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Ember Scale's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Enjoyment | #2841 | 2.909 | 2.909 |
| Creativity | #3000 | 3.136 | 3.136 |
| Overall | #3006 | 3.030 | 3.030 |
| Style | #3061 | 3.045 | 3.045 |
Ranked from 22 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?
We wanted to implement the theme, right in to the gameplay so, we made the scenario itself the HP of the main character. Every time an enemy reaches out to touches the border of the canvas, it grows smaller each time. But you can heal it and make it bigger again, alongside another stats.
Development Time
48 hours
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
See description for full credits
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Comments
Very fun game! A bit too easy, but I like the concept of the play zone changing. Maybe damage should actually increase the size of it instead of shrinking it, making it harder to defend :)
"hot" game! ;)
I wish I could attack a liiiiiittle bit faster in the very beginning, but maybe I just need to dump all my stat materials into attack speed lol
Neat little game! I enjoyed it. Nicely made!
Thank you very much!!!!
Nice idea! it was an enjoyable experience! the winning strategy for me was to invest in greed early, that payed off big time after only a few rounds haha. Congratulation on making this :D
Thank you very much!!!! I was planning on nerfing it a bit, but decided to up the enemy hp and damage at last minute, in retrospective maybe not the best idea, but if we continue development I have some good ideas for the greed system
Loved the concept! It makes sense that the larger the canvas, the harder it becomes to defend. Be careful with balancing; never reduce cooldowns by a fixed amount (e.g., -0.1 sec) because it can exponentially increase the power. Great game!
Thank you very much!!! I was actually wondering how to balance some of the upgrades and this would have been great to know. Definetly keeping it in mind for the next time though!!
Really liked the idea of the “health bar” being something that affects gameplay! There was a bit of a balance mechanic there, since when your “health” is lower, you have more time to react before enemies can hit the canvas again.
The store confused me at first because the shooting sound effect happened every time I clicked, so I thought I was buying things when I clicked on the icon, but eventually realized I needed to click on the price (or the +) to actually purchase. This also meant that I would auto-fire as I clicked “done” in the shop, so couldn’t always react to the first enemy if my shot was on cooldown.
I wish there was more incentive to move around, since speed was an upgradeable trait. I found that staying in the middle was optimal because it meant I could see enemies approaching from any side. Perhaps projectiles from the enemies could incentivize moving (although it would be super hard!)
A couple of bugs I noticed in the shop if you get a chance to revisit post-jam: It lets you buy canvas health upgrades even if you are at 100%, and you can upgrade the shoot cooldown to be negative.
All that said, I played until Wave 15 or so, and practically maxed out everything (except speed, haha), so clearly I was having fun!
Thanks a lot for your comment!!! I totally forgot to block the attacks when you were shopping, I tend to playtest without audio so I didn't realize, but that won't be the case anymore. Also originally one of the enemies was going to shoot the player, but we figured that as the canvas became smaller it would be harder to dodge the bullets, so it was going to be a nightmare to balance!! After that we thought that we could add some power-ups (like the triple shot), that could incentivize the player to move, but we were running out of time and I decided that rather than adding anything new I would like the game as bug-free as possible. Glad you had some fun with it though!!
Nice work ! The 5th wave got me hard :( but was fun to play !
Great game and really well executed! I played through the first few waves without realising you could move haha
I feel that it starts kinda slow, and then gets a bit too hard too quickly. Just holding to fire woud've probably felt a bit more fun.
The arena scale idea is interesting!
Thank you very much!!! It was originally planned to hold to fire, but when I added 10 more waves, numbers seemed to get out of hand and holding to fire was crashing the game, In retrospective, as someone else mentioned in their comment, upgrading attack speed by (not) a fixed amount would have fixed it, but what I came up with was to make it click to shoot. Added the triple shot upgrade in exchange though!!
The little flame is adorable !
Fun idea, though greed makes the game pretty trivial, at round 20 I was getting 250 pixels/kill and the only reason I didn't win is that the game crashed from there being too many squares on screen.
Moving around didn't really feel incentivized in any way though, so I never really interacted with the main gimmick. I felt like since there was only so much screen room and no way to change the camera other than moving, that if I walked to the left I'd take damage from the right just because I can't see over there.
Also the game very quickly becomes just spam clicking, the shots should probably auto fire when holding down the fire button.
This is such a neat concept! i really loved finding out what was going on and how the size of the box affected the gameplay. Super cool game!
You have beautifully combined the build to scale with the arrival of waves of enemies. Maybe it would have been better if the enemies died after being shot and running out of health instead of dying upon direct contact.