itch.io

Great work, definitely the funniest game in the jam and the art is just fantastic! Especially the AOE attack behind lol. 

Mechanically I agree with other comments that it falls behind a little by comparison, but I also definitely see the links you drew in another comment to MMBN and Necrodancer. Honestly I've wanted to work on an MMBN-like for years and I think a rhythm element could be a fantastic addition. If you end up exploring more in that direction or just want to talk design and stuff, uh, hit me up

I really felt the rhythm aspect with the timing rewards on the bigger attacks - I don't know how intended the mechanic was, but since you can functionally extend the hitbox of any attack by one column if you time it so the scroll happens while the hitbox is still live, it felt like there was a bit more depth of execution there than at first glance, which was neat. It also felt natural that this is harder to do on the bigger, higher-windup attacks because of their delays.

Honestly, I think something that could be really freeing is just allowing direct lateral movement control, even with the autoscroll. The AOE backwards attack is incredibly strong, and the forwards AOE attack really suffers by comparison since it always covers primarily the front most column. Since the wind up is so big, you just don't know what's going to be in that column when it hits most of the time, so using it feels like a gamble a lot of the time. Being able to move backwards by even a tile I think would make that move in particular feel a lot more useful

I know obstacles were limited by time, but I think other obstacles or a health/fuel system would help a lot. Having fuel that you want to pick up and not destroy (especially combined with free movement) could immediately make things much more engaging. Needing to not just destroy the most things, but destroying strategically to weave in, nab fuel, and then setup a big attack, I think would be really satisfying, especially if the bigger attacks had some fuel cost or something 

Honestly I could go on for pages about any MMBN-like design (different chip systems, impact of larger fields, alternative movement styles, One Step from Eden's design choices, etc etc) but I don't want to flood your comments, so, honestly, hit me up if you want to chat lol

Really cool idea!

The controls were too slippery for my tastes, personally - it was very difficult to control, and combined with the platforms going away after a couple bounces, it felt overly-punishing to me. It was also unclear to me visually how many times I could bounce on a platform before it disappeared, which added to the confusion and punishment.

Platform bounces also had the issue of ending up just above a platform, where it felt like 90% of the time I just would die instantly because I couldn't get enough height afterwards, or I would get no height from just glancing off of a platform. Sometimes I'd even hit a platform and then immediately fall through it, and basically waste the jump and the platform, which was frustrating. 

I also ran into a bug a couple times where I landed on the paddle or a platform, then instead of bouncing up, I immediately shot straight left and then fell to my death.

It also seems like fastfalling into the paddle itself doesn't give you extra height like it does on platforms, which isn't very intuitive and killed me a few times. This is especially notable when the screen scrolls up so that the paddle is at the same height as a platform you want to use - the paddle tends to take priority in those situations and you waste the paddle without getting any height.

The idea is really cool, and you made this very fast, so great job! But I think it needs some tuning - it's quite difficult to control, and that combined with how easy it is to put yourself in an unwinnable position made a lot of it end up feeling frustrating for me. But with a little bit of tuning, I think those things would not be all too difficult to fix, either.

First, I tend to just rush into things, download the game, and launch it, and I did not realize that this required a controller at first. I played through twice while just clicking, which still did things it just always crushed the fruit entirely. I had to go back to the game page to realize that I had to plug in my controller to play.

Also, the UI was a bit broken for me - the timer and score displays that are supposed to be in the lower left are invisible or gone, which also meant when I was clicking and crushing things outright, I had no idea if it was giving me points or not anyways.

The game looks and sounds great, though! The music is very fitting, and the sound effects are so satisfying. I'd love to see a little more juice (no pun intended) in the squeeze animation, though - the hands are quite static during the squeeze, and I think it'd make a big difference if they pushed slowly inwards as the fruit squishes, and maybe if they shook a little with the exertion of squeezing.

The strict display size also bit me in a similar way to some others - it did open in 9x16, but it was also *too tall* and didn't fullscreen with black bars or anything, like I would expect it to. It displayed with a vertical size equal to my display height, but since it also opens windowed, the menu bar thing at the top of the window pushes the whole thing down. Since I can't put that menu bar above the top of my display, it means a menu bar-sized chunk of the game window is always invisible off the bottom of my screen, even after hiding my taskbar! I think this would be fixed by just having it start in fullscreen, though.

