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Thanks so much for playing! The velocity mechanic was the starting idea, I wanted to explore how fall damage would effect Downwell's play model. My plan to address the issue of how easy it is to just farm and get overpowered is I want to try and change the game so your upgrade materials get mined out of floor blocks where you have to like, avoid enemies while you stop to mine a pickup. I'm at least gonna try it out cause I think it'll be interesting.
Glad you enjoyed!

Just gave your game a try and was very confused at first. I skimmed the description but it took me a minute to find a combination that actually did damage (found the fire trail first and kept doing that to survive).

After 2 rounds, one of just running flailing and dying, and a second of finding some success with the fire trail spell, I went back and fully read your description and also your GDD to see what I was missing. Knowing that you did this in just 7 hours is very impressive!

If I could suggest just 1 improvement, some form of tutorial would have been very useful. It wasn't until after I read the GDD that I realized I could double up on the same element for spells which makes sense now that I know it, but when I was trying out combos it never even crossed my mind to try.

This is the bones of something cool! I hope you keep working on it.

Thanks for playing!
Enemies start off beefy (as you noticed) as an incentive to upgrade. Tho due to a lot of feedback I've gotten I've got plans to rebalance and change up how upgrades work and to balance out the player's power scaling. The enemies falling thru the floor glitch has already been fixed, but it wasn't fixed in time for the deadline lol. It came down to fixing that or getting enough sleep that night and I picked sleep.
I'm glad you enjoyed it! I had been wanting to make a game inspired by Downwell for a while and was super excited to get the chance!

This is very fun! I wish there was a restart button so I could try out different configurations of towers more easily. I wanted to keep experimenting and find the perfect layout. I got to round 7 on my best run!

Thank you for playing!
On the last day of the jam when I was crunching to finish, tuning down the speed of the enemy projectiles was on my list of things to do after I finished the ending of the game. Unfortunately I just didn't have the energy to go do it lol. I spent the final few days of development constantly thinking "Those projectiles are too fast" so I'm totally in agreement.
And the health potion is totally underbaked. It's only application is to heal if you finish a level with low health, but I hadn't even thought about intentionally dying to heal lol. I should probably recontextualize healing for the updated version.

I appreciate the high praise!
There's a lot of quality of life adjustments I wanted to implement but didn't have time during the jam. Good call on highlighting the materials in the menu, the entire crafting system was put together very sloppily and I'll be overhauling it after the judging period is over.

Thanks for playing!

I definitely agree about dying in the shop, I just have no idea how you managed to pull it off? Did you die while at terminal velocity and appear in the shop, thus taking 2 damage? Because that is for sure a bug, but I have trouble thinking of how you would go about dying in the shop.

Thanks for playing!

I agree that the enemy projectiles are too fast. Slowing them down was on my to-do list but after crunching to finish level 3 and the boss fight I didn't have the energy for any extra tuning and left it be.

Enemy projectiles going through walls is intentional, as them being blocked by blocks would have made the game significantly easier and the game is already quite easy (if you know how to exploit it(swapping worlds to dodge projectiles is key)), but I did go back and forth of this choice a few times and am still considering what way I want to go on this mechanic in the definitive edition after the jam. Enemies are going to be completely overhauled one way or another.

Velocity, however, is punishing on purpose. After all, you'll never take fall damage as long as you hold that last bullet to cut your speed! I wanted it punishing specifically to encourage the player to track their ammo count. I set the fall speed to limit at a specific threshold (you just kept falling faster and faster in the first few days of development lol) and tested the threshold a lot to make sure that you had a window to identify that the floor was coming up so you could cut speed. I may tweak it more in the definitive edition, but I'm very married to the idea of it being punishing. Maybe instead I change it to have multiple damage thresholds based on how long you were at terminal velocity instead of just 2 hp flat?

I appreciate the feedback!

I had a really fun time unlocking the ULTIMATE FLAMETHROWER but it wasn't until I scrolled down and read a comment that I realized that this is just an interactive webpage! I'll admit I've daydreamed about attempting a project like this, but I doubt I'd ever pursue it. Hats off to you!

You caught me lol, the potions were in fact just an addition to fit the theme.

I've got a plan to update the game to make potion crafting more engaging where instead of fighting enemies for items, you mine items out of blocks forcing you to slow down without forcing you to directly fight the enemies (which are not the most engaging things to fight), and I should probably pare down the ingredient numbers. My thought process for having so many was that I wanted to force the player to get ingredients from both the light and dark worlds, and I initially wanted to have more potions but was pressed for time. It is what it is for the jam.

Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Thanks for taking the time to look into it! This is super helpful information.

This is a graphical glitch I wasnt aware of until after the deadline, it seems to only happen on laptops (are you using a laptop?) and I think its caused by the slightly odd resolution a lot of laptops run at. Hopefully I can figure out how to fix it when I go back over the game after the judging period.
Thanks for playing the game! I'm glad you enjoyed it. The game is unfortunately not very well balanced, as you saw. I've got ideas to address that issue too, but for the time being it is what it is.

You needed to press W instead of Z? I made this using a QWERTY keyboard as well. Do you mean you have a AZERTY keyboard? Cause yeah it looks like Z and W are swapped on that keyboard. I was using Z and X because they're right next to each other in the lower left I hadn't even considered variant keyboard until just now lol.

Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed!

