itch.io

Thank you! It's overall lacking a lot of polish that I would like to be in there, but I'm rusty as heck after almost 2 months off from any game dev work - mainly happy to have put something out on time :)

I got sucked into this and played it for far longer than I expected I would! Overall I had a great time and from a dev perspective I'm amazed by what you managed to achieve in the time you had!

Unfortunately my running experience was one of minor frustrations, most of which stem from the starting speed. Game balance is a difficult art and as such this is somewhat my personal taste, but the slow speed + quantity of enemies spawned means it is near impossible to collect long-range experience orbs without the relevant upgrade. This means I lack upgrades and as such the number of enemies alive grows far faster than I can kill them. 

In the end, what usually kills me is (I think) a physics bug: enemies partially stack up on each other as they turn to face the player, then explosively move away to ensure  that they have their own space. The outcome for the player is that the basic enemies essentially start dashing towards the them, faster than the player can move. The only time I managed to reliably avoid this was by luck when I could stack Celerity 3 times.

I don't want your takeaway from my comments to be negative, or that I didn't have a good time - I spent the better part of 45 minutes playing, and for good reason! The upgrades are creative and I really like how distinct the starting weapons/powers are! It's a great game and with a few small tweaks I think could be absolutely fantastic fun!

Thanks for playing, and well done for making it to the end - the last AI is on 'Harder' mode, so even as the dev I've found it can be challenging!

I must confess that I'm so early on with learning game dev that I had no clue about that potentially being an issue for Macs! Thanks for raising it to me :)

This is actually based off of an existing game/series called Mushroom Wars (with a couple of small additions from my side), which I can wholeheartedly recommend checking out!

A really fun concept for a mechanic and really lovely presentation - up until the closing SFX, which my headphones dutifully played to me in horrifying detail.

Besides that, I had a great time playing it, in particular the increasing music modulation was a really great touch!

Made it to the end, a really great platformer with a twist! Loved the idea that more power = more of the map revealed, especially as later on in the game you were more free to choose the order in which you collected the power cells/electricity!

Really great little game! Liked the ability to dash being tied to having energy currently on you.

Had a slight issue with the particle effects, each time a new one had to be played for the first time the entire game froze for a few seconds - it's something of a known issue for Godot with HTML exports. I'd recommend trying out the solution here (https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/87843) and displaying your particles off screen at the very beginning for 1 frame, allowing them to essentially load before the game properly starts!

I'm pretty much 1:1 in opinion with Stealthness - I really like the presentation of your game, but the requirements to move up each time to the next tier of drill was too slow to remain engaging. Try playing around with the numbers a bit more and see how it plays!

I really enjoyed this! I liked that you had the colours arranged in the corresponding order of the keys (made remembering which key press to use much more intuitive).

2 main pieces of feedback:

1) I would recommend a brief pause after the player successfully solves a 'Simon says'. As it currently stands, the moment the last input is received the next one starts up, making it quite tough first time round to catch all the requested colours.

2) As a fellow Godot user, I understand the struggle of in-game camera resolution vs. export resolution. As it currently is, the playspace on my screen is small box in the top left, with the rest of the screen being grey. Look into the project settings menu and have a play around with the Display Scale settings, so that your game space fills the whole screen when played at different monitor resolutions!

Really like the visual presentation, completely understand that you ran out of time. I feel you've got the foundation for a fun arcade-style game here, I hope you find the time and energy to finish it!

A fun idea, I think everyone else has covered most of my thoughts in their feedback.

One additional point I would raise is the pause menu - clicking on the pause button fires off a shot (losing me 1 energy) and then clicking 'Play' fires a second shot (losing me another energy). In other words, there's an accidental 2 energy tax placed on the player every time they want to pause.

Really nice take on the theme! Controls were snappy and the progress bars at the side showing the transference of power was quite satisfying.

It would have been great to have some SFX or audio included, but I know that the 3 hour limit doesn't always allow for that!

I liked that there were different difficulty options, but I couldn't tell the difference between 'Easy' and 'Impossible' - they both felt identical to me.

I really like that the slimes move the direction they face, and that they take a 'turn' to face a new direction before continuing to move - it keeps their behaviour predictable and means that there are no unfair deaths.

I would personally recommend some SFX, such as when picking up a powerup.

Neat puzzle concept! Can definitely see the bones of a larger game there. My one comment would be that some SFX or music would be a good addition!

Thank you very much, I put a lot of effort into the audio side of things this time round! As for the gameplay, I love Mushroom Wars to bits and cloning it was a very rewarding challenge!

Thanks for playing - I realised that it needed some sort of tutorial, but hope it wasn't too long given that level 4 is the first "actual" gameplay

I really like the mechanic design you came up with - shots needing energy creates a nice trade-off for the player to decide is it more important to power the ship, or to remove a tar monster. Also like the volcano animation a lot!
Two pieces of feedback I have:

1) There is currently a text box in the top left of the screen that seems to serve no purpose, it simply reads 'New text'

2) Collisions were a bit wonky. Tar monsters would kill me well before they actually touched me, and I also found that I could leave the island and walk into 'space', as the island had no collisions to keep the player on it

As always, your presentation is fantastic - really love the lighting effects + background particles! Really great idea as well and a nice take on the game jam theme! There would be two things I would ask for as a player, one much easier than the other given the 3 hour dev time.

First off, for the camera to be more zoomed out - the player can jump insanely high with a (nearly) full bar, but more often than not you'd waste it by hitting a platform that was just a tiny bit out of frame. The same is true even for jumping at a half-full bar, so a bit of a wider camera angle gives players more  input on their choices.

