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A jam submission

Till Dawn: Defenders of the UniverseView game page

2D Fast paced action shooter with roguelike elements, survive waves of creatures until the sunrise.
Submitted by Neno Games (@NenoGames4) — 2 days, 12 hours before the deadline
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Till Dawn: Defenders of the Universe's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Art#481.8973.000
Overall Fun#541.2652.000
UI#541.2652.000
Sound/Music#601.2652.000

Ranked from 1 rating. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

I'm not skilled or experienced at arcade shooter games. I wasn't able to survive more than two nights into this game, but I hope my feedback will be helpful nonetheless.

While most of the visuals have a rough, early-development look, I see and appreciate the attention put into the title art and the player character. His cyborg design is cool!

When I started my first night, I started to try out the controls but for the first half of the night I didn't know what I was looking at. I may have spawned behind a wall. By the second night I was better oriented.

The UI is bare-bones; this is both good and bad. Only the necessary information is shown, with no extra clutter. However, despite the health bar being in a predictable place on the screen, death often still took me by surprise. Maybe a larger, more conspicuous health bar would be helpful. Other indicators of low health (a warning sound or changes to the screen periphery) might also be a good idea.

This game is labeled as "roguelike"; I'm guessing this is because barriers and zombies are randomly distributed. The enemies' random distribution is an important element; not knowing where they'll come from adds to the challenge and scariness. However, the terrain's variations fall short of being significant or interesting. From a mechanics standpoint, the scattered walls consistently provide a small measure of cover but nothing like a hall or room or anything else with navigational significance.

The game's download page gives a simple yet promising intended story, and the protagonist's cyborg appearance begins to tell it. The horror of being surrounded by zombies every night begins to tell it. But I see no signs of what the special operation is, or what the war against SCs is, or what kind of world the protagonist is surviving in. Even without adding any words or gameplay complexity, the there's a lot that the surrounding environment could do to establish the setting, but the environment in its current state isn't doing that.

Since I failed to advance far, I'm also wondering, does the game have enemies other than the first type of zombies encountered? I'm curious what to expect from this game as it develops.
Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Hi McKathlin

Sorry for the late reply I appreciate the feedback it was very insightful.

Anyways, for now most of the art will still have an early development look because I am trying figure out the world mechanics first.

Yeah about the bug(in wall spawning🤣) I'm working on a fix to spawn the player on a clear area. And thanks for the advice on the UI it does look better bigger I'm also going to add particle effects for the UI elements. Information about the current ammo of the weapon in use will also get a Ul elements soon.

So, what I have planned is for the game it's going to be a procedurally generated environment at each run. I still busy figure how to implement the algorithm cellular automata to produce organic looking environments.

I also plan on adding plants to the which have special abilities the mostly affect the player.

I still have to update the download page so it reflects what the game is in its current state and what's it should be at the end the development.

But thanks again for the feedback and about new enemies, yes there will be more enemies, but I just got to figure out on how to create a charge and attack state I have a vague idea on how to do it, but it was clearer it would be better. Then I'll start creating a variety of enemies.

Submitted

Your plans sound interesting!