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This is so sick, you totally captured the feeling of scourgebringer with the dash chaining. I love the enemy variety too. I really like how you can stun enemies out of their attacks, so when a big wave spawns in you have a second or two to identify the biggest threats and just stunlock them down. Also it’s so cool that you made this with a custom engine, that’s gotta feel so good. Wish I’d seen this during the jam, really great work!

Thanks! Glad you liked it. Really happy you found the attack patterns fun. I don’t usually spend so much time on a single boss fight, but since this game was just 1 fight, I had a lot of fun making the attack patterns more intricate.

I totally hear you on the grading system. When I watched my friends play it on discord pre-launch, I could hear the anxiety ramping up in their voices when they’d be close to no-damaging an attack, only to get hit at the end. The grades here were kind of an ‘engagement stop-gap’ to give players something to strive for during the practice phase, but if I ever return to this concept, I think I’ll have a more free-form practice mode (a ‘playground’ like you describe). Or maybe I’d do something like the player has to demonstrate a certain level of mastery before proceeding, but they get as many tries as they want.

Music is something that’s been on my ‘list of things to improve’ for a bit. I’ve been doing “seasonal themes” this year, so my fall season theme was “drawing”. I might do “winter of music” or something to give myself a reason to do some music exploration. I’m still happy with the OST, but I do feel like I’ve fallen into a bit of a formula. I’ll check out chiptune.app, I’m definitely in the market for new musical inspirations. I’ve been listening to a ton of jazz fusion recently, so I might try experimenting with that a little.

Thanks a ton for playing and for the comment. I think I always say this but I’m always really happy to get a notification from you.

Loved it. It feels like kind of a meme to compare every retro horror game to Faith, but man this game really reminded me of Faith (especially the battles).

Loved the use of sound vs silence. It felt like the tensest moments were the hallways where all of the sound completely cut out. Walking into the library after the ‘outdoors’ music and having everything but the ticking clock go silent was so good.

The room with the really-messed-up-geometry was sick. Going from silence to THAT was a really cool moment too.

I really liked the entire ‘camera following’ section where the camera swaps from fixed mode to follow mode. Something about that switch was super unsettling. I half-expected a first-person mode at some point haha

Good fights too. That final boss double-projectile attack pattern was gnarly, but ingenious. Felt really good to stand my ground and watch the projectiles go around me before I repositioned to dodge the boss.

I also really liked the little unanswered mysteries you peppered in throughout the notes. Like the “it’s not even human blood”, or the books written in “a language we don’t understand”. I remember reading somewhere that a lot of horror is just getting the reader/player to ask questions whose answers might scare them (“who/what bled here? who/what wrote these books? what is THAT?”).

Renaissance pig!

Thanks! If I get time, I can probably release the GLTF reader code on github, though it’s not very clean / re-usable. If I end up releasing it, I’ll let you know!

This is super neat! I loved the full game, so it’s really cool to see what was originally pitched and how much it changed in the final product.

Super sick. I love how the enemies only attack once they die. It adds a really cool element of planning to the game, where if a wave spawns and I see a bunch of pink dudes lined up, I can do a little bit of prep work getting into the right position to dodge before I actually aim the saw.

I really appreciated how enemy waves tended to alternate sides. It made it so that when new enemies spawned, it was rare for them to all just die instantly (leading to a big burst of bullets I might not have been expecting). It goes back to the aspect of planning I mentioned earlier.

Also having the option to reset the size of the buzzsaw was really interesting. At first I was like “why would I ever give up the big saw?” but the big saw, despite being more powerful, makes planning around enemy spawns way harder. Surprisingly cerebral, very cool tradeoff.

Great work dude, good luck at the jam!

Ah I wish I had more time for music this jam, ended up rushing through it a little so I only got two tracks done. I can see how it’d get repetitive though. Thanks for playing, glad you liked it!

Nice work! It took me a few tries to figure out a route that wouldn’t lock me in, but I eventually made it out of the hole. It felt good to plan my route around the falling gravel in the second screen, that was a cool moment. I also appreciated the music changes between going underground and going back up. Good job!

Thanks a ton for playing, glad you liked it! Technically you can restart a phase by hitting escape / start and selecting ‘restart stage’ and it should reset the boss’s health to max, but it’s not mentioned/explained anywhere unfortunately. Only 9 retries is great, thanks again for playing! I really appreciate the comment.

