itch.io

I was checking the top 10 games of the Boss Rush Jam 2024 (https://itch.io/jam/boss-rush-jam-2024/entries) sorted by Popularity, assuming Popularity = Top rated.

However, I noticed a few entries with very low jam ranks. I checked this explanation of filters on the general game discovery page: https://itch.io/t/719515/how-does-itchio-sort-games-by-these-criteria-popular-newpopular-top-rated-top-sellers-most-recent and, assuming Popularity works the same for jams, it’s using a different algorithm that takes into account activity (apparently a mix of dev updates, comments on the jam page and possibly comments on the main page too).

In this case I think a Top Rated sorting for game jams would make sense. While I do not like using Popular and Top Rated during jam voting to avoid being influenced by other people in my votes, I find it very useful after a jam + voting phase ended so I can enjoy the best games out there.

To be honest, the Popular sorting works quite well and most entries at the top also have good ratings, although they are not ordered in the same way as e.g. Overall ranking - I could only find one entry at the top that didn’t make it to Top 100, and I think it’s because it had a lot of dev updates. It’s, but it may give a false impression that a game is really liked when the dev is just patching many things, so I feel that this should be reserved for the sorting “New & popular” which is used on the main game discovery page (but currently not on game jam entries list).

Thank you for your reply, this time it was very detailed and I could understand your intentions and way of thought better. If you’re already using thumb up and ratings then that’s alright!

Then yes, your one-liners make sense, just make sure give more details when you can, so I can feel you’re really giving a personal feedback.

Also, don’t feel obliged to comment first on a video if you have nothing special to say. Some people just comment “first!” but it doesn’t really help the creators (obviously “nice game” is already better because it gives some evaluation, but you have to mean it). Nowadays comments are often sorted by popularity (on YouTube, not itch though) so it doesn’t matter that much, but it would still show if you only have 2-3 comments on your videos (as in my case).

As you noticed I hid your comments on YouTube until you read my message. I’ve unhidden you now so your new comments will be visible. Or you can just thumb up as you said.

Reversely, I will also think about using thumb up on users’ comments with thumb up, so you know your feedback is appreciated.

Looks like you can just put anything to build at any step… is a piece verification missing in the code?

Also, how do you control player 2? Arrow keys and WASD control the same character. I haven’t tried gamepad though.

Oh, I see the demo was already released on Steam in June 2024 (with Kickstarter, although for some reason I can’t see much info on the funding anymore), so this must be the latest demo and also a way to promote the game on different platforms and prepare the itch page before the actual release. Wishlisted and eager to try the demo in the meantime!

By the way, I notice a duplicate link to Steam page in the metadata.

So it looks like it’s more focused on frenzy shooting than balancing or forcing the player to die and retry. The recovery rate is quite high and obviously infinite lives make it doable in one rush, although you can challenge yourself to rush without losing a life. But considering your lack of time, it was a smart way to ensure the game is finishable.

I was pretty impressed by the graphics, not just the sprites themselves but all the shaders around to give it a scifi look.

The first boss was the hardest as there is a gimmick to understand and you must stop spamming shots continuously. It disturbed me that you can only move horizontally and only on that boss, it forced me to wait for the right moment to shoot and makes it harder to experiment shooting at different locations. But the gimmick itself is clever.

After that it’s mostly about barriers. The first one rotates a bit too fast to rotate around, the further ones are okay as you always find openings to shoot through - and the barriers break if you shoot them too much anyway.

I think barriers damage you too much, at the end I was only focused on dodging them and didn’t care about hitting asteroids or projectiles are they would relatively damage you much less, and you can recover that.

UI issues

I pressed Escape once to open pause menu, then Escape again to close pause menu and it closed the game!

Testing Windows version on Linux via Wine

The game shows no text at all in menus and ingame.

I tried to randomly click on buttons and it started a boss, where I could properly move, jump and shoot, however I did continuously lose HP even when nothing seemed to hit me (it was a bit hard to verify when camera was behind spin top as it would hide enemy bullets, but even moving it I didn’t see the enemy’s green bullets - or I didn’t know how to dodge them). Maybe with text I’ll be able to read more instructions and understand how to play.

In case it’s a Wine thing, I’ll try again later on Windows 11.

Oh, that’s cool!

I forgot to say that I really liked how the music went up when entering phase 2. I’ve been playing a few entries where the music was too quiet and/or monotonous so it really stood out!

P.S.: good dedication, I basically stopped working on the game while uploads were locked, using it as an excuse, instead of preparing a patch!

Oh, is that the game from the organizers?

Very polished!

I’ve been looking at a few circle arena boss fights and in this one too, rotating the camera to track the player character is quite nice. It’s hard to counter to rotation to aim correctly while moving, fortunately it’s easy to stabilize and stop during boss 2, and to aim at the flying enemy while moving during boss 3. Boss 3 is probably easier than boss 2 but it’s actually nice to move more freely at the end!

