"Unnecessary Sequels" - Awful Summer Jam 2018

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A jam submission

Rogue DesperadoView game page

Submission for SummerJam 2018

Submitted by sedgr — 1 day, 5 hours before the deadline

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Rogue Desperado's itch.io page

Results

Criteria	Rank	Score*	Raw Score
Community Choice	#46	2.676	2.909

Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

Rogue Desperado has a solid and on-theme idea behind it but it’s execution ultimately makes it very frustrating to play. The procedurally generated levels are inoffensive but they don’t really add anything to the game, and hand crafted levels potentially could create more interesting scenarios. The bizarre and inconsistent collision detection issues with your bullets ultimately let down something that is so close to being fun.

Liked
- Art style
- Theme adherence (Turning a scroller in to an open world game feels on-point)
- Powerups
- UI
Needs Work
- Collision detection
- Reloading
- Enemy attack feedback
This game has a really solid core idea but it needs a ton of polish, I kept running in to things that I expected the game to do but it did not. The chief amongst these is the player bullets colliding with enemy projectiles. I kept running in to cases where the dynamite cowgirls and/or the knife throwing dudes would plant themselves in the corners and spam their attacks. The attack cooldown for the dynamite throwers is close enough to the dynamite fuse time that they would end up creating an impenetrable wall. Shooting the flying knives also had a really low success rate for me - 9/10 times my bullet would get destroyed but the knives would remain.

The Boss, and their unnecessary sequel, both felt very unfair. Instantly replacing the last-killed enemy was a big “wat” moment for me, and the first time I fought the boss I got insta-gibbed from his fancy dynamite. It would have felt a lot better if all the minor enemies cleared out of the level, and it was a proper duel with the boss. Trying to kite him around only to run in to thick packs of enemies was very frustrating. And because of the extremely-bulletproof-dynamite the times I defeated the boss ended up being somewhat unsatisfying since it involved cheesing the projectiles and getting a few shots off while the dynamite was stuck on a fence.

Some suggestions that may be good directions to work on: weakness windows for enemies (i.e. enemy takes 3 shots then a reload), enemy dynamite at minimum isn’t bulletproof & spammed - perhaps even being able to blow up enemy dynamite with your shots. Additionally having invulnerability frames for the player would really help smooth out some of what are no-win situations right now.

Elevator pitch
A Western themed roguelite isometric shooter.

Describe how your game adheres to the theme
A spiritual successor to the NES/Arcade game Gun.Smoke. The game started out as a sequel to Red Dead, but most of the plot hooks that would have made this make sense got cut. Whats left actually fits a Gun.Smoke sequel better. Unnecessary because not only has that game had spiritual successors before, one of the major ones Red Dead 2, is right around the corner.

Comments

SAGiggsSubmitted6 years ago (1 edit)

Pros:

Very nice visual design
Randomized level generation works well
Fun boss gimmick

Cons:

Balancing issues (reload time, shot distance, health pickup amount, second boss fire rate, etc)
Slight oddities (Fences block bullets dependant on your distance to them, enemies immune to their dynamite)

Here & There:

This is a cool idea for a game that's bogged down by its details. In my first couple games I didn't get any drops but health pickups and so I didn't know upgrades existed. The reload time is too arduous and doesn't allow you to reload a partially spent chamber which kinda punishes you for attempting to be efficient. I really liked the idea that you could shoot the pickups around until the HP I was saving got in the way of killing enemies. I played through it a few times and beat the boss twice but couldn't take down the second because of the necessity of close proximity due to the short shot distance and its accurate and frequent dynamite tosses. The audio and visual aspects are nice and clean, although the fact that your gunshot audio cuts out when your bullet disappears gets frustrating after a short while. I had fun playing it but also got pretty frustrated by particular situations. It's a bummer that you didn't have the time to polish it up a bit more because there's definitely plenty of potential for fun with this game after some tweaking.

Submitted

Story Time with Grampum Peepmpop 2: Revenge of Puppem Gramma

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TomRSubmitted6 years ago

There is some fun to be had here but it feels unfinished. I wanted to discover what was in the game and explore the power ups but the slowness and buggy shooting kept me from playing more. I feel this could be refined into something good and it may be worth cleaning up. I'd come back for another round.

Submitted

Horse World 2

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sedgrDeveloper6 years ago

Thanks for playing. Its definitely in an unfinished state. Usual jam problem of overscoping for the actual development time. Probably going to use what I learned here as a basis for something else.

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RaujinnSubmitted6 years ago

The random map generation and overall visual look of this game is really nice. The gameplay is OK, but its riddled by some things I found frustrating.

First, the reload speed is _far_ too slow. I get that you can obtain upgrades for it but at least at the start it feels like you spend a lot more time reloading than you do shooting, which feels pretty bad.

Bullets seem to be colliding with things they shouldn't be, which often results in my bullets disappearing in open spaces for seemingly no reason at all. Combined with the slow reload, this can make the gunplay outright infuriating

The gunfire sound ends the moment the bullet disappears which is weird.

Movement is kind of slow, but the enemy projectile speed kind of matches with it as it is, making dodging enemy fire reliable. Not sure what I'd change there really if anything..

Submitted

Pong II: Legend of the Ball Paddlers

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sedgrDeveloper6 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Bullets have a max range thats fairly short in the beginning. Maybe some of that that you are seeing. The pistol was actually only ever intended to be a starting weapon, and the back end is setup for implementing other guns with generated attributes and the like, just ran out of time before I could get it all in a working state. The original goal was to end up with Diablo-like weapon affixes. Brutal Pistol of Fast Reload and the like. Its mostly there, but wasnt ready in time for the end of the Jam, so got stuck with the starting weapon because at least it worked. Reload speed is probably too slow to start with. And the gunfire sound is a bug that has to do with implementing the sound on the bullet object where if it gets destroyed the sound stops playing. Known issue I just never had time to resolve. Thanks for playing!

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AnActualWizardSubmitted6 years ago

Nice work on the art and style. Everything works, though everything also felt really slow. From bullets, to reloading, to movement. Also, I felt like my bullets never traveled far enough. Have you tried speeding everything up a bit? See how it feels as more of a bullet hell type thing?

Submitted

Where the Red Fern Still Grows

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sedgrDeveloper6 years ago (1 edit)

I havent tried speeding it up, but that would have been an eventual goal. Really the whole thing needs play testing and balancing, but I was still working on implementing core ideas when the jam ended. I look at it as a basis for something in the future at this point. Thanks for playing!

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RectusSubmitted6 years ago

Pretty fun gameplay and moderately challenging. Overall a fun game to play. Character movement feels a bit sluggish and awkward though, and touching against obstacles stops your movement.

Submitted

UltraFighter RX5000 / The Girl Next Door II

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sedgrDeveloper6 years ago(+1)

Speeding up gameplay would have been an eventual goal. Thanks for playing!

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