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Thanks a lot!

Very nice. Dragging feels a little slow, but really liked the concept. Well done.

Loved it! Controls are a bit tricky indeed, but slowing down time helped. Also like that the bullet doesn't get destroyed when you hit an enemy but keeps going. That would've been great for building combos! 

Thanks for your feedback! With more time I definitely could've done more on the balancing yes. 

• At least the asteroids don't shoot at you unless you're relatively close. So in order to get them to shoot other asteroids you need to be at least somewhat close. I hoped that that would encourage the player to play more risky. 
• And if you survive for more than a minute the asteroids will start to move towards you, adding to the difficulty. But they're probably too slow, as you can always outrun them.

Thanks for the feedback! Btw, I totally recommend giving PICO-8 a go. It's well worth the money. It's quick to get going, and the restrictions make it an excellent choice for game jams (limits scope creep). If you want to see if it's something for you without buying it first, the roguelike and breakout playlists from YouTube's Lazy Dev are an excellent and easy to follow introduction.

Thanks! I'll give you a hint: To get to the top of the green room, you need to use the new ability somewhere else in level.

Thanks Caletun! Yes time was definitely a limiting factor content-wise and polishing. This one might be worth it to put some more time into indeed. 

Thanks Seraphii! Getting the last coin is tricky indeed. It can only be done by wall jumping up and out of the blue level. Thanks for the kind comments!

Thanks for the feedback Stinger! For this game,  I choose not to relate the theme to the character ( I think most people went that route ), but make it relate to parts of the level instead. And yes, hehehe, PICO-8 has a lot of limitations. Worst is probably the code editor screen size, but it does a good job at forcing you to keep the scope of the game small.

Thanks for the feedback Nature! The controls can definitely use some more love, but escaping the level through the first room is intentional :).

Thanks Blas! Yes it was intentional. Glad to see (in the comments) that people tried that out. I really wasn't sure if people would notice it / try it out.

Thanks for the comment Conner! Hehe, it's not entirely a bug, but definitely a bit of a hidden easter egg. It's the only way to actually get the top rank (S++). Glad you liked it!

I have been working on removing some bugs, and polishing it. So stay tuned. :)

Uhww... I like that "Level -1" idea! Very fitting of the game and theme! Thank you very much for the feedback!

Setting someone back 1 level seemed right to me, just because there is a substantial amount of "Luck" to it. Sure it's easy to die, but it's also really easy to get that one perfect glitch you need on the first attempt, where your controls are still fully functional. That's great if it happens for the player, but doesn't really prove they've mastered the game (at least for me, but I might be too harsh here, and can only look at it from my perspective). The set back is also another way to "hit pause" sort of, same as the "loading screen" does. They're both there to add a bit more time between attempts. The last thing I wanted was for someone to get stuck on the same level repeatedly without any cool down / pause, just randomly spawning glitches and dying until they got the one they wanted. That seemed like the most frustrating way to experience the game.

Secondly, I also didn't want someone spawning glitches, and deliberately killing themselves if they got the wrong one (or one that made the level more difficult), and them immediately retrying the same level without consequences until they got the glitch they wanted. Dying should be a bit of a punishment IMHO. But then again, I might be too harsh here in my thinking. You're definitely not the first one to mention the level set back.

Again thanks playing and the feedback! It's appreciated.

The load times are artificial, they serve more as a quick pause between levels. Maybe it could be tweaked a little to happen faster.

Thank you for the feedback! :D

Thanks for the feedback! :D Hope it wasn't too frustrating.

Thanks for the kind words! Really glad you enjoyed playing it.

Thanks! The idea of setting you back one level came a little later in development. The idea was to alternate between slightly harder and slightly easier levels so you wouldn't be set back too far (having to complete yet another hard level) , but also not continuously have to retry the same hard level if you kept dying there. The glitches probably need to be balanced way better to avoid getting a bunch in a row which are not useful. Thanks for playing!

72 seconds. Wut? Well done! And thanks for the feedback!

The randomized glitches are indeed a little tricky. I've already added some rules to ensure certain glitches can only trigger in certain levels / circumstances, reduced the likelihood of some glitches, and that you can't get the same glitch twice in a row. Although I enjoy the randomness, I understand it doesn't work for everyone. The only improvements I could come up with to avoid this was:

• Maybe show a queue of upcoming glitches so you could prepare, but although that might take some frustration away, I'm not sure if it would be fun to play.
• Improve the level design so you don't have to wait for that one specific glitch to happen. Level 3, although probably the hardest, has multiple options wrt. glitches. Unfortunately this is pretty tricky with a 16x16 level size, and the current physics.
• Somehow add more rules to better balance the glitches. Dying should be ok, but it shouldn't become frustrating. So perhaps avoid death mode, if it's killed the player in the past 10-20 glitches (I was aiming for it to be triggered 2-3 times per full play through).