The reload mechanic is a nice retake on the “perfectly timed reload” from some other shooter games, with a penalty of slow reload if failed. The tutorial page seems to miss some text “Reload” before it explains the reload mechanic so I didn’t understand it, but it was easy to understand by experimenting. Same thing for the boost description about the blue/yellow gauge area, it should state “Using the boost” somewhere.

Nice to have damage + damage confirm or recovery in player character health “bar”, to reduce punishment and reward player who pays attention after the first hit.

I had troubles with the enemies that explode sending bullets, but it forced me to manage them by killing them one by one (or several but only in safe times when there were no spikes), so it was manageable in the end (although unfortunately sometimes spikes would appear quite fast after I make my decision to kill them).

My issues:

• lack of feedback on damage, esp. for boss 1: no particular feedback FX/SFX on eyes when hit (about the same as when hitting a wall / non-vulnerable part). As a result, during phase 2 when it’s invincible I tried to shoot at the orange parts (thinking orange was color coding for weak spot). It did nothing but it wasn’t obvious since there was no clear feedback to start with. In the end I just looked at the boss health bar and deduced it was invulnerable while health bar was empty.
• some bullet patterns are really tight and player character hurtbox is quite big, matches the model (understandable, as it’s not a classic bullet hell either). I tried to play smart and zigzag between the bullets but always got punished for it (typically by double hit, confirming damage) so I gave up and tried to just avoid the tight patterns completely
• … but sometimes it’s not possible because you’re stuck between that and some other damaging entity (in boss 2, the “tail” and its spikes, or the small enemies projectiles on death and the large spike areas), and the best seems to run across the level away from them, taking one hit intentionally, and count on the timed recovery (didn’t try though as I kept trying to fit right between them, to no avail)
• boss 2 large spikes covering 1/4 of the circle: appear quite fast, esp. during phase 2 and you need very good reflexes to get away… if you happened to be near their middle it’s almost impossible to get away in time

Bugs

At the end, boss 1 timer was 0

The final button to go back to Main menu didn’t work, I had to Alt+F4

UI improvement suggestions

• pause menu item / shortcut to quick restart the current boss: after losing 1 HP near the beginning it will be too hard, may as well die to restart, but it’s cleaner to do it via menu or button shortcut (require holding it to avoid accidental press). And exiting the level would go back to main menu and you’d have to restart from boss 1.

I didn’t take part to Boss Rush Jam 2024 but I played Shinigami Shrine from last year and really liked its GBC Zelda Oracle style.

This time it looked like a hybrid kinda GBA with vertical screen for shmup. I liked the aesthetics including that spinning main menu (I realized later it was on the theme too!), and Intelligent Drums (so reminiscent not only of GBA but also PS/Dreamcast era).

It was clever not to make the character rotate around the screen but having the camera track the character and rotate the whole arena around instead, as it would be disturbing to press left to go clockwise but then it would go right when the character is at the top of the screen (as in Sonic when you’re on the ceiling and horizontal direction is reversed). Although circle arena just work in some games like Froggy’s Battle but I think this one allows stick control (while old school games work with D-pad).

Using radial coordinates also help maneuvering around bullets which are also using radial coordinates: it’s natural to go left and right to follow the waves (while it would be tricky to move diagonally to follow the same patterns in XY coordinates, esp. with a D-pad).

It was interesting to shoot while moving sideways (and shoot very little if you alternate left and right too fast), to force you to move and keep the same direction while having to decide when to stop before hitting projectiles => dynamic of moving left as much as possible, then right as much as possible, etc. Although during the tutorial it toook me a bit of time to understand why going left was shooting to the right (because the BG wasn’t rotating, understandable in pixel art - but I got it once I understand it was the camera following the player character).

Boss design

Sometimes it felt like it was impossible to escape a wave of huge bullets, and the best way was simply to predict it and start moving completely to the left or to the right in advance… Or maybe there is a way to dodge between the big bullets and it was part of the challenge.

The boomerang bullets of Side Car in the middle of another pattern was quite smart to make you think (and not such a common pattern).

UI

Convenient to put Options on a dedicated key in the main menu, although I kept opening the Options by accident when I wanted to confirm my selection… I thought it was a bug at first (it’s easy to swap X and Z on a new game)

Art

Very pretty and polished, I don’t know enough GBA to know if it fits particular hardware constraints but it felt right. I did spot a few rotating bullets in pixel art, but I think all pixel art teams had issues in this jam about “Spin” (even us, we were kinda saved by going with HD at the end so we could rotate the main character and his weapon as much as we wanted).

