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Thanks for playing the game :)

The evolution has to be 'balanced'. If you move 1 slider left by X points, you have to mode another to the right by X points. But I get where you're coming from, that screen is not explained well at all and we didn't get time to program out animation to actually see what you inherit.

I really tried to understand this game, but I dont.

It;s definitely on theme and tries something new and experimental, but there's a few glaring design decisions that would need to be addressed.

1. It's not clear how any of the stats affect anything. Should I only address some of them when they are below zero? Doesn't seem like it, since my population will die way before that(even though food and water is still high).

2. The MEWA MEWA screen puzzle has no purpose. Maybe the feature was suppose to be more complex? As of right now, I just need to scroll down from the page to see the combinations and pick the one I need. Would be easier to just let me pick directly instead of creating these combinations.

3. What do these evolved Blubbs even mean? I can infer some like Ninja=Agility, but why does the third Blubb with bizarelly large hands affect multiple stats? What does the businessman do? Why don't you just write this in the picture tutorial so I can know what I'm doing?

4. Outcome is unrelated to skill/understanding of the game. I tried to understand it, I tried to modify my MEWA MEWA often. I would always lose due to a population crash or some random negative event. In my last game, I went to 'business' blurb in the second generation and just progressed generations until I lost at 70k points. This got me to #4 place. I'm pretty sure if I played enough, I'd luck out with enough positive events at some point to be #1.

I'm not saying it's a bad game, I think I would enjoy playing it if I understood the core mechanics. If you are creating a game in a game jam whose mechanics aren't similar to other popular games, you need to invest more time in creating a tutorial/explaining the mechanics.

Ah, I never looked at the game logo close enough. I like it!

Pretty cool entry. It's unclear if the minigun is better than the flamethrower. I'm assuming that the flamethrower does AOE damage and minigun doesn't. Hard to know which to pick without seeing their stats.

It's decent, but you can get pretty far through the game by just holding the shoot button and always moving left/right. I didn't have to start actually dodging stuff until pretty late into the game.

It's definitely an innovative entry. The mechanics are way too simple, but I had fun just waiting to see what happens to my dude as the mutation level goes up.

Seems like the game is bugged. Buying anything in the shop uses points, but has no effect.

For me it's a bit laggy on a macbook pro, so it makes playing for score too hard.

I like the game, but I don't understand how does it implemen the evolve theme?

One of the best games of the jam for sure, but not without it's problems.

The game feel is really well done, and the visuals/sound is good.

I don't enjoy the difficulty scaling that much though. It rapidly moves from almost boringly easy, to too much going on. This doesn't seem to be a linear progression, but rather random spikes.

In one session I think I survived about 10 minutes. The first 5 minutes there's almost no challenge, since at most there will be 1-2 enemies on the screen. After 5 minutes, more enemies will start appearing, but at random spikes. I'll still fight 1-2 enemies at most, and then I get swamped by 6-7 all of a sudden - which I manage to beat, and then it seems to be back at 1-2 enemies for quite some time.

The problem with 6-7 enemies is that the colors are so diverse and intense on the screen, and so many projectiles moving so fast that it's very hard to process what's going on. It's no longer a challenge of 'can i beat this', but more of a am I biologically fit and young enough to process all of this.

Still think the game is pretty good and rating it highly, just tryna leave some constructive feedback as well.

Thanks for playing the game :)
Yeah, we didn't have time to explain the mechanics in the game. 

Basically when you're on the level-up/evolve screen, the items on the left side is what is currently on your ship. The items on the right are newly generated modifiers. 

With sliders, you pick which side you want to have more % to inherit, but the balance across all sliders has to be equal.

But honestly, it's just an unfinished system.

Thanks for playing :)

I'm glad you liked the initial stage of the game. I messed up some scaling formulas in the last few hours of the game jam and didn't notice since I was play testing only for 1-2 minutes each time. The fire rate never should have scaled so much that it becomes a performance issue and unloseable :D

Hey, thanks for playing the game :)

Yes, it's made in Godot. We had some sound effects made in BFXR, but without a main theme playing in the background they would start being very unpleasant once the shooting intesified.

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Also, the game is too large on my screen. Did you set the size on the edit game page? I recommend resetting the size back to the default and keeping the fullscreen button.

Great game. It's in a very polished state for a game jam. The sound effects and art go well together.

I'm personally not a fan of moving and shooting at the same time with the mouse - it makes it hard for me to process in real time what I need to do and in the latter stages of the game I'm just moving around and hoping my bullets hit something.

 The system works well in the earlier stages when there's less enemies/stuff going on, so I'm able to process if I want to keep shooting at a target, or avoid bullets. 

