.

What a trip! I was pulled in by the interesting looking eyes, but stayed for the json editing, transparent game window, and fun commentary throughout the level. Very refreshing!

Love it. Super nice

i think i was able to make it to the end, despite the crashes (probably on purpose?). i ended up just guessing the coordinates until i got to the end :3 very cool game!

Hello again my friend! Glad to see you participating in this new game jam!

Talking a little about your game, I really liked the graphics. It really is a unique style. I find the zoom controls and especially the mechanics of the boxes interesting.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to reset your game as it closed by itself and for some reason I couldn't open it anymore hahaha.

But in general I think it's a good job!

Love the concept ... looking at some of the less used features in an engine and asking yourself _'what can I do with this'_?

Artwork absolutely fits the rest of the experience ... and the theme.

One thing I ran into (or rather _didn't_ run into) at the start was that the 'press R to reload' was just outside of my screen. So I thought I had to restart it every time (well until I cleared the first bug that it ... oooh I get it now _bug_ ha!)

As for the rest. Hm. Can I guess that you haven't worked a lot with freeform input from users yet? (What if I set things to -1? What if I delete a part but leave the json well-formed? What if I garble the json? etc.) Unless the crashes are on purpose of course, then you succeeded brilliantly! If that was an accidental thing then well, it's extremely hard to get it right for all circumstances.

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**spoiler** @jk5000 You have to change stuff _inside_ of the file. **spoiler**

Great idea! Didn't expect my screen to be unexpectedly hijacked =)

It's the Stanley's Parable with bugs! :grin:

I like the unique concept and managed to achieve a lot with just editing the data file, even though I am no coder.

However, a lot of edits just result in crashes, inability to launch the game again without wiping all the files and redownloading (especially if you remove something from the file, like one of the bugs) or just do nothing, even though it seems like they should (like adding additional variables to bugs, changing their speed etc.). Some of it might be intentional, some probably isn't. But, as a player here, I am not sure which crashing effect is on purpose and which is not. And that's probably not very good that I'm not sure, as that means that the game does not communicate well with the player.


Funnily, when I changed my own scale to anything below 1, I couldn't move at all, just look left and right. Even when I decreased weight as well.


In any case, it was actually fun to poke around and try to break the bug(gy) world. The main character is just adorable. I knew I can count on you to come up with some unique concept, and you surely delivered! When it comes to gameplay, this one is my favorite from all your games I played. Although, emotionally and conceptually, I liked the bear one more.

And now, that the Romanian era of your game jam career is over, you're ready for the advent of Mannerism :wink:

Good job trying to make a compo game! I think you can build upon this experience to get a more cohesive product in the next jam :)

OH wow, I haven't seen many translucent video games before. (at least, the window was translucent on my end, and it looked pretty cool) I love the idea of modifying files to change the game, it reminded me of [one of my all time favorite Ludum Dare games](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/documentia). It's a really cool concept that I love to see, taking the game outside of the game. Great work!

@spotted-leaf @maluskhan @owl-skip @ratogodoy @kaleva-poincare @mathiouza @irwatts @salaen @korolles Thank you for all of your praise! n_n

@shp Yeah, I actually planned on giving the player more variables over time, with different puzzles introducing them... but that had to be cut unfortunately. The player's position would thus only be editable in levels where it wouldn't make all other choices pointless... that's what I thought at least :D

@javicoder yeah, the movement of the character sucks... I actually forgot how to write a platformer controller and panicked around for what felt like (and probably was) 6 hours because it just wouldn't feel right no matter what I did :'D

@ethanzech Don't worry, I myself don't even know what the game was haha :D

@be3n2 yeah, me neither, that's why I went with it (also it spared me from actually caring to draw reasonable backdrops haha)

@cornflowerblue yeah, I noticed. There would be a lot of stuff to do (i.e. better communication) before the user doesn't feel too frustrated, I figure.