Generally not a fan of “moe anthropomorphization” (probably saw a little too many - I suppose I wouldn’t notice if there were general anthropomorphizations with mixed gender teams), but I admit the character designs are quite varied and funky - I especially like the space cowgirl (?) at the end.

The animation details like the hat drop on defeat are also very nice. I think the jiggly breasts are a bit too much though, they tend to break my immersion esp. in old school games.

Ending

I remember saying that Shinigami Shrine didn’t have a clear ending, so it was nice to see a proper ending sequence and explanation of why all the battles, esp. considering the time constraints. I’m happy to join the Elite Four!

I haven’t tried Hard mode yet but it seems harder to fill the SP gauge, and also it’s cleared when I get hit, so I must be extra careful!

Oh, it had quite the pacing! I read it was the first game for your team members, and it’s working quite well!

What I liked:

• how boss elements combine and are indicated by the mix of colors in the boss warpers
• combining dodge and attacks into dash
• you can tune your own difficulty by choosing to use the healing circle or not, between bosses and during the bosses (for instance you could start Easy by using it every time, Medium by using it only between bosses, Hard by recovering only 2 HP between bosses and Very Hard by not using it at all)
• game page explains only to deal damage to boss, there is also a little demonstration at the beginning

What I had issues with:

• even with the explanations and the spinning light demo at the beginning, I didn’t connect information together: dashing through the spinning light felt very different in the actual context of a boss vs doing it peacefully in the hub. In fact I didn’t even notice the laser attack at first, only when doing it with an actual boss. Unfortunately you’d require a proper “boss tutorial” to demonstrate that and that requires some time to put in place (we didn’t have one either, but entry Vertiga has a good one)
• I also didn’t get what the green circle was doing at first since you start at full heath in the hub. Fortunately it becomes clearer later (before I got hurt, I thought I had to stay in the green circle to spawn the spinning lights and trigger the attack)
• I have no control on how spinning lights spawn and I spend a lot of time circling around the boss looking for one. They don’t seem to spawn at regular periods like Spin On, or maybe they do at the opposite location in the arena and disappear before I have time to reach them
• so having an arena much bigger than the screen is an issue to spot these spinning lights, and also to see the boss actually spawning projectiles. We also had a circular arena in our game and we had camera scrolling initially but we changed the zoom so player could always see the boss, it was important to also predict the boss spinning attack incoming. In Vertiga you don’t see the whole arena but because most attack patterns are symmetrical by angle, you don’t lose much info, and most importantly you see the boss (you only miss the part of the arena on the sides and behind the boss)
• in the last boss, red projectiles are not contrasted enough with the dark red background (we also need to make our projectiles brighter in our game)

Suggestions:

• reward player with a nearby spinning light to deal damage after either a fixed period of time (like Spin On) or when dashing through a certain amount of projectiles (to encourage risk-reward) or when dashing through special, colored projectiles (requires attention and precision)

Art remarks:

• I see pixel art sprites but considering how big they are and how they are rotated, it could probably have been “HD” / digitally painted everywhere

Cool concept, I only saw it used for monster taming (frankenstein or genetic combinations) but not on enemies to fight.

Is there an end to the boss rush? Would be nice to see some progression/objectives like Win 5 times in a row!

I didn’t notice the procedural music at first, but looking at the description I assume there is some vertical combination of tracks based on the different parts, which is also an interesting idea.

The full dragon was dangerous, spawning fireballs everywhere. When it reaches 1 HP it raised a barrier and I couldn’t break it and lost… I’d like to have a hint on how to break it.

Performance-wise it was OK but there was a lag on first fireball spawn.

Gameplay

My main issue was gameplay, with controls being raw or unresponsive:

• no possibility to chain melee attacks, no Cancel period at the end of the melee attack animation. So you have to wait for a full melee attack to end before starting the next one (and there is no input buffering so it looks like click input was completely missed)
• similar issue with gun, although animation is shorter so it’s easier to chain
• gun has quite the startup time (time between input and projectile spawn)
• also felt hard to chain between sword and gun (same, no cancel period)
• tutorial mentions that sword charges gun, I suppose it means that individual sword hits charge the gun gauge. That would suggest that gun is quite powerful but it doesn’t seem so (I beat one boss more reliably spamming sword attacks) so I’m not sure if this mechanic really balances things

Art

the pixel art slot machine looks nice (except the rotation pokeball I suppose, but many of us got that issue about rotating pixel art in that jam), then there is the HD battlefield which is in a completely different art style, and even has pixel art fireballs in the middle, making it quite inconsistent. It’s less problematic between different screens but stands out on the same screen.

Hm, so in the first level with the fossilized dragons, I went up, left, found a lever, interacted with R and it sent me back to the first “hub” location where you have to jump in the void.

I couldn’t find the first boss. I’ll refrain from voting as it wouldn’t be representative of what you made.