Also, I know this is designed for a custom controller (excited to try it that way!). So all of this is about the game as I can play it, since while I know the experience is going to be very different on the intended way to play,  I can't do that quite yet lol. So, on the controller, I had a bit of a struggle with consistency in the controls. From looking at an input viewer on my controller, it looks like the trigger is set to start the squeeze action at 0.5 on the trigger axis, which is super deep when playing on controller, especially when you need to control how hard you're squeezing. Confining the squeeze control to only the 2nd half of the trigger is rough, especially when there's no controller feedback like rumble to help reinforce the muscle memory of where the squeeze happens in the trigger. I frequently found myself trying to squeeze gently but then pulling the trigger like 40% of the way and watching as the fruit just fell past my motionless hands. It would be nice if the initial squeeze action happened waaay less deep into the trigger on a standard controller.

I'm real excited to see this game in person with the custom controller, though. I feel like that will elevate the experience a lot, and I love unusual peripherals and controls like that!

Brilliant slice of panic! The music and SFX work together with the gameplay super closely to deliver the frantic pace.

One of my only problems with the game, which I realized on maybe my 4th or 5th play, is that there is a subtle mismatch of the mapping between the spacing of the letters on the screen, compared to the spacing of the letters on a standard QWERTY keyboard. This mapping is super important when you're panicked (which the game is well designed to make you), so any mismatch gets translated into mistakes that don't feel as earned or fair.

In particular, the right half of the bottom row of the keyboard begins to shift father to the right than it is on a physical keyboard, due to mismatched placement of "M". On the keyboard, M is placed below and between J and K - however, in Dam It! it is placed between K and L, while N is placed between J and K instead. 

This difference makes things look a bit more correct at a glance, since otherwise the bottom row looks a bit empty on the right side, but it sacrifices clarity. I found myself repeatedly hitting the comma key when the game wanted me to press M simply because the game looks as if you should be pressing the key below and between K and L for that - but that key doesn't do anything, it doesn't even show up on the screen when you press it. That difference makes the right half of the bottom row way harder to work with because it's suddenly unintuitive when the rest of the game maps so well. B looks like it's right under H, but that's where N is. N looks like it's between J and K but that's where M is. V looks like it's directly under G but what's under G is actually the gap between B and V.

In the end this is a pretty subtle thing with a very quick fix, but I wanted to point it out because I think it's easy to miss while still having a big impact on how intuitive that corner of the game is, and could remove one of the only points of friction in an impressively smooth experience.

I'd also echo what another commenter said about wanting more feedback about when a leak stops. I think it would help a lot to have something like the SMACK of some flex tape over the leak to let you know you should let go of that one

Probably my only other complaint is that the game felt too tightly tuned to end the game around 1:45. After recording a little footage I realized the limit of keys you can press is only 6. While I do get that some keyboards only have 6-key rollover (though some are even worse), this feels too limiting, since the average person has 9 or more fingers. But it especially feels too limiting when, at 1:45, the game is willing to throw 7 leaks at you at once, and surviving becomes quite literally impossible. What am I supposed to do here?

Altogether, amazing job on this! It all comes together so well, it is instantly understandable, and it's a ton of fun!

This game has moments that feel great, when you get your grapple spacings and timings just right and are able to fly up and up and up, constantly slingshotting yourself up further with the grapple. 

However, I think there's a handful of things really holding this back, the biggest of which is the camera. The camera sits much too low relative to the player. Much of the time, jumping and grappling upwards sends your grapple slightly above the screen, meaning that if you're the highest you've been, or you're trying to go up as quickly as possible, you are quite literally firing blind. This really puts an immediate halt to any momentum you've built up with the grapple, and is also just generally frustrating.

Another issue is the lack of sound - I think just sound effects for the grapple, the jump, the super jump, and landing would be more than enough to breathe more life into the game alongside some music.

Frequently I found myself making it as far as I ever had, having felt like I had improved at using the grapple and making it to a new high much faster than before, only to be shut out entirely by the fact that there was absolutely no visible platform anywhere near me, and I was resigned to blindly shooting my grapple up in the hopes of hitting something, and then simply waiting out the timer anyways.

While the scores creating new platforms is really interesting in theory, in practice here it amounted, for me, to forced repetition and frustration. My high scores didn't feel earned, because I could simply do it all over again in the same way but get farther because of my last score. I never felt like I actually reached a "high" score because of this - I wasn't getting farther because I was getting faster, or improving at the game. It was just, well, there's another platform in reach now, and there wasn't one before. This was made worse the higher up I went, where the naturally-occurring platforms got more and more sparse, leading to sometimes two or three separate runs before I made it to another black, non-score platform. For a high score game, it felt like I would never be able to keep a high score, since the next decent player would just use my platform and outscore me anyways.

