This might be the most viscerally fun game (not game jam game, game) I've played in a while! The control scheme is like nothing I've played before and it works so well! If you described it to me, I'd probably not believe it but playing this game just feels good. The amount of juice and polish put into this is impressive! I love the art direction and especially the character design. Seriously, this game is instantly addicting. At first I felt the connection to the theme was a bit tenuous (ok some cowpokes are scaled up and some are scaled down, sure) but that is, I think, key to this game working so well. If they were all the same height, aiming from one to the other would not be as engaging as it is now!
I think the one weakness this game has is that engaging with the mechanics on a deep level is not incentivized as well as it could be. The game becomes trivial if you just stand back and spam pot shots at cowpokes from a distance, rather than running and gunning. But the running and gunning is so much fun!!!! Ideally, the optimal strategy should be the most fun strategy too.
I have a couple suggestions, I'm sure some of which you've already considered or actively had to cut for time (I know the feeling haha!)
- Adding terrain/ obstacles would make it harder to snipe cowpoke from a distance, forcing the player to engage. You're character controls kind of like a car so it might be fun to design the levels like you would a karting game, with ramps and turns etc. But even just walls and columns would go a long way to make the movement and shooting coalesce better.
- Missing a shot doesn't feel very punishing since the gun doesn't reload and is fully semi-auto. I love how cowpokes are stunned if you hit their torso so that you can follow up with a head shot, but right now it's so easy to spray and pray that the stun is kind of negligible. Decreasing the rate of fire and adding a reload may help.
- As the game "scales" the difficulty doesn't really scale with it. More cowpokes doesn't add more challenge, it just adds more cowpokes. It's just as easy to defeat a cowpoke if they're surrounded by a dozen or standing alone. So teaching them how to use their guns may help add scaling difficulty. It also might make the stun when you hit their torso more engaging. I'm imagining a scenario where a cowpoke is signaling that it's going to attack, and you have to decide in a moment: do I risk missing the headshot and eating a hit, or do I take the safe but slower path and stun them before they can get off their shot on me?
- The dodge/ crouch action didn't feel particularly necessary or like it added depth to the already excellent movement system.
- Unrelated to the game itself but, I'd recommend adding gifs to your game page! The screenshots are beautiful and expressive but they don't really capture what makes this game so much fun!
This is genuinely the first jam game I played where I immediately wanted to get right back in when I finished (I'm not sure if I lost or won lol) and if you release a post-jam version that really hones in on what makes this game so instantly engaging, I would sink hours into it without a doubt! Anyway, great work! Now, I'm going to go play it again.