Otherwise, it was nice to have an intro but it was a bit long (a lot of lore exposition) and the text auto-advanced with no way to pause it and advance at your pacing. The default auto-advance speed was too high and I couldn’t finish reading most of the lines.

We actually thought about a Beyblade game when brainstorming, so it was nice to see something make a spinning top battle!

I really liked the shield + dash mechanic where you have to time contact point right. The tutorial doesn’t say it but combining dash and shield makes for really good attacks with no damage. From here, the key is to minimize the time spent on shield (may be difficult with bullets incoming and the slower basic motion). Fortunately shield regenerates slowly (I think it wasn’t written in tutorial, it seemed impossible to me to win at first when I saw my shield reaching 0), so it really becomes resource management (although once you get the hang of it you can just spam dash and insta-shield - many it becomes a bit too spammy and not caring about opponent’s moves?)

My main issue was the right-click to Dash button not reacting half of the time. After my last dash+shield I had to right-click once to “reset” the dash state and then once more to properly dash. Unless it’s not an input issue but some cooldown in design? In this case it should definitely be indicated on screen somewhere (e.g. a cooldown gauge and spark when next dash is ready as in Zelda: Twilight Princess for Cyclone attack, etc.)

The duel was funny too, although it felt like I could still move around instead of being at a fixed position and focus on releasing the trigger. On release I saw some message “-15hrs” which I suppose gives the time difference between me and the gunner shooting, and maybe time format was wrong so it showed hours instead of milliseconds?

Music: could be more dynamic, rocky or something. Also BGM volume is quite low while SFX volume is high so you cannot increase PC volume that much or the high-pitch SFX will be too strong.

Performance: I’d really like a standalone build as web runs quite slow on my laptop (I could switch to my desktop but it felt overkill for a simple 2D game like this)

I admit I was a bit worried when I saw the quite raw main menu and the long tutorial (which looked blurry on my 1440p monitor), but the ingame was actually much more polished and looked crisp!

It had good pacing and had me retry a few times but not too many. At first I didn’t understand where I could power up as the tutorial briefly talked about blue flames which I expected to spawn across the level as power ups to reward good moves, but they were in fact spawning at one of the fixed locations (pedestals) after an unclear amount of time, seemingly unrelated to my moves. So I spent my first run drilling through bullets and the boss doing nothing else.

My main issue across all bosses was with the energy system (some feedback similar to bashindan’s):

• energy and health is shared which meant that powering up with pedestel blue flame and getting hit creates a movement of back and forth on the single energy/health gauge, making it a zero-sum game where you may do a few mistakes and get back to square 1 (or even square 0, see below). Having two gauges, while more traditional, would allow to advance toward max power = ability to defeat boss = victory and in parallel toward 0 HP = defeat. Being close to victory and defeat at the same time = climax -> more tension before defeating boss or being defeated. Not saying a game couldn’t make it with a single resource, but in this case I felt like I’d rather kill or die and retry at some point. Of course you’d have to tune the power up steps so you don’t reach max power too early since getting hit would not decrease it anymore (and once you reach high drill level you can basically drill across the whole level and you don’t fear many things anymore)
• same remark as bashindan, having 0 energy preventing drills entirely made the game quite depressing and slow, as you’re waiting for the next blue flame to spawn, unable to protect yourself (and when cornered by bullet patterns there is simply no hope). Ideally you’d still be able to use your basic move (if you separate health and energy, energy would never reach 0 so this wouldn’t happen, but if you want to keep the single resource system you could at least give a minimal Drill attack at level 0).

Now for boss specific feedback:

• boss 2 and 3 have 360 bullet patterns, which per se are not an issue as you can drill through individual bullets. The problem is that you want to drill toward the center when the bubble appears, and sometimes you do it a bit late. So you destroy the bullets instead of the bubble, but only in your path, and often upward. After that, it’s easy to move a little left or right and accidentally touch one of the non-destroyed bullets, making you feel you’re not rewarded, and even punished, for drilling toward the center half a second too late. May have as well got away and drilled tangentially just to reach a safe place. Now, if this was intended as a risk-reward / push-your-luck (not really luck but timing) mechanic to incentivize the player to only drill toward the bubble if they are sure they’ll reach it in time - and if them not to move at all to stay in the vertical path and not touch side bullets, that’s fair. I felt like the bubble time was a bit short for this though. Now, as with all patterns, with training I could reach all bubbles in time (or learn to give up, or force myself not to move sideways), so it was OK (I’m still writing my first impression because eventually, all challenges can be overcome with training and nothing sounds unfair once you master it, but at this point my feedback won’t be super interesting).
• speaking 360 patterns are quite dense and it’s hard to jump between the bullets - prefer drilling through them. Unfortunately in some configurations you drill through it only to fall into another pattern. But this can be reduced by predicting the next 2 patterns and how they will combine (as usual in bullet hell). Generally speaking I find it harder to dodge bullets in side-view platformers, but it’s an interesting challenge.
• boss 3 has a pretty cool intro. It does the first 360 shot without any warning nor bubble though (of course you learn it afterward).
• for boss 3, I tried a few different approaches such as focusing on the center which is the most dangerous pattern (ok if you’re good to dodge the 3-bullet patterns from left and right, but I still managed to get hit :p), or attacking both sides as well (which surprisingly worked better).

