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EVENT HORIZON's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #4 | 4.059 | 4.059 |
| Visual | #15 | 4.176 | 4.176 |
| Overall | #44 | 3.647 | 3.647 |
| Fun | #64 | 3.353 | 3.353 |
| Theme | #145 | 2.353 | 2.353 |
Ranked from 17 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Did you use any third-party assets or skeleton code?
Skeleton from last year's submission
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Comments
Is stage 2 supposed to be just a few waves of enemies and then an infinitely repeating empty stage?
Stage 1 is pretty solid, regardless, and is good enough for a jam game alone. I want to say this is one of the better entries I've played so far, but there are a few flaws that make it less enjoyable than it ought to be. My main complaint is that the ship is a bit slow. I can't zip up and down and get into a nice rhythm to destroy the enemies as they spawn. It also makes the game more memorization prone, since you're more reliant on already being in the right position as the enemies spawn.
This is exacerbated by the ship slowing down a bit as you charge. Slowing down as you charge in itself makes sense, but the narrow width of the charged shot combined with the already slow default speed makes it hard to move enough to hit the enemies. Combined with the punishment for holding the charge too long, I don't feel like I have enough time to reposition myself, and it also doesn't end up being as fun as it should.
Then there are nitpicks like the enemies that teleport into the back half of the screen on stage 2. Since the game is a bit on the punishing side, it feels cheap. Trail-and-error like that is not great in the context of a jam, where people potentially have 200+ games to play and rate, but it might have been fine in a different context.
Also, I think you can milk the bosses infinitely by absorbing bullets? You probably want to add some timers, or not give score for just absorbing bullets. One of those would solve the issue.
The contols are also a bit weird: arrow keys + space + shift. It'd be more comfortable if you had shot be at 'z' which I think is more standard?
Also, during one of my playthroughs, the stage 1 boss just disappeared and the game never advanced to stage 2.
You seem to have encountered a progression bug in stage 2 there, oops.
As for controls, note that the alternative of x for absorb and c for shoot is also outlined on the tutorial stage. I didn't pick Z because I have a German keyboard, where it is in the place of Y on the English keyboard.
It should be possible to have key bindings use "physical keys" (not sure if this terminology is universal, this is what Godot calls it). 'Physical z' would correspond to the 'y' key on a German keyboard layout, and the 'z' key on an English keyboard layout, since they are the same physical key.
I'll take a look next time. I just personally have grown to despise use of Z in button layouts so I don't default to it. I wanted to have configurable inputs but ran out of time.
Very well polished! The sounds fit well, and the music was great. Some enemy designs reminded me of Momodora 1-3.
Gameplay-wise, sadly I'm not used to horizontal shooters, and also not feeling the bigger hitboxes and slower player movement so well. Thankfully the tutorial stage let you experiment with the mechanics and take some hits, so I had a fair idea of how large the hitbox is, but some of the issues I've had were:
- Because the player moves so slowly, sometimes it felt like there was too little time to react to attacks. The wave that spawns and shoots behind you at the start of stage 2 was what killed me, and the midboss' return towards the end of stage 1 kept draining my lives because the blackhole cooldown was so large and because its attacks didn't have large-enough gaps to fly through.
- Speaking of the blackhole ability, it really felt quite cumbersome to use. It slows you down, it has a cooldown, damages you if you hold it for too long, and the resulting laser attack is very narrow and lasts a short while, even at full power. Too many penalties. And while the full-powered laser does deal good damage if it connects, the problem is that the enemies you can use it on tend to move vertically a lot faster than the player's speed during blackhole, so usually the spots where you absorb bullets and the spots where you can attack the enemy efficiently are too far apart. For instance, if the second midboss' movement was timed so that it stays at the same spots where the player can absorb its attacks, it'd be so much more satisfying to use the laser against it imo.
- Lastly, the very small amount of lives (not sure if replenishible or not) combined with 0 continues felt extremely punishing. When I died at the start of Stage 2 I thought I'd be able to continue from there at least, but it sent me all the way back to the tutorial... Before I could progress back to stage 2 I got hit by some collisions, the attacks of the returning midboss #2, and finally finished off by the boss. Probably won't have the patience to finish the game at the moment, but may return to it later.
