itch.io

Incredible. A little bit too hard, but incredible. Amazing work!

This was an incredibly good concept! Though I almost gave up on it instantly since I was trying to drag a gun onto the ship without adding a block for it first, and thought the game wasn't working, I'd love to see just a simple breakdown of "place down a block for a weapon, place weapon in block, launch, kill things, repeat" either in game or at least in description. 

- Unlocking new upgrades as you go, and building up your ship was incredibly satisfying. 
- Effects and sounds were all on point, only thing missing was screen shake
- I think it was a bit too hard, most waves I spent half of the wave just dodging things since I barely had time to shoot. Would love to see enemy speeds slowed down 30-50% 

Overall great gameplay experience, exceptional  idea, and  fantastic aesthetics / audio. Would recommend.

I actually really liked this one! Here's some feedback, hopefully you can find it helpful!

- The most fun i had was when I hurled a spear across screen and hit someone, but since enemies generally came in rows of 3, i usually just found myself running underneath the row, and shooting straight up. To encourage players to play the "more fun way" I'd recommend splitting enemy spawns across the screen instead of having them in rows, and having more enemies that each take less hits to kill. This would encourage players to run around more, and hurl spears constantly, which is fun!

- I think the first wave was really long, I was super surprised when the first upgrade menu showed up! I'd personally shorten the length of the waves especially the first one, more upgrades is more fun, and the faster it starts getting challenging the better!

- For game feel I'd recommend screenshake for when enemies die, and for them to leave splatters of blood on the ground where they died. I liked the on hit blood splatters, just a bit more effects and this could be incredibly satisfying. 

- I REALLY liked the fact you had a volume slider on the front page, I have to start implementing those. 

I got a 0 even though I made it to the end :(

I wish more people made twin stick shooters for game jams, really fun to play! I loved getting to make progress through the level, I feel like most games like this just have an infinite amount of enemies spawn in the one room you're in (like my game xP). 

The music and sound effect all fit the game very well, as well as the art style. Really simple, but worked well for the game, though I'm not completely sure how it fit the theme.

I'd personally love to see a little more juice, screen shake, death particles, death splatters, stuff like that. I know it's hard to fit in on game jams, but some simple additions can make the game infinitely more satisfying to play! 

Anyways I enjoyed playing the game, nice job!

(also I felt the stress associated with this number, glad you managed to make it in time!)

1 minute, 50 seconds before deadline

The game stopped spawning anything after wave 6, sucks since I love the concept of protecting my shape rockets from afar :(

One of my favorite things about game jams is getting to play unique little games such as this one! It was incredibly hard to get used to the controls, but satisfying when finally getting the squirrel higher!

I'd personally like to see you make the controls a little bit more forgiving, maybe have the space release button move at a lower speed, or mouse button hold it's position for half a second every time you click it. Maybe even go as far as to do both?

The art and audio are all great, and the idea is completely unique and interesting, at least I have never seen anything like it. Well done!

I love games like this! Have a massive soft spot in my heart for geometric art, and arcady games in game jams are my favorite!

I think you could have made the different obstacles appear much faster, maybe reduce the length of the first segment to 1/2 or maybe 1/3rd of it's duration, so people get to enjoy the variety of obstacles sooner.

When using rectangles for art one thing that is incredibly easy to implement in unity is 2d lighting, and more precisely 2d shadows. If you attach a light to the player and make all the obstacles cast shadows, the game looks significantly better with very little work from your end.

Another thing I'd add is a very simple animation to turn the cube 90degrees to the left when turning left, and 90 degrees to the right when turning right. You can look into doing it with unity's animation system, or just through code. It can make the whole game feel much more responsive when there are visual reactions to your input, and both of these are easy to implement! 

Overall I enjoyed playing your game, I enjoy simple concepts executed simply. Well done!

I don't know If I've ever played a "snake like" before and this was fantastic, basically a reimagination of a classic!

I know this is something most people don't think about, but your color choices were maybe the worst possible choices you could pick for color blind people, I really wish the green one was blue or white or black or purple or literally anything else since the colors you chose blend in together for me, but I understand that it's a problem specific to me. 

Gameplay vice I would've loved for either the map to be smaller, or for the train to move faster to begin with. Start of the game was a bit too slow for me. If you wanted to expand the idea further, i'd love to see different maps with different obstacle configurations.

Over all it was really fun to play, graphics were very simple which worked very well for a "snake like", and the idea of putting in a small twist to a classic genre that hasn't been revisited is something I may want to try myself in the future! Great job!