Since the game is also all about moving upwards, there never felt like there was a good reason to do anything other than grapple straight upwards. Occasionally the super jump was useful to put me in range of an otherwise out of reach platform, but again, there's almost no way to know there is a platform that high up because the camera stays too low. The super jump itself also felt inconsistent. It was definitely higher than a regular jump, but doing repeated super jumps occasionally sent me much higher for reasons that I could never quite pin down.

Also, I think the UI broke after my first couple of attempts. The UI for entering the initials was blank, so I couldn't see the initials I was trying to enter. Also, I could have sworn there was a number that showed how high I was next to the meter originally, but it also quickly disappeared, and reloading the page didn't make it come back on the web version.

I would love to see a version of this more akin to a platformer, rather than an endless jumper, with these grapple mechanics. I think they have a lot of potential when there's more to explore, rather than solely going up, as that would give the player a reason to use the grapple diagonally or sideways! The grapple mechanic itself is a lot of fun, and works so smoothly.

I feel like rolling ball games are still kinda underexplored, so it's always nice to see someone playing around in the space. The ball feels weighty and has good momentum, which is a good start!

However, it's missing something that's very key to these kinds of games - the ball's physics. If I park the ball on the slope and let go of the controls, the ball just sits there. It feels really unnatural, and I feel like the ball should roll down the slope. Once that kind of behavior is in, I think it opens up a lot in terms of more interesting environments - rolling down longer slopes to build up speed and launch off a ramp or spring, slides and corkscrews and pinball-style bumpers, etc. There's a lot that could be done in this space or added to make the environment overall more interactable and interesting. A lot of the features scattered around the environment feel pretty samey, and I think it's because of these kinds of physics limitations that interacting with each different thing doesn't end up feeling very different.

I realized I had to download the game, because the web version didn't really look like the screenshots. I think there's some kind of issue with rendering the water in the web version, because the surface of the water is invisible, which makes the game much harder to understand visually.

That helped the readability of the visuals a lot, but I think one of the remaining challenges was that there wasn't a separate animation for diving - it just looks like you're falling, which is pretty confusing at first. That combined with the fact that there's only one button for flapping/diving/gliding, it's pretty ambiguous what's happening in the beginning when you're still getting used to the controls. 

The controls themselves are also a bit awkward. The dive/glide/flap all on one button works well, really, but the mouse controls feel quite awkward. Making the camera's rotation speed relative to the mouse's horizontal position is a pretty unusual choice, and it feels slidey in a way that I think will be challenging for folks that have trouble with feeling motion sick while gaming.

This is made a lot worse for folks with multiple monitors! You aren't capturing the mouse, which means moving the mouse outside of the game window and putting it on the opposite end of a second monitor causes the camera to rotate blisteringly fast, especially when the hawk is at a standstill. I'd highly recommend using `Cursor.lockState = CursorLockMode.Confined` to prevent this and confine the user's mouse to the window at the very least.

Overall, though, the concept is really interesting! Flying mechanics are really challenging to get right, and this is a unique and engaging take on it that I think could just use a few tweaks here and there. It's good that you can't grab fish while just sitting on the bottom of the lake, but the height of the fish vs where the bottom of the lake is feels like a pretty small range, so it often feels punishing when you smack against the ground, and it can be maybe a bit too tough to maintain the correct height, especially when it can be hard to tell how high you are and how high you need to be to catch fish. Some kind of height meter or indicator could help with that, but I think deeper water could also help the feel of things!

Oh, I was also able to get 9 dodges at once instantaneously once? I'm not exactly sure how, but I was able to clip it. You can also see a bit of the strat I mentioned of trailing the flying enemies.

The aesthetic is awesome, first of all - I love the look of the game. The pixel art is super cute, and the elements are all very easy to read.

I do think the major issue is the hitboxes - they are way bigger than they look, which leads to many instances where I got hit while visually appearing fairly far from the creature that damaged me. Often after dying, visually even the shadows of my dino and the dino that killed me aren't touching, which often feels like I got cheated, especially early on when I was learning the game and where the hitboxes actually were.

You can also farm dodges pretty easily off the flying enemies - it's possible to increase your multiplier by 4 or 5 just off of one of them if you trail behind them as they fly across sideways. This means you can farm your multiplier up pretty quickly pretty early on if you're aware of this strategy, without a lot of risk. This can be exploited for some pretty high scores.

I also think that the difficulty doesn't ramp up very much - it would be nice if the game got a bit faster, or forced your to jump or slide more frequently somehow. In my score where I exploited the above strategy, I managed to hit over 350,000 points and I don't think I ever used the jump or slide at all - they were simply not safe or consistent enough to use compared to just dodging around enemies and obstacles. 

