itch.io

Yeah, I pretty much immediately abandoned clicking in favor of the space key XD.

That's a lot of graphics work, looks nice, and it's great that you had functional story embedded in the game too. I like the idea of the very literal one resource, especially in stage one, theoretically you could have pushed that even further and done a 'companion' style resource, and even more thematic, a bounder of coal maybe, it's a very well themed game. and the music is fine if a bit generic-actiony. Would have been nice with a bit of Christmas flare. But it is really themed well in general, like needing to defeat 12 enemies to clear a level.

I feel like the weakest part of this is the gameplay. The arena is well designed to kill enemies, so much so that in no time I was prethrowing ice trying to catch zombies as they spawned in. For the most part, it's very easy. If you're ever on the ground for some reason, though, you have to get quite close to hit an enemy to hit them with your ice because of your fixed attack. I kept finding myself trying to run toward them in hopes of adding my own momentum into the throw so I could hit them from further away on the ground. An idea anyway.

Programatically, it looks like there is a great deal of inconsistancy about when an enemy counts as being dead. The game immediately counts up and lets you exit the level when you hit your 12th enemy, but their collision area isn't disabled when they're hit, blocking shots during their entire death animation (up to the explosion), and can actually still kill you. And that's consistant with the counter in the upper left that doesn't count them as dead until the explosion triggers. Personally, I'd count them as dead, and disable their hitboxes immediately when they were hit, but I understand that you  wouldn't want to make the game any easier.

Oh, and I instinctively used some of the alnternative controls, it's nice that they're there.

I don't think so? I suppose it depends on the formula but that wasn't my impression. The number of level ups each time I collected resource kept increasing steadily, and I started just feeding them all back into multiply drop rate, so at some point you're buying like a dozen levels of multiply drop rate in one pick up, then like 100 or more. It gets silly pretty fast. I'm guessing the multiplier is somehow exponential, especially when you buy like 100 levels consecutively.

Yeah, a trigger even as low as like, 10,000 to move to a victory screen would be cool, and avoid it from getting this silly 😆

And I must have had my headphones off for some reason at the time not to mention this earlier, the music is quite nice too, very atmospheric, suits the setting and tone well.

I am a big fan of logic puzzles, so I actually realy like the types of puzzles, and this variant adds additional limitations that are normally missing. There's no dumping water, or filling the vessels to the top. The pause mechanic (you could call it a thinking mechanic) is actually really central to this, and could have used a dedicated icon. Unfortunately there's a problem. Unless I'm missing something in the way this works, it seems very much like every puzzle besides the very first is impossible.

You see, since  this version has no way to dump or add water, the total water volume in the puzzle has to equal the water volume in the goal. Also since you're either emptying or filling a jug with your last pour, one of the goals has to be entirely empty or entirely full. That doesn't necessarially mean having those properties makes it solvable, but it definitely isn't solveable without one of those properties.

Given that it seems like each pot has a specific goal volume, it would be nice to have those goal values graphically next to, or part of the buttons. (Ex: 2/ 5 - Goal 4). I'm a big fan of the concept in that I like these sorts of puzzles, and this interpretaion works alright for me. We have a set volume, and the game keeps track of the contents as we work. The timer... well I suppose it prevents endless random shuffling, and with the pause mechanic it works well. You could also choose a maximum move count, or even just give a clear rating based on the moves left. (Keeping track of cleared puzzles / ranks would be nice in theory if you continued this.)

Let me know if I missed something! The first puzzle works perfectly,

Like the bit of parallax you had with the BG. Some things you could have done to make gameplay smoother is instead of checking on a timer if the shoot button is down to shoot, when they shoot, start a timer, and then don't let them shoot again until it's up. That way when you wait for a while, then shoot, the bullet comes out instantly. That better suits the idea of paying for shots as well.. About that, it would be nice if there's immediate visible feedback of your resource count going down as soon as you fire a shot. As it is, you see it going down, but it doesn't really feel like it's linked to you firing.

