Squeezlings by Rongo Matane

[raw]
made by Rongo Matane for Ludum Dare 56 (JAM)

ldjam-hero.png

Your little Squeezlings need help!

Though cute and very diligent these tiny creatures always require a little "nudge" in the right direction.

Guide their Rapid Evolution™ and satisfy your hunger!

Watch them as they take care of themselves and your plants.

The next yummy Nellemon is ripe for the growing!


— Controls —

WASD = move camera

Left-click = pick up/drop

Right-click = squash


TEAM:

René Habermann - Direction, game design, coding, production

Anne Hecker - Art

Raffaele Picca - Art, Coding, game design

Luca Martinelli - Coding, game design

Ste - Coding

Shux - Cover Art

Ron Kaiser - QA

Martin Kvale - Sound design

Cameron Paxton - Composing, music production, logo


Download the OST here!

Ratings

Overall 134th 4.017⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Fun 250th 3.733⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 66th 4.033⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Theme 20th 4.467⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 79th 4.45⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Audio 19th 4.317⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Humor 236th 3.6⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Mood 54th 4.25⭐ 32🧑‍⚖️
Given 7🗳️ 3🗨️

Feedback

BroHeartTTV
08. Oct 2024 · 04:48 UTC
Love the squeezlings, the art style here is absolutely gorgeous. Well done!
Kevin Meissner
08. Oct 2024 · 08:43 UTC
super cute and relaxing, good job :-)
merdeboi
08. Oct 2024 · 08:45 UTC
Very cute visuals, chopsticks and fingers are great tools to interact with the berries and seeds, amazing. They really reinforce the fact that these are tiny creatures, relative scale to humans etc. Very fast puberty for these guys. The AI works very nicely, great consider the time restrictions. So much squishing of these poor guys. Did get the glorious meal achievement going, but seemingly my scissors handed people never gathered any Plumkin or Brimquince ![thing.png](///raw/e0a/z/67cae.png)

The game was an absolute blast though, well done.
MrEliptik
08. Oct 2024 · 21:38 UTC
Very moody! Super cool aesthetics with a nice concept. Congrats :)
osh.studio
09. Oct 2024 · 08:36 UTC
Well done bippinbits! Another great submission, I'm always impressed by your entries, you and your team did a great job. Looks and sounds amazing, my only critique was that I ran into a few bugs here and theres, for example my chopsticks got frozen at one point and I couldn't un-freeze them without quitting.
icxon
09. Oct 2024 · 10:47 UTC
Controversial yet captivating gameplay; I do not feel right squishing those cute humanoids; Got used to it over time in a challenge to beat the game though; Was not able to get past arm/hands thing; Music, art and mood are incredible; 50 minutes is my record for a jam game;

Really impressed this is made in Godot too.

Here is my attempt:

https://youtu.be/wA4GMvD2DBY
LandbergLife
09. Oct 2024 · 19:01 UTC
It looks and sounds awesome, unfortunately there are still quite a few game breaking bugs.
My first and third run the chopsticks got stuck together, only taking movement input when i held the mouse button pressed. My second round I got quite far, but one night, when they gathered around the campfire, they just stood there doing nothing, never to return to their daily activities.

This is to be expected in a Jam but given the long game loop, it's quite annoying.
If you do take the time to fix these issue please send me an @ and I'll be glad to try it again.
Belle
09. Oct 2024 · 20:31 UTC
Amazing and relaxing! The atmosphere was brilliant, the music and lights really built a vibe where I just wanted to stay in the game. Visually I adore 3d-2d combinations, it works very well here. As stressful as making a LD game can be, you used that to make a huge stress-reliever. Great job to the whole team <3
OlliBanjo
10. Oct 2024 · 22:18 UTC
great submission, cozy, nice artstyle, lighting, visuals, music and sound.
love the chopsticks and the finger mechanic ;)
tanis
12. Oct 2024 · 12:41 UTC
Superb entry. Really well done, it reminds me a lot the games from Will Wright. Kudos!
zimny11
13. Oct 2024 · 19:14 UTC
Great entry! It was fun to watch all of Squeezlings running around doing their jobs. Same with figuring out what do to and how to progress further. The art is amazing. Music and the mood are awesome too. My only complain would: be after getting first Nellemon, it was just quite a waiting game to get rest, without anything new to do. Besides, that well done!
Langotriel
16. Oct 2024 · 00:58 UTC
Fabulous presentation, good vibes and a great use of the theme! (top marks!)