I'm also not entirely sure I understand how the health/death works. Sometimes I get the Watch Out! message and my multiplier goes down, but other times I feel like I immediately get double hit and die instantly, and I'm not sure why that is.

Overall, though, it's a good bit of fun! I think the dodge mechanic is a great way to encourage risk-taking for more points, but the game's pace ends up being a little too slow without ramping up enough as time goes on.

First of all, I wanna commend you for your positivity and your dedication to playing and providing good feedback to every one of the other jam games!

Second, great job on this game! I love jam games and games in general which lean into their silliness, and keyboard-mashing hacking is a fantastic way to do it, and you really nailed to aesthetic on basically all of it. The music is great and drives the player forward in a way that matches the visual aesthetic really well, and the game itself is pretty quick to understand and pick up!

The scoring is maybe a tiny bit opaque, and also heavily biases scoring towards players with better keyboards that have n-key rollover, since you get 1 point per key pressed as far as I can tell. Most keyboards only have 6-key rollover, which (in case you aren't a keyboard nerd) means that the keyboard can only correctly register up to 6 simultaneous separate key presses. On the other hand, some gaming keyboards, especially high-end keyboards, have n-key rollover, which means you can press every single key on the keyboard and it will still register new presses properly. With an n-key rollover keyboard, I can smash my entire hand into my keyboard and instantly get 10+ points, and before even lifting that hand up I can mash my other hand down for another 10+ points, whereas a cheaper keyboard this tactic would only net 6 points total.

I managed to get just over 1,500 thanks to my unyielding trust in my keyboard to take any amount of abuse I can throw at it, alongside a handful of attempts to figure out how to optimize the game a little. I don't think that the mouse sections necessarily take away from the game, but I do think it creates a little bit of conflict within the current design.

The conflict with the mouse ties into another (minor) conflict that the game feels like it has internally, which is the pull between being entirely what it wants to be (a fun, low-stakes game about hacking with microgames sprinkled in) and being a score attack arcade game. The reason that this introduces tension, in my opinion, is that the microgames are not all created equal - some of them take significantly more time (clicking the numbers in particular seems quite slow), while others are extremely quick (clicking the popups can be done very efficiently by mashing click in the center of the screen, arrow keys can be mashed through very rapidly). Since the microgame choice seems to be fully random, it is entirely possible to have significant swings in your score simply by virtue of your microgame luck.

I think that this is the source of some people wanting the mouse games taken out entirely (moving your hand takes longer and loses you score!), since there's some frustration involved in this luck aspect if you're chasing a high score.

If you were to continue development on this, I would love to see it outside of the context of score attack, as a short game with an absurd over-the-top leet hacker story, with some more variety in the microgames. Basically all of my critiques would be instantly solved by this change of context, and I think it would be super fun based on what you've already made.

Echoing other commenters, this feels much more like a puzzle game than an arcade game. The arcade elements feel unnatural in this context, and lend themselves more towards frustration. The puzzles are interesting, but putting a timer on them alongside limited lives feels doesn't end up feeling rewarding. 

The collisions with the red blocks also feel much too sensitive in a way that is unintuitive. For example, in Level 4, the solution that was the most obvious to me was to push gravity left, then immediately up to put the right red block into the hole, then push gravity right and then immediately up to put the left block into the hole. Typically, this stacks the two red blocks. Since the hole is about the depth of two red blocks, intuitively I feel like I should be able to just put gravity to the left again, then slide over the hole to the finish - but no, this actually just kills you and resets the puzzle, because a tiny corner of the two stacked red blocks will clip you.

I ended up just playing through the levels and not bothering with the Arcade Mode, which led to another minor point of frustration - when in Play Levels mode, there's no way to just progress to the next level! Instead, the game takes you back to the main menu, where you have to click Play Levels again, scroll to the end of the levels list, and then click the newly-unlocked level. There's really no reason for it to take that many steps to go to the next level, and this problem just feels worse and worse the farther in you play and the farther you have to scroll each time.

There was also rarely a reason to use the boost button. I didn't use it until level 12, and I really can't imagine getting that far in arcade mode. 

Level progression also felt a bit awkward. Level 13 felt very easy and out of place, along with level 21. 

Some of the levels felt a little tedious, in particular level 24 where it felt like the best strategy was just to immediately hit left or right, then slooowly make your way up while drifting back and forth to collect all the dots. Level 25 was basically the same thing but worse - just slowly zigzagging across the screen while occasionally adjusting using the boost to stay far away from the red block. It was a bit disappointing to me that the final two puzzles felt like the most tedious.

