Skip to main content

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

This is quite the arcade-like beat-em-up experience. I feel like there are a lot of good things going on here, but there are a few points that keep it from being "excellent."

I like the bust art and dialog. It's witty, it's clear who's talking, and the busts fit the overall art style. It even manages to fit in all the relevant information. It's a little info-dumpy with the controls at the beginning and seems a bit redundant once you get into the tutorial. Maybe don't focus on the controls as much as just recite what the abilities are so the player is like "ooh, how do you do that now?" and then the tutorial kicks in.

The tutorial, to it's credit, does a pretty good job of taking the player through the controls and really encouraging the player to understand each lesson.

The main gameplay also follows some good design philosophies, chiefly in how it presents new enemies: each new enemy is presented in isolation so the player can assess how the enemy works and how to best combat it. Once beaten, the player is presented with a mob of enemies (more of the same in the first wave and then a combination of all enemies seen so far in the second), which challenges the player to remember all of the relevant tactics and to really think on their feet.

Sliding is a cool mechanic and fun to use.

Now for the things that didn't quite work for me. Dashing was awkward. I did eventually figure it out, but my instinct was to hold the spacebar down to run rather than just tapping it and moving. It just never felt natural. My biggest issue was ammo: why limit it? Perhaps you were trying to discourage players from just kiting the enemies all day, but the melee swing is so generous that I don't really see the argument. Also, it's practically mandatory for getting past the diamond-shielded enemies (the stage I died on every run and prevented me from finishing the game), so either there needs to be generous ammo drops in that stage or just get rid of the limit altogether. A related issue was shooting in general: for one, I didn't understand why my shots would sometimes be large and sometimes small; for another, the shot spread, while realistic, doesn't really work in a game like this. I lined up what I thought were accurate shots, only to have them go all over the place. Combine this issue with the limited ammo and you have one frustrated player. Another aggravation was the fact that you go back to the beginning when you die. I understand that this is a short game, but it's also a jam game; you don't want to punish your players that badly because you run the risk of the player never finishing the game (which happened to me).

So overall, cool game, just needs a little refinement in some of the mechanics.

I'm definitely thinking of patching in a checkpoint mechanic (and maybe just tallying deaths at the end). At this point even I am getting sick of dying to my game too often haha. To be frank almost all of the difficulty tuning happened at the last 2 or 3 days of the jam by which point I had lost track of how hard or easy my game was.

The controls infodump was there before I actually managed to create a proper tutorial, and I kind of just left it there tbh.

So I probably didn't explain the ammo stuff sufficiently, but basically there's two types of shots, default shot (large shot) which doesn't take ammo but does take your mana/time juice, and weapon pickup ammo (the HMG or heavy machine gun) that takes up actual ammo and also takes time juice but has a way faster firing rate. The default shot you can fire one at a time, but you can hold down fire on the HMG and it just fires a spread. 

You're probably right about the shot spread, it's really meant to be used when you get right up in an enemy's face to burst their shield. I think I mainly added it to feel more like a machine gun, but a +10/-10 degree variance is a big factor when trying to hit enemies on the other side of the room.

Thanks for playing and your feedback! I think I will probably end up patching in a checkpoint system at some point at least, just so people can at least see the end of the game. A good point on making these things completable by jammers.