I think doing 2 and 3 together would be best, but I'm not sure if I can pull that off in pico 8 easily. But again, thanks for playing, hope you enjoyed it overall, and thank you very much for the feedback!

Thank you very much for the feedback! Do you think death mode is just a bit too much? I was aiming for a roughly 50/50 chance of survival, but it depends very much on where you are in the level, and which glitches are active, when you trigger it. Thanks for playing!

Ah yes, my archnemesis... controls. Thanks for the feedback!

Wow, thank you very much! Just played and rated your game too. Very cool, and also visually very impressive! Good thing I'm pretty fast with a keyboard. :)

Thanks! I'm really happy you enjoyed it :D

I am not a very musical / artsy person, so thank you very much for the compliment. Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks for playing, and for the feedback! I will try to check out your game too, but I need to dig up a Windows machine first.

Sorry about that. I assume it's level 3 that keeps getting you, and likely due to 1 or 2 specific glitches. In that case you might be a victim of RNG here, just unlucky. To keep things balanced/not aggravating  the game has some rules as to when certain glitches may be triggered based on the level and previously triggered glitches. But it's hard to balance, and no guarantee for success. Thanks for playing, much appreciated!

Understandable. I've actually been trying out controlling the ball with a PS3 controller using the left analog stick, and that seems to be quite a bit easier. But you're right. The mouse does make it a bit too challenging. Only other solution I could think of, is to make the levels wider/easier. Thanks for playing and commenting!

Thanks Philip, that means a lot to me! Good feedback and I totally agree. Thanks for trying it out.

Thanks for trying it out! Like the others have mentioned before, the difficulty ramps up a bit too quickly. I'll see if I can play around with that.

Thanks for trying it out! Yeah other players have noted the steep difficulty curve as well. That's definitely something to work on.

Hmmm, it looks like a Windows only error message. Unfortunately I don't have a Windows machine to test this out, but it seems there are multiple things that could be causing this: wrong path specified in the command, corrupt jar file, wrong arguments specified in the command (also see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11943948/what-causes-unable-to-access-jar-fi...). Since it's worked for others I'm going to assume it's not corrupt, and since I've tested this with Java 10 as well, I'm guessing that's not it either. Perhaps when running the command, the JAR file isn't located in the same folder as where you're in (in the terminal)? I'm afraid I can't really help much with this. 

Ahhh sorry to hear that! What did you mean by "java doesn't wanna run on chrome"? Chrome shouldn't really have anything to do with it, since it's a desktop game. If you don't mind debugging this with me, can you let me know which OS and which version of Java you're using?  If you're using OSX or Linux typing "java --version" in the terminal should tell you which version you're running. You can also try starting the game from the terminal with the command "java -jar propulsive-paint.jar". If it fails to start it should at least say why it's failing.

Thanks! Interesting remarks regarding the energetic vs preciseness. Hadn't really thought of it like that yet. I guess the difficulty ramps up a bit quickly in this version, so adding more "quick" levels could help with that, and give the player more time to master the controls. Not increasing the difficulty and sticking only with these quick levels might be too boring, although I could always increase the level size dramatically. Thanks again for the feedback! 

Thanks Klark! Wasn't planning on any blood, but once I added those spikes I knew I had to put those particle effects to good use :D. Tried various colors and effects, but this seemed like the best option.

Hey Edmond,

Thanks! Especially the comments about the difficulty. I wasn't really sure if I had made some levels too easy or too hard. I do think I made the last level a bit too difficult, but it being the last I figured the player had something to prove by now :D. 

I also tried making / adding some sounds and music, but unfortunately I quickly started to run out of time and decided to focus on other aspects of the game. I was hoping to make it sounds a bit 8-bity, but who knows, maybe I'll add that in later.

I actually didn't use any game engine (or libraries for that matter). It's all Java's own AWT/Swing to do all the graphics / animations, with a healthy dose of trigonometry to simulate basic collisions and physics. Especially the collision detection was hard to do. It probably wasn't the smartest idea to build my own "game engine" from scratch, but it was fun, challenging, and I taught myself something new :)