Very nice. I’m usually not a huge sudoku guy but the restricted size / symbol set makes this the perfect amount of doku for me. Ended up trying a random Doku level puzzle and had a good time solving it in 44 steps. Also did the daily, nice job! Really well-executed. The little shapes in th ebackground and the fx when you win feel really good!

Thanks a ton for playing and for the kind words! Pre-launch the grace period in between attacks was a little too short so I upped it by about 50% right before I released the game, glad it felt good.

Thank you! A hard mode would be fun to make for sure, I might consider it haha

thanks!

Ended with a score of 320. Super cool game, I haven’t played anything like it before! All-around a really great complete package. Loved the music, the art, the zoom-out was super smooth and impressive for this jam, the little laid-back puzzle of pathing airplanes around was really well done, everything was really good! Great job!

Ah gotcha, thanks for clarifying!

Thanks for playing! Glad you liked it. Just to make sure that you didn’t run into a bug: There is a boss fight after the practice phase (after the Practice Phase, there’s a Battle Phase and a Phase 2 as well). Did you see both of those + the “The End” screen at the end? If not, you might have run into a bug or something. Let me know!

Ahh the eye copying my own movements makes so much sense. I can’t believe I missed that, that’s actually super clever, makes a lot more sense. Also that’s hilarious, me complaining about the eye moving erratic and unpredictably when it’s actually just me moving erratically and unpredictably lol I love it

Thanks for playing and for the kind words!

Damn, the eye that pursues you is relentless. A little tough to deal with, I felt like it read my inputs (?), like I’d try to do a quick turn back and it’d just track me with 100% accuracy sometimes. I was only able to beat the first zone, this game is tough! Definitely just a skill issue on my part, but an “Easy” mode without the eye pursuing you would probably still be plenty difficult for people like me haha!

The wall-jumping is a little finicky, it seems like you need to be pressing in the direction of the wall while pressing jump to wall-jump. Consider adding a 0.1-0.2 second timer/window to allow the player to press away from the wall while still allowing a wall-jump (I believe most games with wall-jumping do this). It might make it a little more forgiving.

I almost missed the tutorial, but I think that’s not really your fault: The low resolution of the ‘keyboard’ art in the first room made me almost miss it (I didn’t recognize them as keys), but that’s more of a lowrezjam limitation. Glad you posted a comment with the controls below (consider adding the controls to the game’s page itself just to mitigate this).

I can see this game being fun to speed-run! Once I got the hang of it, I found myself going pretty fast holding space and zooming around. The music and art are really good too. I really liked the little button sections at the end of the first stage, where you had to throw the bomb at the buttons and double-back to the newly-opened door while avoiding the eye. In retrospect, I can see how the eye pursuing you is core to the level’s design, so honestly take my ‘easy mode’ comment earlier with a grain of salt. I’ll try to find time to come back to this and actually beat it, it looks like you’ve made a lot of cool levels in the screenshots.

Nice job!

Honestly, crazy but cool to go purely with platform-specific APIs. It makes sense that the web would be the easiest to target outside of that, with JavaScript and web apis being cross-platform. I had a brief stint where I tried to ship a game with pure JavaScript but got frustrated with non-web bundling options (I didn’t want to use Electron to make a downloadable build, didn’t see a lot of other good options other than basically shipping a web browser with my game).

Thanks a ton for the response! I might check out some of your other games, thanks for the link!

Really great work for your first game. I liked the randomized new weapons in between rounds. It was pretty funny to have an axe one round and then get what looked like a loaf of bread for the next round lol, I had a good time with this.

The melee weapons felt quite strong and good at crowd control. Some of the ranged weapons felt a little weak, like you could oneshot most enemies with an axe but it felt like the bow took quite a while to kill an enemy. It makes sense that the weapons have different stats, but the balance felt a little bit off. Also, consider adding a tiny bit of juice to some actions. Felt like a tiny bit of screen shake would go a long way.

I liked the enemy variety too, like how it seemed like the enemies drew from the same weapon pool as the player so I’d see an enemy with the Blue Tissue Box weapon (?) that I had the previous round, or a gun or loaf of bread (?), that was pretty cool.

Nice work!

Thank you! I’m really glad you liked it. I really enjoyed your entry as well.

Wow, amazing work. Everything in this game is just top-notch. I love the art, the music, the cutscenes, everything is so good. Loved the two stages as well. I really loved the different items (the knife and the gun) and the enemy variety for such a short dev time. Rushing down the gun/knife-weilding guys for their weapons always felt super good. You nailed it! Probably my favorite entry so far.

Just stopping by again because I just found out: You made this with a custom engine? That’s sick!