EDIT: forgot to add suggestion to fill the energy bar when doing a successful action (dashing through a bubble or projectiles, or specially colored projectiles) since in my suggestion you wouldn’t have pedestals. That said, I now see that having to rush to a pedestal after dodging an attack was actually quite interesting, and predictable. I played Re-Balance in the meantime and it alos has a mechanic where you must keep dodging until a certain item appears to attack, but I found it harder because the “item” could spawn anywhere on a big map - but on a map covered by the screen, it was actually okay.

I see, maybe the boss could blink to telegraph the bullet attack (esp. blue ones which you can’t destroy with the sword).

By “language” I guess you mean the tongue: in French it’s the same word, possibly in other Latin languages too.

Thanks for sharing you experience! I didn’t expect it to be that hard, but I suppose 3 hearts is a bit tight.

You can jump above the tongue while using the spin attack, but you must get away quickly to avoid the counter-move.

Yes, spin increases your move speed (I added it to the description). It is not as clever as simulating spinning top physics or anything, you really just get increased character center velocity in a uniform way.

In the original design the boss tongue would spin faster and faster as to force the player to use spinning at some point but then it would also be less controllable and risky (e.g. hitting spikes or the bullets), but currently it doesn’t show off too much (because half of the bullets can be destroyed by the sword and the other half can be jumped over even while spinning).

Speaking of which, I will add to description that you can destroy red bullets.

Hey, wondering if there was a standalone version (should be easy to export from Godot) for Windows or Linux, since HTML version runs quite slow on my laptop.

Thank you!

Cool, it works now! And I could finally beat the Minotaur! I didn’t expect more bosses, it’s actually a boss rush!

Couldn’t beat the scorpion though and there was no option to retry directly from that boss (an option I ask for every Boss Rush Jam entry because it’s useful to train even if eventually you want to do the full boss rush at once). Nice variety of patterns anyway!

Played on web anyway. Wow the Minotaur is harsh! Maybe it should be more balanced to move not so fast. But the game surprised me, I didn’t expect it to be so challenging! It looks like a Boss Rush jam entry!

A bit tough to get the green bullets since they may randomly be spawned opposite to your direction and don’t stay on screen after hitting a wall.

Interesting that you can just block to produce slow blue balls then parry them again later to hit the boss. Some risk/reward to parry to immediately hit the boss or block for more safety. But since block doesn’t last very long it doesn’t seem so efficient in the end.

Linux: same issue as Bearly Climbable, .pck is missing. Looks like Windows has the same issue too (and the .sh is probably not a standalone but just a startup script)

Hey, I could not play the Linux version:

• install fails silently on itch app
• manual download from web page works, but then I must chmod +x the .x86_64 and even then when running, the Godot .pck file is missing.

Funny, the ballistic prediction reminds me of volleyball exercise: is it landing in front or behind you?

Could work as an automated runner instead of free running, where you just pres a button to go slower or faster!

I’m trying to install the game on Linux via the itch app, but the installation silently fails. I had to download it from the website manually. There, I had to chmod +x the binary and then I could run the game. Could you have a look?

(nice to have a Linux build anyway - and fast to export with Godot!)

Very cool concept!

I cannot enjoy most of the modes because the block randomizer stops at some point, only showing pink blocks (and fortunately still flames and skulls).

EDIT: I appreciate how you departed from PICO-8 aesthetics on this entry (not sure since when you did that but I like the new font, etc.). I saw you had a PICO-8 prototype though (surprised it’s not a SUGAR prototype but it was nice to get a super lightweight car to play with my PICO-8 binary). I’m surprised it was already so polished! And it didn’t have the pink block bug so it was quite nice to play even with just the standard mode.

The chain combustion even slowed down the game from 30 to 15 FPS!

Cool aesthetics and animations, although a few feel a bit clunky (not taken alone, but in relationship to the other fighter’s sprite or to the ground, it’s probably just some sync / root motion stuff). Are they hand-made based on martial arts move pictures? Impressive variation of moves, especially the low, mid, high and back kicks!

Nice cinematics between boss phases too. However for the 1st two bosses it was almost the only time they “hit” me, see game design feedback below.

