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A jam submission

LifespanView game page

Submitted by Pannda (@amPannda) — 4 hours, 18 minutes before the deadline
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Lifespan's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Enjoyment#14693.0863.333
Presentation#33472.5462.750
Overall#35932.4432.639
Creativity#53931.6971.833

Ranked from 12 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 player has the choice to reroll a metaphorical dice and restart the run, making all enemies harder.

Did your team create the vast majority of the art during the 48 hours?

Yes

We created the vast majority of the art during the game jam

Did your team create the vast majority of the music during the 48 hours?

Yes

We created the vast majority of the music during the game jam

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Have a lot of feedback for this one! I actually quite enjoyed this, so don’t take it as me railing on the game, but there were a lot of small low-hanging fruit for improvement. And sounds like you’re working on a post-jam, so hope some of it is helpful!

The game has a really satisfying core loop of killing enemies, collecting their juice, and spending it on neat upgrades to get progressively more powerful. The upgrades were varied, and behaved differently for ranged and melee ships, so there was a lot of variety.

I do think more variety in enemy design could help here though; most of the enemies were relatively weak, but came in large numbers, so the best builds were almost always more bullets, more pierce, and more AoE. A few enemy types that were big tanks could incentivize single-target damage more, or some enemies with shields on one side that can only be attacked from the back to incentivize maneuverability, or enemies that move fast and hit hard but are squishy to add variety.

I do think in general your bullets could travel a lot faster. Slow-moving projectiles rarely make that much of a mechanical difference, but feel a lot worse to play with, especially if your ship moves close to the speed of their projectiles (it looks like you had some randomness to projectile speed, but I could definitely race the lowest rolls there with my ship). Can’t recommend enough watching The Art of Screenshake which is definitely the most impactful 45 minutes of education in my entire time making games. Feel free to also look at how the faster projectile speed in my entry makes the weapons feel.

Here’s a list of other (relatively minor) things that would be really quick to fix but help a lot:

  • Make the shop wait until the end of a dash to appear, or keep dash velocity. When dashing, you’re almost always collecting XP in the middle of a horde of enemies, and it feels bad when you level up and it cancels your dash and strands you in the middle to take a bunch of damage.
  • Prevent getting duplicate upgrades on the upgrade screen
  • Make the damage indicators for enemies drift up a little, or move in a random direction, or appear in a slightly random position. As-is it’s hard to tell whether you land one or multiple hits since the indicators are on top of each other.
  • Add an indicator for dash/projectile radius, like a glow or particle effect. This makes it easier to get used to the spacing of it without having to experiment nearby enemies.
  • Add more obvious visuals for dashing. Especially with the brawler, it was hard to tell when the dash was over and thus hard to gauge the distance of the dash. Adding an effect or change of color would help a lot. The guardian felt a lot better in this regard, since the speed boost was more obvious.
  • Add more obvious visuals for taking damage. Especially for melee ships, it was sometimes hard to tell whether you took damage, or if you mis-spaced and took a little at the end of the dash. You might consider screenshake, flashing, particle effects, etc. You could even make the player take a lot more damage, but explode, killing nearby enemies and giving a bit of breathing room to escape.
  • A nice-to-have would be a comparison of your current stats when taking upgrades. Saying “1 extra dash distance” is a lot less informative if you don’t know what your current stat is. Adding one to two is a big increase! Adding one to nine is less impactful.

I’ll also say that for a game jam game, I would make the extra characters more easy to unlock, or make it more obvious what the requirements are to unlock them. I would have loved to experiment with all of them to give more detailed feedback, but wasn’t sure what I needed to do (more play time? More games? More total enemies killed?). I would also generally only expect players to play your game for between 5 and 20 minutes and balance unlocks accordingly. I only ended up playing with generalist, brawler, and guardian. On a similar note, it would be nice if the runs took less time or scaled up more quickly in difficulty; all my runs ended because it felt like the difficulty stagnated, so I intentionally died to try a run with a new character.

Again, had a great time with the game, and most of these are minor details that might push the game to the next level. Great work on this in 48 hours, and would love to check out the post-jam version if you end up completing one!