I feel like I’ve been slowly trending away from big engines over the years and have been wanting to eventually try making my own. How long have you been rolling your own tech? Are all of your other itch games made with the same custom engine? Was porting to the web simple (i.e just call emscripten? or do you have a lot of web-only code)? I’m guessing your custom engine is backed by SDL (correct me if I’m wrong) but are you using any other libraries? (last question): Are you using pure C for game logic, or do you hook in with a scripting language too (i.e Lua)?

Sorry for the question spam, no pressure to answer. This is just a topic I’ve been interested in for a while, and I’m always really impressed when I see people actually shipping games with custom tech.

Thanks for playing! Glad you enjoyed it.

Loved it! Super creative. Each level was really satisfying to finish. The bird mechanic felt good to figure out too (spoilers: It attacks if the rabbit is still, so you can avoid being chased by making sure the rabbit can keep moving, i.e lifting it up on 2 platforms instead of just 1).

Each mechanic that was added felt fun to play around. It always felt good to trap an alligator in a 1-width hole somewhere lol. Great job!

Thanks!

I got briefly obsessed with this game before I had to pull myself out. Incredibly difficult but so perfectly fair, I love it. The hitbox on the bottom of the line is super tight though, felt like the hitbox on the top was a lot more generous. I made it pretty far I think but that one backwards-S shaped level (where you start on the left and then go right over and under things, and then do the same towards the left, and then go into a tiny opening) broke me. Maddeningly difficult but every mistake is the player’s fault, feels like the skill ceiling is crazy high. Great job!

Thank you! Glad you liked it. I might do a post-jam update where you can go straight to the battle phase via some ‘stage select’ menu, I wish I’d added that originally.

Took me a while to fully understand what I was doing (I mistakenly assumed that the default speed was 1x and not ‘paused’), but I think I eventually understood what I was doing. Like Vivanter said, energy cost on draw felt pretty punishing especially if I drew a couple fires without having yet drawn a water card.

Still very cool! The card art and stage art (with the cool background) are really nice. I still feel like I haven’t understood the game completely, but I was able to get the whole island covered in a cool pink goo and a few trees to keep giving me mana and some water that put out the fires periodically. Great job!

Thanks for playing, glad you liked it! I’d love to make a followup to this game with a few more bosses sometime in the future.

Thank you!

Thanks!

Thanks for the credit haha, looks great! totally ok with me

Glad to hear it worked out!

As for standalone vs web code: The main change I make is all my audio is loaded in “static” mode (including music) for the web, whereas in the downloadable version, the music is loaded in “stream” mode. Outside of that, I don’t think I have many other web-only changes.

I’ll definitely try to post some of this stuff to github, that’s a good idea!

thanks for playing! I’ll try to add a ‘phase select’ screen in a post-jam update, a couple people have asked for this so far so it seems like a good idea.

Glad you enjoyed it! I think I’ll add the ability to skip to the boss or some kind of ‘phase select’ in a post-jam update. I agree it’s a little tedious to replay the whole practice phase just to fight the boss again. ABBA and 3 deaths is really good, thanks for playing!

Really great, I had a ton of fun. I love the ‘fake 3D’ art style (the final boss reveal was perfect). I really love the variety in the levels too, I was surprised. I sort of expected every level to be the same as the first but the ring world level caught me off guard: it was a really cool concept.

I had a lot of fun with this, great work!

Awesome, I love it! Really cool concept for a boss rush. I don’t think I’ve ever played a boss rush where you’re not actually trying to hit the boss, but I think the core mechanic of throwing bananas into the light felt super good. It’s like “indirect combat”, it’s really cool; I might steal that someday…

Boss variety was great too. I was surprised by how much mileage you were able to get from just changing up the movement and projectile patterns between bosses, but each fight felt quite different. The music changing between bosses was great too.

Ended my first run with 17 hits. Tried hard mode, but got taken down by the big gorilla. I might come back to this to conquer hard mode. Also I loved the minimalist UI with the banana in the background for the player’s HP bar. All-around great job! I really enjoyed this one.

Super fun, pretty tough but very forgiving which I appreciated. I liked that the more zones you cleared, the harder the starting area became. Making my way to the ‘settings’ app was harder than I thought it would be, that was neat.

I liked that the fire rate was just tied to how fast you could press the button. I started doing a weird two finger double-tapping strategy that let me machine-gun down enemies which was super satisfying. The boss at the end was fun too, though a little easy compared to the areas before. Nice job!