Mai-Chan's Sweet Buns is a cute puzzle game about pastries. Our goal is to help Mai-Chan serve her sweet buns to customers at her bakery.
This game was created as part of the A Game By Its Cover Jam 2018.
https://itch.io/jam/a-game-by-its-cover-2018
How to Play
Dpad (Arrow keys) - Move Cursor
X Button (X or M or V) - Confirm. Serve pastry.
O Button (Z or N or C) - Cancel. Turn cursor.
The 4 cards at the bottom of the screen represent the orders of the customers. Our task is to find and select a line of pastries on the board that matches one of the cards. We can select vertical or horizontal lines. But it needs to be an uniterrupted line of the same pastry.
We can only serve lines of pastries that perfectly match one of the cards. Some orders are easy to satisfy - like the x1 oders. Others may require some setup - like the x3 orders.
If we ever get stuck, we can look into the magical Star Box to activate special powers. Special powers cost stars. We can gain more stars by aligning 4 of the same pastry in a row.
We lose the game if we get stuck and run out of stars. But if we manage to serve all of the order cards in the deck, we win!
Some Background
This game was created as part of the A Game By Its Cover Jam 2018. The goal was to create a game based on of the cartridge covers from the Famicase Exhibition 2018. The cover to Mai-Chan's Sweet Buns was created by Louis Lloyd-Judson.
https://twitter.com/Louistrations
He's the artist of the webcomic Apricot Cookies.
https://apricotcookies.net/
I've livestreamed the entire process here. It seems like it took around 100 hours.
The entire playlist is here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLea8cjCua_P1taIqeYv6mKVdIfIZLFZGK
The music was made by my friend Sebastian Haßler
https://twitter.com/sebashas
This looks awesome! Great animation and art. The gameplay is also quite entertaining :)
This is such a feature-filled game (on top of looking super good, of course). Love the unlockables, they change stuff up a lot and make for some great replayability.
Ok, we're used to saying a game is good, but this is orders of magnitude better than just 'good'. It's 'legit-professional-level, super-polished, would-pay-for good'.
Man, the level of polish on this game is off-the-charts! Like something out of the GBA! Fantastic job, Krystian!
Crystal clear play, Krystian !
Nicely done. Good turn-based puzzle. Lots of thinking involved.
Really well executed -- graphics, music, gameplay. Nice work!
This is really incredible, this could've been a GBA game and I wouldn't have blinked at all.
am i overlooking some kind of fail state? also couldnt each button represent a direction for group selection(x is vertical,o is horizontal)
@VgBlade: You lose if you can't fulfill any of the orders (the cards at the bottom) and you're also out of star powers (the box in the top left corner). X fulfills an order, and O flips between horizontal and vertical; if both fulfilled an order in a direction, the UI would probably get a little cluttered? Maybe it'd work, like a cross highlighting all sequences.
i guess ive been lucky with it always giving me things i need. thanks for the fast reply, i see how it could get a bit cluttered.
unless you feel like adding a ingame timer the controls are great
Such a short & sweet [ no pun intended :P ] little game, good work! I love the overall graphics and you did a great job picking out which colors work well with each other.
Thanks for the livestreams as well, will definitely have to go through the playlist soon and watch them all.
Nice job!
This is a situation where Japanese and Chinese character support would be so useful.
Thanks for the feedback guys. I'm glad you are having fun with the game.
@VgBlade - that is a good suggestion. I honestly haven't considered it. I guess something that was important for me was to communicate the mechanic of selecting and serving buns. Because that part is super uninitutive. It goes against how those games usually work. So it was important for me to be able to show a preview of what will happen when you press a button. That would be hard to communicate clearly if there were two "serve buns" buttons.
Very fun and polished puzzle game.
Playing it also makes me hungry. The sprites for the food really do look tasty.
Fantastic game, and I'm enjoying the making-of streams! Game plays great on my android phone from this bbs but on itch.io no sound for some reason.
Hey guys, here's a good deck:
Cupcake
Nussecke
Pastel De Nata
Croissant/Eclair/Scone
i'm absolutely losing it looking at this screen
also i love the game great work
@supree Oh god. Why did I notice this just now. This is hilarious, thank you! XD
(Also, Cinnamon Roll is god tier in endless games. I should prolly nerf it)
I can’t believe how good this is. The graphics, animations, controls and sounds are really nice at first glance and stay pleasant over many plays. There is a meta-game with a shop and deck building! Incredible polish and replayability. And when you feel that the game is a little easy, either you enjoy that (I do like Puyo Trainer https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=4109 for that reason), or you try the hard mode! Amazing game here.
This is an excellent game. I just sat and played it for two hours straight. Really impressive and fun.
Hi! Still playing this :D
I cleared a double 4-row and got one star, is it intentional?
Also a wild request: could there be a 2-player version someday?
This is one of my most played games on pico-8. Is it based on another game?
Here's my best score so far, using Eclair, Croissant, Scone and Cinnamon Roll:
This game is so addictive. I love how easy it is to get to grips with, but it's so rewarding to figure out little combos and start to be able to see a few moves ahead. Absolutely fantastic presentation, really polished graphics and animation, great music, and it's even got a decent tutorial to get you started. Such attention to detail. Awesome game!
I recently got a Miyoo Mini Plus handheld console and this is the first game that I finished on it.
Incredible puzzle game. Very fun and addictive. Really nicely made! Thank you
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