My initial thought was that you should add a delay to prevent them from selecting a level up ability as soon as the screen came up, so  the player doesn't accidentally select a powerup just because they're holding in the fire button. Well, that's not great if you level up a dozen or hundreds of times at once.

An end condition trigger in that case would have been nice. Turns out multiply drop rate is pretty good:

A lot of fun. Using the modules and a bit of acclimation, I was able to pick up some wins. The ending is a bit lackluster, though, although I'm glad to see there is one. I also thought it would be interesting if negating a certain attack had any effect on the way in which the game continued, but that didn't seem to be the case, that could have been a fun way to activate a different mode so to speak.

I think I'm pretty close to beating it without using any of the modules, but that's a tough challenge. Restart optioin from the pause menu would be nice for those runs I doom in the start. Great little game.

Pretty challenging, It took me a few tries to get my first win. It feels like it takes a run to figure out what the options mean and what the goal is. 

I get the impression that the logic going on is pretty intersting under the hood... Or it has some rng that you are free to interpret as your strategies working, which if so still works to a similar effect. The game can feel unfair though sometimes in that it seems like you can't effect their stats. 

The interest bar is a bit misleading in the sense that as far as I can tell, it seems like things get pretty hopeless at anything past like one third interest.

I appreciate a story that draws on personal expression, but I'm not sold that there is a meaningful character change. The character seems to start and end in a positon where they are at the whim of the (dystopian) setting they find themselves in.

I think you could tell a similar story mechanically and thematically with a focus on character improvement in a way that those improvements solve their problems in a more permanent, personally empowering way.

Very interesting mechanic, thanks for sharing this game.

👍

The chip graphics were nice, but in general everything was pretty empty and abstract. The player and all the bullets, even yours being the same color... well it's readable, because you and yours are small and on a track, but it isn't very visually interesting, even if it is thematic. The music was nice, if a bit on the shorter side for a loop.

I never quite understood how the player decided which direction to face when it wasn't part of the the rotation pattern. Like after you move down a direction, or got to a fresh intersection. Other than one corner where it seems like you don't turn the right way immediately at an intersection, it didn't really effect play that much. Most of the levels were very easy. Though if you did die, the game did not handle respawning gracefully at all, breaking in various ways. Something isn't being reset correctly there.

Since you can't shoot at intersections regardless, I think it would be nice if you only ever faced in valid movement directions. That would also allow you to more strategically dodge the final boss by staying in a corner until he shot at you. 

I really liked the idea of having the ammo and health be one resource, I think that worked really well, even if it wasn't that obvious to me what that number meant my first two playthroughs or so.

Fun game, loved the style. The button doing three things in some senses, aiming, charging, and firing worked well. Would have been nice if some enemies had higher health to make the charge more obviously effective, although the charged shot worked well with stacked piercing, especially off the sides.

I did find it a bit overly easy, maybe piercing is too strong in this game to stack without limit.

Not sure if it would have helped here, but alot of the time, I like to use things like >= instead of == all the time, just to make sure my conditions go off, and nothing weird happens with simulateous events, floating point math, or whatever. Living forever with negative lives is a good common example. It shouldn't be possible to lose two lives at once, but if you do, and your code is structured in a certain way, the player might live forever, even if you didn't do any extra checks after that, two bosses or more is probably a better result game structure wise XD.

Gameplay was solid, and cool aesthetic, would have liked some bg music though. I feel like I got pretty lucky with some of the later puzzles, and the timing mechanic puzzle solving was intersting, but not in itself challenging without more of a penalty. This is especially true of the time two at once puzzle that doesn't lock you out. Because you aren't locked out, there's no reason to try to actually time both of them at once, rather you can just choose one or the other at random and time that one and see what happens.

Some way of acknowleding or enforcing a more structured approach would be nice to emphasize the puzzle aspect. Tracking the number of button presses for instance. Or having a limit or par score for each puzzle. Something like that.

