itch.io

Yeah. I can get that for you after work.

Uh. I think you misunderstood what I meant by winnable state. Anywho, congrats.

Good catch. I saw this while testing. The solution to pass the gate is to move off the south button before pressing the north. Ideally it would work as you intended but I didn’t have time to work out the logic issues with the two buttons. 

Great theme matching! Its the strongest point. The weakest point is the GUI, which looks like it was an afterthought which is a huge problem since its looks like you were going for a rogue-lite / shop mechanic. In the future I recommend making the GUI and menu layouts before anything else. It allows you to set up a winnable state which this game does not have (making it an incomplete game in my opinion).

While the game had some good sound fx, not having any music makes the game boring and lifeless (in a bad way). I get that's goes with the theme of a Wall-e world, died and boring, but at least having some ambiance music is considerably better than nothing. 

Scores are low across the board by about a point due to its incomplete nature.

This is really impressive that you made this using your own custom engine, it looks like this is what you spent most of your time in. Not something I would do personally. Its like doing the game jam on ultra hard mode, ya know? The movement mechanics work well enough, but are a bit sticky when it comes to wall jumps. The levels (up until it abruptly ends) were well enough designed and seemed to flow fluidly. The theme matching seemed to be a bit weak though. All we have to go on for theme matching is a single graphic spanning the entire level which what looks like building windows I guess? The trouble is that the level layout doesn't match what you would expect to be a urban environment at all. I suppose the plan was to add more urban graphics to match it. Unfortunately, I gotta mark the theme low because of this.

Its a pretty nice shoot em up. The balance of the game seems okay but its very hard. After repeated attempts I never could get past a score of 500. I like how its too hard to just shoot them and that using the shield and hack is essentially required. I also like how there's pressure to kill more enemies as quickly as possible to keep your cpu up; however, it's here where the game's balance is thrown off. Once you run out of cpu you're essentially screwed. Its too hard to fight the enemies head on to recharge since their bullets move too fast thus there's no way to build up enough cpu to get the cycle going again.

One other issue is with the hack and shield abilities: there's no indicator or warning of when the effect will wear off leaving the player vulnerable to an attack as soon as it runs out.

Lastly there is little feeling of progression, sure there is rank ups, but means nothing if nothing additional is gained from it. Giving out the abilities bit by bit might have solved this, but that's just a overall design dilemma.

Anywho, the graphics were nice, good special effects and nice music to go with the action.

Oh yes, the theme! I was going to give you a lower score since I thought you were only going for the "Machine" route with the bad guys supposedly being robots or something which would have been a pretty weak way of meeting the them alone. But! I now realize that the main mechanics of the game is organizing and managing between the different abilities by cycling through them in to gain an advantage. So props on taking on that theme as well!

These notes where taken while playing though the game. 
You'll just have to guess where I was while writing based on context.

Tutorial walls are nice.

Pitfalls that force a reset are generally a bad thing. In game design you should avoid 
forcing reset unless necessary. Allow the player to backtrack for example.

The indicator for the zoom module is a bit too subtle. When its recharged it should
provide an audio feedback to the player to let them know its ready again. The line on
the body is good for visual though.

The spikes are a bit too high up for that first encounter with them. In design players
know that spikes are bad, but the zoom module still hurts you unless you jump. Lowering
the spikes a little more in the first room gives the player more incentive to jump first.
Also this is a leap of faith since the player can't see where he/she is going which is bad
for design.

Warning the player of spikes with writing on the wall is okay, but it would have been better to
either allow the player to lower the camera down to show the spikes or to lower it for them for
a better view. Another leap of faith here. Ah I died here because I didn't press the button.
It blends in too much with the background. A little contrast works wonders here.

More leaps of faith, or in this case a safe fall, then immediately a death fall.
The player should only die if its the players fault, but because he/she couldn't see
where to go. Hiding the button in a leap of faith also violates this rule.

Nothing bad with this room. It teachs the new mechanic in a closed environment with no
surprises. Good one here.

Oh this is a big problem. As far as I could tell there was no instruction on how to
change modules. I had to bash the keyboard until I found out it was the arrow keys
which are generally used for alternate movement. Using 1, 2, 3 keys to change or
any other key to cycle would have been better.

Oh, now we have the sign to tell me how to choose. The only reason this was a problem
is that by default when starting a new level the module automatically was set to
zoom. It would have been better to show how to switch modules immediately after aquiring
the second one. Level design-wise this level was pretty solid. The leap of faith was
the right kind of leap since it was obvious it was the only way to go.

This stage is find so far, Its a little annoying to have to wait for the recharge of the
leap module. If its going to be used so frequently why have a delay at all? There a leap of
death here as well at a pit fall if you go the wrong way.

Opps. I wanted to see what was in the pit. I guess I will never see what freedom is like.
Ugh, this ringing noise is getting annoying. The base jump is completely worthless. I
can't even jump past my height. Oooooh. Shrinkage nice. What happens if I.... I get stuck in
the wall. Shrinking again stucks me more! Oh no! Okay I'm forced out somehow. You should
just kill the player if this happens, leads to less bugs and its the good kind of killing
the player. I think there's another pitfall if you don't get the shrinkage module. Again 
pitfalls are bad.

Okay so you can violate the cooldown rule by shrinking and the using another ability. This
is inconsistant since you can't do this with any other ability. The wall says trust me.
I assume freedom meant death or something.

Neat to have branching paths.

I think I got the evil path? Due to how slow the recharge rate, I don't want to try for the
other ending. Providing a post victory option to go back to somewhere before the branching 
path would solve this.

Overall it was a pretty neat. If you most of the problems with level design was issues with controlling
the camera and pitfalls.