itch.io

Thank you!! I absolutely want to do more with these ocs, tho I'm still figuring out exactly how I want to go about that. Maybe more VN type things, maybe I can manage a smol action game with one of em, who knows!

Huh, did you happen to get any errors or notice any particular behavior when trying to launch it?

Heck yeah, absolutely spent the better part of a decade slowly learning how to get those signature N64 smeary vibes :D

not as scrunkly as u <3

Glad ya liked it, thanks for checking it out! I'd love to explore these characters and setting more, just need to figure out how to go about it =w=b

Heck yeah, thank you so much for playing! >w<

Glad you enjoyed it!! I stumbled on the stream archive of your playthrough, and I gotta say... this is officially my favorite comment I have gotten on Railgun:



(though fun fact i am not in fact a zoomer xD)

Thanku for playing!!

So the idea of a snowboarding game in which you can fall off the snowboard seems it would be, on paper, a miserable experience. Yet the implementation of it here is not only super fun, but also really goddamned funny.

No for real, this is worth breaking down here. The raw physical comedy of bonking into a wall, splatting face first onto the ground, and watching your board sail off in a mockingly extended arc before embedding itself in the terrain cannot be overstated enough. This level of polish and charm didn't need to be in a prototype. Neither did a fully animated (and cute af) character model, nor a number of particle effects and little visual touches. But the fact that it's all here indicates to me a level of not just competence, but finesse, care, and love that really ought to be commended here.

The separation of board and rider isn't just for shits and giggles though. You can toss the board ahead of you, jump off it ala Odyssey's cap jump, and recall it back to you with a burst of momentum from the direction it returned from. If you catch it before hitting the ground you can chain straight into a board glide with that momentum in tow. You can wall kick, summon a block of ice anywhere to kick off it, and yeahhh there is no tutorial here so it took me about an hour to discover most of the basic tech you can pull off with this moveset. But let me tell you, it's a hell of a thrill to steadily find your snow legs and learn to pull off some truly unhinged physical absurdity... and bonk headfirst into the occasional wall.

Historically the snowboarding genre of games have been largely limited to two focuses: racing, and stunts. And while there's nothing wrong with those, I always knew snowboarding could be more than just that. Exploration is an element I feel is, ironically, left sorely unexplored in this context. I've attempted to fuse the two myself before (and likely will again!) and yet this prototype approaches the same concept in ways I never would've thought of. The simple act of carving and jumping around to find all the lil soda can tabs was such a treat. There is a certain magic in spotting some far off ledge, thinking "wait, can I get myself over there?", formulating a concoction of moves, then pulling it off until you actually make it. And I can't really say I've gotten the opportunity to do quite that in any of the snowboarding games I've played previous.

While I'm saddened that this prototype is the most we'll get of this particular interpretation of the concept, I'm very grateful it exists. It's got me thinking about my own ways to make this sort of thing work, and I hope it gets other devs considering it too!! All I'm saying is, if I'm running around in a graybox prototype for upwards of five hours, there's something really special here.

This mini-metroidvania is just lovely, I can hardly believe it was made in the span of a month. (This is an abridged version of a longer review I left on the game)
 
The evolution of the moveset here is wonderful; fairly straightforward jumps evolve into blissfully fluid displays of momentum. It's got some pain points pointed out by others already-- namely the tricky wall kick sections that in retrospect were likely intended for the wallrun-- but the simple act of moving around is still such a joy.

The world is big, impressively so, though it was easy to get lost, mostly due to some samey looking areas and the lack of a map. However the presentation overall is gorgeous: the cute player character and their choppy animations, delightfully blurry texturework, crunchy sounds and hauntingly beautiful music were all very reminiscent of the era. The N64 inspirations absolutely shine through. 

It can be a lil rough around the edges, but it's very impressive for what it is, and the time it took to make it. I understand there are plans to finish things off with a steam release, so I very much look forward to that!!

The devs have made something very special here. To me it's obvious that they've got a ton of potential for great things.

what the heck that is all so thoughtful i am going to crry hfhdskjfhdsgh
THANKU, I'm glad you enjoyed it!! I did hand paint in all the vertex colors for the room, and originally, it was meant to be a much darker night scene lit  solely by the monitors. But I slapped in the light shaft on a whim, and the vibe carried the lighting elsewhere... I think it all turned out much better for it >w<

I mean... Spider will force her to fix it. Now will the repair be any good? Probably not (definitely not)

Thank you very much!! >w<

Hell yeah it's got that signature 3-point filtering xD
And thank you!! I'm plottingto do some cool things with these characters in the future, so we'll see what's in store for 'em

Personally I find the level design and control to be fighting against each other a bit... it feels less like I'm driving a car and more like I'm trying to wrangle a slippery bar of soap. Turning feels both way too sharp and much too wide depending on the situation, the camera whips around in a disorienting way, the acceleration backing up matches that of rocketing forward. That all combined with the narrow platforms and precise jumps makes for a rather frustrating gameplay experience. I was able to get a handle on the drifting with some practice, and it wasn't until a decent chunk in that I discovered you can actually double jump, so perhaps with more practice I could get a better handle on it. I snagged the end of the first track, took a long time to climb up to the second, and couldn't manage to get very far at all in the third. As it stands, the tracks demand a pace and precision that I can't seem to grasp with the present control. Perhaps that's the whole point of combining racing with platforming here, and that's simply going right over my head :P

I do love the bouncy synthy soundtrack (especially the halftime drum intro for the city level). The sounds for the cars themselves feel a bit flat, and they're in need of a sputtery engine loop to give a better sense of speed and torque.

