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


Man, the level of polish on this game is off-the-charts! Like something out of the GBA! Fantastic job, Krystian!


@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.


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.


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.


https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ca2mSUmPzKSXkWUVKi0RHP0Uk-9xZBjBtRI73-3kG0M/edit?usp=sharing something i recommend


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 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!
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