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The idea and style behind the game instantly caught my attention. Very striking and great use of colours.

It is very clear that you have spent a lot of time planning all the elements of this game out, and you have managed to scope everything perfectly in the GDD, which by itself deserves some credit.

The use of multiple different perspectives is great, I especially enjoyed collecting the resources, but that's just my inner Minecraft nerd coming out.

I would have liked to see an in starter tutorial at the beginning of the game, but I do recognise that you have a help menu with lots of info so that did help to mitigate that aspect. 

Great Job, I only wish I had more time to play the game further

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Hey Puck,

I can see that the game was unfinished. I read through your GDD and I really like the direction you were going in. A retro side-scroller where you have to destroy things, but also make it through certain obstacles sounds like a lot of fun! 

I was able to destroy all the boats, but there didn't seem to be a way to fly, and even when I hit the helicopter, it wouldn't die. 

I liked your artwork in the retro style. The colors really popped and were pleasing to look at. You are the weapon, running into things, killing boats and the like; you definitely kept to the theme and incorporated it well. Great job there!

Your GDD was clear about your goals and what you intended to do. I do wish there was a development timeline of sorts so I could more accurately see what you finished, had plans for, and didn't finish. That helps a lot as judges, and, I feel, as developers to keep a running tally of what we're doing and still have left to do. 

Overall I think it was a great start to a game that has a lot of potential!

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Very clear design document, easy to understand what kind of game you are 'gunning' for... Clearly sticks to the jam theme. I really like the music design, especially the menu - somehow a cross between halo, fallout and mass effect! As for the game itself, it's a cool concept and a really good effort on your first game. Nice choice of artstyle and really nice assets. 

The game was clunky at times. Something I noticed is that there seems to be a bug with the viewport. Despite the player and NPCs being on a sphere, the viewport remains locked to the XY plane, rather than relative to the planet's surface which makes aiming a little tricky! And the mouse movment speed seems to be extremely variable. Issues like these could be ironing out with a bit more testing and more polishing

It might also be useful to illustrate a map of the controls, as the game loop is quite fast pace.

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Hey! Thank you for your submission! This game was interesting to play. 

I enjoyed the artwork of the Main Character, the Weapon, and the Pack. I also liked the cute/minimalistic look of the enemies in game. This game made me feel like I was playing a retro shooter from the early 2000s or the 90s. 

I don't know if I'm just bad at the game, didn't understand a specific mechanic, or if the game was just really hard, but I died a LOT. It felt like my bullets weren't doing anything. Your GDD says that successful attacks 'heal' you, but it seemed like all of my bullets were draining my life and nothing was regenerating my life. It meant that I wasn't capable of killing the full number of enemies on the objective list. 

I always like games that have additional movement abilities; so clever use of the jet pack and incorporating that into the theme. 

Your GDD had what I was expecting. I noticed your information under the "art" heading, but it may be helpful in the future to have a color palate that you're working with. some of the colors worked really well, while others felt a little out of place. 

The controls felt fine, it was just a little hard for me to tell if they were working 100% because either a lot of my bullets were missing, it took a lot to kill each enemy, or the bullets 'disappeared' before hitting the enemies because they were too far away. I'm unsure exactly what was transpiring. 

Great game, if a bit difficult. Good art style, very nostalgic sounds, feeling, vibe, responsive controls, well thought-out GDD; overall a great offering for this GameJam!

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Hey nickbdawg, 

This is a great game! I really enjoyed playing it. The art was cute and nostalgic, the vfx fit the art/style perfectly, and the sfx were on point as well!

The game felt a little difficult at times, but that is probably just a skill issue on my part. While I love playing these types of games, I'm not generally super good at them. 

The tutorial was a very nice touch. I can see you put time, effort, and thought into the programing, the mechanics, and the game loop. 

I will say that the theme 'you are the weapon' doesn't really jump out at you. And by that, I mean, It doesn't change anything about the game between this and another game of the similar genre. I'd like to see the theme incorporated in a more meaningful (change the way the game is played) way. 

The GDD is simple and succinct. It told me everything I needed to know about the game, and gave the impression that you finished all the aspects of this game that you set out to in the beginning, so massive props to you!

In all, the game is fun, nails the artwork and vfx, and has tons of replay value. Great job!

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The artstyle, especially of the cover art, is very nice. The cover art itself is beautiful, and I personally would love to see more of its likeness. That being said, music would have been nice to add. I feel that the game doesn't particularly do anything interesting with the theme itself, and I would have enjoyed more variety in gameplay. The core combat didn't feel too good given the lack of confirmation in animation or sound effect.

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Thanks for your entry into the game jam! I wand you to know I enjoyed the game!