Like others have said, I think this would work great as a mobile puzzle game, but it doesn't fit well into the arcade box. Judging it as a puzzle game, I think this has a lot of promise. With more levels, maybe some additional puzzle elements, I could see this being a great phone puzzler to add to my rotation. The music is definitely a highlight, as I would expect from y'all!

I think Scrumbo captured most of the thoughts that I would share already, but mainly I agree that some more complexity would go a long way. On top of moths that reduce score, maybe something like camera rolls that reload or partially reload your camera instantly when you take a shot of them could also help. 

It's also difficult to tell when you're getting credit for a photo and how much credit you're getting - the score counter goes up, but it's not really possible to tell how many points you're getting with each shot as you're playing. It would be great if there were little numbers that came up from each butterfly when you took their picture, so you have some feedback on when you're getting points from each butterfly.

I think that mashing is a bit of an issue here as well, since it felt like the best strategy was pretty much to just click as fast as possible on high-scoring groups, which feels less dynamic. Making butterflies vanish after their picture is taken would alleviate this a lot and make sure the player is moving around more, while also making it much clearer when points are being gained!

Doodle Jump with timed presses!

Overall I think it looks good and the sounds and visual effects feel great. The core loop is simple but fun, and is a good score-chaser.

I was a little disappointed that a lot of the controls basically never come up. Swing and Jump are both pretty much only used once per run, which feels a little clumsy. I feel like this could have been just Left, Right, and Bounce 

The gameplay itself is a lot of fun, but there's definitely a slightly degenerate strategy. When playing without this strat, I found the static scrolling of the screen occasionally frustrating - you can pretty easily outpace the screen scrolling, and when you do there's no recourse once you end up too high to react to the next window. It's just guaranteed death, which doesn't feel good.

Another comment mentioned that the timing is very tight, and I actually pretty strongly disagree, and this ties in to my high scoring strategy. I actually think the timing is extremely forgiving - not necessarily because the window for a bounce press is particularly large, but because it is large enough that you can simply mash the bounce button and you will always hit the bounce as long as you're near a window.

To show the disproportionate power of the strat, on the attempt I discovered the degenerate strat I got 7 million points, then on a subsequent run I got over 20 million using it the whole way through.

Basically, after realizing that being high on the screen was a major liability as the speed increases, since it limits the time you have to react, I also noted that there is a large and forgiving window below the screen which does not kill you, but still clearly shows your position. Since mashing the bounce button consistently gets a bounce without the need for timing, at high speeds hovering intentionally below the screen while mashing is optimal, since you maximize your reaction space to the window coming from the top. You simply position under the window as quickly as possible and mash constantly. It then just becomes a test of how quickly you can reposition under the next window, which is always possible, rather than any test of timing. Since you gain height relative to the screen very slowly once you're moving at high speeds, it's very easy to lower yourself again if you get too high on the screen at this point.

I'd also like to note that the score display in the lower left appears to just be wrong. On my high scoring run, the score shown in the bottom of the screen was less than a third of my actual score on the game over screen. I have a screenshot of the leaderboard showing the score mismatching, but itch isn't playing nice with image uploads right now, so lmk if it's helpful and I can send it to you over discord or something.

Overall, great job! I had a lot of fun playing this one.

I think the concept has some promise, but it doesn't quite come together here.

I think the game is hit a bit hard by the lack of sound and animation, which together make it fairly difficult to figure out exactly what's going on. The main goal also doesn't really get explained ingame, and the mechanic of bouncing the balls off the octopus doesn't end up feeling relevant, since you can still just toss the beach balls into the crabs yourself, which is much easier to aim and doesn't seem to penalize you in any way.

The hitboxes also feel inconsistent - you have to shoot *above* the crabs to kill them, since if you aim so the ball goes directly through the crab sprite, it'll just pass through them harmlessly.

There's also only 40 crabs. If you kill them all the game just... kind of stalls out? There's no end, you're just on an empty beach until you close the game.

