Love this game. Fiendishly difficult but very fun nonetheless. The music fits the hectic fast-paced gameplay. Love the knockback too. Nice one :)
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DOWNER's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Fun | #22 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
Game Design | #28 | 3.971 | 3.971 |
Overall | #55 | 3.681 | 3.681 |
Audio | #84 | 3.559 | 3.559 |
Graphics | #96 | 3.853 | 3.853 |
Theme | #148 | 3.765 | 3.765 |
Innovation | #284 | 2.941 | 2.941 |
Ranked from 34 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
The game's screen constantly scrolls down,so you'll lose if you stay in place or try to climb up, leaving you no other choice but to dive deeper.
Did you write all the code and made all the assets from scratch?
I've made everything, but the the music and font.
Comments
This game is one of the coolests! The knockback from the shooting allows for some sick saves from the spikes and the randomness from the level allows unique layouts, this gotta be one of my favorites from the jam, awesome work!
Very simple but with enough nuance to keep you playing it again and again. I really enjoyed this.
My only issue is that the camera view isn't large enough. This causes the game to feel cramped and prevents you from seeing hazards below you when you are jumping down sometimes.
But an otherwise flawless little game.
Really well implemented - the shot kickback adds a lot of more complexity. Lots of cool little aha! moments from that. Super polished and fun. Great work!
Everything is in the game, it is nice, it is polished, looks good, feels good, plays well and it fits the theme. Great job!
The game feels great to play. The graphics and audio are just perfect. Also the different enemies paired with the simple control to jump and shoot are the right amount of complexity for this game. It all feels right... But: I find the game very hard. That can be a planned decision, which would be totally fine. But me personally I never survived longer than maybe 30 seconds (Not that I am normally any good in those kind of games). Jumping down without knowing what you will land on is a gamble which you always lose when you do it long enough. And if I tried to play it safe the enemies got me for not paying attention to them.
But I still had a great time and think for other players this can be a perfect game.
I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed it! Yeah, I think the game can be challenging at first, and a more thoughtful difficulty curve would make it a much better experience. Maybe dividing rooms into pools based on their difficulty and spawning them according to the player's score would solve the issue. Letting players memorize room layouts in small chunks instead of throwing everything out at once.
Very fun. Nice chunky controls. My only concern is what I call the leap of faith problem.
For example, you jump over some obstacles and fall, but you can't see what is down there. You can land on a hazard you couldn't know was there, cannot avoid, and instantly lose.
This removes skill and replaces it with luck. Which is one way to go, but can get frustrating pretty quickly.
I'm not sure what the fix would be, maybe a quicktime event or something if you hit a hazard that was offscreen when you jumped. Or maybe bullet time in some form.
Also, are the levels procedurally generated? If so, well done and very cool.
Thanks!
Thanks for the feedback! Dying because of the unseen treat is indeed frustrating. My solution to the problem you describe is that the tile next to the wall is always safe, unless the hole that you dropped from was in the center of the room. That's a strict rule, so when you're unsure where to land, you can hug a wall and be okay. I understand that this isn't the best solution, and the game doesn't tell you about it, but that's what I came up with during the jam. Levels are generated at runtime. They're a sequence of randomly chosen, predetermined layouts chained together. That helps with the "leap of faith" problem further, since skilled players will start to recognize generation patterns.
Really fun arcade-style game! Movement feels really smooth and I like the recoil effect from the gun, it definitely made platforming and jumping a bit tricky. It's also cool that the level is randomly generated as you progress. At times the recoil felt a bit too strong, so maybe that effect could be a little weaker or smaller. I also think the jump and shooting controls feel a bit weird; my gut feeling is to use Space for jumping and Z for shooting while moving with arrow keys, you use probably use a key on the right side of the board if using WASD for movement.
Overall though, this was very enjoyable! Great job on the submission!
Very fun game, but would be better if it told you how to jump and shoot (had to kinda guess which one it was)
This game could be made into a popular mobile game, no doubt. volume slider would be sick as well. Great entry
Interesting control schemes for jump and shoot. Personally didn't mind it but I thought the knockback made things way harder. For example where I land and there's a bird coming from both left and right, I shoot one and I push into the other.
Not necessarily a bad thing, I think it comes down to the player figuring out patterns through trial and error. The art and soundtrack were amazing tho!
Overall well done!!
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