Loved the art style. And you really made the limitation the core of the gameplay, so well done there.

This was a ton of fun to play, and the visuals were good, especially mechanically. The minimap was an unexpected, but great feature to have for this, though personally I would have put it on a toggle. I liked the sort of, 'worm' feel of the game as well, where as the cart got longer, it was more difficult to dodge.

One thing that I wasn't sure of is what recourse if any was there if a cart was lost. It seemed like there was some difference between it being knocked off and being destroyed, but if so, I didn't discover it in one playthrough. From the description, tt seems like the carts had individual health, but I didn't see anything that looked like a health display for the individual carts. I would have loved if reordering the carts could have been at least optionally done between rounds as a seperate menu/strategy layer, because it was obnoxious to plan and execute a certain ordering while playing, though it certainly added to the difficulty.

When I first started it up I was quite confused, because I could only move in one direction... I was trying to use left, right and down like I would for a twinstick shooter. But then (after going out of bounds and panicing a bit), I realized it was using a driving mechanic, and you have to turn left and right... but you can't go anywhere if you aren't going forward... and it's basically a bullet hell. So the train... has no momentum or default velocity, and if you don't move, you won't shoot?.. I played around a bit with using a shotgun, no-movement build or similar and just blast everything when it came near. But I was unconvinced there was really a reason not to constantly be holding forward, except that normally the game would have done it for me.

Music was great, very stylized, and fun game.

Really like the visual style of this, very cyberpunky, loved the neon. Balance wise, more of a cooldown on the bullet time is probably a good idea, with the multi-shot at the end - a cool feature, which reminded me of a talk I heard about a reload mechanic. 

The gameplay is pretty straightforward, although I did notice that the geometry bounced shots in interesting ways, you could probably take advantage of that. Constantly backing up and firing works for most things, although it's a lot easier to dodge shots when you're diagonal from an enemy rather than directly across from them, which adds a nice touch of strategy to the backup and hold shoot pattern. 

It was cool that there were a lot of different enemy types, but other than the shooters, it didn't matter much to the gameplay because the solution was pretty consistant no matter who you were encountering - keep your distance and fire at the closest enemy. The shooters were the most difficult. It seemed like sometimes your bullets would deflect theres, but it didn't seem consistant, which is for the best, as they were the most challenging enemies. It seemed like if you were in a bad situation dodging a shot could be impossible, which isn't terrible, since you have some control over your positioning.

The music worked fine. Don't do much 3d gaming/creating, so I can't say much meaningful about it other than the laser deflections being pretty random at times (normals?) The game played out well for me in the sense that I only got to the boss when I had pretty much mastered the game, was getting a bit bored with it and was more or less on full health. So I beat the boss and was done. Exactly the right pacing for me.

I certainly think I could have done a lot more to match the color choices to the mood of the game.

 A more desaturated background would have made the enemies and allies read easier better and fit the mood of the game better. As it is, the game feels a bit cheerful for the theme, but it still seems to read alright - perhaps because of the outlining, window mechanic, and green/brown domination in the relevant portions of the background. 

I think with the time crunch I defaulted a bit toward EGA style without thinking about it here XD.

Okay, got past that, and to what I assume is the end (the computer checkpoint). I have a couple more notes for you now that I've played a bit longer.

The boosting mechanic... On the boost jump, I was constantly jumping late to make sure I made the hard jump after boosting, and not having enough ground after landing to hit the next jump. I went with timing the boost to run out at a good timing - which is kind of marked by the pillar in the ceiling, so that worked out. It's true that the boost running out was hard to read . Ideally you'd have a timer graphic of some sort. More importantly, your boost state persists between lives, so you could respawn and still be boosting, for instance.

Also, maybe its just me, but I liked spamming bullets in the general direction of my target when time was paused rather than aiming carefully, but they would occasionally disappear on me. I think I tracked down the reason - it seems bullets can collide with each other, destroying any that were overlapping with time paused.