Love to see different games represented!

I don't know why, but i find the idea of the game absolutely hilarious. I can honestly say I've never played another game where I throw chalk at students :D

I think the main thing I would adjust with the game is increase how fast it scales, it felt like I could go on forever if I played it well. Also if hitting a chalk didn't increase order, it would also help with the same issue. 

Overall excellent job executing on a simple yet really unique and interesting idea!

That was fun! I made a game for gmtk where you could fly through rings and many people had issues with the controls, so I'm taking notes on how you did it (:

Also I really like the lightning projectile, very clean work overall!

Thank you for playing and feedback! Glad you made it to the end of the game, and yea an end game screen was right after tutorial in the to do list that I ran out of time for :(

Thanks for playing!

Also the character art in symbinode is fantastic!

Thank you for the feedback!

Regarding performance, did you play the web version or the windows version, and what gpu does your computer have? I'm not sure if I'll keep working on this but I'd love to have a reference point for performance to keep in mind for future jams! Again thank you for playing and leaving feedback!

Thank you for playing and linking your vod! Love seeing how people approach games I make!

Leaderboard when?

I was wondering if I'd see any games with literal scales, this ones the first one for me so far! I feel like you could've easily made the game infinite with a scaling difficulty, right now it's quite simple and it doesn't go on long enough to provide fun challenge. The Egyptian aesthetic is wonderful, great job on the art!

This one was really creative, would love to see a more polished and faster version of this!

Are there more than the first level? When I get the 5th needle the game just stops and tells me to restart or go to the menu and I dont have options to advance. 

I liked playing around with the shrink gun, one thing I would do to improve it is either increase the mass on the objects or freeze their positions so they don't go flying around the room when you lightly push them. 

That was insane, by far my favorite game so far this jam. Breakout x platformer is a genre mix up I didn't know I needed until right now, and it handles beautifully. Also the pacing is so on point, the second you have played with a mechanic just enough, something new happens. Fantastic submission, only criticism is that it's not longer. 

Also extra points for using construct, love seeing more engines represented!

Thank you for your feedback!

The long range of the laser helps with the issue a little bit, since you can defend the base from the tall buildings that are far away. We did want to do bigger rewards the further away from base you were, but I may or may not have gotten distracted making particles. 

The atmosphere is fantastic, and the concept of a wild west train outrunning zombies is really cool. Gameplay vice I think the game could benefit from instructions, I wasn't sure what the money did and if the train had health or was just plowing through zombies until 100? Anyways it was enjoyable to play, would love to see a post jam expanded version.

Thank you for playing, glad you enjoyed it!

And yes, definitely won't make cursor disappear in future games. It was an attempt to help with too many effects happening on screen, but clearly just made it worse. Thank you for the feedback!

Love the way you used level design with your lighting, really cool feel to walk around.

One thing that I think could be improved on is the size of the levels. It took a long time to wonder around, and much of the map was empty, just reducing it's size to 1/3rd or even 1/2 of it's current size while keeping everything else the same would make the environment feel more full and greatly reduce walking around purposelessly. 

Anyway fun game to play, nice submission!

Idea: Amazing

Having dinosaurs splatter on your screen: Super fun

Graphics: Absolutely solid, only thing missing is a parallax effect. 

All your tutorial prompts were perfectly placed and had useful information, props for that. The idea was brilliant and gameplay fun, but I think it would've been better explored in a grid based system. There were many spots were you were half over an edge, and it was unclear if you should jump or move forward, where as if the movement was on a grid it'd provide much clarity. Also I wish enemies moved more linearly, them accelerating to speed made it hard to predict my own movements. 

Anyways I very much enjoyed playing, solid submission and I'm shocked I haven't seen turn based platformers before, brilliant concept.

I love the aesthetic and thematic feel of the game, you definitely succeeded on your goal to make it dreamy! At first I thought I understood the mechanics but later on I realized I didn't, and I was having trouble understanding how everything works even after reading your itch page. I ended up just sort of pressing buttons and guessing my way through, which sucked a little bit.

Props for adding skip level button and level select screen, I feel like these should be mandatory for game jam puzzle games it was so useful! I feel bad for not understanding the core mechanic, it clearly had much effort and thought go into it.