The art style is so fun and cozy that then is juxtaposed with the fact this is an arena game :D

Sound and music are great and I enjoyed the vibe you set out to provide!

The mechanics are simple but fun to work with!

Really like the upgrade shop and how parts of your wand give bonus or new attack options!

The combat could use an UI pass. Having to inspect the enemy to see remaining health was cumbersome. It makes sense to inspect the enemy for stance not health.

I also didn't understand the attack, defend and magic options in relation with the opponent.

Defend when they attack made sense

Attack when they do nothing??  unsure if I attack when they defend

Magic when they defend?

A tutorial might help explain mechanics and best practices.

Overall a splendid game and concept. I enjoyed playing!

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Playability

- No bugs as far as I can tell. 

Theme Implementation

- Unfortunately just being a guy with fists doesn't quite make the theme, or if it technically does it's not the most exciting angle. 

Cleverness

- Not much to say! You punch a spazzing ghost.

Artistic Style

- You've injected a lot of humor into this experience! The cutscenes were on point and I enjoyed the dialogue and the effects you put onto the text. The Fists are Comically large.

- The pixelization is a good look, I think it adds a lot of depth to low-poly assets.

You've made a funny little entry; forgive me for not having much to say, it is a very short game without much innovation. Considering how you started the jam a week late, you hustled to make a complete experience by the end! Thank you for your participation!

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Rhidian Yiou was a blast from the past of nostalgia. I am a huge fan of turn based games and I was happy to see your submission when I picked it up. The art style is excellent, the music is great, and the flavor text is exactly what I was expecting. Very faithful offering to the genre. 

I had a few bugs while I was playing the game, but they all essentially amounted to 'never ending hallway.' I found a few hallways with no turns, no events, and no party members that I traveled 100+ tiles down the same direction with nothing happening. If I would change anything about the game in its current state (besides just... more. I'd love to play a more robust version of this game), it would be to fix those endless hallways. Also, I felt as if there should be some way to heal, regenerate, fix yourself, or rest after getting clobbered by skeletons. Needless to say, I died quite a few times, which is par for the course on these games. 

The GDD was clearly laid out. Your goals were manageable, trackable, and expandable. 

Overall, I think this was a great addition to this year's Game Jam. You should be proud of this game!

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I just LOVE the retro sounds and animations used in this game; text bubble sounds and the jumping just give me nostalgia. Also, the assets/art are very appealing.

I did notice I had to go through the whole text tutorial again if I failed to jump the first time on the cliff. It would be good to have a skip button the second time.

I love the humour also in the text from the wizard.

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Playability

- If you land on the tip of the barrel, you can't jump. You could make sure the collision box envelops the whole gun OR make it match very closely to the gun shape.

- I wish there was either more air control or none at all. It's actually quite fun to control once you get the hang of how the grapple propels you forward.

Theme Implementation

- Playing as the weapon is a popular interpretation this jam, so this fits the theme!

Cleverness

- The grapple hook should have a shorter distance limit and the bullets should go farther, in my opinion. And it would be nice if you could jump mid air so long as you have a grapple connected.

- This game actually kind of reminds me of how My Friend Pedro plays. I think your level design was more focused on precision grapplehook swinging and less about doing Sick Stunts and slowmo somersault shooting enemies. I think it would be a great direction to push your game considering the vibe I'm getting from the music and emergent gameplay.

Artistic Style

- It's simple but that's fine. I do think taking the vector art approach might be a better fit though as the gun is the only obviously pixel art thing in this game. SUPERHOT gets away with extremely low-power graphics thanks to its excellent, focused art design. Maybe there's an avenue you could find that could suit this game, I mean you already have the white and red flat color bloom.

- Love the bullet trails and the little squiggle you give to the grappling hook before it latches to something.

Great job with the physics, it was actually pretty smooth and entertaining to play and control. Your GDD is Too sparse, its helpful for judges to see what your inspirations are, your hopes and dreams, your development timeline, etc because it helps inform our feedback. Thank you for participating, I hope you had a good time!

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I really enjoyed the game. I like that you are made out of weapons and you can use dead people for your weapon. It's really fun and the quality is perfect. It definitely reminds me of TABS and feels really good. The only thing that was a little rough was the camera movement.

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Hey HyphenTV, 

Great submission! I had a lot of fun playing this game. The upgrade system was a lot of fun and felt very meaningful. I enjoyed playing around with the combinations on the passives to see what cool repeating boosts I could get. It all felt very addictive and loop-happy, so I think you nailed the feel of the game overall! 