Game design issues:

• too easy to chain stun the first 2 bosses by spamming punches or kicks, or a combination of both. 3rd boss starts getting interesting, but then it was a bit late to learn proper counters, so it became all hit-or-miss (since there is no low/high guard system, either just guard and get grabbed, or block and chain counter attack from there). Enemy grab doesn’t seem to have a startup lag (or a very short one) so there’s not much do dodge it. Also, fighters sometimes overlap in position (hitting doesn’t push them back enough, and there is no forced collider separation when both fighters reach the edge of the arena as in Street Fighter, etc.), so it becomes hard to see what the opponent is doing (esp. with silhouettes). So in the end there are many moves and animations but not enough incentive to use them all depending on the situation.
• all stat gauges start full therefore there is no point in exchanging stats (unless you lost many HP)
• speed affects ALL animations (but not gravity), resulting in ridiculous moves at very low speed. It’s still possible to beat the first bosses (but very slowly), but it must be too tough to beat the last one. That said, since it’s stats exchange, it’s the player choice to sacrifice such an important stat (but I’d rather have it affect walk speed and roll distance only - or only slightly attack speed). Anyway, it does look really funny to watch though, and could be like the ultimate challenge to fight at low speed. Since gravity is preserved, air attacks end up with character sliding on the ground and finishing the attack as if still airborne

Suggestions:

• tutorial: demonstrate block by making AI opponent auto-attack

Cool entry! I tried both playing looking at the timeline and looking at the ball, the second option is more challenging but I appreciate the animations better.

I like how it’s just hit or miss, no tracking of exact timing for perfect score, since I don’t feel like optimizing my performance for a jam game. Also it’s nice to heal after a good strike (although I didn’t need it when I did a focused run).

To be continued! Sounds like we’re teaming up with not such a good guy but we have common interests, uh? At first the floating head reminded me of Katamari Damacy’s king, but it looks like it’ll be getting deeper later…

I found the second level shorter, but it makes sense because it was also faster (in tempo), so more intense.

Also, clever use of the same character animation even when the ball goes a different way, to reduce budget, as the eye focuses on the ball anyway.

UI issues:

• no full keyboard/gamepad support (must use mouse to click Play)

Accessibility issues:

• button mash is not great inside a rhythm game, it would probably be keener to have some repetitive beat challenge instead: you could press any time, but pressing at correct (high, but not too high) tempo would fill the gauge faster. This way you can succeed the challenge with timing skills. Seems like you prevent “cheating” by alternative Z and X by the way, which is actually quite clever to avoid exploit multi-input exploit, but with a faster tempo beat challenge you’d just allow alternating Z and X since some people like tapping this way (it does work on normal beats though).

Progression issues:

• no save after close and restart game, and Level 2 is blocked from the start so I couldn’t test the Level 2 once more

Wow, how could I miss this! Oh, I see. They were all released in 2024! (and I barely checked my itch release notification emails during the past year)

Looks like I got a lot to catch up. But it also means the dev managed to release those games at a very high frequency, cleverly reusing the framework… I’ll remember it.

I’d probably just give up and thought the games are broken if I didn’t know they were made by Hempuli! But knowing this I’ll try a little harder!

I did it on second run… with rank D! (yeah…)

Interesting use character swap but since boss basically stops blocking after 1st kick, the 2nd character is really used as a support then you just swap back to the blue character. Felt like there could just be a button to kick as in traditional fighting games, since there are not many other changes (just the special effect differs). But I get how 2 characters vs 1 was important to match the narrative.

Really good flow, it felt good to learn to hit as much as possible, dodge at the last moment either back or sideways depending on the type of enemy attack and hit area, esp. dodging the fireball with the right timing (although on my 1st run I just a phase where boss was charging fireball and melee attacks at the same time and it was very disturbing, maybe a bug?).

Not sure how I could optimize to get a better rank, as I pretty much swapped to 2nd character and back to 1st efficiently on my second run. Maybe pick the right character for the most effective special (but the tutorial was a bit fast on the special and didn’t let us try so I didn’t remember which one was better to deal damage vs recover health or something?)

Finally, I was disturbed by the boss phases, apparently both teams got healed? But I lost track of enemy health at some point and couldn’t remember if I was already in 2nd or 3rd phases and at some point it felt like it would never end, then I died (and didn’t have time to check my progression before dying). Maybe some text or animation to indicate we’re moving to next phase would help the player get an idea of where they are, and encourage them as well, telling them it’s not endless.

Anyway, a very good flow and not many deaths, maybe a bit repetitive at times but a solid entry nonetheless.

Phew, just started it, it’s fun to find out the rules but the minimalistic animations didn’t help at the beginning (what’s going on? is the flag gone or confirmed? do I need to do something else?)

The second stage reveals it better, although I took some time to understand the exact rules. I guess some memories of Bonfire Peaks helped.

Interesting mechanic though, eager to see what it will lead to.