I could see this going somewhere if the bounce mechanic was tuned a bit more, with the crabs only vulnerable to the ball once its been bounced or something; and with more enemy variety or at least more of the crabs spawning over time.

sometimes you need a game to remind you that you don't have to respect silly things like walls

This scratches that itch for wanton destruction that Red Faction: Guerilla gave me as a kid, but in such a goofy, streamlined way that I love. Like BigScrumbo said, the routing of using the stomp vs the charge is really fun, and a lot more engaging than I expected it to be at first glance. Stomping a couple dozen boxes or office chairs out of existence at once is just as satisfying as it should be

More in the way of sound effects would be great, though! There's not quite enough oomph to some of the destruction, particularly when charging, when some of the objects have minimal or no sfx on breaking

I would love to see more of an animation for the regular hit, too - it's not always easy to tell when that's happening, and since it stops you in place for a second sometimes I'm bashing my head against a wall longer than I need to without realizing it's already broken and I can walk through, because I'm holding forward through the wall and not moving because I'm still mashing the hit button. 

That compounds a little bit with my one other issue, which is that the vertical walls don't read as clearly when they break - sometimes it's a big tough to tell when it's entirely broken vs just damaged

I also like the way you did the controls tutorial screen, it's clear and concise while still making sure the player actually engages with it

Overall, great job! Love the Downwell-like aesthetic, and the core idea is really neat! I do agree with some of the other commenters that the scoring is a little opaque, and that I wasn't sure if the game was actually ramping up in difficulty as I went on, or if I was slipping up, or if I was just getting unlucky in terms of the amount of fuel blocks and TNT that were spawning in. I managed 47k on one of my earlier playthroughs, but in later playthroughs often got only a fraction of that score without really feeling like I was approaching things any differently or playing any worse. I'd be curious to hear what the fuel/treasure spawn rates are like and how those are determined/change over time and stuff like that.

Another thing is that the alarm buzzer sound that played when I died never stopped, meaning if I wanted to play again I either had to power through the alarm noise blaring constantly, or restart the game entirely.

I'd love to see other enemies, or the ability to move the drilling platform somehow. I think either the ability to move the platform or maybe certain blocks/obstacles that force the platform to move could make things feel much more dynamic and evolving. 

The first thing is that the controls felt very awkward to me with WASD to move and X to shoot, since that's what the instructions ingame say. Especially in a game where I feel very heavily incentivized to be shooting constantly in order to tell where I am relative to the walls - which feels like its own problem. This gets compounded by the fact that there's no autofire holding down X, meaning my right hand was just stacked underneath my left hand mashing the button constantly. There is also no cooldown for firing, meaning that you can just mash as fast as you can and fire very quickly. I only realized after my first playthrough or so that space would also shoot. I felt a little foolish, but the instructions ingame should probably say that X and Space will both shoot.

Back to the "shooting to tell where I am" problem - it does not feel clearly communicated to me where I am relative to obstacles. Some enemies or obstacles can feel like they come out of nowhere since the camera angle doesn't let you see very far forward at all. This is a lot worse if you're specifically in the upper right corner. The section with waves of hornets I entirely gave up on shooting them and just mashed the fire button in place, since it was a much safer option and I could not reliably aim my shots to hit anything. Without walls, there's nothing my shots can consistently hit, which meant no way to tell exactly where I was in space.

The boss enemy exacerbates the mashing problem, since to kill the boss faster you just mash as hard as you can, look at where the bullets hit the boss, and then use that as a reference for dodging the attack patterns, then alternately move in any direction to dodge the attack that fires towards your position. With quick enough mashing the boss can only get in a few attacks.

The flowers that fire sideways also seem a bit awkward - I was never threatened by them, since they always fired way ahead of me in a spot where I couldn't possibly be, and then didn't seem to fire again. I'm not sure if it's possible to get hit by the projectiles those shoot.

The pollen system as well didn't feel very consequential. I was able to beat the boss without ever shooting a flower, but keeping your pollen topped up is generally pretty easy anyways. 

I'd also like to note that the height meter on the side isn't very helpful, and in my opinion misses why the height meter in the original Zaxxon was important and useful - in Zaxxon, the height meter is oriented on the same plane that the ship moves on, with bars on the meter which correspond to the lines along which the ship is controlled horizontally. This, especially in the indoor sections where the wall is also easy to trace relative to the height meter, makes it much clearer where the ship is in the physical space of the game, as I've tried to illustrate below

Without the meter being exactly relative to the space, alongside height markers angled for perspective grounding the meter in physical space, it becomes much less useful to the player for determining their vertical position relative to enemies and obstacles. The provides clarity - you know the top of the high section of the wall on the left side goes to the top of the height meter, so you can also tell about how high you need to be on the height meter in order to clear the rest of the wall at a glance. The Beexon meter, though, doesn't directly correlate in this way, so it doesn't cement the player's

I know that this was kind of an essay, but I hope this is helpful critique for you. I love these kinds of modern adaptations of old retro games, and I love the character of this version of the game - especially the little frogs

While I'm probably better than average at shmups, I don't consider myself an expert by any means (I've never touched the touhou games), and the difficulty felt fairly low. After looping through level 5 a few times I dropped out at around 80k points, but at that point it felt pretty rote.

