Remind me never to go on a road trip with you X)
Thanks tho !
Old Dry Witch
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Great pixel art, it’s very moody I like it. It’s also supported by the animations and effects, it’s pretty polished. It was a bit weird having the leaderboard in the middle of the screen tho. Also, a quick explanation of the powerups when you have to choose would be helpful. Those are only details though, good job for the game !
Congrats for your game ! I like how this looks like a sort of Cuphead-ish boss fight, with several simple patterns to keep track of at the same time which makes it challenging and fun. One thing I’d add to make it fell better would be sound screenshake, and particles (that’s more than one thing oops lol) You could also even out the pixel art resolution ;) Other than that, well done !
Congrats for your game ! It’s pretty fun managing to hit the hole in the exact number of bounces, tricky but satisfying. To improve it, I’d make the background less saturated, and add some effects like sound and screenshake when the ball bounces. I know you didn’t have enough time tho, just throwing my 2 cents ;)
Frankly, seeing the graphics at first I thought this game was going to be meh. But although it looks simple, it is not only one of the most fun games I played during this jam so far, but it’s also really polished, visually in particular. The shaders you added on the numbers, on the ball that squashes when bouncing, go a long way in making the game feel great. When you get in a good flow and start combo-ing like crazy, it gives this “in the zone” feeling, which is awesome and crazy cool for a 72 hour game. Amazing entry, good job !
So this is a weird one to comment, I feel like it has some great points and at the same time some accessibility issues. First, I want to say how cool the animations of the main menu are for a 72 hours game, and how it transitions to and from the gameplay. That’s seriously awesome. It’s polished, and also has a fun mechanic (that I thought about for my game but decided it was too complex). But then, the experience is kind of undermined by a few things :
- it really lacks a tutorial
- it’s hard as balls (or I’m just really bad ^^’). You bounce so little, and there’s the limit on the number of trampolines too
- it takes too long to restart a game when you lose (although the animations are, once again, really cool)
- the font you chose is great for titles, not so much for the rest of the UI. Scores are pretty hard to read
- and also, the user name field having the exact same appearance as the play button, is unintuitive
I might sound harsh with all those negative points, but it’s just some UX issues, I really think this is amazing for a first game jam, and in so little time. Great job, keep it up !!
Amazing game!
I really liked the fast and nervous pace of the game, but I think what makes it feel so nice (besides the juicy shooting gameplay) is the fast that you have to stop shooting to collect all coins on the screen. This gives a very nice rhythm to the way you play and feels really satisfying once you get it right.
Definitely one of my favorite games of this jam!
The tutorial at the beginning was appreciated, it’s good to play a jam game were you don’t have to go back to the itch page to check the controls again.
I thought the player’s move speed was a little fast, it made dodging bullets somewhat harder.
Also, there’s a strategy that you might consider cheesing : if you stick to one of the walls and always shoot upwards, you will only have to dodge bullets from the enemies of the other side, it makes the game way easier (too easy ?)
Good entry though, great job !
Thanks a lot for your feedback!
We indeed used Touhou as our main source of inspiration (it’s actually the only bullet hell we’d both played before this jam I believe), and this gave us the idea of the new mechanic.
I think you’re right about the double djinn & the other enemies together, they might be too hard. I’m pretty sure I struggled on this too, but we didn’t have enough time to polish the levels as much as we wanted at the end of the jam.
About the keyboard bindings, we had some early feedback from our testers (some were Touhou players, others not) before the end of the jam and they were not satisfied with it either but had different opinions on the best key bindings (we hesitated until the very end of the jam between mapping “slow” to shift or k, or even mapping everything on one hand with slow on shift and warp on e). If would be interesting to have your opinion on this matter, as we couldn’t reach a satisfying answer! We have never implemented an in-game controls remapping system, and though we’d have loved to do it here, we had higher priorities and sadly never found the time to do so :(
We didn’t notice the dialog button overlapping the text below, nice catch!
I also agree about the font, we didn’t want to use a pixel art font for the dialogs as it would negatively impact readability but we could have chosen something more fitting!
That’s some interesting feedback ! Concerning the player’s bullets, I’d say the damage of the wider cone is too low compared to the straight shots, which means you’re going to do almost nothing if you aren’t aligned with your target. The goal was to encourage precise placement, but that might have been too much ^^ You were also not the only one to suggest the game is too slow, that’s something that should be worked on then, if we expand on this, although I’m still not sure exactly what to do to improve… A scoring system might be nice, but we thought we would focus a bit more on the story aspect, and make the game accessible even to non-shmup-fans. Not saying they wouldn’t enjoy a scoring system, but it might not be the reason they would be interested in playing. Also we are not well-versed in shmups, do scoring systems typically penalise you for keeping shooting all the time ? That’s still an interesting possibility though.
(Also that screen of the credits is too cute XD)
Thanks ! If we do expand on this, we’re probably going to make the levels shorter, and more focused on the bosses (those were the most fun to make too) We would also definitely have some kind of upgrade system, though as you said we didn’t have time to cram that into the game during the jam ^^ We focused on adding the parts that pushed the swap mechanic as much as possible.