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A jam submission

Black HellView game page

Brutally difficult action game where every flash counts
Submitted by Incognito_User — 3 days, 31 minutes before the deadline
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Black Hell's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Controls#83.2633.263
Sound Design#83.3683.368
Fun#113.0003.000
Overall#133.0743.074
Era "Feel"#173.0003.000
Graphical Presentation#202.7372.737

Ranked from 19 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

What style of retro game were you going for? (Year/Era/Console/etc)
~late 90s era coin arcade

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Comments

The game is great, but it took me a while to realize that I was losing health from the tiles with spikes on the floor. They look too similar to regular tiles.

Developer

Glad you enjoyed!
I think I might have to add an in game tutorial about hazards or something after the jam. I was kind of lazy and didn't bother to even though I had three days left, and I'm starting to regret it now hehe

Submitted(+1)

All the limitation make for a truly horrifying expirience with so little graphical details all thanks to the mechanics in the game. You achived something really great with very little. Just some of the positioning of the traps are sometimes way too much but I would not change way too much as that give a great sense of dread!

Developer (1 edit)

Thanks for playing!
And yeah, this was my first time writing a procedural generation algorithm, so things probably got a little weird sometimes. :/

Submitted(+1)

I wouldn't normally like a game that relies this much on trial and error, but here, it actually works — the unexpected appearances of turrets, paired with the lighting system, makes them genuinely startling when they appear. Aside from the clever use of arcade-style difficulty for horror, it feels like a pretty standard top-down shooter. I would like it if the spike tiles were made to look more different from the floor, since I thought I was just randomly taking damage until I realized that I was actually stepping on spikes.

Developer

Thanks for the feedback!
I'm still trying to experiment and balance based on player feedback, and it seems like the spikes being too difficult to spot are a recurring theme, so I'll make them more obvious in the next version.

Submitted

I actually kinda liked this game even with the difficulty, and i'm probably gonna still playing until i finish it!

Developer

Glad you enjoyed! Thanks for playing!

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

I do quite like the concept of this game, especially with the limited light vision, and having your gun with limited ammo, temporarily light up the rest of the map. I will say, it took me a good 9 or 10 attempts, where I couldn't figure out why I was randomly taking damage, and I thought the game was glitching, before I realized that some of the ground had spikes on it, I think the spikes are a bit too camouflaged. I do also think the turret bullets move a bit too quickly. Given that they can see and shoot the player without the player seeing them, sometimes the deaths felt a bit cheap. Perhaps if the turrets fired more frequently, but with projectiles that move more slowly, it might feel similarly hard, but more fair. While I couldn't beat the game, I think it was pretty cool, especially the lighting mechanics.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing!
Interesting - when a bunch of my friends and I play tested this, none of us had any issues with the spikes, so I didn't think they would be an issue. That said, someone else also brought this up on the game's page after I posted it, so I might make them more visible anyway.

As for the second bit, I just played it a few more times and I think you're right. In theory, the sounds that the turrets made before they shot were supposed to warn the player and allow them to retreat back into cover or prepare to dodge. But in practice, sometimes the turrets would spawn right around a corner or at the end of a passageway and ambush the player, making them impossible to avoid.

I'll be experimenting with the turret parameters post-jam for sure. Thanks for the feedback!