Skip to main content

On Sale: GamesAssetsToolsTabletopComics
Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
A jam submission

Heart InvadersView game page

Protect your heart from an evolved pathogen
Submitted by Golden Projects (@goldenmomento) — 12 hours, 55 minutes before the deadline
Add to collection

Play game

Heart Invaders's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Technical#263.2993.389
Theme#283.2443.333
Overall#303.2123.300
Design#323.1363.222
Artistic#363.4073.500
Gameplay#362.9743.056

Ranked from 18 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

Comments

Submitted

Good game. nice atmosphere and story. Went from quite calm to total mayhem rapid though. Would love to se more game from you. 

Submitted

I love the popcorn sounding gun hits! Game felt and sounded great!

Submitted

Very good atmosphere and an interesting story. Some bits reminded me of Disco Elysium which is a very positive thing in imy book. A rockin industrial soundtrack wrap this package up. The stages were a bit too dark on my monitor but no biggie. The combat was hectic and a little too hard for me at times but it was always fun to find upgrades and evolve from pea shooter to a lethal weapon of mass kick assery. Good job!

Submitted

This game had a great story, and the combat was really fun as well. I got stuck and couldn't win the final fight which was a shame because I really wanted to see the ending :(

Submitted

Looks and plays really darn good! Love the atmosphere!

It gets a little bit too tough by the end, but all in all it's a solid game!

Submitted

wow, very great shooter. the mood and light effects are stop on. congrats :-)

Submitted

I really liked the game. On first try I only wish you differentiated the enemy bullets. Most of the time I didnt know what hit me.

Submitted

I'm trying to be restrained and honest in my praise and give ideas for improvement, but for this I'm just going to tell you to keep going. Really, really great fucking work.

There's no point in pointing out the "faults" here, because there's always a million of them in a jam game, and here they don't stem from bad design decisions but a lack of time. What I mean by that is things like visual feedback, pacing, balancing, etc. and those are areas you obviously are going to succeed at judging by what you managed to pull together here, so again I'm not going to comment on that.

What I am going to comment on is the combat, character and enemy design, because wow. So much thought put into them, way above any of the jam games I've tried so far. The way they're combined to counter your instincts as a player without being random works so well, I was giggling to myself out of joy as I was playing.

Example: the room where you enter and there's the spawner mobs along the top wall. If you go in defensively, and retreat when all the other mobs surprises you, you put yourself at a disadvantage. The mechanics encourage you to be aggressive (Souls-like), the back cannon is a genius early addition to help with that, so to get the upper hand and to kill enemies fast enough (spawners put a time pressure on the situation) you need to get the most out of both guns, so that means towards the center of the room. That means dodging bullets from all angles.
Even if you do manage to kite them along the wall, or shoot from a narrow hallway, the way the different enemy types act means they will quickly overpower you. At no point did I feel like I could outsmart them with my "gamer brain", I had to outperform them. I had to take risks, and got rewarded for it.

And this is where the take on the theme works so well. You've incorporated ideas I've seen in many other games here already, but here it just clicks. I'm genuinely interested in seeing how changes to the cell is going to affect the flow of combat, how it's going to change your priorities.

There's a bunch more here to be impressed by, on so many fronts, but I'm out of keyboard juice. Good luck continuing on this title!

Developer (1 edit)

Thank you so much for your words, and if it's not a problem I would still like your feedback on things to improve, since this is only the second game that I've published (That was not a crappy game made with RPG maker lol)

Submitted (2 edits)

Hmmm areas to improve... I can think of things it could be smart to avoid or to strive for, based on what's done right here.

  • Avoid scaling health to increase difficulty on enemies, and keep player health scaling small. Make a 5% increase to health feel huge and have a real impact on your strategies. A unique way of doling out rewards in strength can be through your actions (think Elder Scrolls series) and fits with an evolving organism. Your physiology (traits and appearance) changes on a curve instead of in steps, if that makes sense, based on how you play. Make you grow your own character, literally train it, instead of picking up upgrades or selecting from a menu.
  • Make retries and/or replays the focus. Try finding the rhythm that prevents the player from relaxing their controllers, but doesn't feel rushed, for a death/retry loop so they can stay in the flow. If your play style changes your character over time, it's tempting to see the results from playing differently, and players gets to see more aspects of the game.
  • Don't do procedural generation. It's OK to replay the same areas on multiple playthroughs if the combat is varied enough, and it often can just make your game less interesting as players instinctively notice no matter how good it is.
  • The concept does sound good for a roguelite, so it's tempting to go that way, but my instinct tells me it will work better as a defined progressive story you play through 1-5 times depending on the player. Better to be short and sweet though, than long and tedious for this concept.
  • Don't indulge too much in particle effects or light sources, less is often more and shouldn't be added early cause that constant slowdown in launch time and framerate really adds up to the frustration and lack of momentum when developing. There's other ways of making it feel good early on that doesn't affect performance, like slight camera shake and physical feedback. Write yourself a nice and versatile camera shake function and you can use it for both combat and story telling, even in cutscenes. Your cannons in this game felt really weak compared to their actual effectiveness.
  • If you're lucky you can get someone dedicated to sound. Sound design is going to do a lot for the feeling of being inside a body, like a muted no-reverb kind of soundscape with "squelching" and indistinct bodily sounds, and if you do that right it's going to be the X factor that makes the environments memorable.
Submitted

I liked movement and arenas ) But it often hard to find health (

Submitted

Not generally my kind of game but I did my best to get a few levels in (did my best like I'm bad, the game was well worth the time!). It's a bit dark so it was tough for me to see, but I really enjoyed the atmosphere it brought. +1 art for the squamous-cell-looking tiles :D

Submitted

There is a lot of game here I like it.  I enjoyed controlling the, blue blooby thing and the weapons felt good.  It was a little too dark.  I could not enjoy the speed of the blob without crashing into enemies I didn't know were there.  However, great great great set up story.  The music was good but a little too haunting after a while.  Great game!

Submitted

The opening art and in game art was cool, maybe a hud to keep track of upgrades would have been nice

Submitted

absolutely love this, the art side of things has been shown an insane amount of love and it shows :3