itch.io

BEST GAME OF THE JAM YES

you can avoid using chainsaw boss's door by jumping over the wall north or south of the gate.

choice music

2/2

• 1st dungeon music is goodwarp button is broken?
• different sprite for a block that disappears when all enemies are dead would be nice
• your sprite work is great, but something seems off about your color choices. it's the difference between functional graphics and something that i love looking at.
• the stone sprites in the first area are low contrast.first dungeon looks sickly, with that green and blue.
• i would recommend doing a color pass with someone else.
• flash black on enemy looks bad. you did because your bg is white for so long. idk what you should do
• i died??? in the room in the second dungeon where the knight comes to life. the screen froze, no real death screen. i went to main menu and reloaded. forgot to save so that's all for now.
• the darkened unlockables on the main menu is a nice touch.
• I really want to like this, but it's missing something. Nothing hooked me to continue after dying.

• try a smaller font, so you can fit more dialogue in the box. i have very little patience for scrolling text.
• i hope the "you cant open it from this side" box has a function in a puzzle later.
• ok, cool. it is.
• block pushing is a bit counterintuitive. i thought i had to press x to move at first. it seems you want to forbid offgrid movement, fine. what about letting the player move the box smoothly, and either 1. lock it in the allowed paths or 2. snap it back in place if you abort halfway through?
• or add a wobbling animation when i start pushing, just so i know something is happening
• maybe consider allowing offgrid movement? i can see either way being desirable.
• arrow keys are broken in the map screen. i can move to "warp" but not back
• dont tell me the whole key message each time. teach it once, implicitly or explicitly, then keep it short.
• why can i only push a block once?

• Interesting idea.
• Good melody, but something in the instrumentation is killing my ears. It's a high pitched whine, I don't know enough about music to say what.
• You can take an enemy's form with you from level to level. This might affect level design later?
• It's possible to clear the "reflect objects" tutorial by only jumping. This is poor level design.
• The pixel artstyle is a little inconsistent, but iirc some of these sprites are from earlier iterations?
• If you can, you should expose a level editor so you can crowdsource levels.

• Authentic wii feel.
• The hand drawn logo and tutorial feel like they're from a completely different game.
• The MC's color scheme is way too close to the BG. I actually lost the MC on the screen a few times.
• Color scheme in general is very washed out. Try playing around in Photoshop with screenshots, make it brighter and maybe more contrast?
• The gameplay doesn't really grab my attention, so I'll leave that to others to critique

• Great grafix!
• I am ... dumb. I was stuck at the first destructible wall. The fact that I couldn't carry things and the weird jump when I drop something was disorienting.
• The controls do take a little getting used to, but there is a lot of potential once you pick them up.
• You should add a guided or implicit, tutorial, where each challenge has to be solved by using the mechanic in a precise way, slowly teaching all of the mechanics/combos of moves.
• Destructible terrain should be different visually.
• The colliders of the terrain isn't clear from the grafix.
• BG could be darker, to contrast with interactable elements. Actually, overall you have very low contrast.
• Inertia makes the character feel slippery.
• Both of these things together makes lining up precise jumps difficult and a little frustrating.

• This track is a jam!
• Good art.
• I prefer the MC artstyle to the bats. No lines looks cleaner.
• I don't really care for the gameplay, so I'll leave it at that.

• I played for a good 15 minutes or so.
• Graphics range from passable to good. The skeleton sprite is legit good, everything else is alright.
• Reminds me of early 2000s pixel art. You have a good grasp on color schemes.
• Having to destroy a card every time I shuffle feels bad. I understand the need for card destruction in a deckbuilder, but there are some other ways to include it:
  1. a cost to use some cards
  2. an effect of taking damage
  3. as part of the card buying process.
• As an effect of the shuffle, it feels arbitrary. As a cost, it's a fair trade. As an effect of damage, it's another negative effect for an action you want to avoid.
• Remember too, that in deckbuilders like Dominion or Ascension, a huge deck full of bad cards is worse than a smaller more streamlined deck.
• Overall, the graphics and sound feel crisp. You didn't overload this with screenshake and juice, which I appreciate.

Cute idea, okay execution. This review is going to be all criticism, because this is an idea where a lot of the value comes from thinking about the idea, saying "wouldn't this be cool", and once you make the idea, it's just work to get it finished. I guess it's a meme game? Again, really good idea but your execution has a few flaws

• Dragon drop for the cards would have been nice.
• Cropping the images instead of stretching could have looked better.
• When using the default waifu, you could color the waifu based on the suit.
• The gelbooru results were a little weird. I tried "rei", and no results. But searching "ayanami rei" (which I had to go to gelbooru to find) found a billion, as expected. You might not be able to do anything about that on your end.

• Best shmup of the jam.
• Excellent sprites.
• It still feels like a GameMaker game, because you don't have individual ships wobbling or lerping. It reminds me a bit of the demo project shmup from a really old version of GM, with WWII planes.
• I'm looking forward to seeing you apply your sprites to a more interesting game design.

