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Ridiculously polished, and just an excellent game that is clearly on theme.

A point of critique—I think checkpointing would be helpful, and would make more sense for the speedrunning objectives. As it stands, it doesn't seem like there's much difference between completing a level on your fifth death versus your first, so why does the timer count across deaths?

Putting that minor point aside, I love everything about your game, and I'm going to go back to playing it now.

Haha, the art is adorable and made me laugh. I like your interpretation of the theme.

Am I missing something, or is the gameplay unfinished? When I play, I win instantly without having to press any key.

It's a nice start. I'm really impressed by the look of it. I can see the MS Paint usage if I look closely at the details, but overall it comes together in a very cohesive and stylish way.

This is a great first submission for a Jam. Please do update it—I'll come check it out after the rating period is over.

Thanks for the comment! I'm glad you enjoyed.

I hear you on on the feedback... I was working on a visual cue that would show you exactly where you hit on the line. Unfortunately, my indicators were extremely bugged and would sail off into the sky in a hilarious but deeply confusing way. So I had to scrap them :P

Animations and hitting sounds are extremely satisfying when the game is working. But more often than not, the animations didn't seem to show up properly. (I'm on mac.)

So gorgeous. And horrifying. I wasn't expecting the latter.

It didn't seem like there was anything preventing me from spam clicking to pass the levels.

I really like the different abstract environments for each of the game-types. There was something sort of meditative about playing this game.

I was already having trouble with the individual games, so it made me laugh when everything came together. 

Bravo! I really love the way the enemy ship firing patterns capture the instruments in each of the songs.  Very satisfying.

The rhythmic gun was oh-so-satisfying. Big fan of that.

Was there any indicator for what the shot pattern would be? I think that would have been useful to be able to aim more strategically.

My biggest problem was that I couldn't if there were enemies spawning behind me. So I kept strafing in circles and then suddenly dying.

Interesting concept, but I had trouble with it. 

I never really figured out what the timing was supposed to be. The sound effects confused me, and the animation of the squares on the chess was a bit jarring.

It didn't seem like it was possible to dodge the projectiles from one enemy (queen?) without moving faster than the rhythm allows.

I did think the way the rook moved was really neat. When it first came on screen I was like "woah, I see the idea now!"

Nice work!

• I like the three-button control scheme. It was nice to be able to play with one hand on my laptop keyboard.
• The art is so nice, so I found myself wishing that the lanes were more centered on the screen. I feel like all my attention was on the small left part of the screen and I couldn't look away to appreciate the art.
• I liked most of the levels, except the 2nd. I didn't feel like there was as clear of a rhythmic element in that one.
• +1ing the feedback on the grey notes... I didn't notice them at all until I came to write my review.

The art is awesome and I love the concept.

Unfortunately, I could not catch those hands—difficulty was too high for me. I never made it more than a few seconds, and it took a while to restart.

Looking forward to trying again after the jam since y'all plan to make it a bit easier.

Wow!  It's really immersive. I love the character designs (conductor baton wand!!) and perspective and all the little details, like the foot tapping on the first opponent. I need more battling music wizards in my life.

I had to play the game a bunch of times before I figured out the timing on when I was supposed to press. And I never really quite figured out what was going on with the stuns. So I would have appreciated some more tutorializ-ing, rather than getting my bass handed to me over and over by the first opponent.

Also, it's not clear to me what the purpose of moving around is... but maybe I didn't make it far enough to find out!

Super nice! I really like the look of the game and it's very fun. I love that you can jump over the islands.

It seems like the game slows down on subsequent playthroughs though—I had to refresh to get it back to full speed.

Such satisfying sounds, but the crabs are too cute and I feel bad. Nice game! I love the concept.

The game seems to crash when I try to play another round? No crabs spawn and clicking causes the screen the hammer to freeze.

Not quite sure if the difficulty curve is deliberate, but it is amusing.

Nice game!

Fun—water looks great!

A really satisfying and wholly pleasant experience. I decided to check it out after seeing the Randomise User video and had a lot of fun. My only real gripe is that the root division seems to be really unreliable until you get a certain amount of points into it.

I was also kind of hoping to find a Dolphin Olympics "edge of the universe"-style easter egg from growing up into the sky ;)

Great work overall! I very much enjoyed playing your game.

It's an insanely crisp and fun game :D

I missed your entry during the rating phase but I'm a huge fan now :D

it's really fun!

Ah, thanks so much! it means a lot <3

Thanks for playing and sharing your thoughts! I'm sorry the game didn't seem to be your cup of tea. I have a few suggestions based on your feedback which might make you enjoy the game a lot more if you have a chance to revisit it.

Something I saw a bit of when watching my friends play-test the game was that they would repeatedly shoot the white ball off the table so they could place it down behind the eight ball. It sounds like you may have gone down a similar path when you played the game. Unfortunately, this strategy is not too effective because of the time it takes to retrieve the ball, but more crucially I also think it makes the game a lot less fun.

You might be surprised how effectively you actually can reposition the white ball without relying on placing it down as crutch. The trick is to really make use of your bullet time so that you can aim your shots. No matter how unpleasant the location of your eight ball seems to be, as long as you can get the white ball to the left of it, you actually should be in the clear. Here's a simple example of that:

Here's another example which I think demonstrates this really well. It might seem like there is no hope of rescuing the eight ball here, but leaning into the bullet time makes this into a nice save which feels really clutch, but isn't too hard to execute. 

As long as you still have bullet time left in the tank, pretty much anything is possible. A large part of the mastery curve in the game comes from being able to pull the clutch shots off quicker, so that you don't run out of your ten seconds of bullet time as the levels get harder.