I think if the difficulty ramped up faster or farther, it would be a better experience, but as it is, it feels too slow and simple. There is decent enemy variety, but the last level doesn't use all of them, and since that's the one that repeats, it feels stale fairly quickly. The last level is missing the missile enemy, which is one of the more challenging ones, I think.

Another issue with the difficulty is that the powerup is *very* strong and *very* easy to acquire, leading to basically no threat to a decent shmup player who doesn't use them constantly. I began using them basically every time I felt at all threatened, and still had a stock of over 20 of them.

That said, ramping up the enemy variety and difficulty farther would quickly improve the experience, in my opinion. Those aspects are primarily what's holding it back.

Also, the keyboard controls are very awkward. WASD to move with Z and X for shooting and powerups makes you stack your hands on top of each other, or else make you contort your left hand in bizarre ways if you want to only use that hand. I had to plug in my controller to play.

This is billed as an endless vertical bullet-hell runner, but I didn't notice any bullets to make it a bullet hell, and it definitely has a pretty quick end.

As others have said, having sound effects would add a lot to the experience, and it's not entirely clear what you should be doing for max points - going for speed? Killing all the enemies? Prioritizing pickups? etc

The speed mechanic is really neat, though, and I feel like if the scoring system rewarded speed more, I'd feel more incentivized to optimize around the speed building stuff.

I found myself a bit confused on how things worked mechanically. It's still not clear to me what the energy bar is for exactly, or how the throw attack works, exactly. It seems like there's some sort of cooldown on the throw attack, but I couldn't find any visual indication of what the cooldown was or when it was available to me. It was also difficult to tell when my melee attack was connecting and how much damage, if any, it was doing.

Another issue with the melee attack is that the delay between pressing the button vs the animation of swinging the sword is pretty big, but the actual hitbox of the attack is instantaneous. This means walking up to an enemy and pressing melee attack causes the enemy to just vanish, then half a second later you swing your sword, which is pretty confusing.  Once I realized this was the case, I was able to win fairly quickly. 

It also seems like you can spam the melee attack button to continually put out new attacks, much faster than the sound effects and animation make it appear. 

The page description also says you can hold down either attack key to charge, but I never noticed any difference between holding a button vs tapping it.

I did also get stuck on the inside of a rising floor tile once.

On the other side, the pixel art looks great, and there's good variety in the enemies and their behaviors - I particularly like the smaller enemies that chase until they attach to you and detonate. They made me pay closer attention to watch out for them in a way that still felt fair

Thanks for the feedback! The walls are definitely the worst part... you can kind of pincer them off the walls a little bit, but if I'd had more time I would definitely have had them automatically walk away from objects they bump into to avoid that a little better.

That's a good idea! I definitely ran into that problem when playtesting as well. Unfortunately I was torn between not having enough time and also not wanting too much UI getting in the way of the art

Neat idea! Definitely a lot of room for more puzzles, too. I think the function of each color is a little too vague, and because of that a lot of early puzzles feel like trial and error because of the way things combine, but especially for a jam game I don't think that's a big problem

Great concept and really good execution.

I found jumping with w and swapping with space awkward since I'm so used to using space to jump. I would've preferred using Shift or something for the soul control stuff.  

Great work overall! I think there's a good bit of potential for expanding the idea with other obstacles that only affect the soul or the body specifically and such

Thanks for the feedback! 

I think that getting an animal off of the edge is easily the biggest flaw of the game - I wanted to make them walk away from obstacles after hitting them, but it was one of the things that fell by the wayside unfortunately.

Thanks! Time constraints (and being generally busy) made it difficult to put in the story we wanted (and balance the gameplay) but we definitely had stuff in mind. 

The main idea for me was to ensure you had to switch sides in order to win - balancing how many enemies you let past on either side and managing when you switch to keep one side from running away with the win. 

Turns out though that's pretty complicated without playtesting and playtesters. The idea only really comes through in the 2nd and mostly 3rd level (which is significantly harder than the 2nd). Since they're much longer levels, there's more chances for enemies to slip by you to the point where it's inevitable. 

The idea is that you *have* to let some enemies by, and it's a matter of minimizing it and ensuring that it's the team that's behind that you let by to keep things even. I don't think we quite accomplished that, but the 2nd and 3rd levels (though overly difficult) do a little bit

Thanks for playing! Glad the controls weren't too tough (and also that I'm not totally crazy regarding the difficulty lol). Overall (especially with health and invincibility after getting hit) the game's fairly forgiving. 

