itch.io

Hi there,  

Thanks for your kind words,  And we are glad that you enjoyed the game. 

There were so many improvements we had on the Trello board that didn't make it to the game simply because of limited time.  As the deadline closed in we had noticed that with a large map and a large number of collision objects, the performance had tanked to <10 FPS. We spent our remaining energy on getting it back to 60FPS which wasn't easy. This task was hard and long enough that we could not get to so many bugs we wanted to fix. Better to have bugs in a playable game, than an unplayable game. 

Thank you for playing the game. 

We did know about all the issues you mentioned. But, given how much content is in the game, we intentionally prioritized making the game playable in the browser over glitches like the ones you found. Our motive was that we MUST make the game playable in a browser at 60+ FPS. Believe me, making performance improvements was really hard. We simply ran out of time to fix bugs we were aware of.

Thank you for playing the game.

Thank you for playing our game. 

One of the ideas was if you keep the swarm small, it is hard to kill enemies and takes longer, if you have a big swarm it is hard to control them. There is a lot of room for making the swarm act a little smartly, but for the game jam, we only did a simple implementation of the swarm.

Thank you for playing the game. We are glad that you liked it. 

The thorn/trap area mechanic was intentional. It is to hinder the swarm movements through/alongside it to force the player to plan and play. 

@brentcrane,

Thank you so much. We are so glad to hear positive and constructive feedback. We simply ran out of time to polish the game more, and fix bugs we were aware of. The last day was the scary one since our final map made the game unplayable in the browser. We took last-minute drastic measures (you won't believe this, but, up to the very last minute). But we made it. It was worth the stress and punishing work-load. There were many techniques we learned, including things like object pooling, dynamic chunk loading. We used .NET as our programming language of preference. We had like ~300 PRs to our repo which I find insane! 

If you have questions about the game in general or the implementation of the game, ask away. 

Our lessons learned: 

1. Create web exports (From our first GWJ). 
2. Test early with a large number of game items that you ultimately intend to have in the shipped game.  Their positioning/sizing isn't that important during development, but the number of items is. It is stressful and hard to diagnose performance issues. (This GWJ).