@zachsbutt oh wow, you actually made it? o: I imagined guessing the coordinates to be rather hard, so good on you! The game crashes if your lives-counter reaches 0 or you complete the game, any other crashes are, of course, a welcome addition to the game's "feel" :'D

@vphyre eyyy, how are you? Like I said above, you probably reached zero lives and would've to set your lives to a bigger (or lower?) number in the .json. I'm looking forward to see your entry this time around :D

@remco Thank you for sharing your experience! You guessed correctly in that I didn't test for the player doing "unexpected" stuff with the file, which is a major problem with my game as it feels frustrating thinking of a solution to the problem but then getting a completely different result than expected. Of course, as the rest of the game loves its bugginess, it would be easy to say "that was on purpose :^)", but it would also be a bit cheap :D Nonetheless, I think I know now where my priorities should lie when choosing to do anything like this again, and to no little part thanks to your comment! Thank you a lot!

@fabula-rasa Glad to see you both back! n_n

About your first point, I wholeheartedly agree of course. It doesn't communicate properly at all. One example that would've made your life a lot easier: You don't actually have to redownload the game again, all you have to do is erase the .json file and with the next start the game would recreate the file with its default values. Now, wouldn't it be great if the game actually told you that? >.< arrgh.

Very happy to hear you still liked the gameplay the most although it doesn't always do what you want to, and I'm also glad that you liked the game I did one year ago! Curious to see what you guys did for this jam o:

Thank you as always for your in-depth critique, I always look forward to reading your feedback each jam :D

@100th-coin whoa, I feel honoured you decided to give my game a try honestly, and thank you very much for your high praise!

Thank you for showing me Documentia, too! I immediately took a look at it and played through it two times (with different approaches). Phenomenal what those people did and how perfectly everything fits together! I aswell love those games that ask you to interact with them in an indirect manner, especially if it's done with this self-aware narrative!

I still have a long way to go to actually make games as good as you or them!

(Oh btw, one inspiration that led me to the game's way to interact with variables was a game called RAMnesia I was very fond of last event :D)

@trexxak I think I encountered a bug (not the flying thingies in the game). The game did NOT crash upon reaching 0 lives. Instead it went to -2 before I changed it back to 10 :P

I love the idea ! I did not get very far as I didn't really want to bother with reading code atm, but still very interesting. Alos fits the theme perfectly.

Very nice, this game really beggs for a more enriched standalone version. Was a fun little experience.

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BEST GAME SO FAR ON THE JAM, SO INNOVATIVE, SO FUCKING GOOD, AND THE GRAPHICS, OH YEAH, FUCKEN TOPS!

I love the overall package - the audio visual components hit the theme really well. Humor is also excellent. I struggled with editing the json - things werent really taking like i thought they would, which was a little frustrating. Still, you nailed the theme, and I enjoyed it.

Very interesting concept, the weird jump mechanics and lack of WASD controls made it pretty annoying to move around though. I also would have liked a bit more of a response for finding the skinny pink bug, but I imagine time was an issue. Overall quite neat.

*Rolling dice* It's natural 20! Death trap dodged! It's not cheating alright if you are Lucky! ;) 

@civmaniac ahaha :DD

I mean... the source code IS out, and the game WANTS you to mess around with it, so who am I to say that what you're doing is wrong in any way? :D

Hope you're having fun and not too much trouble looking through that messy code :P

Not at all! Kinda fun to mess around! ;) I'd complain about stability, but I'll give you 5 stars in theme, instead :D. Love the art and especially soundtrack.

Weird and really well done. Technically I have no clue how you made that. I have my desktop - and floating bugs on the same screen. The controls work as expected and the animations are well done. Your project fits with the theme - totally unstable. Music is pleasant. However I have a question for you ; sometimes, when the game is over, I want to play again, but it crashes. I don't know if it's a bug or a feature in your game. Overall, a funny trip. Thank you ++

Great concept! The animations are very fun :D

Innovative concept, I realy love graphics, yes, it's unique,! this game is fun :)

I've been doing Ludum Dare for quite some time now and your game has taken the 'meta' cake by a wide margin. A title that actively encourages you to break it (or un-break it!) in order to do things is a clever and enjoyable experience - well done!!

Very well done and unique. The jump mechanic feels really strange, but I know, you can change it via json file :D Loved the characters aesthetics!

Interesting art! Like the animations. The movement mechanics needs some polishing though.

It was funny, but I have a phobia of pink flying elephants :D
An interesting idea, it's a pity after several attempts to play the game started to crash

The art is so nice. Such an original style.