I've got no strong suggestions on how to handle this, but maybe have a targeting cone in front of the player and allow bullets to home in on enemies in this cone?

Was too lazy to install autoclicker software, so now my finger hurts.

Cool game, especially considering everything except sound assets was made by you. The textures look really nice. Is the player an infamous among us reference?

The player movement is a bit floaty, feels like you are applying force to a body - but in a game like this i'd expect movement to the more 'constant' if that makes sense.

In the later stages of the game when there's a lot of pins, it can be hard to process visually where to shoot the next ball - since standing pins are mixed in with knocked over pins. Maybe a color adjustment to the knocked over ones would have helped draw the players focus to where there's still standing ones?

Thanks for playing the game :)

" Right now game seems to be too easy. In just a few minutes my fire rate was so big I could just stand in one spot and rotate and no enemy would be able to hit me :) "
We were doing some leveling/evolving system changes in the last few hours, and using a bunch of non-linear formulas that scale over time. Our math was off somewhere, but sadly we can't change it anymore.
"Also no not sure how leader board worked. Did I miss the place to enter my name?"
You didn't miss it, we tried to add this in the last few minutes of the jam but failed to upload in time. The game uses loot locker's leaderboard already, so there's unique player identifiers on the server - we just don't display them.

Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed the game. I appreciate your feedback and it gives me some clear actionable steps on what I can improve in the future.

As far as the visuals, the "shadow" effect is done with a timer that creates a new frozen AnimatedSprite copy of the players and changes it's colour. This "ghost" node then reduces it's transparency over time and finally deletes itself after a couple of seconds. I tried some different approaches like using the particle effect system for this, and while you can create a ghost trail, it doesn't work with AnimatedSprites.

The living/dead animation is the players death animation played forward, then in reverse. I split all my nodes in the world into "corporeal" and "spirit". On world change I notify one group to add transparency and the other to reduce it. I also do a color change. Someone told me it could be improved further with sprite masks, allowing you to have alternate versions of tilesets for the spirit world etc. It seems like a good option to explore.

The graphics are lovely, and the attempt of storytelling without words very interesting but it's a bit unclear what you are suppose to do in the game.
I reached some house I guess, jumped around to the right side there where I couldn't pass and then went left. This returned me back to mothers home where she was heart emoting but I couldn't do anything. Going right I would just dissapear of the screen with nothing happening, and jumping around the house and mashing the keyboard didn't help either.

The game is fun(or maybe I just really like bullet hell games). Not sure how it exactly fits the theme. I see that upgrades change the enemies but I haven't noticed that much in game. I got to wave 4 and I guess maybe the enemies shoot differently but the mechanic was not completely clear to me. I wasn't clear how to make a proper decision on the upgrades.

While the main character is charming, I didn't realize initially that the heart is the hitbox,  I thought the whole body was or at least the chest. I would make the heart a darker red honestly as it blends a bit with the other bright "pastelish" colors in bullet hell.

I also noticed some collision issues that would happen when I shoot at the enemies. I could see the bullet going through them without registering a hit. It happens rarely, and I tried replaying to pinpoint when the issue happens but I was not able to figure it out.

The two biggest issues I noticed:

- If you do not take the speed upgrade, some boss fights can be really annoying. I guess the boss movement direction is random, and he will sometimes move away from me and be too far for my bullets to reach him. We move at almost the same speed, nothing is happening, and the fight becomes cumbersome.

- It's hard to know which direction the basic enemies will shoot and in what pattern. I have to stay close to them in order to damage them and get the score, but not knowing what to expect from their attacks makes my positioning harder and I take some damage that feels unfair to me at that point.

Still, fun is most important and this game hits the spot well. I expect to see it place highly in the rankings.

Thanks for playing the game. I really appreciate the detailed feedback, I feel like people usually avoid being too direct on game jams so sometimes you don't get the critique you need.
I didn't experience the issue you had with jumping. I thought in that way the controls were fine. Not sure how I could fix them in that case either. Maybe reducing the jump impulse(how much force is applied initially), but also reducing the downward gravity acceleration a bit?

For everything else I completely agree with you, most of them were issues I was aware to some degree during the work. I think it boils down to what you said, it was overscoped.  I need more experience working with some core mechanics for these types of games before I could execute it properly in such a time frame.

This is such a cool game. I'm really digging the art style. This game kind of hits a soft spot for me because I made something relatively similar for my first Ludum Dare. It was also a float in the sky being going around with "seeds" and leaving a trail of those seeds on a grid.

Anyway, you guys did a way better job than I ever did. Really enjoyed playing the game!

There are some very creative mechanics in this game, but it also has a couple of issues. I really like the float mechanic, and I used mainly that to finish the game. I was not clear what [C] does, and I didn't need to use super speed even once.

