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(((Sonic Bloom)))'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun | #8 | 4.125 | 4.125 |
| Visuals | #17 | 4.333 | 4.333 |
| Theme | #45 | 3.708 | 3.708 |
Ranked from 24 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Woa this is excellent. I'm really enjoying it. Definitely challenging, nice music and visuals. Moving the ship feels nice and I quickly became in trance. Great job!
I like that animation. Good job!
Very nice graphics and animations. I like the use of positional audio too - audio effects like that get overlooked in too many games.
For the keyboard controls, I would have liked to have had a WASD option. The button mapping on an X-Input gamepad is really weird - movement on the left stick is fine, but shoot is assigned to d-pad up and the face buttons are all some weird sideways inverted movement.
The boss needs some sort of visual indication that it's taking damage and eating a death from that initial popup from the bottom of the screen with no warning felt kind of cheap. Other than those issues, the boss was fun and the artwork is great.
Nice pastel colors used, at last a wise selection which doesn't tire one's eyes ! Fine gfx, and many elements a shape-ship shooter likes.
Check out Project-x and Xenon from Amiga games, if you wanna get inspired.
Overall polished game with the sfx, different pickups and enemies! Good entry! :)
Truth be told, I am not great at shoot em up/ bullet hell games, so I was only trying to beat my own previous highscore - so maybe one minor suggestion is to add the (high)score at the "Game Over" screen, just so I can have a gauge if I am actually getting better each time I play?
(PS. I tried tracking on my own and eyeballed my score when I am down to one life and the answer is actually no - I guess I am too tired to play this xD)).
really cool game but I somehow felt like the hurtboxes were too big, but I'm not good at these games anyway XD Great entry!
Wow, this is definitely one of my favorite submissions for this jam I’ve played so far! This was really well-made, the music and visual design were fantastic. Really nicely polished, and the enemy variety was great - the difficultly spike kind of felt abrupt, but the difficulty is what made it so fun for me too. Honestly I’m a bit jealous of how well-polished this all is - lots of little things that just add up to make the whole thing feel fantastic. Amazing job! You should be proud of this one :)
EDIT: Played through it some more, made it to the final boss. Would be nice to have some indicator as to how much damage I’m doing to him (unless I’m just blind and missed it), plus him appearing from the bottom of the screen was a nasty surprise that stole one of my lives before the fight even started. Those are just minor nitpicks though, I really enjoyed it overall! The sound design for the boss was great too
Really enjoy this game. Think this game out of the entries I played, makes me feel the most like: I'm gonna jump back in soon! I didn't do too great but found myself replaying it several times. The graphics are awesome, the music very fitting and really gets you in the mood. I love the 3D sound. Also super appreciate the toggle to turn off the shaders!
Very polished entry, had a blast with it. The variety of enemies was great. I love the sprites for them. One minor thing could be I wish upgrades dropped more frequently. And I wish the green enemy bullets were a different colour. The green bullets look similar to when they die so those I get hit by more on accident. Might just be a player issue on my end though haha.
Whole game just a real fun high octane joy to play. Fantastic enemy design. Fast paced and fun. Nothing much more to say!
I'm gonna go back and keep playing now :D
EDIT: I went back and played it. Made it to the boss. There might be a slight bug there. Wasn't able to kill the boss and hte boss didn't seem to be shooting out bullets like in the screenshot. Just expanding and popping up. So I was firing at him for a super long time and nothing happened. I love his voice though! Really adds to the whole game vibe.
aww sorry you struggled with the boss! Ya, he doesn’t shoot until his final phase, and he does have a looot of power, but if you get powerups he goes down pretty fast. Was hard to find the balance between not too long w/out p-ups, and not too short with them. he says “what” for each phase (though there’s admittedly no differences between the phases until the final, something we’d change in an updated version).
Thanks so much for playing and so glad you enjoyed what you did! :)
Hmm might have to give him another try then. I didn't see any indicator he was taking damage so assumed he was bugged and quit the game unfortunately. I played and heard him say "what" twice so thought I was doing something but he kept on with the same pattern until I quit because I didn't think anything was happening. But I'll try it out again! I didn't have a lot of power ups so maybe it would just take longer.... How many times does he say "What" before he reaches his final mode?
Haha when you die man, dude only that goves this game a 5/5 :D loved it! Nicely balanced difficulty! Yeah the use of 3d sound man, nice! :) this was fun! Continue on this one!
You did something REALLY cool here that I didn't notice immediately. The first time I played through I was was wondering why it is so hypnotizing and then I noticed the sound is 3D. Also the enemies and weapons change the music seamlessly. I thought that was really cool!! It really brings the game to life in a way I haven't see in other games. The boss caught me by surprise when he came out, I thought it was really great!! I didn't look at the screenshots before I played so it came as a surprise xD
I’m so glad you noticed! Ya, one of the things I wanted was for the sounds to pan based on where they were coming from, which is kind of a hassle to do. Also, once we had enemies being generated by the music, I wanted the weapons to fire to the beat as well. It’s not quite a rhythm game in the traditional sense, but it is in that as many things as possible follow the beat, so you can groove along as you play. Thanks so much for playing! :)
I don't play arcades so I died in the first few minutes but it gets an old-school vibe and everything was smooth and well done. Great job!
it’s definitely a challenge, but the good thing is you don’t have to keep putting in quarters to try again. Haha
Thanks for playing. :)
This is a great classic SHMUP! Your animation skills are incredible! I loved every animation! I just wish there was some screen shake and particles to go along with them to give it that extra 'umph'. Great work though! I am a big SHMUP fan and this one is a perfect casual classic style game I could play for a while! Amazing!!
oh my gosh thank you so much!! Yes I considered adding screen shake and particles (though the particles had a specific purpose besides just visual fun), but it was very late in development and I needed to make sure everything was working properly. At this point though I think we’ve decided to expand on this, so look forward to that!
Graphics look nice (cool retro 16-bit style), great animations and controls are responsive. I'm kind of missing the neon-theme here, and the enemy movement could've used a lot more variation (instead of only 'top-to-down'-patterns). But in general a nice game! Rated!
Totally fair. It was interesting trying to find ways for the movement to match the music I originally tested a stop and go to the beat thing, but that didn’t work for the faster rhythms. Other directions would’ve been good though, we did add the horizontal projectiles later in development at least. Haha
Oh and as for the neon, I was really banking on the shader to neon-ify things, perhaps not to the greatest effect? 🤷‍♂️
Fun shooter with a lot of attention to detail. I found it especially cool that you added controller support and shader settings. The power ups were also very satisfying, great game.
Very nicely done shmup!
Really fun game! I love the enemy death animations, great attention to detail!
SHMUP! this is fun as hell!
Well done shoot 'em up =)
Absolutely incredible, this game is really awesome, it's a bit hard, it took me a couple of tries to get to the end, and the boss is a bit too repetitive, but still really amazing game, great visuals, great gameplay, i like the powerups and the bullet-hell a lot and really cool music and voice-acting. My highscore was 1434.
Oh my, this is incredible! I found the pacing a bit hectic for my taste and did not appreciate the little blue guy blowing up, BUT the music is amazing and the execution like nothing I've seen before! It's amazing! The animations are also amazing!