Finally, this time playing it through, I managed to get myself stuck inside terrain quite a lot.  Setting r to respawn is one quick fix for that. The game does have some nice mastery elements though. Knowing everything about the game, I managed to get in a run from start to finish without dying - which is pretty satisfying.

Huh, I thought it would be something like that, but I couldn't find the control for it, maybe I missed it in the instructions, or just was like, left shift with wasd? okay, never pressing that... and just forgot about it. I'll give it another shot, thanks.

Good use of the limitation. The dark blue wireframe bullets were especially hard to see on the black background. I had some difficulties with the boss room, the worst of which being that I could shoot my way back through the invisible barrier on the right side.

The patrolling enemies worked pretty well. It would have been nice to have some sound elements in the game. But good first attempt.

Good points! Maybe I could have made the cursor change depending on the fire mode... Although I do kind of like that uncertainty aspect of it too, needing to track which mode you are currently on, leaning into the whole one button having two functions which in this case are opposite functions. I think I could definitely have made the teleport mode look more drastically different from the zap mode though. A larger field that goes around the glass coil instead of forming inside it would have been a lot more readable. Glad the switch did it's job there!

I heard there was some difficulty distinguishing the humans and robots in a quick playtest, so I went back in to do a fix before release, unfortunately for f.lux users and the like, the main gist of that fix was to tint the robots faces blue instead of orange, which is more or less the opposite of what blue-light filtering programs do!.. Something I didn't really think about when I made the change... I wanted to keep some difficulty there, but I could have definitely gone way harsher and use dark greys instead of just using light-blue. I guess you're getting something closer to the original sprite experience that way XD.

Yeah, I had some code in to increase the spawn speed as the waves went on, but I don't know if there was a bug associated with it, or the ramp up was just too gradual to be obvious. In any case, the trains shoud at least return quicker as the game goes on. I'm glad I set the minumum wave duration to 60 seconds, or there would have been more waiting for them to pull in, maybe I could have added even more time, or variation on the time in that direction.

You're absolutely right that there's a fair amount of waiting, especially at the beginning. I can think of a few things I could have done code wise to optimize that, but in part I quite liked that it gives players a chance to see the background, which you mosty ignore during play. It might be a good idea to drop out some of the background elements - conceptually tilt the camera down toward the ground a bit, to fit more trains on screen at a time to help bring the difficulty up.

Thanks for the comments!

I quite liked the ideas behind this, it's a great idea to link jump and time freeze to the same button as well, since they sort of naturally go together. However, I had an issue early on a jump that it looks like I am supposed to be able to make is impossible for whatever reason... So either the game assumes a higher resolution than I have, and I'm just not seeing a panel, or the jump is just a tile underpowered.

So from my point of view, there's an item pickup that doesn't seem to do anything, and a '>>' icon in the bottom left that doesn't seem to do/mean anything, so that's a bit frustrating.

On perhaps a related note, the Cob-T7 screenshot doesn't seem to be related to the graphics in game as far as I can tell. Presentation wise, the graphical style that really exists is fine. But the slow pace of the games autowalk and forced deaths, really highlights the lack of music.

Great aesthetic! Yeah, the bottom command is always run, not the top, so the instructions made the game harder XD. I think my favorite level was the one where you only had Shoot and Walk as commands, and you could use the button to turn off your automatic walking, although I'd guess you could probably just time it on start.

I think I'd play like another 15 levels of this, easy. There are a handful of things I'd change. First of all, I kept trying to use which panel the wire was linked up to, as the way of setting which command would go in which slot, if for no other reason than there wasn't any visual indicator of which slot was selected. Good thing there was some audio to let me know clicking them did something.

Also, as I progressed through the game, the option board clearing whenever I failed was a pain, since it was usually an execution problem rather than a strategy layer problem. I'd probably keep the existing board, and maybe add a reset button if needed. I wish there were more chances to change the wiring during a level. I don't think there was a puzzle where you had to change what the button did while driving.

