WHAT’S UP, CHAMPIONS? ;)

Only half an hour left, and I’m here among the top 20 highest-rated entries to give you all an extra boost - may the best one win! Everyone gets 5 stars from me as a gift! The jam is almost over, and I hope everyone’s hard work pays off!

Go, champions!!! 🎉🔥

Congratulations on the fantastic creations you’ve worked so hard on! It’s amazing to see such incredible work come to life! :))

ALL THE BEST!

I didn’t take part to Boss Rush Jam 2024 but I played Shinigami Shrine from last year and really liked its GBC Zelda Oracle style.

This time it looked like a hybrid kinda GBA with vertical screen for shmup. I liked the aesthetics including that spinning main menu (I realized later it was on the theme too!), and Intelligent Drums (so reminiscent not only of GBA but also PS/Dreamcast era).

It was clever not to make the character rotate around the screen but having the camera track the character and rotate the whole arena around instead, as it would be disturbing to press left to go clockwise but then it would go right when the character is at the top of the screen (as in Sonic when you’re on the ceiling and horizontal direction is reversed). Although circle arena just work in some games like Froggy’s Battle but I think this one allows stick control (while old school games work with D-pad).

Using radial coordinates also help maneuvering around bullets which are also using radial coordinates: it’s natural to go left and right to follow the waves (while it would be tricky to move diagonally to follow the same patterns in XY coordinates, esp. with a D-pad).

It was interesting to shoot while moving sideways (and shoot very little if you alternate left and right too fast), to force you to move and keep the same direction while having to decide when to stop before hitting projectiles => dynamic of moving left as much as possible, then right as much as possible, etc. Although during the tutorial it toook me a bit of time to understand why going left was shooting to the right (because the BG wasn’t rotating, understandable in pixel art - but I got it once I understand it was the camera following the player character).

Boss design

Sometimes it felt like it was impossible to escape a wave of huge bullets, and the best way was simply to predict it and start moving completely to the left or to the right in advance… Or maybe there is a way to dodge between the big bullets and it was part of the challenge.

The boomerang bullets of Side Car in the middle of another pattern was quite smart to make you think (and not such a common pattern).

UI

Convenient to put Options on a dedicated key in the main menu, although I kept opening the Options by accident when I wanted to confirm my selection… I thought it was a bug at first (it’s easy to swap X and Z on a new game)

Art

Very pretty and polished, I don’t know enough GBA to know if it fits particular hardware constraints but it felt right. I did spot a few rotating bullets in pixel art, but I think all pixel art teams had issues in this jam about “Spin” (even us, we were kinda saved by going with HD at the end so we could rotate the main character and his weapon as much as we wanted).

Generally not a fan of “moe anthropomorphization” (probably saw a little too many - I suppose I wouldn’t notice if there were general anthropomorphizations with mixed gender teams), but I admit the character designs are quite varied and funky - I especially like the space cowgirl (?) at the end.

The animation details like the hat drop on defeat are also very nice. I think the jiggly breasts are a bit too much though, they tend to break my immersion esp. in old school games.

Ending

I remember saying that Shinigami Shrine didn’t have a clear ending, so it was nice to see a proper ending sequence and explanation of why all the battles, esp. considering the time constraints. I’m happy to join the Elite Four!

I haven’t tried Hard mode yet but it seems harder to fill the SP gauge, and also it’s cleared when I get hit, so I must be extra careful!

This is probably the best bullet hell from the jam, the visuals, music, simply everything is awesome!

cool

Nice and simple game. Good job!

Very simple but fun, clean and well polished game!

Simple concept, great execution. No wonder this game has the most votes.

Really cool game and nice art!

Man, such a good game, can't sing enough praises
the theme was so well implemented, and the ending was such a welcome surprise
I am glad I played to the end, your art style is full of charm and the gameplay is smooth af.
i hope you guys win, you deserve it!

this fucks with my brain, but its real fun

Those jungle breaks man, this game is smoooth. Had a lot of fun, great work!

Probably one of my top 3 favorite games in this jam and the number of ratings shows! Everything about this game is just awesome, it feels like something that should be on steam already!

(PS: If you're willing to I'd love it if you can rate and leave some feedback on my game! This is my first ever jam and I'd love to see where I can improve for the future!)

I beat every single boss including Margherita! Art style is phenomenal and adorable, controls were confusing at first but you get used to them after a while. Spinning the bosses attack is really unique, but I wonder if also spinning the background arena would make it more clear on what's happening.

For anyone struggling on this game, the best advice I could give is that you don't always have to hold down shoot.

Definitely my favourite game of the jam.