I love games like this, but I had an issue where every time I would die it would mangle the json file. I love the idea, but that made it quite hard to play.

What got me started with game dev originally was discovering a text file for an existing game with a bunch of numbers, and having fun discovering how each number changed the game. This game kind of recreates that idea, which is pretty cool. Might be nice if it was a bit more stable though. Putting a float in a field which I assume is supposed to be an int just crashes the game instead of giving an error, so some better error handling would really help this. And formatting the json so it isn't all on one line.

Aight, this was just super freakin' cool. I had absolutely no idea that you could render game windows with a transparent background like that! Such an awesome surprise. :)

I will say that it might be tough for some non-programmers to get into (especially when it comes to navigating to a specific folder deeeeep in your directories), and sometimes my changes wouldn't exactly take, even after I saved.

However, I loved this idea so much, and could totally see it expanded into a more involved experience that might actually teach someone a few things about programming and game making in a roundabout way! :smile:

I thought I'd wipe the JSON and see what happens, and the game crashed. So, yeah, it's unstable. :stuck_out_tongue: As some others suggested, enabling some prettifying the JSON file and implementing some error checking would have been a nice touch.

It's a really meta game, that's for sure. Given that we're all game devs here, it's got its best (and only) audience here.

This game is sooooo weirdly awesome. I loved the "I hate this game more than you" comment, priceless

Definitely experimental and out there, so kudos for rolling the dice on this one. Unsure if it was the point but the game for me crashed a few to many times and I didn't really want to debug the json to figure out why.

the game crashed a lot its really cool

@markveligod @ghatazorg @kumber @erikkire @orangutanrider @thegreenworm @wizard @yorsh @pbg @baconharemthug Thank you all for playing, your praise and valuable criticism! <3

@heremeus Oh wow, that's weird! Maybe you were killed by two bugs in short succession? Glad to hear you knew how to troubleshoot, though :P

@lesinvisible thank you so much! I'll think about working on it... Still wanted to first complete 2 of my other jam games first :'D

@cebula Can't tell if serious, regardless I am very glad you are so enthusiastic about my game <3 :D

@civmaniac Oh come on, I don't deserve those theme stars, I'm just a bad coder :'D Thank you for your praise on the soundtrack, though! Was very anxious about it as it didn't feel like it was fitting at the time of production!

@geckoo1337 Thank you so much for your praise u_u The crashing is indeed a feature. The idea is to simply change the lives in the .json file - I know, it's weird, and the game doesn't really explain it all that well D:

@megasmasterx Oh wow, I feel very honored to hear that! I do have to admit while working on it, I thought it's so cheesy someone else had to have done something similar already :'D

@ve-ret oh what a shame to hear you couldn't enjoy the flying things :'D I'll make sure to include a non-elephant toggle next time :P

@bougiebirdie First off: thank you so much! Sadly, there's no way to change the way Godot rearranges the json (at least to my knowledge), probably because dictionaries aren't indexed by number? I knew about that, but thought it would make for an interesting challenge. Guess I was wrong, sorry D:

@tykenn Ohh, I know that feeling! "What happens if this says 'speed: 999' instead of 'speed: 1'" :D Glad I could bring back those memories for you! As for your feedback: Of course you are absolutely correct. Error handling isn't done at all and having the json all in one line makes changing it only cumbersome, not more difficult. Thank you very much for your comment u_u

@coleslaughter Yup you indeed can turn the background transparent in Godot, it's an inbuilt (yet hidden) functionality even! The thing with the directory is sadly another limitation by Godot - it's simply not possible to save userdata anywhere else but int the appdata D:

I totally get what you're saying though. I think I forgot to implement a few bugs taking their attributes from the .json, which makes for a frustrating experience.

Thank you for your praise as always u_u I would love to expand on the game, though the only ressource failing me for that endeavor is time, unfortunately :D

@xedur yeah, it would certainly need to change a lot to gain "mass-appeal" for sure :'D Thank you for your suggestion aswell! I'll prettify it if I ever get the time to work on it more!

@duckonaut yeah that's the game in a nutshell it seems :'D Thank you for playing!