The art is nothing short of phenomenal. The texturework is detailed, Acropolis and CPU look great, but Shibuya... is on a whole other level. The sleek skyscrapers and grungy tunnels, the reflection of the world in the wet pavement, and the lighting oh my god. This is one of the few entries I've seen with proper vertex colors, and given the vibrant liveliness of the city I can only imagine how much fun the artist had painting in that lighting, I know I would. Massive props to the environment artist, these tracks are nothing short of breathtaking.

also: yellow team for life

I can't say too much about the gameplay since the prototype is presently in a pretty early stage, but I did run into a bug where the shape on the back of the ammo indicator desynced from the ammo type shooting out of it (I believe from flicking the mouse wheel around a little too quickly or something). I do really dig the wacky enemy designs like the massive chomper box, and my favorite was definitely the floating hexagonal... brain... cage... turret... thingy xD

The raw power of duplicating a mesh and setting it to a shadeless black material... is far too great
(the fan looked kinda awkward without em so it was a hacky, if period appropriate engine-side solution lol)

Thank you very much!! I'm a sound designer by trade, but cranking out the art assets and animations and pulling it all together with the writing was a hell of a learning experience xD

I love the charm here, everything looks just lovely. The textures are small and smeared out over large surfaces, the mole is appropriately chunky and exhibits a dorky bounce as they walk around the hub, and there's a decent amount of resolution crunch on the final output. It all looks a bit fuzzy, and in the best way.

I will say I ran into a few issues when playing. The difficulty spike from level one to two was quite a wall, and it took a lot of attempts to finally clear it. The aim on the gun is wonky and I could never quite suss out how the position of the onscreen cursor correlated to where in 3D space the shots would actually wind up. Aim was very slow on a controller stick so I had to swap over to mouse/keyboard to clear level two. The rate of fire felt slow unless I was really mashing the button. And a few times the minecart wound up with some odd offsets from the track, either a slight displacement horizontally or, on one occasion, a fair distance above the track. I suspect it's due to how gravity is implemented, and how the grace period is granted for swapping lanes when your current track has already ran out, but that's all just conjecture.

Overall I love the lighthearted vibe here! If you wind up implementing the boss I'm curious to see how that fight plays out!

So I did have a rough time trying to play this. I'm sure you're likely aware of most bugs, but as a quickfire list just in case: the punch doesn't seem to connect or have any sort of effect. The game hitches and stutters more and more, seemingly the longer it's been open. And after three or so CPU rounds the game hung indefinitely, and even after force closing it caused some graphical hiccups on my machine (Windows 10) until I performed a restart. Additionally the time it takes to dig up an item is so long that I only ever managed to grab a single item with the CPU smacking me the whole time, and the round timed out before I got the chance to use it. I can't say I know your exact intentions of how the flow of game would play out, but speeding up the dig time, or providing a way to better stun your opponents to allow for strategic power-up nabbing, feels like it'd help make things more interesting and chaotic.

(edit, forgot this part) Additionally I had some trouble with controller input. Namely, the B button (to dig) pauses the game instead, for some reason. I'm using a PS4 controller, and the issue persists with either it by itself or using DS4 windows to spoof it as a 360 pad. (It's a common issue I run into with Unity titles, so it's likely some pre-existing engine jank/incompatibility.)

However, technical issues aside, this looks and sounds phenomenal. The energetic soundfont-driven title theme, the cute and colorful characters, the bubbly and bouncy UI, the chunky pre-rendered audience cutouts, the indistinct blur of the arena: it's all gorgeous! Very cozy and reminiscent of the era.

I understand y'all had a difficult time getting things playable for the deadline, but I will say, this has a lot of potential. If your team decides to keep running with it, I look forward to seeing what you're capable of!!

YEAHHH I REMEMBER THE AIM SOUNDS
at one point mine was this obnoxious triple guitar chug. that played with every. single. message. my god how did we live like that

Oh they very well know... but it's a choice they've resigned themself to ;w;
Thanku much btw!!!

Question... given the strict limitations set on assets here, would 3D be viable under any circumstances?

To give an example, even a simple background rendered from a single static camera angle is going to incur a number of runtime-loaded assets: separate objects/props, multiple textures and different materials, etc., all things that could be drawn reasonably into a single background image if it were instead 2D. If a reasonable attempt was made to emulate what is presently allowed with drawn 2D assets--single camera angle limited to zooming/panning, mostly static background elements or a simple looped animation (nothing dramatic like time-of-day relighting, etc), and a sole character comprised of a single mesh with a looping idle animation and one gesture-- would this be acceptable?

I ask because 3D modeling and texturing is within my present range of abilities, but not drawing, and I would be working solo for this.

Additionally there is the smaller matter of simple sound effects associated with on screen text being rendered to the screen, aka "babbling", and whether or not these would count as GUI sounds or take up the single SFX slot. Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback! Glad to hear it's working on some flavor of Linux. As for future development, sadly I wanted to just get Gub-Ball out the door so I could work on bigger and better things. Any future updates will most likely be for fixing any major game-breaking bugs if they crop up, rather than adding new features. Thanks for playing and giving feedback though! =w=b

https://gubbles.itch.io/gub-ball

It's a small, dumb game that's free anyway, but I'm more than happy to contribute to this cause in whatever small way I can. Thank you for creating such an awesome force for good and justice <3