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If I'm honest, I don't think the music matches the pace of the game either! That's a very reasonable observation...It's so difficult to make 1bit slow and expressive that I didn't want to try and the result is sort of stylistically compromised. I'm not displeased with it as standalone music (compared to other songs on the same gear) but there wasn't time to try again to get something that matches the tone better. I'm glad you enjoyed the game anyway though!

The spidey-sense [!] mechanic to warn you of oncoming enemies was a very smart idea. The art and style is very Gainax-y, which I should have guessed from your "buster" title. There's actually a whole genre of like, PC-88 lesbian mecha games if anyone reading this wants to dive down a rabbit hole.

Thank you! I uploaded it to this page just now and it's also on soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/kelarima/sets/hit-harder-ost

The description says that you made everything, but then it says you didn't make the music. Then one of your comments here says that you also didn't make the sound effects. Did you make the graphics?

Hi, I actually like the controls (reminiscent of old quake/cs mods) but I couldn't figure out where to go after the first platform. It looks like the ceiling opens up, but every direction I travel just teleports me back to the start. The graphics seem pretty easy to read so I am not sure what I am doing wrong. The music is a good choice for the gameplay with its relatively unobtrusive composition and instrument choices.

Very spooky! The atmosphere and graphics are stellar. Verbal instructions are a smart way of getting around the limited resolution but I had difficulty understanding our robot friend and I think she could benefit from less reverb and/or a boost to her high frequencies. I had to revisit the game page to find out how to crouch but that wasn't a big deal.  It's a great little game, all in all.

Hey I quit itch not long after posting this and never saw your comment, but I am not offended at all and you're completely correct! It was a misunderstanding of terminology on my part and I will fix it straight away.

Haha, that took me a minute!

Thank you!

Hi, I worked on Hit Harder! I can't rate it per se but I want to talk a little about my experiences.

The dev was really nice! Yollie had reached out to me for a previous jam but then had to cancel. This time I was a little busy and then became inundated with life problems. I didn't start writing any music until well into the jam and worked until close to the deadline but he was very patient with me. I also wanted to create sound effects for the excellent animations but I didn't have the time, so Yollie did that too. So, great dev overall. Not to mention the fact that I kept forgetting he was experienced and kept explaining relatively simple stuff about game audio, which was probably obnoxious. 

Anyway, even though I'm not good at fighting games, the fighting game style controls really impressed me, and I had a lot of fun flying around like Goku. I didn't get very far into my own game though! I didn't even hear my boss music, but I hope the rest of you get to enjoy it :3

I knoow about the mix but I ran out of brain juice when it became time to mix things. Thanks for remarking on the FFVII-ness ^^ I admit to having Ahead On Our Way in mind here, or actually I wrote a pastiche of that a few years ago and couldn't use it for the jam, so I sort of gave you the dollar store version. I'm honestly okay with making things like this over and over and I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Your mix and sound design are outstanding, and using that 90s choir rompler sample is a galaxy brain move. I love the music concrete -- it sounds like this isn't your first try with that sort of thing.

Jeez this is great. The vocal samples are excellently placed, including my main man the red-tailed hawk.

This is great. Very good use of the stereo field, something I never get right. The instrumentation is very appropriate and the arrangement is faintly...Goron-esque? It's also quite unobtrusive, which can be important for soundtracks.

Thank you! I am so glad you mentioned this. YES I am. His SNES soundtracks (and the other Square composers) are what got me interested in music as a child.  He's probably my main inspiration for town music in general, for better or worse.

This is like the exact instrumentation "dinosaur town" made me think of.

It's neat that we all seemed to pick up on the idea of bass instruments being dinosaur-ish. This sounds to me like some sort of future urban dinosaur city where they all wear sunglasses and smoke cigarettes.

Thank you for providing the FTM file! 

I love how lighthearted we are... while cooking all these people! >:)

Great choice of art & music, and the gameplay is super addicting! Good work and congratulations on your placement!

Cute! And hard! It's very interesting to see Kirby mechanics in a difficult bullet hell game.

This may not have been intended, but I had a lot of fun with pushing W and Space on the same frame to jump twice as high. I think part of what makes gameplay tough when fighting multiple enemies is the lack of invincibility frames after taking a hit. Your art is really good though!

I love the sense of humor in this game!

If I recall correctly, you have to press F to use items after getting them! And also hii, thanks for playing!

