cool concept, and I liked the art
Cheers Arend

No engine, just plain HTML, Ultima graphics, love it!

A tutorial would be nice because it took me way to long to figure out what to do. Maybe mouse-over hints could describe the UI elements? I think the beaver and the counter should appear on the square you place it on, is it a bug if it doesn't do that? It would be convenient to have some kind of indicator which squares are going to flood next, although that would probably alter the gameplay :thinking:

An enjoyable game, well done!

I love this game! The gameplay is simple, but really innovative and interesting. Though i needed some time to figure out what the mechanics are. I only found out in the last level, that you can pair the beavers <3 So a little info window at the start would be nice.

Short tutorial while author is still asleep ( :P ):
1. Place a beaver on a tile with trees on it to gain sticks
2. Place sticks on a tile to build dams that are impassable for the river
3. Your goal is to prevent the river from flooding the circular thing (nest?) in the bottom right side by redirecting the river elsewhere

Thanks @udo and @raxah - a tutorial of sorts (in the form of pop-up messages at the beginning of some levels) was on my roadmap, but I didn't get around to it before the submission deadline. I'll probably add something basic as a minimal post-jam update -- and also in the description box here on this page.

udo, the counter should appear on the beaver dam square indeed. Did you use the full-screen toggle by any chance when encountering this? I am aware of a placement bug related to that toggle, for which I'll have an other 0-day bugfix in soon.

Thank you too @arend-hintze !

Haha, much appreciated @hekateras! Pretty spot on, one important piece missing is that you can gain new workers if you place two beavers on the same tile. (But they will not do their job then!)

I have all these stupid things keeping me from updates, such as sleep and work. Bugfixes and tutorials will arrive in 6-8 hours.

What a cute little game. I managed to beat all three levels but I'd love to have the Random Level button accessible from the start! I love the simplicity. Thank you!

Cool concept and I really like the pixel art! Very effective artstyle!
I could see this as an expanded game with even more features and interesting ways to use many beavers to protect your nest. Would make a very interesting little RTS!

Great work!

I've added an in-game tutorial to explain the mechanics. Hopefully things are more straightforward now! I'll also add a few sentences to the description above.

Thanks @okamit! I'd love to make a post-jam version eventually, and I'm interested to hear suggestions for new mechanics (but I do have a few ideas already that I just didn't have time for during the jam).

@hekateras I included an update just for you, press R to get a new random level.

Thanks for the feedback!

Wonderful! :D

Omg the new intro is so cute and funny. "Above your paygrade for now", haha.

I like it, you really captured the NES style feel for this game, with its graphics, music and sfx. I also like the humor in the dialogue. I was just confused at the start on which was the river tile and the land tile but it became clear once the river tile spreads. Nevertheless, it's an awesome game.

Really great level of polish on this, fun and novel concept too.

Really solid puzzle mechanics here and the beaver dam holding back the inevitable river is such a nice way to tie it all into the theme. Writing is very charming as well, all in all a solid game!

Made me love corporate interests and recruitment! Really nice concept, it just wasn't always clear to me where the river would flow exactly (clearly it's not just left to right), when a dam would disappear completely, and whether or not I'd be able to replace it. I feel like there are lots of creative directions to go with the mechanics :)

well, i did my best to place beavers to repair the damn and stem the water flooding, but i got a lot of game overs without really understanding what i did wrong or how i could have done better. is there something more to it than assigning beavers to the choke points?

i liked the attitude / humor in the dialogue. the graphics reminded me of the old "dwarfs" game.

@dining-philosopher Thanks! Yeah, I'm starting to think that "left to right" joke is more misleading than helpful. Rivers flow in every direction, wherever there's adjacent open tiles. (The only open tiles for now are grass and swamp - both have these green diagonals in the graphics.) The left-to-right thing only applies for the still water ponds that dams create, which is always one tile to their right... I'm not satisfied with this whole still water mechanic, I had much more plans for them in my initial drafts, but they turned into a bit of an (apparently confusing) gimmick by the end of the jam. Oh well! As for dams disappearing, the rules are rather simple there: dams start with 4 strength, and every turn they lose 1 strength for each adjacent water tile. This means that a new dam surrounded by water on all sides will not survive the turn, as the second level's opening and tutorial message tries to point out. A dam with strength 3 that has water on 2 sides will survive the turn with 1 strength left. The counter on the dam turning red is meant to indicate that the dam will not survive the turn, but this color is currently unreliable, there's some bug here that I will need to look into.

@sakura-magika there's only one way to lose a level: allowing water to flood into an objective tile (white circle thingie). The objective that was flooded is marked in red in this case, but this is not always visible due to the game over screen. As for choke points, those are the most critical of course, but on later levels you need to balance your resources and figure out where you can afford to let the water flow while you tend to other locations. It is possible to beat all standard levels! (The game offers infinite random sandbox levels after you complete the standard ones - not all of those are possible to win.) Thanks for your comment!

Thank you guys too @chingle @indigowolf and @jhax!

Really liked the aesthetic and the beaver world setting and writing. Even with the tutorial took a little while to figure out what was going on and still not entirely sure I understood what the water movement pattern was. Equal parts intriguing and confusing. Was a bit annoyed that the pop-up Game oever sometimes covered part of the map so I wasn't entirely sure what had happened in the end. Made it to the end of the normal levels. Music was nice too, sort of surprised it didn't loop. Solid Entry

@ditam thanks for the explaination, i gave it another try, and was able to get a lot farther. it's actually pretty fun! i love the "...erm, 'recruit' a new member" function by sending two beavers to the same location, it's a cool mechanic to trade improving present state for having more workers, and grounded in reality in a very funny way!

review updated :3

A very cute and interesting management sim game about little beavers doin beaver things. Full of charm and demands your full attention. Very well done.