• As always, love your artstyle. The one who puts you back together is a qt.
• The wall tile sprite is meh.
• Recoil is great.
• Health and money is invisible against the background. You can make it red.
• A platformer without jumping is mathematically equivalent to a topdown shooter.
• Between the bullet size and speed, the player hitbox, and the screen size, getting shot is easy and punishing. I played the game as a puzzle, staying in cover as much as possible. Both viplike and SSJJRT have this conflict between fast game elements and slow game elements.
• If you want to emphasize the cover shooter gameplay, make the screen bigger so you can see who's shooting at you.
• Or you could make the game faster, by letting the player take more risk. More health, smaller hitboxes.
• Kekked at your title screen giving me a blurry screen and telling me not to change it.
• Looking forward to more of your games!

• I like this one-pixel edge style.
• Heart breaking effect is good.
• The refresh rate hurts my eyes. It might be white/blue/black all on the same pixel in a very short time?
• This looks like an ice floe game, not an asteroid game.
• The up to burst is surprising and fun.
• I can't pickup the pickups.
• Did you think more people would play this if you left off the screenshot?

• This would be awesome as a .io browser meme game.
• Again, v good idea, but your implementation is lacking.
• Lack of singleplayer means you will get approximately 0 plays. I'm testing it, but playing as both players. As an indie or amateur dev, you really need a singleplayer mode.
• One hit kill feels bad.
• Asteroids are really big compared to the planets. That's good for visibility, but hard to dodge out of the way in time.
• Asteroids spawn almost immediately when the level starts. You have maybe 2 seconds to dodge the first one.
• Menu buttons don't have enough contrast.
• Tutorial text and arrows are v cute. The player can wander off in the tutorial. The first asteroid in the tutorial can get lost.
• I'd like to see this developed further.

Alternating left/right is an interesting control scheme.

I got a score of 2192 by doing nothing.

I got a score of 2052 by alternating left, right, forever.

• Holy shit this is the best game I've played all night!
• I can get right in and start playing.
• The two button control is great! This is perfect.

I'll come back with a full review once I beat it

• Online! v good
• I love the pixel art style of the clouds. A kind of sloppy MSPA-esque style. I appreciate the effort put into the foreground assets as well. I'd like to see a game done all in the clouds style.
• The black outline on the sand sticks out against all the other pixel art styles. I know borderless pixel art is a meme right now though.
• Charlotte feels a bit too slow for her sprite animation speed.
• Overall the movement feels stiff somehow. I don't think it calls for adding inertia when walking or anything. It could just be coming from that slow walk speed.

• Nice trick of giving the player cosmetic choices at the beginning. I went back and checked to see if the run was different with different characters.
• Is there a combat mechanic too, or is it just puzzles and riddles?
• The demo felt a bit short. You only just finished introducing the mechanics. A full puzzle with all of the controls would be nice.
• Standard feedback I give on all games with low contrast is: you could increase the contrast, but this is an aesthetic choice. You have a good aesthetic going now, but it wouldn't hurt to experiment with the exact shades.
• Hands on both wasd and ijkl feels nice. I wish the demo was longer so I could use the controls naturally.

• Cute voices. Who's the VA?
• A dialogue for every fishing is a bit annoying.
• You should be able to move while casting and fishing, for fidgety players. Could be a mechanic that some fish like the line to move in certain ways.
• Swapping items to the active slot is VERRRY tedious. Minecraft/Terraria did this right.
• The demo should get right into the gameplay mechanics. While your eventual players will sit through a slow introduction, the demo should have all of the mechanics unlocked. The full game could spend some time introducing mechanics though.
• Seconding the zeroquest's issues with the shop. Another solution I've seen is an 'undo', that is buying back the item you just sold for the same price.
• Overall very comfy and no outstanding performance problems like I've seen in other demos.

• Reset freezes the game for a bit.
• The ships take a huge amount of screen space. That's fine if this is confined to an arena. But if a game can take place over a huge map, you should see more of your surroundings somehow. Even in an arena, if your ship is a quarter of the height of the screen but your beams can go on forever, there is a problem of not being able to react.
• Swarming missiles are fun.
• I wasted some time searching for enemies and trying to explore. A more explicit boundary for the demo would be useful.
• Graphically the background is close to the main ship's color scheme.

I'll be playing this some more after Demo Day

Overall thoughts

Great work on the graphics. Once you get some more foreground assets made, this will look great. A reef level will look beautiful. The controls are floaty but will be well suited to mobile if you want to go there.

Immediate concerns/bugs. I found workarounds for most of these but I would have dropped your game here if I wasn't reviewing it.

• On the pilar that juts out of the water on the way to the cave (near the surface with a teleport), I can get stuck out of the water on the pillar.
• Is that cave a dead end? I couldn't find a way out.
• Health as a white circles is way too subtle. That is probably placeholder though.
• Is there a way to recover health? Restarting when it's all gone sucks.
• When I CTRL+ESC from fullscreen then go back, I can't input into the game anymore. Windows 8.1.

anything you want bb

I played this, it was fun