Lonk's Island

Impressive game! I though it was kinda okay until I noticed the floating boxes, and it really changed the game for me. The different bonus items are pretty fun, and having a reason to roam around the water makes the game more dynamic. The fact that water plays an important role is pretty cool too, since it's not just "the game happens to be on a island".
I couldn't beat NONGANON but I'll probably try again later!
The only thing I didn't like is the way the player takes damage, I wish there was knockback or more iframes (even if it means having less HP), because sometimes by the time I reacted like half my HP was gone and it fels pretty bad :(

Easily one of my favorites! You accomplished a lot just by yourself. I can see from the end result that you actually had some time to polish and balance the game, which is impressive and very unlike how we've performed in the previous games we've collaborated on... It's a very neat, complete package. Winner material!

Really well polished, well thought out, solid entry! The visuals do a great job emulating the era, while still being readable and stylish. The music sounds great, and most importantly, the gameplay is well balanced. Usually, in a game like this, I would never use bombs, since they're so unweildly. However, since you can't use your banana while wading in shallow water, it incentivized me to situationally change up my toolkit.

When I first saw the boxes, I got really excited about them. I thought you had to place a bomb in the water, and hit it at the boxes to blow it up. This didn't work. Turns out, I just had to touch the box. Maybe let the player blow it up from afar, and if they pull it off (cause it is pretty tough to time it right-- trust me) they'll get a higher chance of a better item drop? Either way, really cool game. Great work!

This is a really solid entry with great retro art and a fun fighting style with plenty of enemy variation - I think it's a little confusing to begin with that your weapon is also your health indicator, though you very quickly figure this out - that aside, it's a fantastic entry, well made and with some great effects, good job! :)

Looove the art, and the gameplay's real good too. Fun to play but boy am I bad at it compared to those highscores on the leaderboard 😳

This was a fun little wave survival game. I loved the graphical style, and the variety of enemies was quite good. My only main criticism was the pixel perfect camera, since it jittered pretty badly when moving diagonally. Besides that, the game felt good!

Great graphics, music, and fast-paced gameplay! Really feels like an old Zelda game... but with a monkey.

I love this! The pixel art is beautiful!! The banana attack animation and sound are perfect. The powers are so cool! It was a really good idea to have crates drift to the shore to provide more powers to keep you going. I love that you can attack the old wise monkey and he gets mad at you xD Great Jam!!!!

This is pretty fun! Very polished, art and music are good. I wish the player had more invulnerability after getting hit. Right now, it feels like one mistake can cost many lives, whereas I think it's better for balance if each mistake costs exactly one life every time. Overall, really good!

Very entertaining little game! Using the bombs was really fun and I love the look of the banana slash. The game being upscaled by default would have been kinda nice.

My fave so far - excellent polish, excellent action, excellent scaling challenge, excellent enemy types, excellent power-ups, really love the 'drop a bomb and whack it into hell' mechanic. Also the bomb fruit is just inspired. Really really well done!

Definitely more on theme than a lot of entries I've seen, especially as the layout is important to managing the onslaught, with the terrain makign strategic herding necessary- I managed to corner myself into having to go into the deeper waters a few times, and enemies of course caught up and inflicted damage.

There's a lot of depth in here, especially for a 48hr game, which is impressive. My game suffers from spending too much time on getting the design itself up and running, and then running out of time to put in much in the way of content. The difficulty curve here is pretty smooth, and the frantic nature of it does ramp up in increments, rather than noticeable jumps.

The only thing that comes to mind to improve is some slight jankiness in the collision detection department, as there were a few times I got hit when I swear the enemies weren't near enough by my estimation to hurt the player character.

Overall though, a very slick entry. Nice work!

Very enjoyable game! I found myself getting immersed into this small island hunting down bananas and bombs, trying to survive as long as possible. I think the game looks great and captures the art style perfectly of the era. I thought the combat was a lot of fun and the different enemies forced me to adapt my play constantly to what was after me. Sometimes I found the feedback on taking damage to be a bit lacking as occasionally I'll notice I was missing health and unsure of when I got hit. I thought the crate power ups to be really fun but I always felt myself hoping for the Alien gun. Unsurprisingly, as a fan of all your other submissions, I really liked this one. Great job!

This was a very fun game, the graphics are very reminiscent of the style you were going for. I really liked the animation of Lonk swinging his banana. The combat feels good, and combos are satifying to pull off. I feel like the player isn't given nearly enough invincibility frames though. The highscore aspect kept me coming back for more. Really good job in this game!