Secondly, and more difficult, would be some visual feedback on how powerful a jump will be - some sort of a trajectory path to show where the jump will take you. This comes down also to  a question of design preference, i.e. how much info do you want to give the player, but for me when the resource is limited to pick ups and a mistake can mean a full restart, a bit more of a visual indication of how high a jump will go would be great.

Really enjoyed the presentation (the audio cues on winning/losing are great!) and the movement system is quite unique! My only real issue was as PixelGameDev alreaady described, long wait times - I made it to level 6 on my 3rd attempt, died there and then felt I didn't have time to try and beat the game since I wanted to play other jam entries.

Found and fixed!

Thanks for playing! I've literally just discovered this myself and am furiously bug fixing as I type!

Oh, I did not realise I could look down twice - I am an idiot. Properly played and rated! Really great game, how did you implement the chest getting bigger? From the way the pixels adjusted, it didn't just look like a sprite being scaled.

Sounds a plan - good luck with the Halloween game!

It's super refreshing to see a game mechanic like your taking pictures one, and the visuals are wonderful! Personally I prefer WASD style controls for something like this, as it can be conflicting when the mouse location has to serve 2 purposes: in this case (1) the direction the player moves to and (2) has to hover over the fish you want to photograph. WASD/arrow keys for movment here let the player have a bit more control in my opinion.

Would love to play again when the upgrade system is implemented!

Love the idea of the "pistol" pistol shrimp, firing out the pockets of water! Really enjoyed the visuals, particle effects when swimming made it quite satisfying! Others have already pointed out the lack of increasing difficulty, which was an issue i felt as well. All in all though, great job to both of you!

Really like how the mechanics come together and the interaction between the anchors + sharks! Is it uarenteed that the anchor will hit a shark, or was it just chance on my end that it always happened? Presentation and sound were great too!

One small bug I found, was that I was able to go out of bounds. Interetingly, if I only went a small distance off-screen, I could come back, but any further thaan that and I was stuck somewhere  and could never come back on-screen. 

Really liked the presentation of the game! The beam weapon was nice, usually people go for simple projectiles, so it was fun to see something different!

For feedback, two points - both of which I raise being aware of the time limit! First off, it would be great to have some sort of a hit indicator for the enemies (e.g. they flash white when hit). Currently they have so much health, that I was uncertain if I was hurting them or not. Secondly, the relic being reduced to 0% health doesn't end the game. I "beat" level 2, but for the majority of the level the relic had no health, but I could keep killing monsters to win the game.

Edit: Also just read that you did the art yourself, for which I have to say the the Mech design is great (I'm a total sucker for Mechs)

Really love the game mechanic, presentation and the atmosphere (the music had me extremely on-edge), but I wasn't able to swim. I could only see the swim button when looking up, and clicking it was doing nothing.

Could you please let me know what i'm doing wrong, so that I can come back and do a proper playthrough?

 Having just made it over a score of 30, of course I spike myself on my own body! The level of polish in this game is just astounding, visually, audibly and in the kinetic controls. Even in the little details - as someone who has spent a couple of recent Trijams creating games with procedurally created lines, I am impressed of just how smooth yours is. Love your use of colour in the game, and my one recommendation is here - as with others, it took me a while to realise what my food was (for the first 30 seconds I assumed I just grew over time), would it be an option for you to have the food particles be a slightly different colour to the snake/smaller background particles?

Thank you so much, for playing and for the nice feedback! Atmosphere ended up being my #1 focus for this Trijam release version of the game. I was quite frustrated to not have time to include the monster fish's attack functionality, but the fact that it worried you at the start makes me happy that the initial reaction I'm going for worked!

Thanks for playing, and for the feedback! I've never tried anything horror-based, but i'm glad that the first few moments of my monster fish showing up on-screen had the intended effect! Unfortunately in the last couple of hours its navigation wasn't working and my options for final coding were (1) Fix it so that it can navigate, but not attack, or (2) Have it constantly just attack the player with no complex movement. I decided that option 2 was more atmospheric, but looking forward to having full functionality for it!

And glad you liked the mechanic, I've never played Undertale, but might do so to get some inspiration for how to fine-tune my mechanic!

Thanks for playing and for the feedback! I think I did a truly awful job of explaining the mechanics of the game, so just to quickly check - were you aware that returning to the diving bell (spawn point) you could recharge your oxygen? I'd hope if you were going straight to the outer edges, the high tier resources get you to the 250 line quite fast!

I'm genuinely sorry, but I can't find anything that could be causing the problem. I've tested with several different sets of hardware and can't find any obvious issues. Thanks for the error name though, I will keep looking into it.

Sorry about that, is there any more info you could give me please? Is it that the game failed to start at all for you or did it freeze at a certain point?

A quirk of Itch is that if you go fullscreen, you need to then click the fullscreened game window for inputs to be registered, making it seem like it has frozen - could that have happened to you?

Thank you so much - I have a huge amount of respect for the games you've posted to Trijam in the past, so this was a really nice comment to receive!!

I feel you on the balancing, my play testing for Trijam has so far always only been for “Does the game break? No? Ship it!”

Thank you so much for playing! In hindsight I would love to have made stage 1 shorter (maybe 3/4 health compared to current), but my play testing was restricted to “Why on earth does the player healthbar not go down when it worked earlier?!”. 

I just scraped in under the 3 hours on this one, with reusability of the boss code being the only way it worked out - that and the art and sound all being 1 quick attempt and immediately put it in the game!

Thank you very much for playing, and for the kind words! :)

Thank you very much for playing and for your feedback! Glad you enjoyed it, I had a lot of fun making it!

Thank you for playing, and for the comments! No inspirations I could name off the top of my head, but I’ve been interested for a while in Sorg style telegraphed attack systems - more due to my lack of capability + jam time limit I had to keep it restricted to a grid, but for the future I’d love to try doing dynamic ones!