I'd really encourage you to give the game another shot with this in mind, just because I think you might have a lot of fun with it if you can get past the initial hump of figuring out how to best utilize the controls. But either way, I appreciate you playing and sharing!

Really fantastic use of the theme. I love that the game is so simple yet results in a lot of depth in the gameplay.

Thanks so much! <3

It's a cool idea and the game looks very nice.  It was really satisfying every time to release the barrage of bullets. The title screen / tutorial was great too and the game was easy to get into.

However, even with some enemy variety being introduced I never felt like the gameplay while charging really picked up. I think I'd have either liked to see more complex bullet patterns but also allowing the player to move during the charging, or just something else to do during the game like collecting power-ups.

Really fantastic art style. I enjoyed the platforming, though it seemed like there wasn't any jump buffering which I felt at times.

I got confused by this level though, is it possible to make it up that platform? It seemed like I wasn't able to jump high enough.

Any chance you'll be making a mac or browser version of the game? It looks really interesting :o

Thanks so much! I'm glad you enjoyed the strategic depth :)

This is literally my dream comment because you hit on exactly the things that are my favorite parts of the game.  It's so on point that one of my friends jokingly accused me of writing this one, haha.

Thanks so much for playing and sharing your thoughts! I'm glad you enjoyed :)

I had a lot of fun with this game and played it through the end. It felt like a really satisfying mix of puzzler and bullet hell. My moment was in  the stage that looks like a fort (not sure what number it was), when I realized I could go around and blow up the back wall instead of trying to charge through the front.

I was surprised at first by the music, since it seemed at odds with the very cartoony graphics. But as I played more, I liked the vibe it gave; together with the somewhat fiendish expression on the bomb and the simple instruction "destroy", it made me feel like a very sinister force.

My problem was that I felt the rest of the audio really clashed with the music. This was especially grating during the sound that plays when you lose a level, which was extremely dissonant when it overlapped with the music. I really did not like hearing the loss sound. 

The win sound was similar, but it was much shorter (and I heard it considerably less often, haha) so it wasn't as bothersome to me. Beyond that, sounds that weren't necessarily discordant with the music, such as the bomb explosion, still just felt like they were stylistically opposed to the music, though they did seem to fit the cartoony graphics.

Despite that, I still had a great time with the game! It was a really satisfying and unique experience that stayed fun and fresh for me throughout the game. I also thought it was really easy to get into, and never got too frustrating even though I found some of the levels to be pretty tricky. Great work!

No problem! Glad you figured it out :)

Waiting for the mac build ;D

Here's a GIF (it's sped-up and poor quality, sorry!) so you can see what it looks like on my end. It's like there's an invisible circle I can't move past. I think it's most observable towards the end of the video where you can see the character slowly rubbing against it.

Thanks so much!

Thanks! The music was definitely a bit too dramatic for some but I'm glad you liked it :)

Haha, if you're curious, the way I came up with the idea was super serendipitous but somehow natural at the same time. I only got started with trying to make games recently, so when the jam started the only thing I knew how to do in unity was move a sphere with a rigidbody around using the arrow keys. That pushed me towards trying to do a physics-based bullet hell, where you're a sphere trying to avoid being knocked off a platform by a bunch of flying objects, since that felt like something I could reasonably pull off.

I was in the shower thinking about level designs for this game when I came up with the idea of a pool-table shaped map, where you would need to avoid being pocketed by a bunch of balls rolling around. I really liked this concept, and it got me thinking—what if the entire game was pool-themed?

That question took me down the path that eventually led to this game. I honestly had no idea if the game would even make any sense at all, so I was incredibly relieved when I played my first 'tech demo' and it was FUN.

Thanks so much for your comments! That vibe of making you "feel like you're making the best shot of your life every time" was exactly what I was going for with the music and the gameplay, so I'm really glad to hear it worked for you :)

I'm impressed—I think you've done the best out of anyone I've seen or heard! Level 9 is the final level for now, so you've almost beat it all.

I'd be willing to bet your experience with the eight ball seeming to be hit too hard is because of the heavy (solid-colored) variants of the balls that start spawning later in the game. 

I tried to design the levels to introduce those ball variants in an intuitive way.  For example, Level 5 (Flood) is the first place where they appear. I structured the level so that the level repeats itself, once with the lighter striped balls, and again with the heavier solid-color balls.  I also designed the spawners so that the player would be virtually guaranteed to have either the eight ball or cue ball experience a collision with both variants.

I like the way heavy balls are introduced, but this is probably something that really needs text if I want players to be able to figure out, just because it's totally non-obvious that striped vs. solid would be anything other than a cosmetic difference (and you might not even notice the cosmetic difference). It's not like anyone is expecting to see "elite enemies" in a pool game...

I wanted to make sure losing the cue ball was a least a little bit punishing, but it would be really easy to dial the respawn threshold back, so I think I'll do that based on your thoughts.

I'm really glad you liked it, and thanks for the feedback!

Thanks!

The difficulty in the game ramps up really quickly, so you should blame me for at least part of your struggle. I'll definitely be looking at adjustments after the jam since you're definitely not alone in finding it at least a bit too hard.

I'm really glad you like it :)

Trying to make ridiculous saves on the eight ball is my favorite part of the game, so that probably explains why I like the overdramatic music so much with it :P

(I can't wait to try your game!)

I'm so glad you enjoyed! I think one of the reasons the game concept worked is that, at a base level, the game is just a pool physics simulation, and physics simulations are just naturally fun to toy around with.  I also really like the experience of slo-mo mid-motion pool, so I'm a bit curious to play with other variations on the game using the same core mechanic.

I knew the music could be an issue of taste for people, but I'm glad it didn't kill the vibe even if it wasn't your thing :). But I'd definitely like to replace it with something original and more directly tailored for the game at some point.