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Canary In A Coal Mine's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #48 | 3.753 | 4.333 |
| Theme | #60 | 3.608 | 4.167 |
| Overall | #139 | 3.031 | 3.500 |
| Visuals | #139 | 3.031 | 3.500 |
| Fun | #147 | 2.887 | 3.333 |
| Audio | #160 | 2.454 | 2.833 |
| Approachability | #185 | 2.598 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Pretty neat, and I get to be a birb!
Plenty of bullets, good visual contrast (I never had trouble seeing where something was), and the bullets fired in patterns, which is nice. I didn't get to the boss, so I'm afraid I can't comment on the design there.
By far the area most in need of improvement is pacing. I think it's mostly that the waves drag on longer than they should. I had a similar problem in a recent game, and what helped me was to remove *all* spawns that occur mid-encounter, then only sprinkle back in the ones that were absolutely necessary to make the encounter feel right. If after reevaluating you still feel that a nontrivial number of spawns are needed, it would help a lot to have some sort of feedback so the player knows that they're making progress--I had a few moments where I wondered if I was doing something wrong because the enemies kept coming. Also: if you haven't already, try making a simple UI timer to show total time elapsed when playtesting. This will give you quantitative backing for your intuitions about pacing, and it can be removed when you're ready to build.
Everyone wants to be birb right? :D
I agree with the pacing stuff. I could definitely made work better with more time, I just got the game somewhat working in the last minute hah.
The spawns (the glowing light blue icons) appear randomly on destroyed blocks, so I cant exactly manage how many spawn you get, but I definitely would like to make them less random. The spawn activate sequentially staring with the spawner you uncovered first, I did make it so they activate slower the more enemies are alive, but it did not have time to properly tune it.
The game is really interesting! The idea of a bullet hell mixed with a bit of exploration/search is really cool! The game is ab it sluggish though. Enemies spawn slowly, and rounds drag on for too long. Immediately losing explosive uses after getting hit once is really annoying. No clues as to where the marks are really makes finding them feel like going around lost, not really fun. The reloading mechanic is also completely unnecessary. The visuals is very nice though. Even with these issues, the game is still really creative and unique! Great job at the game!
Wow, haha. Pretty fun and cool. I especially liked the name and concept.
I realized now that might have introduced a couple of new bugs while panic balancing the game at the end. (Game was too hard)
Bugs / mistakes i've found now:
- Sometimes after a fight round player will not enter place dynamite or cave in stage, it seems restarting the game is your only option if this hapens :/
- Players get dynamites for "Bird without dynamite" icon, these icons were added during my frantic effort to make the game easier, they were only ment, 3 dynamites should be maximum.
- Players can place dynamites on the first fight round, this due to the changes I described above.
- When reaching the boss, all other uncovered spawners are also activated, this is not supposed to happen, if you want to fight the boss by itself you can restart the game and press "k" to cheat your skip to the boss.
- I forgot to raise the bosses HP, its very low as it was what I was using for faster testing. So maybe the above bug is a blessing :D (if you want a challenge)
I wish I would have spend more time earlier to avoid this rush, there is a lot of polish and juice I would like to add. but since I can't estimate time, I managed to include very little of that. But I will most like do that later as I am pretty pleased with this concept :)
one of the most interesting game ideas i have seen in this Jam, very cool idea and classic bullet hell boss action
Thanks!
Read the game page description for how to play!
If you did not manage to pentagon connect all pentagram shards, then boy do i have a cheat for you! Just press "K" to skip to the bossfight!