Overall - in my opinion, gameplay needs work, at the very least give the player more chances, or reduce penalties posed by current mechanics. It feels way too punishing to make mistakes right now and very little opportunity to learn from them. At the same time, you've got a very solid visual and audio foundation, which is quite impressive to achieve within only 10 days. Congratulations on finishing the jam! ^^
Yo! Thanks for the feedback. There was supposed to be a health up every 5000 points but I broke it like 2 minutes before the deadline and can't push a patch until next week :(
I'm consistently reaching the second stage now, although the crawler from the second part of the first one still takes me some life. The difficulty might be ramping up from there, which is perfectly fine, or maybe I'm not using my shield enough here, either way it's possible that I don't complete the game before the end of the jam so I'll just comment now.
A detail, (playing the downloadable version) sometimes the level 1 does not load properly. I don't know exactly but it seems linked to passing through the pre-screen too fast, like pressing just Enter really fast, not even pressing C or X before, I think it's consistently reproducible although I've not gone deep inside either. One time I could swear the last boss of the first part of the first stage did not appear either, although this happened only once if it really did.
The game is excellent, super fun to play, except for the weak theme integration I only have good things to say about it. It sounds great and looks awesome, with tons of details, reaching the second part of the first stage then the second stage ... wow all these environment as well as what populates it looks so different and so great ! This crawler ! Gameplay feels perfect, I don't think the shield thing adds that much but I kind of like it anyway. Up to where I played the enemy formations and patterns were already good, crawler is great again, and it seems the more you advance the better it gets so what I've not seen is probably even better. The game is extremely polished, that's stunning.
Congratulations !
Really polished and cohesive experience. Sound, visuals, and those little touches (like the screen change effect on menu buttons) is all exceptionally done.
I found the actual game play a touch on the too challenging side of things. The color palette looks amazing, but can make picking things out from the background tough to do ( I ended up having a similar issue with my entry).
Overall though, this game is excellent, really great work!
Up front, the aesthetic and soundtrack are crazy good, and the black hole mechanic shows a lot of promise. Unfortunately, I had a handful of issues with both that mechanic and enemy design.
The black hole is fun to use when you’re already in position to land a shot, but otherwise the combined very slow move speed while charging it and the fact that it can damage you if charged too long make it a chore to use. In practice, I used it less for the actual laser attack and more as a small bomb by spamming short charges, minus the times where I was forced to use it to deal damage at all.
I found the enemies and bosses quite tanky, especially the small square enemies that I thought would be popcorn enemies at first. The bullets for a lot of enemies also had visibility issues, either because they were the same color as the player’s shot, or because they were to dark against the background.
Wow! I'm shocked by the amount of polish in this game, really impressive for 10 days!
This is super polished with great art and music. nice work.
My biggest feedback is i mostly just stuck to the normal shot because the risk of overcharging or being right in the line of a bullet to avoid overcharging meant it was overly risky to use and the regular blaster seemed sufficient.
The theme use is a bit of a stretch! BUT Holy damn that's a good game!!! Music is fire, the art is fire, the menu is fire, the gameplay is fire. Everything is on fire!!! AAAAh... A shame you had an issue with the healing system but I'm betting 3 bucks you're gonna be in the top 1% nonetheless.
The sound, the sprites and the overall design fits together nicely.
Reminded me a lot of the old games I used to play back in the day.
I mostly just used the regular shot, because the speed penalty on the absorbtion was too high for me to aim.
Overall a fun little side-scroller!
Really love this game. The visual, the feedback , the gameplay, everything about it! A small nitpick would be that there no checkpoint. It a bit of a chore to play the level overall again to reach the end. But overall a very good game this is!
Thanks for the feedback!
This lack of checkpoints would usually not be an issue if the current version didn't have a bug where the score-based health increments didn't... happen... at all.
I'll patch them in and make "Hard Mode" the default where they don't happen, so that the unintentional and caused-literally-last-minute "Jam Experience" stays playable, I think.
E: Oops nvm the organizers are my enemy 'cause patching is a no-go apparently.
Fun game! The visuals and audio seem very polished!
Really fun !
It feels quite polished as well, sprites are really well animated (especially like the discrete squash and stretch of the ship when you move) and also has a really good gamefeel with the imact on both player and enemy hits.
Soundtrack from what i heard (cause i admit i couldn’t get passed the reinforced version of the 1st boss) is an absolute banger ! That stage 1 tune is ultra catchy :D
Small nitpicks, the speed reduction on the absorbtion mechanic make it quite hard to use, and i’d say that the purple bubble like bullets are a bit too dark against the background making them quite hard to see at times.
Just in case, probably a small bug i encountered, sometimes if i didn’t skip the intro text on stage 1 the game would not play the stage music.
Other than that its a cool game ^^