For my tastes, this is probably the best looking game I have played and the best use of the theme I have seen so far. Great work!
silkworm_sweatshop
19. Oct 2024 · 15:13 UTC
Great entry! For some reason I didn't pay attention to the evolution symbols for the longest time and I didn't understand why all my squeezlings just ignored the Brimquince. I think they all had been so imbreed with arm evolutions other than the scissors. Once I made a batch of new squeezlings I finally got som scissorhands and it went smoothly from there. At some point I got a bug where the chopsticks where stuck and I couldn't interact with anything. I kept the game running for a while and suddenly it got unstuck, thankfully and I could finish the run. Nice graphics, the chopsticks and finger were a nice choice. Some nice sounds and chill music as well and a cool evolution system.
WeirdBitGames
20. Oct 2024 · 15:47 UTC
Wow this is very good! The depth of field and graphics in general are very impressive! I had a lot of fun with my squeezlings! It took a few attempts to get used to the controls and to work out how everthing worked. Amazing job!
Hawkin
20. Oct 2024 · 18:30 UTC
I really LOVE this! There is so much to play around with, and I will flag it to come back to once my beefier PC is set up. But the graphics alone really sell the feelin that these are tiny creastures.

There are so many great systems you've implemented -- automation, breeding. This is really an impressive submission. 5/5!

(Maybe) bug report? I dropped one of the first berries in another bowl, and then tried to pick it up -- the game crashed. But maybe there was something else happening during the night that caused the issue. The game is not very performant on my laptop XD
LelulaGames
20. Oct 2024 · 22:02 UTC
The design drew me to this. Lovely art style, nice use of blur to give depth, and great mix of 2d and 3d space, as well as cartoonish figures in a more realistic setting. It is endearing.
I figured out the icons under their name showed what upgrades they had already, and how to cull the herd. I do wish you could close out of the help / quest windows when they popped up. But that's really all I think that would make it better.
Tomssuli
21. Oct 2024 · 12:28 UTC
Great and polished entry!

Encountered one bug where the night feast wouldn't end and the game would be stuck. Not sure what triggered the bug, perhaps me killing a squeezeling during the feast.

Graphics and musics were great and made relaxing mood so I could play this for a long time all the way till the end.

I liked the evolutionary mechanics and the fact you could cultivate inferior creatures away to make way for the next pinnacle creature.

![squeezClipboard_10-21-2024_01.png](///raw/a34/d1/z/6902e.png)
Shasaur
22. Oct 2024 · 00:42 UTC
Very impressive and intimate atmosphere, almost feeling like an up-close view into these creature's world. Graphics, lighting, ambience, and especially the audio captured a cosy, almost tribal aesthetic. The chopstick mechanics felt satisfying and well integrated into the theme of the game. Well explained tutorials helped ease new players into the gameplay loop. Encountered some bugs and freezing here and there when interacting with objects with the chopstick that could only be rectified by closing and restarting.
Diego Teran
23. Oct 2024 · 02:41 UTC
Loved the atmosphere! That finger at the end tho
HestiaJ
23. Oct 2024 · 15:12 UTC
The art is amazing!!!
Ategon
24. Oct 2024 · 05:23 UTC
Really fun game. Visuals work really well and are nicely polished and the music compliments the gameplay well. The squeezelings ended up being fun to manage (although I think I mostly lucked out in my evolution line that won me the game since my strategy was to pretty much just spam new plants which got me to the end very quick). Can get to be a lot to manage late game but ends soon after so that ends up being fine.

The differentiation to show squeezelings that have existed for a long time is a really good qol addition. The toast to show the end goal for some reason dissapeared very quickly for me (maybe due to me planting things when it was showing?) so didn't know the end goal until I ran into it

Ran into a bug where some frames were leaking into other frames (seemed to only happen to a specific type of squeezeling)
![Screenshot 2024-10-24 010955.png](///raw/595/84/z/690ff.png)
![Screenshot 2024-10-24 010951.png](///raw/595/84/z/69100.png)
Langotriel
28. Oct 2024 · 05:13 UTC
Yo. Just wanted to say that you guys got robbed in the graphics category. I played 124 games and this is easily a top 3 graphics for me.