itch.io

Good audio cues, though the my vital organs one got on my nerves after like the 5th time.  I guess that's a skill issue on my part.  You can add audio files to a death audio array and then have the audio stream player pick_random to alleviate that.

The first time I died I almost said I was done with the game, but then the game respawned me right where I died.  This is the ONLY game I've played in the jam that has a checkpoint system, so well done.

The level design and mechanics are good. The controls are pretty good, though he could feel a bit better to move around. I think perhaps his walk without shift is a bit too slow.  Walking is good for aiming but a drag to move around the level due to the speed, and the shift dash is bad for controlling movement and annoying to have to retrigger.  So maybe hold shift to run and press caps lock to dash, or something. or just have him speed up if you hold down the movement keys a certain period.  I also think clicking once should also shoot one bullet.  As initially I was like "why isn't he shooting?" until I read you had to hold it.  Enter the Gungeon has a similar setup to yours but feels great to play so you can use that as an example for the movement and controls.

Also, I expected my dvorak keyboard layout to automatically work as this is using Godot, but it didn't.  It's a weird thing most people don't use, but something to keep in mind for finished games in the future.  Godot will let you map to the physical key rather than the layout key, and i think that's what you normally want for games, and I also think it's the default if you add a new action.  Not a deal breaker though just something to watch out for in future titles.

Good job, one of the better jams I've played.

Easily the funniest game of the jam.  I really like comedy where the humor is original and not references to other things, or about easy comedy topics.  You have a very good sense of setup and punchline as well.   

As a small critique, even though you're clearly a good writer in terms of the scenes and dialogue, the lack of punctuation and some spelling errors "practicly" did diminish the polish of it a bit.  maybe it was on purpose to go with the laid-back style, but seeing 99% of the games in this jam, as well as many of the games i see online, have pretty egregious errors like that, i decided to point it out.  

But considering that your writing was more enjoyable than Neo Fantasian Dimension or whatever, which I'm current playing, you clearly have some talent there.

And obviously, while the scenario itself is fun, not a lot of gameplay here, so more of a narrative than anything else.  If you could make a proper RPG of a somewhat normal length with this level of humor all the way through, and some solid characters, you might find yourself in Undertale level of success land, as that's what most people liked it about it, was the characters and humor.  I think.

Also, I chose Ultimate Power.  Friends can always disappoint you, but being able to summon a meteor to destroy the planet never will.

Nah I'm on Windows 10 but it's probably an issue with I have an off brand Amazon PC controller.  It has all the same buttons as playstation but probably the game engine didn't know what it was or something.  However, the sticks and face buttons worked.

The opening presentation was impressive.

You managed to make "basic prototype assets" that also have a lot of style and look to them.  I am noting that for my Mental Hard Drive, but I am wondering how you did it, shaders or making the models or whatever?

The explaining the controls one by one in the level is optimally how games should teach things and you did a good job there.  The letters for the buttons on the controller I didn't understand - looking down my PC game controller actually had letters, but I am used to the Playstation button prompts, so maybe additionally add those icons, or the icon with the 4 face button circles with one showing which to press, or just say "Left face button" also.  Not a big deal but not something I usually have to worry about with finalized games, so would add some polish.

The animations seem to be very well done and the hitting the wall one is cute.

The movement does feel a bit clunky, which may be on purpose to add difficulty, but it rarely feels good to make basic movement itself difficult; usually the difficulty is in executing some sort of jump or killing something. When the character himself can't move well it just feels a bit frustrating.  It's particularly egregious when there is a timelimit to do something.  The movement while not walking is fine, but having to control while running and/or press run intermittently to steer the character correctly, it may be fine as a game design choice but personally didn't enjoy that too much, I like to feel "connected" to my character and not like I'm trying to steer him and he's not listening.

I got to the part with the wooden door planks and none of my trigger buttons on my controller worked for the right trigger prompt, so I gave up there sadly.  I do have an off brand game controller for my pc since i rarely use it, but it is the playstation standard layout, so not sure why it didn't work.  probably would be fixed by a key binding screen but that's a little advanced for a game jam.

but still, great presentation and i can tell you are a proper game designer with some experience.

Found this meme, what i would like is the top Left, or the center, and apparently I am not the only one. Kenny.NL (the free assets guy) has some of these in his UI or buttons pack or whatever.  Nothing game-breaking for this one, but a nice to have for future stuff.

I liked the power slide idea, first one of the jam I have seen use that.

I would like for the run button to be closer to WASD, G was uncomfortable as it was too far from the other buttons if you were holding up to run.  

I played through about 3 times, I would have tried more but there appears to be no option to restart other than Alt-F4 the game and run the EXE again.  Maybe I wasn't supposed to fall down to the gun room but I couldn't get away from them once I fell down.  Maybe something easier or less confusing for a first level.

