itch.io

This game was a lot of fun! Once you get a hang of the mechanics there's a lot of fun surprises to find in here!

If I had to make any suggestions, I'd say you should probably add some more interesting enemy variety. Maybe enemies that charge at you really quickly, or bullets that bounce off the wall. A lot of your enemy types just sort of strafe slowly and fire and that sort of repetitiveness doesn't bode well. You have a lot of variety in the environments and the type of weapons the player is using. but if the enemies don't really change much then a variety of weapons don't mean much. Maybe you get more of a variety if you play longer but I saw four or five areas and it felt like in every single one I was just seeing a lot of dudes strafing slowly and shooting a bullet or three. But your base here is really good. The weapons are fun and satisfying. One final recommendation would be to include something like a secondary spell, like a bomb of some type. That kind of variety makes the gameplay require that extra level of thought that will keep people engaged. Your art is lovely btw. Cheers!

Thank you so much for this! Video content is invaluable, I could really see the gears turning as you played. This is super useful!

First off let me say that I thoroughly was enjoying myself with this game and the simple presentation is really fantastic. The art alone probably wouldn't work but the music cements the aesthetic and it works really well.

I think that your game could benefit a lot from coyote time. It's very easy to walk juuust too far off the edge and miss a jump which is frustrating.

I think that while the mechanics here are actually pretty cute and fun, the TAB button is just the wrong button. It is really, really the wrong button. It's super out of the way. Something that my hands are more used to reaching for on games with an arrow keys and spacebar control scheme would be more fitting.

You should probably ditch the platforms during the later phase of the boss fight. They really distracted me and made me think I was supposed to be using them, when in reality by far the best strat for the boss is to just strafe around the bottom of the screen shooting charged shots.

At first I was confused by checkpoints, I assumed they were save points, but in reality if you say, die after getting a new powerup, you still have it when you respawn, and your progress on breaking the walls during the boss fight are kept between attempts to which personally puts me off a lot.

Final comment, there should be a more gradual animation for the charge jump and charge shot. I was under the impression for the whole thing that the big guy can't jump at all until he's fully charged, and it's not super intuitive that different charge times fire the bombs different distances. A bar that shows how charged you are would be really nice.

Overall though this game is super cute and enjoyable and I'm excited to see how you expand on it further.

This game feels great in the hands! Every attack hits good and hard, and I think the ways to go forward from here and improve are really straight forward. Your core gameplay is already really good!

Enemies should have a more distinct spawn animation, whenever I died or for that matter even took damage it was because something spawned behind me. If there was a longer wind up and warning to them appearing I feel like I could react better and reposition myself, like flames erupting from the floor where they appear or something.

I think the small mooks with the cube heads could use some work. I can't actually tell what their attack is and it feels like it hits me from quite a distance.

Playing in multiplayer was actually a blast because it fixed the issue of me getting wrecked from behind. Unfortunately, it was extremely easy to mix up me and my friend because the character is exactly the same. A palette swap for other players would be really appreciated here. Also my friend died falling in acid and I couldn't jump in to save him because I was at one health which was a bummer.

Finally please let me use the stick on my controller. D-pads are really not my thing, and I'd definitely roll more often if I could just push the stick down instead of using the d-pad.

Guns feel good to shoot and I love your mines, there's a lot of good juicy satisfaction with your equipment and I like how each gun behaves differently.

I like your enemies! I hope "Maskie" and "Big Boy" aren't placeholder names because cute stuff like that can keep my attention when I'm struggling with how hard your game is (which isn't a bad thing.)

It's not super clear that slow down is a toggle and not something you hold down right click for. I'd definitely prefer the latter given the option.

For twitch games like this where a lot of small objects are moving at high speeds, fidelity is super necessary and my eyes actually hurt after looking at all the crazy flashing that you have happening. Color theory and a more distinct way to tell the background from the foreground can help with this.

Enemies are crazy small and hard to hit with anything that doesn't have 100% accuracy.

On the bugs side of things my mouse kept disappearing which made restarting a pain.

I never used the sprint because to be honest even if it has i-frames it feels like it's just shooting me in the foot. Something more direct like a dash when you hit shift might work better here.

Thanks for the advice! I should point out the Wizard you fight is not a boss; there must've been some glitch because you missed the actual second boss fight!

I think a map is a good idea. I'm not sure about a minimap but perhaps maybe a map that you can open up with tab whenever that shows you where you have and haven't explored, because I notice a lot of people miss small routes they didn't notice on their first time through. Environmental detail may also solve this.

I'll upload a new version that fixes this and just for conveniences sake I'll also upload a version that skips you straight to the boss fight. Cheers!

This is a good framework for a game, I'm interested to see where you take this, It's already naturally fun to just mess around with your group of minions; my main concern is responsiveness, it's not totally clear how to control the minions. Perhaps mapping an "all move to here" command would be nice, or the ability to drag and select a bunch like an rts.

Having a set of base mechanics that are on their own engaging, even without prominent challenge or polish is a good sign. Keep it up!

Thank you!

I'm gonna be completely honest, you'd be doing yourself a disservice learning from my code. I'm a designer before I'm a programmer and the way almost everything in this game is done is inefficient or poor quality.

The Game Maker community is vibrant and full of people that would be willing to help you learn to use the software, and I'm sure if you have any previous experience programming you'll pick it up quickly.

Thanks for playing!

thanks