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A jam submission

Random Encounters of the Third KindView game page

Not a space invasion...
Submitted by PtitPoly — 2 hours, 7 minutes before the deadline
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Random Encounters of the Third Kind's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Enjoyment#31432.4243.429
Overall#44072.0882.952
Presentation#45612.0202.857
Creativity#51231.8182.571

Ranked from 7 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 kill enemies that roll dices for us to give us power ups/downs.

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 edit) (+1)

Ok, this could go on forever, I'm intentionally dying here...


You have that classic mac issue where the bin inside the app doesn't have executable rights...


It starts off pretty grindy as the big dice are major bullet sponges and your starting arsenal is such crap. But after like few upgrades everything becomes trivial and you can go as long as you'd like.

What's up with the dice rolls. I think over half of the time the landed on five (which were the worst options too) and I don't think I ever saw a six. Threes were also very rare.

The upgrades themselves were also quite bland and grouped such that there was pretty much always a correct choice to be made. Extra projectiles is just flat out better than damage. The default knockback was already too much that half of the time the big dice died outside the screen so the bigger bullets was the only choice there too. And no idea even what jump does and not sure if any speed upgrades would be needed, not too many at least or it'll just be a hurdle to yourself.

So more interesting upgrades would really be needed. You know, homing shots, spread shot, backwards shooting etc. The possibilities are limitless.

The control scheme was quite interesting. A neat double edged sword to have the movement and shooting be bound to the same thing really. Well up until at least I learned that you can move backwards too. But that was actually more dangerous so I pretty much just kept running and shooting separately.

So the game really would need some difficulty curve. Does it stay the exact same all the time now even though player keeps getting stronger and stronger? If it does get stronger, at least it can't keep up. And once that was fixed so that the game would actually come to an end, the scoring should be the next target of improvement. It was blandly linear. Adding some multipliers are the classic ways to spice things up and reward from some unusual things etc.

The visuals were pretty good. Kinda lacking variety in enemies at least. Just a small color variation and maybe size too would have done wonders. And of course more feedback! Flashing on hit, screen shake and so on. It was very unclear to me when I was getting hit and how many times in a short succession. The wonky seeming hitboxes didn't really help either.

The music was ok but didn't really seem to fit. It'd had the ambience of more like flying alone in desolate space than hectic space dog fights. And the same goes for sound effects, they really lacked the necessary punch and variety.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Edit: Oh yeah so there also should be some sort of warning effect where an enemy is about to spawn at least. Right now they can really surprise attack you by spawning very very close while you're more looking to the other direction.

Developer

Wow, thank you very much for that very in-depth analysis. Got (obviously) some amazing feedback here and a lot of these issues (sadly) we did ended up finding out too late in the making of this game. The balancing is really something we could have put a bit more time into. Always good to know for future events (especially in a gameplay like ours!) :D
I think we are going to release a post-jam update of this game and hopefully address most (if not all) of the issues that arose in your comment.

We really appreciate that you took the time to write such an amazingly detailed comment and are happy you got a little enjoyment out of our wonky gameplay here :)

Submitted(+1)

A surprisingly fun game! I unironically spent like 20 minutes grinding for those 3's to see just how big I could get the projectiles. I was a bit bothered by how the hitboxes didn't seem to scale with the projectile size, as once my projectiles got REALLY big enemies could basically hide from my sight INSIDE of the projectile's sprite. Similarly, the dice UFO things would often die offscreen, making it impossible to roll the dice. The jump also didn't really seem to work very well either.  Other than that I really like the VFX and presentation!

Developer(+1)

Thank you for the feedback and for playing our game! :D
There is definitely a lot of stuff that were rushed around the last few hours of the JAM and the jump + projectiles sizes were one of the last features we implemented. The balancing was also very last minute, especially with the increase of difficulty progression.
There is definitely improvements to be made here and your feedback is amazing for it!
Thank you again.

Submitted(+1)

Oh my, I probably spent too long in here, satisfying progression. Could see this becoming a fun endless time waster! :D

A small change I would add is keeping the enemies with power ups inside the screen once they enter, sometimes the knock back pushes them out of bounds and you cannot take the upgrade.

Developer

Haha~! Hearing that you spent too long on there is the best compliment you could give us.

There is definitely a lot to improve and might very well do a quick/short post-jam update with fixes and maybe a few extras that we couldn't put in here.

Submitted(+1)

I liked that I can level up my character, but I think that it could be made better by making the dice enemies have less health and increasing the firing rate. But it was a fun game!

Developer

Awesome! Thank you for the feedback!! Glad you had some fun with it. There was definitely some balancing issues that we would have loved to take care of but that will maybe be for another time :D