Rather than putting a folder in telling what the name of the game is, it would be better to put game in the title of the exe somewhere, preferably with the title, PlayPowerBaseGame.exe etc.  Also it's always nice to put the controls in the instructions on the web page.  Thanks for putting them in the tutorial and I did like that you tried to add a bit of worldbuilding.

I'm also guilty of a long text box for a tutorial, so I can't speak much, but I will say that the tutorial references controls that aren't displayed on the screen (the ammo and power bars didn't show up at the beginning of the tutorial).  It would also be best to introduce the mechanics one by one in a side window/trial as part of the tutorial level rather than all at once.  Again, I wasn't able to do that either...but there is a lot on there.  

Maybe I'm just being tedious but the reload on R felt bad, it was  abit too far away from the movement for something i had to do so often.  Plus it was weak. So I ended up just spamming the fireball until I blew something up so hard that it blew me up through the ceiling and then I was walking on the ceiling.  that was on endless mode.  the tutorial, something happened where the floor disappeared and i died in the lava.  when i tried to collect the first 2 power orbs.  Also with the powers being on 1,2, and 3 that fights with your movement buttons.  Ideally you should always be able to move with WASD while simultaneously doing your main gameplay actions.  That's why most FPS let you switch weapons with the 1,2,3 as a one-time switch but then you fire it with the mouse and right click to reload.  Maybe you had right click do something but I think I tried reloading with it and it didn't work.  If i'm wrong there my bad.

I think it would really help to have a progression system in here, like your gun does more damage if you buy upgrades or whatever.  Having power and health on the same bar is a nice risk/reward mechanic, but I never actually was in danger of dying or even running out of fireballs, so it needed to be balanced a bit.

Also I'll echo that the frame rate seemed to be a bit iffy.  It's not my PC as i'm on a 3090.  

Hope the critiques help in future projects.  Congrats on finishing and submitting to the game jam.

and for sound, you can drop in an AudioStreamPlayer node on the main game (for music) or the player/enemy/projectile scene (for object-based sound effects).  And there are some free asset libraries out there with sounds in them

in godot you export to web by adding the Web template on the export window (same window you added Windows template) to.  Then you export the Web stuff to its own folder,  change the HTML file to index.html, zip that folder up, and upload the zip to Itch 

It's always good to have an explainer of controls on your page so we know what to expect. With PC games they can be mouse or keyboard and many games have different keyboard layouts.

The choice of a shoot'em up was a good choice for a jam.  However, because the power up effects seemed to be sort of random, some actually were bad for the player, and the icons were hard to tell what they were, it ended up not being my thing.  There is something there with the idea of having to turn off your dopamine brain and double check what the power ups are before collecting, but not sure how fun that is in practice.

I also got an itch quarantine warning, the game was submitted to multiple jams, so I won't be playing either.

As this was submitted to a lot of different jams and does not appear to have been created for Big Mode I will not be rating or playing this one.

Note that as of Saturday 2/10 the game is not available to download.

If this is corrected please reply so I can change my score and post.

Yeah, I too was missing the music sadly in a guitar game.  

I kept dying even on easy mode, so maybe make easy mode a little....easy

The movement felt great.  The aiming, the rotation of the gun felt a bit slow, so it didn't feel as good to control, it felt it was lagging behind my mouse. 

I would like the health and power bar to be in the same spot (top left probably) as it's hard to look at both at the same time.  Also I was not really noticing when I was about to die in the heart bar, it's obvious if you look at it, but  we don't look at meters during action, so the "bloody red vision when you're about to die" while tropey maybe wouldn't hurt.  Or maybe a dark souls health bar which is easier to see than the more compact version because it's longer.

I liked the legendary and rare drops choices, however, there weren't enough options at least in my 3-4 runs to make them strategically different.  Obviously you didn't have a lot of time, but think of that in your design, a choice should end up affecting the gameplay, like in vampire survivors, where it seems to be inspired by, each weapon and powerup does completely different things.

It wasn't clear what the batteries did until I got my first power up.  Maybe making the first power up come a little earlier (maybe as soon as the first battery) would help, as well as some labeling or iconography around the blue power bar.  I don't think I even noticed the blue bar was filling up for a couple of minutes.

I liked the sound effects for blowing up enemies, I think I was missing something for shooting the gun also.  

It's a fun game for a game jam, but I think it would need some sort of original mechanic or sauce to make it work as a published title.  But if you wanted, the basics are pretty solid here and you could turn it into a larger project if you wanted.

Great job making the procedural levels, they seemed to work well and that must have been really hard to pull off.

Good job on such a short time frame!