Always a little voice in my head saying “Hey, why don’t you make a game like this? Stop spending time/money on art and animations!” but last time I tried, the game design wasn’t that great and it couldn’t just stand out on its own. And sometimes I just want to make that action game…

Anyway, congrats for making a web game that doesn’t blow my CPU to 100%, it just takes around 10% of all my processors. Is it a ClickTeam Fusion export? Even the Godot web builds I’ve been trying recently had that issue on laptop! (but SteamDeck / more powerful computers were fine)

I was eager to play this Zelda Oracle style boss rush and it didn’t disappoint! I also enjoyed the Mega Man-style where you choose boss in orders and unlock weapons accordingly, but with a pair of melee/range attacks instead.

I died a few times in Jam mode and many times in Hard mode, forcing me to try observe boss patterns and weapon properties more, trying different boss orders to find the right weapon for the right opponent!

New Game+ last weapon unlock was cool too!

My feedback by category:

Balance issues:

• ice block is cool to destroy red boss’s spear and preventing it from spamming projectiles in second phase! But it doesn’t work on any shinigami’s attack, making blue weapon less worth against the last boss
• green boss feather attack seems to give a huge hitbox to each feather, was hard to dodge. I had to move away farther instead of just staying at 22.5 degrees which would be more efficient for immediate counter-attack
• in some placements, it’s very hard to dodge the Shinigami’s scythe even if you keep moving
• generally speaking, it’s hard to dodge stuff at the last moment, but in a genre where dodge is mainstream feature, going back to the roots with simple top-view controls without dodge is also refreshing and challenging. It forces us to predict attacks more in advance (or use ice block on projectiles)
• green weapon felt weak, probably due to spreading of damage across the many projectiles… Probably well balanced in a full game with minion battles, but in a boss rush with only one target (with the exception of Blue boss spawning minions), it doesn’t cover up the lack of power

Aesthetics issues:

• hub has imperfect BGM loop
• to allow smooth motion, characters move with sub-pixels, but they may also stop on sub-pixels. To avoid fix you may snap characters who stop moving to an integer pixel. But it’s not that terrible in an action game; in fact, Shovel Knight uses continuous motion allowing sub-pixels even on stop position, and I never noticed until I paid attention.
• I thought the ending cinematic was featuring a camel but considering the setting (and reference to Zelda Oracle’s opening cinematic when Link arrives to the temple) it must have been a horse

Player feedack issue:

• if you stand where the boss weapon orb will appear after defeating boss, player character silently picks (no SFX, no FX) it and player may miss the fact they got a new weapon

UI issue:

• cannot press start to go back to main menu and select different difficulty level. I think I selected Jam difficulty by accident when doing a “New Game+” with shinigami weapon unlocked. So I had to close and restart the game, but then I lost my save and shinigami weapon unlock! See “Go further” last suggestion.

Bugs:

• just before entering Shinigami boss, I lost the blue weapon, replaced with normal one, for some reason. Could not repro. Did I hit the blue fire one time too many?
• when defeated by Shinigami at a certain point (probably at the start of skill SFX), the SFX keeps playing in loop in the hub after respawn, until starting boss again and fight actually starts again
• Shinigami may appear quite offset to the right of thrown scythe target position and that may make it appear more than 50% outside screen

Go further:

• probably due to lack of time, the ending cinematic didn’t show whom the MC wanted to resurrect, although it was hinted in previous dialogues
• ability to pick any combination of melee and range (e.g. using range attack on a torch to replace range attack only). BUT it’s probably easier for the brain to remember the same pair every time, so just something that would be cool in New Game+
• show damage and boss HP bar? Not something that was present in 2D Zelda times, but maybe would be good in expert/debug/replay mode to understand DPS and why red weapon look so strong, or if green weapon is worth it… also for you, the dev, to help balancing!
• add a little message at the end of the game (if finished for the first time in that difficulty level) to tell player they unlocked shinigami weapon for that difficulty level, so players don’t just close the game after beating hard mode
• persistent save for finishing game and unlocking shinigami’s weapon (for the same or inferior level of difficulty, I suppose), so I’m not afraid of closing the game (esp. since there is no way to go back to main menu)

I know it’s hard to get back on jam games to update them, so don’t worry about the suggestions, it’s more important to keep this stuff in mind for your next games! … Although I see you tackle a different genre every time!

Eager to try your other games!

Ah, I see, many things became easier, with a few motion API becoming more obscure in Godot 4 (such as slope snapping) but recently they implemented suggestions we had and so it should be pretty easy to do both simple platforming and more advanced stuff like slope snapping - I forgot to mention it in my previous post but that’s actually a nice “next step” to try as well.

So I downloaded the game manually on Linux, but it crashes on start. Console shows “OSError: Couldn’t find file ‘gui/window_icon.png’.”

Checking the game files, there is no gui folder. I copied gui from another Renpy game, and I could start the game (of course it completely changes the mood). But then BG and character sprites are still missing, so I only see the text.