Really confusing game, particularly since you can't click through the application to stuff behind. I also found the json reloading was really buggy, you shouldn't really need to reload the entire game to reload json, it should be possible on the fly without too much difficulty. Also, the game should be able to handle json errors without crashing on launch, you could potentially punish the player by resetting the json if they make it malformed or something, but having it crash every time was really confusing.

Overall I get what you were going for but it didn't really pan out.

A cool little game, really damn confusing though. It was fun and funny!

I broke it! But i loved it, great game is all i got to say, i made my own bugs, and i made my own crashes so i cant put that on you!

This game is so crazy! For sure it fit under the unstable theme. I really like it. It's original and fun. A little bit hard, but after a few tries I was able to pass through some obstacles.

YEAAAAH i beat it! ultra hard and fun to play. Awesome unusual techniques. Great!

[btw here's the VOD of us playing this on stream.](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1171489560?t=01h20m42s) :slight_smile:

Sorry we weren't able to complete it, but as you probably noticed from my teammate's reactions, we really enjoyed this one!

This game was great, in my opinion. It's ultimately not that deep in terms of mechanics--at least, in terms of mechanics I understand--but it was a lot of fun throwing things at the wall until I finally managed to win.

To elaborate: I thought that it would be possible to edit all of the bugs out of the way, but I failed to change the position or size of any of the bugs other than "bug_0". I also never managed to get the "speed" variable to do anything.

On top of that, I never quite understood how to make the game hide the intro screen or what exactly would cause it to crash. In particular, I was nearing the end of the game, starting to hone in on exactly what position variable I should give the player, when the game started to crash no matter what. I had to delete the JSON file and re-play parts of the game until it started hiding the intro screen again. (I did manage to win after enough manipulations. :grin:)

But... all of those experiences were pretty neat, really. I never really figured out exactly what worked, but I did know that I could always delete my save file and restart from the beginning. The meta way that this game is played is really cool. I always know that, if the game is screwed up somehow, there is a way to get back to where I was by changing the files on my computer. But... changing the files on my computer is also the literal gameplay of the game. So the game destroys the distinction between the game and the meta game. It's very cool.

In particular, if I decide to, say, delete all the info the game has saved and re-download it, I am in fact still playing the game. That's weird. And so I think it's great.

One of the neat little experiences I had while playing is attempting to just delete all the bugs so they wouldn't be in the way. This of course caused a crash. Killing isn't the smoothest way indeed.

The buzzing sound that is in the right ear is great. I actually didn't realize that was a part of this game until I went back and checked right now. The game continues to eviscerate the line between itself and the rest of the world.

So yeah, great game. First LD49 game I've given 5 stars. :smile:

I absolutely loved it. I think not everyone is going to get it, because figuring out what to do and how to do it can be a little bit tedious in the beginning, but so much more rewarding afterwards. I think LD is the best place for this game tho, since it's a game jam, and this game is about "hacking" it. There are probably many ways to beat this one. I tried multiple approaches, until I just went to starting right next to the lady (Nesigur? Btw where/how do you come up with these names?). But it took me a some time, crashes and repeats to figure out how and where to start. So that's 5\* for fun and innovation from me.

The music was really pleasant, and you've really improved with your art. Keep it up man, well done!


Wow, we're really close to the next event and I haven't responded to either of those nice messages. Let me remedy that :D


@honey-pony Whoa, that's the highest praise my game could've hoped for! Thank you so much! I still have a lot to learn, but what the response of the game showed me is that there is some place for those wacky meta-ideas one usually dismisses as too unintuitive or too experimental. One day I may go back and polish this thing to help it become the crazy meta-experience it aspires to be!

@kuro Man, it really means a lot too me being praised for art by my favourite creature designer, you have no idea! To answer your question (with huge delay): Yes, the corrupted pink fairy-thing's name is Nesigur. Nesigur is Romanian for "unsure", the title could be translated as "unsure/ unstable connection". I just stuck with using Romanian names since I started participating. Yeah. :smiley:

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Oh, I didn't even celebrate this being my first game that managed to get into the top 100 in one category! 43rd in innovation, woo!
While I did not comment on it at the time, I am very thankful for all of you who saw Contact Nesigur as doing something interesting! I can only hope to show you something even better in just a few days time!

Cheers!