I got some errors on unzipping the file in winrar and I don't see an EXE to run. any ideas.

there aren't many games that feel finished on here, but this is one of the exceptions.  the graphics are great, the music fits, the game is easy to pick up but the systems let you add a lot of depth due to the interaction between the level design, the player, the enemies and the timer/score system.  I think you would need a bit of extra sauce to make it fun for a longer game, like some power ups (speed boosts etc.) and extra square types (switches maybe) as it started to get a bit boring after about the 10th level with the main mechanics just being to move around; but for a game jam short game it's very strong.  The thing that immediately comes to mind is pac-man and how it changes modes from running away to chasing to keep things fresh. Obviously you can kill the enemies by surrounding them, but it still "feels" the same as just lighting the squares to clear the level.  So some extra modes/ideas that would "feel" a bit different to add some spice. Just thinking for like a Steam release or something like that, as it's a solid concept that you should do something with later on :)  A multiplayer online mode where you play with your friends and try to act like the black ghost and turn off your friends' lights would be really fun and maybe get you on streaming, especially if the game was free to play with some like booster packs or whatever for monetization

Great work!

i was trying WASD and the mouse as well if i recall right and it wasn't working for me.  hadn't had any trouble with any other games on here. not sure what the issue is.

Game currently does not function due to missing files. If this is corrected during the jam please let me know so I can change the rating.

yeah, godot makes you post a .pck file for exes too because that has the assets.   next time maybe you can do the HTML export version - as that also encourages people to play for the game jam as they dont have to download anything.

Cute game, love that your kids worked on it.  Honestly more fun and better designed than a lot of the things I saw on this jam!

Some feedback for our burgeoning game developers:

- I think past level 7 or 8 it seemed like the enemies moved too fast for you to get there on time. I don't know if it's beatable past a certain point.

- You want your iconography to match what the player is supposed to do.  I died the first time because you associate smiley face with good things, so I thought he was a power-up.  

- Giving feedback in-game is good too.  It can be hard to tell you were damaged with just the heart meter, because the heart meter is at the top left. So when the player is doing something good or bad, it helps to let them know with a sound effect, or a visual effect like flickering them red.  Even shaking the health bar when you got hit, would show draw your attention to it.  

Hope you guys had fun.

None of the keys seem to be doing anything to the bird, but space works on the game over screen.  Any ideas?

Finally, somebody who gets it.  A true sorcerer only needs one stat: INT - and one spell: the highest damage one that exists.  I'm so tired of these weak ass wizards who want to multi class or learn 20 spells and whine about not having enough MP to cast Ultima.  Posers, all of them.  And don't even get me started on those warrior clowns with their big stupid swords.

I gave this 5 stars on everything but "fun" which I put 4 on because....

- The staff felt a bit tedious, I think it's window for hit should be taller and maybe wider as if you miss it, you die and restart, and it can be a bit hard to tell if you are at the right height for your attack to land, especially when jumping.

- The changing of the enemy movement is a neat idea and adds a puzzle element, but it also felt slightly tedious after a while. Maybe just because it's tied to the staff and the staff is a bit hard to use.

- Dying in one shot feels bad for the character when you have to replay a lot of the level.  For a short game like this it's ok but I think a health bar or checkpoint system would be needed for a game with more levels.

I love the presentation here. It is very reminiscent of Megumin from Konosuba, if you haven't seen that show already, you should check it out (the original, not the spinoff lol).  It shows how the presentation can add just as much fun to the gameplay, sure killing stuff is fun, but it's twice as fun when there is a choir behind you and a tubular bell.

What I really liked - 

- exploring to get the power felt really good, getting the yellow pieces

- when you actually get the shot, it feels good and i like the idea of having to one-shot everything on screen as the win condition, I would just work on making it feel as fun and less like tedium as possible.  Like maybe switches instead of having to hit them with your staff.  Something less prone to missing, since it's a puzzle game, the difficulty is in the strategy, not in the mechanics, and when you combine both, it can be frustrating if you already solved the puzzle in your head but keep dying because you missed an attack.  I dunno. 

I think you've got a really fun concept that will appeal to a lot of people and could be a good streaming game if you nail the blend between the puzzle solving, fun and the concept of the all powerful wizard.  you are very close already, but I think some extra love and some extra levels and monsters/mechanics etc. will get you to a full game that could do well on Steam if priced right :)  You could take this concept and have different playable characters as well who "one-shot" in different ways or solve the same level in different ways.  

PS

That third level was a mutha trucka but i finally beat it.  I wish there was more of this, it was one of the few jam games I've played that i actually enjoyed.   Great job.

Maybe you can edit the game page to add some instructions on how to do that?  I pressed every button but I saw no tablet or equipment screen.  I am probably just dumb though.  But I want your game to be successful so the more info you can give new players the better.