I was able to beat the game on the hardest difficulty on my first try, but yeah without more enemy types it's hard to have it be properly tough without being just unfair. I mostly prioritized features other than new enemies because I was more interested in coding waves and an upgrade system and such.

The shotgun deals a little more damage, but is mostly useful because it can hit any number of zombies in range at once, and pushes them back to give you space if you get overwhelmed. 

Thanks for the feedback! We'd heard a few players complain about not having any options without ammo, so I've just updated the game to include a melee attack option! It's risky, but at least now there's a chance even without ammo.

I'm glad you mentioned the combos! I think that's one of the most fun parts of the game haha.

Thanks for the feedback!

I've just updated the game with a melee attack to give the player some recourse if they waste a few bullets early on (alongside giving the player more bullets to start on Easy mode). It's risky, but you at least have the option now. Give it another shot if you get the chance!

I've just updated with a melee attack for when you're out of ammo! Give it another shot if you'd like - the melee is risky but it means you at least have some alternative without ammo.

Hey there, I ended up running with your idea and just updated with a melee attack! Give it another shot. The melee attack is pretty risky, but it means you have a chance even if you run out of ammo (even if it's much harder to kill with melee).

Updates are allowed in the rules!

I thought I did but I'm not sure if it did it properly... 

I tested the version on the page and it has the new aim, so just refreshing it should work I think

I just wanted to come back to this - I've updated the build to shoot the way you're facing if you're not aiming with the arrow keys! Now it should be much more playable with your aiming preference. Give it another shot!

You're not the only one that found aiming difficult - for you and anyone else who found the keyboard controls a little difficult, I've updated the build so that you now shoot the direction you're facing if you're not aiming with the arrow keys/right stick! Hopefully that makes things a little easier, so give it another shot!

As to infinite ammo, we can't really do that because the entire point of the game is managing your ammo. If we'd done a little more playtesting and had time though, I think I would've added in a weak melee attack, so if you run out of ammo you still have a chance to defend yourself and grow more ammo. 

Thanks for the feedback, and I hope you have a chance to play it again with controls that work better for you!

Unfortunately our musicians ran out of time for the gameplay music. I'm glad you liked the core mechanic!

I agree that more enemies would make it better, but I guess that's just jam games for you. I wanted to include an enemy that didn't hurt you but would attack your plants, things like that for variety, but having difficulty levels and upgrades ended up taking precedence.

This is a really neat one! I beat it on my second try, but it certainly wasn't easy - I was on the verge on losing, it felt like. I thought the difficulty was in a good spot, especially given the eldritch kind of inspirations behind it. It very much should feel next to hopeless, and it felt like you did that while making it always feel just possible.

The ending did confuse me a tiny bit, since the win text is pretty similar to the lose text at the very beginning. It was neat to see a game with so much more writing than most jam games, even if it meant that the game was very text-heavy. 

If there were more time for features, I'd love to see threats evolving over time instead of being random each day, and maybe even being able to take on multiple threats per day. It could be really interesting to have another set of decisions - do I take out some easy threats, or do I make sure the harder threat is taken care of now before it gets even harder and becomes critical? But obviously that would create a whole slew of balancing difficulties beyond the scope of a jam, haha.

Good work!

Thanks for the feedback!

As for 1, I think if there was more time I would probably have an option for aiming where you're facing, or at least making it so that bullets fire the direction you're facing if you're not holding arrow keys - I probably could have done that in the time we had, so that was definitely an oversight on my part.

On 2, as a designer, difficulty is often something I mis-judge, especially for jams where there's little time to get others to playtest. I wanted to keep the game in a space where you're really forced to position the zombies for the sake of watering your plants, but I think the player should probably be able to get away with more on the easier difficulty levels, especially with regards to how many bullets you start with.

Yeah, that's the biggest challenge for these jams I feel like. You spend a bunch of time just getting everything to work, and then realize you still need to build all these levels... Haha you made more than enough game to be able to make an improved camera though! I bet you can do it

Fun little platformer! I'd have liked to see more puzzle elements. Games with world-switching mechanics like this (like Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams) can do a lot with puzzle elements alongside the platforming difficulty.

The biggest critique (which others have talked about) is the camera is too high relative to the player, and stays fixed on the player. 

I highly recommend reading this Gamasutra article on cameras in sidescrollers. Something like the platform-snapping camera-window used in Rayman would do wonders for the issues that your camera has.