I think the first few 'loops' are a bit too challenging. I had a hard time even getting to 10m the first... 7-8 times. It was a learning curve with the controls and what worked best. It ended up being a strange solution: Just aim straight down and pull the trigger. There didn't feel like much 'guiding' the gun was possible because of how quickly the obstacles came upon you and how fast the recoil made you move. After I got past the initial loops, though, and got my first couple of upgrades, your game really started to shine. 

I will say I made it to ~200m, but the game crashed. I think I made it crash because I hit 'shop' too soon, and the game hadn't finished calculating my gold: that's my guess anyways. 

The sounds were great and very immersive. I loved the sound/feel of the gun on each shot. The recoil, and especially being able to upgrade it, felt very nice. 

The theme was spot on: you are the weapon! Excellent choice of game. 

Your GDD was clearly laid out: I always LOVE seeing a development timeline. It is very rewarding to see what you planned, what you accomplished, and what maybe you had to scrap to polish other things. 

Overall, I thought this was a very polished game. Other than the steep learning curve at the beginning, it was an excellent offering for this Game Jam!

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The game is really nice and pretty easy. It is fun to play with another person and I love the art style and music. The controls and movement feel a little weird but other than that they are mostly fine. The game fits the theme with you being a stickman who is presumably the weapon and used to fight the other stickman.

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I liked that a weapon was wielding another weapon to defeat other weapons. However I felt disconnected on how Dave played a part in the game itself. I didn't see him upgrade or really play any part other then roam around in the upgrade area. He didn't even stay in his pen for very long. I also noticed that the exp required to get a new upgrade didn't go up with the levels either.

Suggestions:

- Have Dave's clothes or something about him when gaining upgrades.

- Add an exit button for the upgrade screen rather then binded to Esc because then the game can't be played in Fullscreen without feeling like the game locked up and having to refresh to get out of it. This one took me a while to figure out and had to reread the controls a few times to realize the issue.

- Have a level where Dave escapes and is on the field and you have to defend him or lose your Dave.

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Theme Implementation

- Controlling a note that does damage is a new one to me this jam, and I like your interpretation of the theme here!

Cleverness

- I like the control scheme! This would be a typical top-down shooter if not for your choice to disconnect the body and the weapon!

- I can tell from your GDD that you came up with the mechanics first and thought of a theme to go with it second, which is fine, but once you decided on the theme to be music related I would recommend circling back to your mechanics and see if your theme feeds you new ideas to develop your main game mechanic! For instance, what if clicking on beat enhanced your note's attack.

- And on that note, your upgrades could use some spice. What you healed on near-misses. What if in addition to flashing your note dropped a held note that slowed, etc. Part of Vampire Survivor's magic is how crazy it gets. As it stands, your upgrades reach a critical point where the note is fast enough to keep up with the mouse, the character is flying everywhere, and the blast radius is enormous and one-shotting anything.

Artistic Style

- You're right, the sprites are goofy and that's fine. I think your game could gain a lot from getting some juice, however.

- I think instead of drummers the enemies should probably be hecklers/rude fans. I mean, drummers are good, we need them!

Great entry! You've made a fun and complete experience in a very short time, you should be very proud! Thank you for participating!

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I found it a little difficult to actually grasp what you are meant to do. Sacrificing everyone, I am just met with a black screen and doing anything else, I "Ending 2". I found everything off to the left of the screen, is this intentional? 

I found a bug with resist - the spacebar only seems to work when the mouse is over the button, but this can be fixed with a little more polishing.  Something that I would like to see is a little more information available to the player as to what happened, why they have been cursed etc. I felt that the backstory is a little thin on the ground but easy to make a compelling story with your interesting take on the theme! It would make finishing the game a lot more satisfying I think, because the player would actually understand the consequences rather than just idly clicking.

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Animal Office was fun! I survived for as long as I could, which probably wasn't very long. I think I made it to level 6 or 7. The visuals were all cohesive and on theme for each other. The music was great! Even though it had a strong beat, it wasn't annoying to listen to, so that's great!
I wish the mechanics were a bit more like what you described in your GDD. I played for a few minutes and hit level 6 or 7, but never went to the next 'level' or got to upgrade anything. I like the abilities that were in there, though. The 'agile' projectile looked really cool and was quite useful.
The theme felt like a bit of a stretch to me. As there wasn't really a connection to 'you are the weapon' except the implicit story of 'fighting for your family through the week,' which didn't end up as an aspect of the final game, that I saw.
Your GDD is a little bit sparse, but it gets its point across. I wish there was a list of things you were going to complete for each feature, like a checklist, so as the judges we can see how far you got vs. how far we got simply because we're bad at the game.
Overall I really enjoyed what was in the game, I liked the music and the artwork the best. Awesome submission! Great work

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Having the option to use an xbox controller is good.
This reminded me of a favorite game of mine when i got my first Tablet and it wasnt long before that game took off to the stars just like i did as i tried to drag the waves of enemy commets away from my home planet in Planet Keeper!
The kiting tactics coming into play had me ducking and weaving inbetween obstacle planets and that was very fun! I could suggest adding some more diversity in the enemys perhaps or some upgrades would be very helpful as you progress through the waves.

