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A jam submission

Pumpkin ProblemView game page

Submitted by Esper — 10 days, 17 hours before the deadline
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Pumpkin Problem's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Treat#263.2863.286
Trick#313.0003.000
💀#332.8572.857
Overall#343.0483.048

Ranked from 7 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

I wish I could fire more than one bullet at once but the music goes really hard

Submitted

Love me some pixel pumpkin jump-and-shoot-man! Was actually pretty fun to run through and there were some good challenges that didn't seem unfair once you got the hang of the game.

Just some quality of life things to note for the sake of tweaking if you wanted to ...

  • I didn't actually realize that you could shoot the first time I played through so the game seemed way harder than it really was. Since it's for a jam you might consider having the controls front-and-center either on the title screen or the first screen of the first level instead of slightly tucked behind their own menu option.
  • It's really easy to get stuck on top of an enemy since most of the AI just track the player until they match positions with you. It would be nicely forgiving if an AI that touched/damaged a player bounce back off of them or something so that players could have that extra bit to recover from an AI getting on top of them.
  • The floating candlestick enemies were cool, but the effect used for their teleport didn't really read as a teleport for me until the 3rd or 4th time I saw it. They're also one of the only enemies that have more than one health so you might take that back down to one health since they're also the first/only enemy that has a teleport trick to them (introducing 2 new significant things at the same time).
  • There's significant delay after the player shoots before they can shoot again and it'd be good to have some kind of visible/audible feedback for when your next shot is ready or how much delay is left. Especially for some of the moments where you've designed levels to trap players between chasing monsters and approaching monsters where there's more tension it would really improve the player feel of the game to have a bit more feedback re-assuring players that their shots are ready or almost ready to be fired.
Developer(+1)

Thanks for the very detailed feedback. I agree with everything you said about the controls being tucked away and the candle enemy being to advanced for how early it appears. Making the controls front and centre would also fix the not knowing you could shoot problem. I’m pretty bad at making any form of AI more advanced than just constantly chasing the player but I’m hoping to experiment more with that in future jams. Thanks for playing!

Submitted

A fun platformer overall. Music was good too. It's unclear when you're able to shoot again after shooting (you get a feel for the timing but a visual/audio cue would be helpful). Also, the gray blocks blend into the gray background of the later level.