Speaking of wiring, I think there's certainly room for a third option on the board, maybe with more power draw to make that mechanic matter more. Some u-turn blocks and/or moves would be nice if you wanted to extend the play area.

In general, great entry. I really enjoyed my time with this game.

The controls certainly took some getting used to, but once I got the hang of it, everything worked pretty well. In that sense, if anything, I'd say this game had too many buttons. The turrets role as enemies was pretty underwhelming for me. I don't think I ever hit a turret for the purpose of stunning it, although i would sometimes jump to them earlier than I had to, to negate the possibility their random shot would snipe me on the way in.

Really nice level design. Good difficulty scaling, if a bit on the harsh side. Ended in a good place.

For things I might change, first, if I could get away without having to use the mouse for the slash attack, sort of similar to Celeste's four direction dashing, I would consider using that with a larger aoe on the attack to simplify the controls, although the existing controls do work once you get a hang of them. I managed to catch on eventually, but I imagine some people would have a really rough time of it.

Secondly, this game has a lot of red going on, although you made good use of changing the values so it still reads very well. I'd look into taking the red out of  the background and floor options red floortiles and reserve it for enemies their attacks, and the wall hazards. While everything worked, the green wall hazards especially didn't read that great at the edge of my vision depending on the wall color. It was a nice way to break up the monotony to have multiple wall colors to work with though.

It would also be nice if the camera moved ahead of you a bit based on your recent movement trend, especially when you are moving downward. With less visible screen, and the tendency to bounce up when you slashed something, the downward sections seemed a bit unplayable. 

As a bonus, just a touch of movement in the clouds, whether in the parallax style, a slow pan, or both, would have been nice. In general though, the clouds were a great look for the background.

The length of the game is just about perfect for a small project jam like this.

The mines are a bit underwhelming. Beat the game once before realizing there was a second feature. Would have been nice if they did more damage to the boss, and/or had a larger area of effect for the maze portion.

Part of the maze was offscreen on my monitor, but it didn't have much of a negative effect. Retry doesn't seem to work during the maze section. And I'm pretty sure the bosses attacks would multi-hit me. Would have been nice to introduce iframes, or make the attacks vanish on hit to make the bosses damage output more consistant.

I did also have a bit of a readability issue, where for a time I thought the flying error messages in the boss level were part of his attack pattern. It became a bit easier when I stopped trying to dodge them.

The maze music works, but I especially liked the music for the boss fight.

Good luck!

https://gamecarpenter.itch.io/save-and-destroy

Here's my submission.

https://gamecarpenter.itch.io/night-courier

I still play (the 1982 game) Paratrooper at least once a week XD. Your chrono time seems actually harder than the bomb runs, especially when you get to three hands. In 9 minutes of playtime I got a high score of 603, which seems pretty good considering how heavily you lowered the point totals (compared to Paratrooper), so I'll leave it there. Nice to see another remake of that game type.

Fun game, beat it. It's quite useful to allow pawns to queen so you can kill them (and earn health). My only real complaint is that it can be very difficult to see if the piece you are damaging is going to attack you (the two types of blinking, and the way they interfere with each other.) You could prioritize the attack animation over the blink animation, or choose a different way to display dealing damage.

Do you think so? It's meant to be a program to encourage freewriting, and I find it useful as a prewriting exercise myself to get me into the right mode. It does save the text for use later if you actually manage anything  meaningful, but I wouldn't really expect much XD.

I could see it either way - I wish I could dual-list it, I think I had it listed as a game initially. Ultimately I think it's a better as a tool (has better utility) than as a game (entertainment value).

After reviewing current usage, I decided to drop the utility tag. While I feel it's definitely in the category of tool - as it's a specialized text editor designed to enable writing, it certainly isn't designed for any kind of system management usage.