Post by Impy in Riding Around in an Office Chair Firing Twin-Stick Style at Wayward Sex Toys jam comments

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Absolutely beautiful pixel art. I think this is about as good as it can get with 4 colors at 160 by 144 resolution! Everything's got animation frames and looks great! It takes real talent to make things sexy at this size! The only thing that bothers me in terms of visuals are the checkered floors and dithered backgrounds, the fast pace of the game makes them flicker too much.

Gameplay is solid and fun. The boss was very disproportionately difficult to the rest of the game, I wasn't even sure if it had a lifebar or if there was some gimmick to taking it out, made my hands hurt. The rest of the game is great and lets you go at your own pace. I don't think you should spoil the different items and enemies in the instructions, it's more fun for players to discover them.

Audio design is really good, I assume you wrote the music and made the sound effects yourself?

Fantastic work, I enjoyed this!

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Grave Reaper Cushions2 years ago(+1)

Thank you very much! 😊

I see where you're coming from regarding the flickering backgrounds. The tiles for the indoors sections are simply repurposed, recoloured textures from the earlier Wolfenstein-esque FPS game I had made; I knocked that game out in a hurry (in the last four-ish hours before a deadline...! 😵) so I didn't have any time for any real visual design. I used them again in this game for... consistency I guess? 🤷‍♂️

The outdoors sections - with all the dithering - were a late stage idea and is a meta gag in which the protagonist finds herself back in the setting of the first game, a platformer that admittedly moves a fair bit slower than this shooter 😅 That one was also a jam entry, and I wanted to get the environments out of the way quickly so I wouldn't need to think about them for long! I'd drawn up a basic tileset and dang it, I was going to use it... 🥴

A remaster is definitely on the cards... 🤔

The boss... 😌 I'll let you behind the curtain: each one of the player's shots counts for one point of damage, and the boss has 200(!)HP... I may have overdone it a bit... 😖 That would probably have felt more reasonable in a bigger game with a more gradual escalation of enemy resilience 🤔

The sound effects are just me tinkering with GB Studio's in-built sound effects setup; it's a little limited, but you get okay results. There are methods to make more complicated stuff but I haven't gotten around to that yet. The music: all me 😎 Basically reinterpreting the one track from the first game in different ways, which in turn had been inspired by the bassline to 🤨Otis Redding's Hard to Handle 🤨 (no, really...!)

(Apart from the boss theme: there's a hidden boss arena in Contra: Hard Corps where the soundtrack suddenly goes all "Uns! Uns!", and I was thinking about that a lot... 😆)

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Impy2 years ago(+1)

Even showing a life bar for the boss on the screen somewhere would make the players feel some hope as they get more damage done with each attempt. Unfortunately there aren't 200 pixels of width in a Game Boy screen, so you'll need to use multiple bars and give players some despair instead.

Making music for your project is a lot of work, so it's really awesome to learn that all the audio is completely original!

I'll be sure to check out some of your other games if I find some free time after rating all of the jam's entries, I really do love your art.

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Grave Reaper Cushions2 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Thanks again 😊 And thank you for the follow, too 👍

Loving the look of your art, too; the variety in those character designs is *chef's kiss*!

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