If you can add a bit more info on controls/how to play to the game page where I feel I got the pieces I was missing earlier, I will replay the game and update the score if it ends up being more enjoyable.  I want to give you a fair shake.  But only because it seems such a high level of effort was put in, I'm giving it a second chance, since communicating how to play the game to players is pretty important.  But I feel you on the rush.  Me too.

Everything about this game is hilarious and I love it.

...But the movement on this character....it looks funny, but uh....it's so hard to control it's almost unplayable.

I managed to beat it, but only because it was funny.

The game looks good.  However at least for me the wall jumping does not feel great with a keyboard, and since I had to keep doing that to get past the very first part, I ended up dropping this one pretty quickly.  I think the physics or timing around that needs to be adjusted a bit.  For an example to copy, Dead Cells (after a certain upgrade) and I think Super Meat Boy have good wall jumping mechanics.  Or Titanfall but that's 3D lol, but if you can make it feel as good as Titanfall you will have won.  

Thanks for sharing and good luck on the jam!

Clearly there was a high level of effort put into this.  I wanted to like it very much, but I ended up kind of frustrated...

- First off, there aren't instructions on buttons other than the prompt to press E.  Which increased the issues below...

- The beginning pistol feels kind of weak relative to how many enemies you have to fight off.  So the first level feels pretty bad.  It doesn't help that you have to keep clicking very fast to shoot things.  Maybe it's just my taste, but I feel like if you have to shoot constantly it would be better to let us hold it down, or maybe spawn fewer enemies on the first level so we can get to the first gun upgrade earlier.  But shooting the enemies with the pistol felt more like work than fun, and you have to clear at least the first level that way unless I'm missing something.  Sure it's the first gun, but killing enemies should still be fun with the first weapon - after all it's the first impression people will have of your game.  

- I was trying to find a way to spawn turrets with the nanites due to the above and the instruction manual and could not figure out how to do it. I thought it was a key issue.  Then I found you have to unlock it and it costs $70. I would make this a default ability and then give you a crappy turret and you could spend money to power it up.  Otherwise the nanite pods are spawning and you collect them, but you can't do anything with them and don't understand why.  Plus it would alleviate my pistol pain.

- I bought two pistols thinking I would dual wield but it still only shot one.  So I'm not sure what the point of letting you have two at once is.  

Maybe it's just me but I really tried for like 20 minutes to get into this and it never clicked.  But it looks great and I think you have some good systems there if you can tweak the balance or whatever.  Good luck on the game jam!

Pretty cute actually and a bit of creativity.   I like when you can just boot up the game and play it and it makes sense.  This game does a good job of teaching you the mechanics without hand holding.

I'll add this as well, though there is a tutorial, I didn't really get what the goal was or what I was supposed to be doing. It said to connect the houses to the factory but i didn't see a way to do that. I am probably just dumb though

My dude (or dudette), for godot EXEs, you need to include the .pck file, that has the assets.  It is not running without it.  My advice, zip the whole Export folder and put that up here.  You can also export godot to web games by choosing that.  You will get a lot more views on it that way as downloading an EXE is a bit scary and also a PITA.

Also please double check your spelling and grammar on your game page etc.

Cool stuff:

- i like the atmosphere, it felt a bit more scary than the other horror games i have played on the jam.  I think it was the fog, but also the more realistic feeling of it being in a well drawn apartment complex making it feel immersive.

- the idea of looking on a tablet to check on things is a nice touch and good for a horror game

- the guy dancing in the camera was funny, but then i was like, i dunno if you want to be laughing at the thing you're supposed to be scared of.  i did like how he would disappear and you had to look up from your camera to see if he was there.  

- i liked the "I can see you" in blood.

- i like the idea of the apartment manager having to check the power. it's more realistic than most horror setups where the guy would have to be an idiot to go in. although obviously  once you saw the blood everywhere in the first room you would call the cops lol. maybe you can have something where its the 80s and they only have phone lines and they can't call wthen the power is out.

Some feedback:

- I was stuck the first time I played it and ran around like 10 minutes, because you are supposed to go to the power generator, but if you run through that gap in the fence to get there, the game tells you you aren't supposed to go there yet.  So then I turned around and ran around everywhere else. Eventually I restarted the game and confirmed exactly where I needed to go from the opening dialogue, and then just ran past the "I shouldn't go here message."  

- If there is going to be a lot of text with the speech bleep bleep bleep sound, it gets old after a while, so maybe keep that sound a little lower in the volume.

- if you're going to have a lot of story or dialogue, tweak the english, like your punctuation and spelling and such.  Most of the text I saw wasn't feeling polished, which is a trend i'm seeing with a lot of indie horror games.  It shouldn't be too hard to run your game text through a grammar checker with an office app or AI or whatever.   Even in the game jam description there is a lack of punctuation and spelling errors.  It gives things the appearance of low effort even if they really aren't, so I hope you can work on that some.