This game had a lovely sense of charm to it, and it captured the art style of old NES games very well. Just the thumbnail visual itself looks simultaneously humorous and very impressive given the gamejam timeframe. The dialogue added to that feel, and the sense of exploration and item utility was great; I felt like those two qualities carried the experience of playing it moreso than anything else. Great work!

I'm writing this feedback with the intention to go back and play more of it! So far it's the game in the jam with the best gameplay loop for me. I want more!

For starters, the leaderboard experience is very smooth. I find highscores addictnig to get and you definitely have a score I think we all want to aim to beat (: Compared to other games I found it very non intrusive and makes it not a chore to have to start up the game and go through it again.

Visually, I think it's straightforward and has everything I need. Not just in a it's functional way but the art direction is consistent and lends itself to making the gameplay feel fun and fair. It's not overly distracting and emphasises the combat more.

I like the little visual details there are like the bananas growing.

Think from the other games of yours I have played, you really know how to make a game feel good. Biggest issues I had with gamefeel were some collision problems and hit box problems. And when you try to move diagonally, the camera got really jittery for me. I don't think the hitbox and collision stuff felt really awful? Just had to be careful moving around obstacles more.

I think a visual of the bomb range might have been nice. If it was there, I might have missed it.

The dialogue was also funny. I spent some time just hitting the monkey and getting called a stupid kid and to just leave :')

Actually pretty on theme in more than visuals. Lots of island interpretations of the outside is not ok to go to which concentrates action on the land. Here, it feels more liek a balance. There's great things in the water but you put yourself in danger doing so. Crates were cool. It lends variety to the gameplay and some thought in more ways than just a pure reaction time thing.

Love the exploring to find out where the best drops are. Very island like too. Nice playing more to learn the layout.

Speed of the game is great. It's fast paced and actiony. The perfect amount. If anything, it is on the slower side of things. Not in a bad way but just in the way I'd rank some other action games.

There's just something about your games that feel good. You know your stuff and how to make things soooo satisfying. Feels like a magic formula haha.

Really addictive I want to go back for more and discovering more items.

I played your game on stream, now I need them crunchy feed backs! heres a time stamp if you want to watch it again https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1091776398?t=39m30s

I got to stay, i love the look (but I'm probly bias) and the humor of the game too.

I felt everything moved a bit to fast for the size of the game resolution, but its not unplayable, this is more so personal preference. I think the speed of gameplay should be within the amont of infomation the avrage player can prosses with the given amount of infomation.

but then again, id still have fun so who knows , lol.

An addictive little game! Not the deepest experience but I definitely kept playing to feel the satisfying flashes and sounds. Nice one!

Really fun, solid gameplay with great art and music/sounds. Loved the variety in items and enemies. Fantastic entry!

Looks great and feels great, would of really liked gamepad support but overall great job. Sound and music was great too, the player's slash felt very solid

Great game feel and very intuitive to pick up (although it took me a couple of plays to realise I could use the item in the third slot; zelda training had me thinking that 'gauntlets' are passive).

Reiterating what someone else said, longer invincibility would be nice. I think that often in arcade action games it is worth giving the player a bit of a reprieve when they mess up. In this case, maybe the enemy that touched you could be destroyed (but give no points?), or you could even clear the screen, but give the player much less health. Either way, the healing would probably need to be less generous, but there would be less of a feeling that a single mistake later on could eat your entire health bar :)

Music and art were great, too. I still have that song stuck in my head!

A really polished and difficult survival game. I think that early on it's easy to get overwhelmed and get defeated quickly because invincibility frames between getting hit are short. Other than that, though, I think it's a great little arcade game.

For a game that has its combat system inspired by the classic Legend of Zelda, there is plenty of additional depth to be found here. Do you really want to go for that crate and risk getting ambushed? Do you think bunching up enemies to game end them with a bomb is better than getting them one by one? Do you think going in the water to dodge the skulls is worth it in exchange for your ability to deal damage? Should you defeat the legally distinct ganondorf or heal first? The game asks me these questions constantly, and because of that I can confidently say that it's a geat arcade experience.

My biggest criticism however is that the game does not know how much mistakes should be punished - the interval between taking damage is too small, meaning I have little time to reorient myself after getting hit by an enemy. taking damage from a sea monster could take one or four HP and there is nothing I can really do about it. Greater 'invincibility time' would certainly make the game easier, but that can be fixed with reducing the available hitpoints to the player.

Final Verdict: The game is pretty Pog! Looking forward to eventually claiming the top stop on the leaderboards.

This was great! Really fun gameplay, the art's awesome, and it's just all around a good game. Great entry