In other words, all the assets are missing!

Did you exclude them from the build?

Hello, please make sure to tag mac and pc builds with the appropriate platforms (resp. macOS and Windows+Linux). I’m surprised the mac build at least was not automatically tagged, maybe you didn’t upload it with butler? And for pc there’s not much choice as itch doesn’t know the Renpy build name formatting. You only have to do it once per project, any further updates in the same channel will remain tagged.

This will allow direct download from itch app and play instead of manual download and run executable.

Cool 3D shooter boss rush, classic shoot with a pistol and a shotgun. Couldn’t find which had better DPS and used them differently based on the situation.

Some QoL like the “lava” (yellow bile) making you auto-jump in the last level, however in the second level you just fall into the purple pile and it slowly kills you and you cannot always easily jump nor walk back onto the platforms. I liked the extra boss phases too.

I didn’t expect it to end where it ended, but that was already a good length esp. taking death into account. But not too many deaths either! Most of the time I could see where I did a mistake and where I could improve. Exception was when hitting some self-exploding minion out from of my field of view.

Also, it seems that the Steam version will expand on it anyway!

Seems like a good work for one person too. I myself cannot make 3D models nor animate them so I never tried this kind of project!

P.S.: I like attention to details like the heroine’s red nails. Surely it’s not made out of blood, right?

Oh. good to see people working on mods getting interest in original game making!

Not too many levels, just enough to demonstrate the mechanics with a harder one at the end. Sometimes it’s a bit frustrating as air controls are pretty stiff (you don’t exactly cancel an air dash but rather go into the opposite direction which goes too much backward if you do it too early) and I felt like I fell many times on easy sections. But the whole challenge is estimating a good position to start dashing, and then adjusting mid-air if needed, after all.

It’s not possible to dash from the ground which disturbed me on level 3 or 4 since there is a corridor here you can barely jump, yet you are expected to dash through a wall to reach the goal.

It’s fun that the fire stomp burns leaves on the ground, although it would be cooler to just stomp through breakable ground (but then there wouldn’t be any fire mechanic at all - unless you implement ground dash and then you put burn leaves on the ground with a normal dash).

Anyway, if the objective was to learn Godot 4 2D physics, that seems like it was a success! If you’re interested in pushing arcade games further, you can always try some dynamic height jump and airborne acceleration next. Or, if you fancy ragdoll and organic physics, you could try a truly physics-based game with joints, momentum, etc. (I have myself barely touched this, it was only for aesthetic cloth motion and it didn’t work out so well, so I wouldn’t be able to give you advice beyond general physics concepts).

Thanks!

If you fancy Sonic fan events, I’ll try to have some demo of my next fan game (Super Sonic Heroes) ready for SAGE 2025.

Interesting, back in the days of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, we had troubles beating the bosses at first, then after understanding the patterns, execution was not an issue anymore and so we could beat them at 100% and it sometimes felt a bit boring when replaying the game as we felt no sense of danger. The solution in later games was to make execution much harder and requires better dexterity and timing skills… but I had never thought about going the opposite way, turning a boss battle into a pure puzzle! This way it completely assumes its non-replayability and focuses on problem-solving itself.

I admit I thought there would be 2-3 bosses where you would have to reuse the same skills but they would have different effects, however I understand that it must be complicated to pull that off… In the end, the one-boss experience was still fun!

It’s a lot of trial-and-error and some exotic effects are not predictable, but I like that most of the combinations can be guessed. This way, after 2-3 attempts the solution appears clearly (at the end it was mostly counting the number of turns of delayed effects to get the right timing).

The delayed meteo reminded me of Golden Sun 2’s Dedalus’ missile attack.

One remark on game size though, I’m surprised it’s 1.5 GB unzipped. I thought it’d be because of HD artworks but considering the artifacts and the size of the native window, it shouldn’t be that big/hires… So it must be the number of animation frames then. The monster idle animation seems to move body parts but maybe it’s actually integrated with fullbody frames, making it bigger? I thought flat colors wouldn’t be that big though…

Anyway, congrats, I see you don’t have many games but they seem to be interesting puzzles! I’ll try the other one later!

P.S.: wow, mentioned just below CrossCode on itch recommends? I just saw it was released in 2018!

No problems!

Ah, I see. It mixed the beginning of katana “bure-do/bureido” and end of English “ade” so it didn’t appear obvious to me (I was thinking that it would me more thematic with “fist” but then I remembered that the master was named “Phisto” already! If his first name was “Me” it would be even funnier… also, there’s this Jedi Master named “Fisto” https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Kit_Fisto).

P.S.: Apparently in Swedish, “burade” means “caged/locked”. In Japanese it could be “bura-de” (with a bra). But I think I’m going astray with this one…