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Hello Pirate Jammer, Thank you for the submission. Starting with my experience playing the game. I had a resolution issues getting past the start button. After I got in the game there wasn't much available. I liked the music and the player animations were cool. Finally, the GDD you made was a little sparse, if you got some more thoughts and some nice formatting in there, maybe some concept diagrams, you might be able to build up an even cooler game in the long run. Even if those extra things would have never made it into the prototype, knowing what you wanted to do would have been cool. Thanks again!

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I like the design of the game. The art style and pixel theme is really nice and I feel it can fit the theme well. The game seemed to work well I was unfortunately not able to interact with anything though. It's a good map design and it fits well.

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I really like the look of this game, the art style is very cutesy and I appreciate the effort that went into the descriptions and the writing of the level setups! However the game stumbles when it comes to the actual playing of it. I found the movement to be very difficult to grasp and moving effectively was a nightmare, I felt like I would shoot off in random directions, and even after I figured out that you only moved when you were within a certain radius of a wall it was still very difficult to make my way through. Also, I found the UI to be very unresponsive in places. For example, the skill tree menu was completely unresponsive and I could not get it to let me select my abilities. I would try to make the movement feel more natural and intuitive before everything else, as that kept me from progessing past even the first level. I like your concept and I see the inspiration in your work, just needs more polish on the base mechanics and functionality!
Also for some reason over half the levels said they were already competed when I booted up the game, so I think someone submitted a test version

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GDD: Nice that GDD has some colors. However add some images to the GDD, so it gives more context to the art section for example.
If I had to nitpick; also add the development timeline as it showcases transparency of the game's state and progress.
But otherwise the GDD seems good and on point.
Game: Good with the main menu. I like the eyes of the sword.
The gameplay kinda remind me a reverse vampire survivors. Instead of the enemies goes to the players, they runs away from the players.
Could be nice if there were a UI that tells me what the goal is (like the amount of killing people). The game loop feels repeatively, so 100% need powers ups to do absurd things.

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I really enjoyed the game and the level design. The art and music fit together perfectly. The controls are easy and intuitive. The fact that you end up blowing the facility in the end was a nice plot twist. I liked the design of the enemies and obstacles in the way.
Thank you for your entry to the Game Jam!

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Nice entry! The Kaiju is really cute and I like the idea of him learning multiple types of attacks and keeping them as abilities like pokemon! I enjoyed the experience of having a bunch of the enemies grouped up and thinking like "Man this is going to do so much damage" as I chose the tile they were all grouped up on, haha!
I think I was a bit confused on how the mechanics exactly worked. First, it felt like it should be a turn based game based on how I had to click to advance the text box after moving. It was unclear if I should just keep spamming it as fast as possible or if there was a benefit to waiting. I was expecting the pacing to be more like
1)the enemy moves
2)I choose an area to attack
3)Does damage, the enemy moves their position again and I have to think about what to do next.
Additionally, I found it confusing why I would lose health at some points and gain health in others. Did it cost me hp to use abilities and I gained it from killing enemies? Do the enemies drain my health while they are on the board? There wasn't a lot of info to clue me in on how I should make my decisions.
Overall I thought it was a solid entry! It was fun to play a few rounds and figure out which element to use on which time. Nice job!

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Clerk.exe Malfunction Mayhem was quite an enjoyable bullet hell, although perhaps not for the reasons intended! During stage one, I encountered a quirk wherein attempting to go across the stage slowly in order to draw out the soldiers would cause greatly increased projectiles to suddenly flood across the screen from the opposite direction. In order to minimize this, I was able to just keep moving and shooting until I made it through the first level. Unfortunately, the gun which I unlocked at that point doesn't appear to have been implemented as a play option at this time.
I found the level design and music quite enjoyable, although I feel some amount of destructible environment would do well in this game. It almost feels like Clerk.exe Malfunction Mayhem could go well with a game loop like the Rampage (city destruction / kaiju) series. Clerk was a very responsive, easy to control, and fun to play murder machine.
Thank you very much for this submission to Pirate Software Game Jam 16

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This was a fun game, interesting take on the theme of the jam. Having to constantly reload and repair the weapon is a cool idea. I liked that after each wave you could upgrade and improve your weapon in multiple ways. The speed at which the enemies were coming seemed a bit too fast compared to the upgrades I was able to acquire. With a few more tweaks like adding music and adjusting the balancing of the enemies this game could be really good!