Developer(+1)

Amazing. You have given me all of the answers to my questions on how to make the game better and how to make it more enjoyable. Half of the changes listed were actually implemented in the update before you posted, so I now know I'm on the right path. Some of the changes listed also helped me confirm the necessity of the change, and just play testing now is SO MUCH better than before. Thank you! You've made this next update so much easier. OH, I also wanted to ask about the melee classes; most of the ideas about them were updated and changed to them now, but I've been thinking about just taking them out and replacing with a similar type of attacking, what might be your thoughts on this topic if you don't mind replying. Thank you again!

Submitted

Glad to hear my previous comment was helpful!

I’ve been thinking about just taking them out and replacing with a similar type of attacking

I’m not entirely sure what you’re saying. Taking out the melee classes and replace them with classes more similar to the ranged ones?

I personally really enjoyed the melee classes. Or at least enjoyed the fact there were ranged and melee classes and they behaved so differently since it adds a lot to the replay value.

Or are you describing giving a melee-type attack to all classes, including ranged ones?

This could be more interesting, but I still think my gut instinct is that dedicated melee classes are more fun.

Random thought, if you want to spice up the regular gameplay with more abilities on the base spacecraft, you could do something like a “special” attack with a cooldown that differs by class (e.g. throws a bomb, triples fire rate for a few seconds, makes a black hole that bunches the enemies together).

Developer

I'm sorry that I was not being clear about the melees. In thought, I've called the current melee classes "bashing melees", so I was thinking about replacing them with "weaponry melees", which would have a regular defensive attack that could change to an offensive attack; but hearing that you actually liked the current melee classes and we both agree on the gameplay difference between the classes, I think I'll keep the current melees in the game, and add the "weaponry melees" for more content. I'm also giving every class a "secondary attack/ability", as more people suggested it.

Submitted(+1)

I think that having a secondary mechanic (maybe something that requires you to stop, but deals more damage) would be nice. Game starts to become repetitive after a few upgrades.

As for the upgrades, I think that you should focus on adding changes to gameplay instead of just changing stats. For example:

  • Add push back force
  • Add option for bullets to pierce through certain number of enemies
  • Dash ability
  • Weapons (different shooting pattern)

basically, something that will require players to change their strategy and adapt to the game.

Pretty simple and polished game though. Well done!

Developer(+1)

Thank you so much for the good criticism and very interesting ideas. I'm currently working on a post-jam update which I hope adjusts a lot of the negatives people had. The examples you used are actually thoughts I had but didn't have the time for during the jam, with this update I hope to look more into those thoughts; also the "bullets pierce through multiple enemies" is in the game jam version of the game, under a stat called "projectile penetration".

Submitted(+1)

It's oddly satisfying gradually become so powerful that everything just kind of dies when you breath on it. I liked the enemy spawn rate early on it felt pretty well balanced if you were trying to play more greedy.

One issue with giving every enemy chase AI is that you'll notice that they bunch up a lot and then the player will gravitate towards circle strafing that blob of enemies. One way to help mitigate this without having to introduce more enemy types is to give the enemies some push away factor from each other so they're less inclined to bunch up so heavily. You can look up boid flocking for a relatively simple way to introduce some spread.

I'd also maybe tone down the offensive upgrades since bullet count and penetration are basically stacking multipliers to your damage and can easily snowball the player DPS.

Developer

The enemy push away factor is a great idea that I will definitely look into; and I will look into the offensive upgrades for my post-game jam update. Thank you for the input.

Submitted(+1)

I spent quite a while playing the game. And I would spend even more with some music in the background. It is very satisfying to kill a bunch of enemies at the same time. As Tonyl said I think some variety in the enemy behaciour would add a lot to the game.

But the game is still very nice, this might be the game I spent most time playing in the jam. Keep up the good work.

Submitted(+1)

it was VERY fun trying to get massive stats and destroying all the enemies, I spend a really long time on this game lol

Submitted(+1)

Played this for longer than I'd like to admit, the upgrades are quite rewarding :)! I think adding some variety to the enemies' behaviour would be great, perhaps an enemy that shoots or dashes at the player… I find fiddling with the physics of how an enemy moves can add a lot more character to them!
Good job on the game.

PS: If you tick the "Windows" checkbox in the game's uploads, it will make it possible to download the game through the Itch app!

Developer(+1)

Thank you for the kind words. I actually have a shooting enemy in the game files, but felt that it didn't fit the gameplay loop, so I scrapped it; but since you say that I might look back into it. I did have an idea for a dashing enemy too but felt that it might not be necessary, but again, after hearing you say that, I might take a look back at it. Thank you for the download tip as well, updating that as soon as possible.