Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines

Paul Spooner

40
Posts
A member registered Dec 01, 2023 · View creator page →

Creator of

Recent community posts

Thanks! Very fair assessment on the "obtuse" aspect. It's definitely doing a different thing.

The music player system was fun to program! Glad you liked how it turned out.

The game works! Movement is punishingly slow.
Leaderboard does not work.
Very cute pixel art.

Am I missing something, or is the only audio faint popping sounds?

Straightforward gameplay, strategy, working score and leaderboard system, great job!

Lol! No score in "ScoreJam"? No leaderboard? Bullied by a helicopter? What just happened?

Platformers need tight controls and these are sloppy. The reverse-parallax continuous background scrolling makes it feel like you are spinning around, and makes judging the jumps way harder than it should be. Nice art assets, but very frustrating gameplay experience.

Congratulations on your first game @BitFiendish!
Lots of improvements could be made, but the game actually works, so that counts for a lot.

Surprisingly challenging to get a high score, very tight controls, not bad at all!

The "R" key doesn't restart when you have successfully escaped via the escape pod, but that's the only bug I found.

The leader-board is disconnected from the players score, so it is not qualified for the game jam. Basic endless runner style game. A scrolling foreground would have added to the sense of motion. The music is very pensive for a game called "escape the machine".

And don't tunnel boring machines make tunnels out of rock? Are you running inside the soil or something? Very confusing setting.

Made it on the leaderboard. "win" condition is 10 prisoners escaping. Fits the theme for sure!

Agreed that the UX is not the best. Will do better next time!
What browser are you playing in? I can resize it in Firefox, and it defaults to full-screen on my phone.

I'm playing in the browser:


My man, you can totally fly waaaaaaaaaay off the screen on the right and bottom. Staying off the bottom of the screen means you can shoot the enemies, and not get hit by any of their projectiles.
As for the game not allowing resize, I'm playing on desktop and can resize the window easily.

Lol! It's just kinda rude for someone who made the game to post a really good score, under their own name. Like, you have access to the source code, of course you CAN get the highest score.
I'm pretty sure I got them all, and there's still a really significant score gap between your score and all the other player scores. I'll gladly take second place to the dev though.

I did a bunch of bugfixes for my game too... just sitting in the input queue as well.

Made a video tutorial, which I concede is a tacit admission of game-design failure on my part:

Video Tutorial

Made a video tutorial, which I concede is a tacit admission of game-design failure on my part:

Video Tutorial

Empty page awaits,

No game to play or to judge

Silence fills the score.

Not much beyond a tribute game, but perfectly serviceable.

Managed to "seduce" all the sailors with full song power, but was unable to beat the dev's high-score. Rude.

Yeah, getting a good score is a bit confusing. If you just click on random stuff you'll eventually beat the game though!

I agree! Midjourney AI image generation does not often disappoint. Wish I could take credit for it myself.

Pretty standard shmup. Servicable art, sound, music.

Has implementation problems. Here are the ones I found.

  • No leaderboard, which is one of the requirements for the game jam.
  • Player ship can just fly off both the bottom and right side of the game, making "surviving" trivial. Also, you can not fly all the way to the left and front, so some pickups are unreachable.
  • Some of the "boss" ship health-bars are bugged, not displaying the correct health.
  • The background is a single sprite that scrolls and then resets. unfortunately, it starts and ends partially out of the play area, which creates a very distracting grey blink at the top and bottom of the screen, right where the enemies are supposed to be appearing.
  • No way to exit to the main menu.
  • Dying and resetting the time loop does not reset enemy projectiles.
  • The music source is positional, so after you beat the game, resizing the game window changes the volume of the music.
  • No auto-shoot (except for a short time when you get the temporal anamoly powerups), so you have to keep clicking to keep shooting. Auto-shoot is a standard shmup feature, so since this game has nothing else going on, the omission seems insulting, especially as the feature is clearly implemented, and just turned off for most of the gameplay.

Controls are good (except for no auto-shoot). Music and sound are asset packs, but unoffensive.

Cute pixel art, if a bit minimalist. A few variations on the tree sprites to break up the level design would have been nice.

Controls are a bit sluggish and unresponsive, very frustrating in a twitchy maze game like this.
Music is annoying. Step up your game Komiku!
Music adds another track playing over itself whenever you exit to the menu and re-enter the gameplay. Set the audio player Polyphonism to 1 to prevent this.
Allows any player to reset the global leaderboard! Why? Just take the "reset" button out of the release version.
Dying to the wizard fire resets you to the start of the map, but does not reset the score timer!

I see there is a melee foe running around in the background of the main menu. Curious why it didn't make it into the release game?

Overall, not bad!

I wasn't expecting "snake" to work so well with the "escape" theme, but this twist really does!
Unfortunately, the game does not seem to queue up control inputs, so it is much for frustrating than it should be.

You're not alone; It's a rather confusing game. The "wall of text" help buttons, was as far as we got for the weekend jam. A full tutorial would be great though, I agree!

Right about the sounds too, there are none! Just the background music.

We used LootLocker as well, just whatever the example code was, with the optional name change functions. Seems to work fine.

Thanks! The green zone is at the back of one of the big ships at the end of the level. If you take too long though, it will fly away and you won't be able to get there. Press Tab, or the restart button in the top left corner to reset the level and try again.

I'm glad you enjoyed it! Sorry you had trouble, if you push the question mark near the top it brings up the help screen which describes the objective.

I got LootLocker to work without user registration. You can change the user name using the provided JSON call, but otherwise it uses a unique user ID.

You made a game! Keep at it, and see if you can fix those bugs!

Bugged. Got a good score but game crashed. Please fix!

You made a game! Good job getting the online leaderboard working. Would be nice to enter my name though. Also, the ms are not reflected on the leaderboard. Rounding to the nearest second is not great. Still managed to get the high-score though. I'm user 5438992 and my time is 41:721 but the leaderboard rounds it up to 42.

Consider making the super-jump controls better. The E press-release and then Space (if that is how it works) which disables your jump while holding E is not intuitive. Or maybe E briefly turns off gravity?

Also, a quick-restart would be nice, or even a way to go back to the main menu without winning.

Odd difficulty curve, the second-to-last level is by far the hardest.

Also, requiring registration to play is a bit odd.

No online leaderboard, and no reset functionality?

Also, consider making the controls single-hand friendly so you don't need to use both hands.

I hope you enjoy cruising around in this game! It is the first serious computer game we have made from start to finish.

Requires UE Prerequisites.

Ball froze on one of the later levels, so I couldn't complete the game and had to restart.

Visual effects also occasionally fail. Not really a "speedrunnable" kind of game IMO. Too much input chaos and imprecision.

No leaderboard, no control help, questionable game design. Looks very cute though!

Beat the game, but I'm the only other one on the leaderboard. How do I set my name?

just sent you a discord friend request 

We don't have a music producer yet. Interested in collaborating?