Fun, great aesthetic, the music and art work really well together. I enjoyed it!

I also appreciate the choice of tech. I checked the repo to find out what engine you used, and to my surprise found "only" jQuery! The coolest part of that, is that nothing about playing the game "gave away" that it was DOM-based. Very nicely done! Maybe "engineless" will become a new buzzword, after "serverless". :smiley:

Very nice submission! Clean, polished, and well executed. Great graphics, audio and gameplay!

I'm biased but I'm just a simple Ultima fan, I see Ultima art style and I hit like button (run away)

The only suggestion is the tutorial is tied with the game procedure, so when you just want to get away the tutorial, the game move forward as well, and the tutorial also blocked the view of the map. I think it's better to add a button to just close the tutorial dialog box.

The puzzles are fun and innovative, I like the game a lot! Well done!

Love the arcade style and premise. The game is fun and easy to dive into. It wasn't immediately intuitive in the tutorial that I had to go get wood until after it flooded a portion of the map and told me, but after that, the rest of the game's mechanics were smooth sailing. Love the dialogue, too. Great game!

Love the game. I'd love more levels and more stuff to build :)

Appreciate the tutorials. Also they are very funny! Just one thing. They are sometimes blocking my view and I can't send my beavers to tiles behind the tutorial window.

When losing a random level it sends me back to the last level, instead of repeating the random level or creating a new random level.

Had a blast playing. Thank you! :)

The graphics were really nice and the writing was very funny. I was a bit confused on what I was supposed to do but the explanation in the comments helps! Great entry.

Nice game ! I really like the innovative puzzle element, even though it's a bit frustrating that there is no really hard levels to use all the mechanics ^^ Also the tutorial bugged a bit for me, i was stuck in the second screen with a beaver constructing a dam in a black tile (probably because i clicked too fast on the previous screen, but i got softlocked from that). Apart from that the game was really fun, and more beaver games is cool :D

I really like the concept art and sound! I ran into a couple of bugs that were semi-game breaking. I got into a state early on where I wasn't able to continue and I wasn't able to cancel an action, so I ended up building outside the map and somehow had -2 wood. At another point the tutorial text was popping up over an area I needed to build in, so I couldn't do it. Anyway, really solid game and would love to see it developed more!

Awesome! such a fun puzzle game. Simple mechanics but very well executed. I've been playing Timberborn lately and this fits right up that alley. Great job!

One of the best so far no question, love the presentation, love the simplicity, love the geometry all over the map making the game world feel big and real. Simple mechanics excellently executed.

I found it a bit difficult to know what to do. Also, the text was difficult to read.
Except that, the idea is really good and the beavers are sooo cute!
Nice job!

Thanks @automatonvx, the music should properly loop now.

@mwcz that's a nice compliment to get, thanks. I think even the jquery dependency could be easily dropped, I only used it to save a few minutes of development time during the jam, but nothing fancy. I think the word for this 'engineless' utopia you're envisioning is 'vanilla'. In my opinion it adds a lot to the charm of LD to do things from scratch, so most of my submissions are engine-less like this one.

I appreciate the feedback @yulotomorrow and @stefan-funke - tutorial messages can now be closed by clicking on them.

@dodormeur and @daniel-username thanks for the bug reports. I couldn't reproduce building outside the map yet, but I'll make sure to include a fix in the next round of updates.

@mantsje thanks! I haven't heard of Timberborn before, but it looks fun.

Thanks to everyone else as well for playing and leaving a comment
@zack-hd @nate-bit-games @rustymonky @raphiell @skyeward @carla

This was really fun. The graphics were amazing. The humor in the dialogue was great. I chuckled when I put two beavers on the same tile and "recruited" another beaver.

Seems like you didn't do the music, but it really fit the game.

I'll be back to try again later for sure!

I really enjoyed this! You did a spot-on job with the vibe of really old games, it definitely would fit in with stuff like Oregon Trail. It took a little bit to figure out how to do well, but it never got frustrating. What made it easier was remembering that the theme is just "delay" the inevitable, and so I might have to ignore dams that I know are about to break because I can survive just one more turn without them. I'd absolutely come back to this with more levels, or even an endless random mode (even if there's no guarantee it's ever winnable)!

Thanks @0x746564 - Indeed I didn't write the music, it is a version of this song from OpenGameArt: [A Journey Awaits by Pierre Bondoerffer (@pbondoer)](https://opengameart.org/content/a-journey-awaits) - I just heavily adjusted the pacing to fit the game's mood better. (There's an `attributions.txt` in the github repo mentioning the same.)

@acearcher Thanks - there sort of is an endless random mode, press R anytime to be dropped into a new random level :) I know it is annoying that after a random level you're dropped back to level 3 (or wherever you pressed R) - jam constraints, eh? I'll add a proper endless mode for the post-jam version.

Big fan of this one! Absolutely nails the retro vibe. The gameplay is also really solid - dam placement is critical, as is maintaining your resources (in terms of both lumber and workers). I'd love to see more levels!

My only issue is you asked not to be rated in audio; I would absolutely give this game good marks in that! XD

Cool game! It had me playing til the end ;-) If I would say something:

- The SFX was too loud and "surprised" me at the begining xD
- I would say that you are not only delaying the inevitable but overcoming it :-P

But both are just trivial "complaits" I really enjoyed the game and it is really polished! Nice job!

Absolutely loved this game. Fantastic concept, excellent implementation (I played after the April 8 bug fixes), and great choice for SFX. I can see myself getting lost playing this on my phone.