This was almost a perfect game, but I was very close to giving up before figuring out how to clear room one. I kept putting my tool in the slot without knowing i needed to click the screen first, and was just guessing codes and trying to remember the access code. I probably restarted the game 5ish times since I thought I'd done something out of order and broken the game, and I don't usually give jam games 5 tries but your atmosphere was soooo good I really wanted to get it to work.

Some sort of indicator to show what you can click would have been great to remove most of the frustration, just some faint light up when close to an object you can interact with or something similar. At this state since you can't modify the game, you should at the very least add some instructions on your game page on how to clear room one, since after knowing how to clear room one the game plays fantastic.

The graphics are absolutely perfect, the way you handle lighting does a fantastic job setting the mood, audio is fantastic, and gameplay is really fun and creepy and you handle pacing really well, the second I wonder if all the game does is press buttons in rooms you start implementing new creepiness. 

Almost 5/5 across the board, but I also almost gave up on it without even getting to play it.

The gun customization is really cool! It was really fun trying out how different mods work together with different mods.  

Some minor things I'd change is:
-Make the tutorial text write faster, I was waiting for it to load instead of reading it
-Maybe have the game pause when you get a power up so you can read it, and decide where to put it. It was a little difficult to keep track of what did what while fighting enemies at the same time.

The biggest improvement you could easily implement in my opinion is making way more enemies spawn, and make them way weaker to keep the balance as it is. As a person who loves this style of game, I've found that blowing up 15 enemies that all have 1 hp and do 1 damage,  is significantly more satisfying than killing 1 enemy that has 15 hp and does 15 damage.

Anyways I enjoyed playing your game, love playing twin stick shooters in jams and you definitely a better and more creative take on the them than my own!

Holy crap it's the legend himself :O

Thank you for playing my game, the thought behind the cursor was to see what you're shooting better, but I agree it definitely didn't feel right.
Maybe having a separate shooting reticle and a separate non shooting one would have worked, or just not having all the effects on the default one. Regardless I'll remember this in the future, thank you for playing!

Yep that was the end. There was originally a giant boss fight against the red thing that you're chasing, with sounds and visuals and orchestras and lights and fireworks and shaders and particles... But then the jam ended :/

Completely agree with you on needing more light, my solution was going to be to have the spawners be light sources so you wouldn't have stuff spawn without seeing it, but didn't quite get to it.

The enemies didn't regrow but they kept spawning infinitely off of the red circles, if you didn't finish the red circles quickly enough there may have been dozens of them on top of each other. That was propably one of the main performance issues as well, and not explained at all by me. 

Truly appreciate your feedback, I'll hopefully be able to do better in all these areas in future jams.

Yoooo what up Kuro? 

Thank you for playing the game and feedback! Glad you liked it!

Thank you for playing, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

I'll focus on optimization in the future for sure, unfortunately I prioritized it too low and didn't quite get to it.

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Thank you!

Thank you for the feedback!

I definitely didn't optimize the visuals as much as I could have, was purely focusing on making it as satisfying as I could. I'll try to be more attentive towards that for future jams. 

Glad you enjoyed playing! For that one you get a button of points if you manage to make it to the next door without touching the floor, definitely could have been communicated better.

Thank you! You may have started playing before we even had a description on the itch page, I was updating it minutes before you commented!

Thank you for the feedback! Since the game only has 2 buttons, I tried to map every natural key to one of the inputs so people could intuitively press whatever key felt natural to them on the keyboard and figure out the controls while playing.

I also tried to make the power ups as intuitive as possible by highlighting the game areas they affected, though we definitely ran out of time while working on that. 

I'm sad it was difficult for you to pick up, I spent a good bit of time trying to make the game mechanics as self evident as I could. That combined with the fact that there are only 2 buttons for controls, I thought if any game could survive without an in depth tutorial, it'd be this one. Lesson learned for future jams I guess. 

Hey I played yours! Love the juiciness!

Here's mine:
https://itch.io/jam/boss-rush-jam-2024/rate/2469506

Amazing stuff with the visuals! I love the simple art style with the really polished visuals, and the audio fit in perfectly. 

Gameplay was fun overall, but quite confusing. I think you added a bit too many mechanics into the game, there was always a bunch of stuff going on and it was hard to keep track of what was affecting what. If you'd added less mechanics, and spent that time on making the smaller amount of mechanics fit together better as well as making it more clear what every thing in the game did, I feel like the overall product would have been even better. 

Regardless it was a fun to play and game feel was on point, great submission.

Hi! I rated your game, here's mine: https://itch.io/jam/boss-rush-jam-2024/rate/246950