Some possible improvements:

- Make it so some segments can only be finished by using [C] or Super speed, if you can't do it I'd just eliminate them completely

- Checkpoint system, make it so the player respawns at predesigned checkpoints. Currently it seems like its done in a way where the last time you safely touched a wall it's your respawn point. I was able to brute force this several times to work in my favour by just spamming movement randomly(I could set my respawn on spikes). This also caused some issues where I would die 10 times in a row in a second as well haha

And finally a bug I saw was, when I was in inverted gravity mode, the bird was saying something to me but it's text was black. I guess you modified some parent node and that affected the text. I was not able to read what the bird says in both occassions :(

There's a lot of variety in enemy types, some of them are very interesting(the little jumping guy?), some of them less so(like the spiders for example). The game is a bit too slow for my taste, I think making it a bit more dynamic would improve the fun factor.
You've done a great job though, especially for your first(published :)) game jam.

Thanks for playing! I'll have to check out sprite masks for sure, I had an idea of the spirit world having destroyed/damaged walls and windows but I wasn't sure how to implement it best.

The enemies are relentless, I agree. At one point I was thinking of giving the player infinite life just so people could play through. I really messed up my enemy state machines honestly, it was so much spaghetti that I just couldn't fix anything :D

Thank you for playing! Honestly the game is a bit wonky with the enemies attacks and level design as I did them both during crunch time so they suffered the most. Glad you like the graphics :)

Thank you for playing :)

I played this when it was submitted, but forgot to come back to rate it haha.
Anyway, I loved playing it. The story is nice, the gameplay is simple, straightforward, and enjoyable. I think with some more work this can be a game people would pay money for.

Thank you for playing :)
I'm glad you appreciated the world building, I really like doing it and try to always put some of it in every game I make.

And yeah, the UI could use a lot of work haha. It's something that I started practicing for this jam, but still needs more time investment to become better at it.

It's a good improvement to the tower defense genre(forcing the player to have an objective during the waves as well). I do think the complete loss of towers is too harsh of an idea. If you really want to stick with tower destruction, then maybe give them a bit more HP(they go down way too fast). Also, once they are destroyed you can leave ruins there that can be repaired in the next turn for 1/4 of the original price. So it still punishes the player for not taking care of towers, but the game is more salvageable if a player messes up a wave.

It's an interesting spin on flappy bird but it's way too hard. The first obstacle for me is usually the purple stones rotating with only 1 small hole in them, and it's very hard to fly through.

Definitely could use an easier beginning so that the players can get into a bit of a groove before the harder obstacles come.

It's a good game, but it needs a smoother introduction to game mechanics. Start with just 1 enemy so people can figure out how to kill without clawing for their dear lives. Some audio feedback would have been nice, so I can register with other senses if I have been hit or if I hit someone. You can use "BFXR
 or some other random SFX generator for these effects, takes 10 minutes to set them up.

I can't remember what this is called, but in platforming games(modern ones) they will usually allow you to "make" the jump if you are close to the platform and would otherwise miss it.
The most notable example that has this is Dead Cells. It's basically really hard for humans to  do precision platforming in games, so these things usually get added to avoid player frustration.

I would consider experimenting with this feature in the future, as it improves player enjoyment of platforming games. I was kind of frustrated by missing so many jumps by what seems to be 1-2pixels.

Cool game! It's a simple mechanic but it's a polished jam game. The last couple of seconds are redundant tho, the net is too far to the right so you can't save anything anyway.

Not sure how to win(I get swarmed by archers and can't  walk fast enough left and right). Cute take on the theme. Really like the attention to detail(monster breathing, villager voice lines etc.). It's a good game!

Needs a lot of polish. I had no idea if I am going in the right direction. I got to a part where I get a tall potion first, then get a wide potion, then I kinda moved to the right and I became massive(bigger then the planet) and I was left with a black screen with cards. I had no idea if I won or what? It's a cool idea tho.

It's a pretty charming game. From the talking sounds, to the dialogue, to the plot of the game. It's all goofy in a great way.  Great job!
It does get a bit too difficult in the level that introduces barrels(compared to previous levels), and I was not able to get past that one.

Thanks for playing, glad you enjoyed the game and beat the Beast-King :)

Thanks for playing  :)
I only recently got into these type of games(and making them!), so I don't know most of them. I'll definitely write down Advance Wars and Disgaea into my list of games  to checkout!

Thanks for playing, glad you enjoyed it :)

Thanks for playing the game :)
I agree with your feedback. There's certainly some quality-of-life changes that could be added to the game(I experienced the same keep-stabbing frustration in my  playstestings).
I gotta push out a fix for that speaker issue haha