I agree, WASD should have been implemented before the deadline. It'll be added into a later version, but there's no going back to fix it now that the deadline's over, and like I mentioned in another comment I was indecisive on what buttons to move Jump and Swap to since using WASD makes Z and X uncomfortable to access.

Thanks for playing!

When I was finishing up development I started realizing that the enemies weren't exactly meshing with the game as a whole, like you said it's easier to just avoid them. And because there's so many enemies it's, inversely, really easy to farm and get super strong so the final boss was given like 80 health to compensate for the fact that the player could feasibly be doing like 10 damage per bullet.

I want to do a second pass at the game once the Jam's fully over where, instead of farming enemies for loot, you've got to mine it out of blocks, thereby making the enemy avoidant playstyle more valid, while also forcing the player to slow down and get loot here and there to stay powered up.

Thanks for playing! I appreciate the feedback a lot!

This is great! I love how your bullets being your light source is almost like sonar or echolocation. I can think of a ton of ways to expand this out into a full length game! Also the music was nice.

That was fun! I thought I soft-locked myself by making a potion in the tutorial before reading the instruction to make a spike shield potion, but I just tanked the damage and crossed the spikes. Using the flashlight to stun a shooter enemy and knowing that the second you turn off the flashlight they're gonna shoot you is very tense.

That was fun! I thought I soft-locked myself by making a potion in the tutorial before reading the instruction to make a spike shield potion, but I just tanked the damage and crossed the spikes. Using the flashlight to stun a shooter enemy and knowing that the second you turn off the flashlight they're gonna shoot you is very tense.

This was neat! That first encounter is a doozy if you're not used to how disjointed your weapon is, if the enemies get on top of you you cant hit them anymore, but once I got the feel of it down it was smooth sailing. Excited to see more when you update it!

I considered adding WASD support but couldn't settle on a good set of keys for jump and swap since Z and X are inaccessible when using WASD. Maybe Shift and Space? It's definitely something I'll be adding when I do another pass on the game in a week or two to add things I didn't have time for during the jam.
Thanks so much for playing!

I enjoyed this! Didn't have time to finish is but I like the unconventional forced perspective and the art, although the font, while it matched the aesthetic of the game, was hard to read.

I really dig the core premise. The game only seems to display in the corner of the window for me and it crashed my browser the first time I tried to play but once I got into it I was enjoying the destructible terrain. Trapped myself under rubble a few times, but that's what the reset button is for I suppose. Good job!

X is jump and shoot. There's a tutorial message in the first room that tells you, but I'll add the controls to the game description!

I like the art and the audio but I couldn't really figure out how to progress. I fed a mushroom to a snail and made it angry, but couldn't find any other interactions. I'd be interested to read a guide at some point to see what secrets this game holds!

Thanks for playing! I'd be interested to know what you mean when you say you don't think the mechanics 'matched that well'? Do you mean matching the jam theme? Matching with each other?

Thanks! The tutorial level was a total accident actually, the room I was using for testing mechanics just kinda morphed into a tutorial.

Neat idea! I could see it expanded into a full game about repairing other people's spell circles, or maybe a game about drawing spell circles and seeing if other players can line them up properly

Neat idea! I could see it expanded into a full game about repairing other people's spell circles, or maybe a game about drawing spell circles and seeing if other players can line them up properly.

Pretty fun! I could see a full game made from this with a little refining of the player controls, but the swapping mechanic works great. It's a similar core idea as my game but a very different execution. 

Just played and left a rating on 100 Enemies! It was super fun (if a bit difficult) and it's really cool to see a suggestion from a year ago left a seed for the next jam! I only managed to kill 4 enemies on my best run but the game itself feels good and functions great, so I imagine with just a bit of iteration it'd be at a point I could likely survive all 100!

If you feel up to it, want to check out my jam entry for this year? Its about fighting gravity in a pinball/pachinko machine

https://boredskeleton.itch.io/rico-shae-in-cat-ball-fling

Nice! Really hit that sweet spot of having just enough control that you feel like you're just barely hanging on.

Yeah the level ended up erring a little on the long side but we wanted to leave lots of room for replaying for highscores. Thanks for playing!

That was the objective! Unfortunately as we were coming up on the deadline we ended up having script to the end as fast as possible and had to cut some variety . Glad to see you saw the bit of choice we did get to make tho!

I just watched your video! I'm super glad you liked it! 

Really enjoyed this! The game does a good job simulating the feeling of actually using a flashlight in a dark environment, and I really appreciate how the game is basically completely lacking in challenge until you start getting overconfident a moving too quickly. Well done!

Had fun! I think that adding in extra ways to interact with the balls would be a nice development on the game, like perhaps you can point at an enemy ball that's about to hit you and kick it away if you time a button press? I dunno but the game was a lot of fun and the art was really nice

It's essentially that old flash game The Big Red Button except with more drawings. Not bad but couldn't get to far on account of the game glitching out and not letting me progress

I got 50 one my first try! Really neat game, if a little straightforward. Gets pretty hectic as it goes on. My main suggestion would be to put a visible grid over the game because I'd often be certain I was lined up to grab a pellet, only to be one row off. 

I had fun. Have you considered making the ship just autofire? Playing through I never really had a reason to stop firing, and if that's the case holding space the entire time seems redundant after a little while. I'm not to familiar with shmups so I dont know if another game has done that already but I feel like a shmup where you cant stop firing or only fire when you're moving would lead to some interesting gameplay if you designed around it. Just an idea. Good job.