I assume I am supposed to be able to turn my character using the mouse but it doesn't work -- he points up the entire time :(

This is such a clever idea! I suspect you don't get to play as a save crystal in any of the other games

I don't know if this happened to anyone else but tThe browser version's viewport is too small to see everything without entering fullscreen, and of course escape exits fullscreen in addition to pausing the game. The windows build was fine though.

This visually and musically reminds me of Doom engine with mouselook, or something of that era.  Very nostalgic and the MIDI work is great!

lol this is awesome! I love the idea of hero as worthless luggage. Some of the jumps toward the end of the game remind me a little of IWBTG or Meat Boy, requiring a close eye on your distance from the spikes. I think your jump sensitivity is tuned enough that this doesn't feel too unfair, but I say that as someone who loves difficult platformers.

Visual design -- characters, backgrounds, and everything, is awesome!

Shame about the lack of music and more sound effects~

It looks like it is possible to miss the dialog explaining how to dash over gaps, and the hero will just stay in the same spot after that. I might be mistaken because I ended up dashing off the side of the map and wandering around the void. Great art and concept despite these kind of funny bugs :)

Nice job with the music and sound effects! They work great with your animations and the whole game has a goofy/fun monster aesthetic. 

Your art is fantastic! And the bgm is extremely good for a first attempt -- It shows awareness of medieval instrumentation (solo recorder) and even has decently classical phrase structure. I give this advice a lot, so I am sorry to anyone who sees all my comments and thinks they are repetitive, but:

Whenever you have music and sound effects, especially from multiple sources, you should try to pay attention to their relative volume levels. If your music is very quiet, the sound effects can become surprising. If the sound effects are normalized, then it is often necessary to bring the music's volume up to match that. You can do this for free in Audacity with the Amplify command! It's a small step but it helps the sfx and music to be more cohesive.

I'm not a very good artist, but I wonder if it would look better if parts of the hero didn't blend into the background.  I like the art style though! I was unfortunately too terrible at this game to get very far and I am not sure to what extent to blame the platforming physics.... your sidekick kind of moves like Luigi (slippery, low air speed), and I can't necessarily say it's wrong but a lot of people seem to have difficulty with it.

I had enough fun to lost a few times in the same place, and I appreciate that you made everything by yourself! Thank you for sharing your game.

I ran out of ammo and for some reason was never given the menu to buy it beyond that point, so I wasn't able to finish the game, but I had fun!

I found the graphics and engine to be *more or less* within the bounds of the contest, like a higher resolution Wolfenstein. I think I prefer the way it looks after the player takes 1 hp of damage and becomes slightly pixelated.

You have the beginnings of some good sound design, with effects pitched a fifth apart so they will fit in the same key. I think to complete the effect here, you need a song in that key too, with either SC-55 MIDI music or OPL.

Mouse behavior and strafing in this game are actually 100% consistent with vanilla Doom / Wolf3D, which I believe was the authors' intention here. PC games of the era often used tank controls, with strafing either unavailable or placed on separate keys/modifiers.

I only played Lemmings for a few minutes, on the Amiga port, and I am stumped by level 3, but this music is great. Very C64, very bassy, & noodling faintly reminiscent of the Follin bros.

This reminds me of a very silly Ninja Gaiden. I think I have to give 5 stars somewhere just for the image of a burning igloo. My one unasked-for tip for audio is to make sure you normalize the music so it is approximately as loud as the sound effects.

Aaaaa this is fun but I got stuck on "The Corner"! Also, are there no sounds? If you need music and sounds, you should ask me sometime instead of submitting a silent game.

This is wonderful! In true Fire Emblem fashion, one of my units, Rora,  got surrounded and killed everybody attacking him, netting 4 kills and 2 levels, and it wasn't even my turn. The original Fire Emblem is actually quite a bit slower and more abstruse than this.

The music is very accurate to the Famicom's hardware and is stylistically appropriate at all times.

The graphics are cute & highly reminiscent of Fire Emblem (which itself looks not too different than Dragon Quest), and importantly, it is easy to tell what everything is. The knight looks like a knight; the skeleton looks like a skeleton, the archer looks like an archer, etc etc.

I enjoyed my playthrough immensely and I only wish that Henry were here to celebrate with us.

edit: I'm sorry this triple-posted!

Fun and highly authentic! Aiming in reverse took a little getting used to but this is one of my favorite entries so far!

Thank you! The music and sound effects are all playable by an unmodified NES & I know our artist Kaynooo put a lot of thought into the choice of palette.