Thanks, this is very nice to hear!

The game was made for the B&W jam and the voting is still ongoing, so I cannot update it yet. However, I have some improvements already implemented and working on more, including a pause menu (with a restart button, indeed), rebindable controls, better camera movement. I will add all of that in a couple of days.

I have also created a palette swapping system (apparently every 1-bit game worth its salt has to have one), but I'm not yet sure how to use it. Perhaps it will be some kind of progression system.

Of course, many features like that are missing! A way to pause the game, for example, or to control the sound volume, like you said. The game was made for the B&W jam, and since the voting is still ongoing I cannot make any updates, but many of those little quality of life things will be added soon.

Thanks, but this is indeed intentional - taking damage or receiving an upgrade "gives you back" all of your jumps.

When taking damage this is so you are less likely to fall into a pit right away (if you're hurt above one), since taking damage stops your movement in the air.

Your air movement continues after the upgrade animation, but I felt the player might be confused after being briefly taken out of the flow of the game and also fall into something. 

For similar reasons, both of those cases also make you immune to all damage for a moment.

Thanks a lot! I have to say - you're really good at the game, congrats on beating it.

Thanks!

Definitely, I believe a lot of cool stuff could still be added to the game and I'm actively working on it. More levels, enemies and a more refined upgrade system are all planned.

There will also be an Android version releasing soon.

All the obstacles and enemies should be avoidable, but in some cases it's very hard and requires precise timing, or using the upgrades. It's something to further refine after the jam. The platforming also gets progressively more difficult as you go on. 

Hi, thanks for the comment. What do you mean by more control? Did you reach all the upgrades? They give you many more options for vertical movement.

Cool concept, I especially like how visually appealing it is, despite the very simple appearance at first. The sort of spilled-paint-ink-thing effect when you win is great, is it some kind of well executed standard animation or something more sophisticated?

My one criticism would definitely be dying by touching the edges. I don't even think it's about the edges being hard to see (though that doesn't help). I believe it shouldn't happen period, you should just stay at the edge until some other color shift kills you. Dying to the game window feels kind of cheap to me, like dying from some arbitrary limitation and not from game mechanics.

Great idea! It's really cool to see what we as gamers were conditioned to think of as "achievementable". 

I got stuck at 22/26 though. I guess maybe the duck was supposed to help with completing the rest? But I couldn't find 30 more gold to pay it.

You might have gone slightly overboard on the dog achievements!

Beautiful. It's interesting that many of your aesthetic choices are so original (few animation frames, the character and background being sort of a different style), yet work well together.

Very original concept. Aesthetics are cool as well.

I think perhaps the idea of being a circle or going the easy way of becoming a square could be explained or emphasized a bit more clearly - I completed the game once as a square, I didn't really understand the point and only got it after looking at the comments here. And completed it as a circle afterwards. The idea itself is great though!

Maybe the game could also use slightly more variety in the platforming challenges. I understand the square ones being trivial, but the circle ones were almost exclusively jumping on sequences of 1-block platforms.

Oh, and the camera has too much lookahead, which is a bit annoying when jumping left and right between 1-block platforms - your view constantly makes those huge jumps back and forth, often not actually showing you the block you want to jump on next.

I mostly don't like it when people try to put a story in their jam games - usually there's a lot of text, very little substance, and a plot that simply cannot be engaging in such a short time. And the mechanics suck because the focus was on the story.

This game is the exact opposite of that - the plot is simple, to the point, yet not simplistic. It establishes some relatively interesting characters in an extremely short time. The game looks good, sounds good. I'm not a huge fan of the box dodging gameplay, but it wasn't bad.

It really surprised me.

It's pretty cool, I like the visuals and the music is great. Did I mishear or is the soundtrack dynamic, changing with the enemy difficulty level or so? I'm a sucker for dynamic music.

I think the difficulty could use a bit of work though - there was very little challenge until I think around the time I got the third turret. Perhaps that's intended, but I felt it was a bit too long. Then suddenly there were swarms of enemies, but I was not really limited by money, but by my ability to run around and spam-build. I think it could start off harder and scale more smoothly.

And also a suggestion - when you unlock a new turret type, it would be nice to have some sort of message indicating what it is (maybe how much it costs?). Or maybe there is some info somewhere and I didn't notice it.

Looks great, sounds great.

But most importantly, at first I expected this to be a very basic game that's just pretty. I was really surprised how much you managed to squeeze out of this concept - especially moving blocks in real time makes it much more engaging.

I found a small bug - if you let the note go out through the floor (maybe also other places), you cannot get the note to appear again. You have to skip the level at that point I think.

Very nice concept in general, and the commentary was pretty cool too. I especially liked that you had one for pausing. 

I think some sounds could be a bit more distinct, namely the wall was too similar to regular running for me. Still very cool and original!

Now how can one rate visuals here. Huh.

The slam is perhaps not as useful as the other two upgrades, but it does play a pretty important role as a movement tool - especially against the eyes and the last boss, moving up and down is crucial. Or when falling right into a trap with no way out, but not being above it yet.

It seems pretty common for such games to use Z and X, but you're right, there could have at least been more options.

The intention for the spikes was not really to be katanas. They are sort of "facing" you - when they were completely vertical it was a bit odd to me that you'd get damaged when running into them from the side. I believed their spiky nature is enough to imply danger.

You're right, I misspoke slightly - the problem is not that they are not the same (they are), the problem is that they are not symmetrical. So the physics when moving them to the left are different than when moving to the right. But the movement you're doing with them is often symmetrical, so they effectively end up handling differently. It's a bit confusing, but I think the image I posted illustrates that pretty well.

I love the concept! The art and especially music are great as well. 

The gameplay is fun, but I feel the controls could be iterated upon. Maybe I'm just bad, but I found that once I got the left tentacle tangled there was no way I could bring it back up. I didn't have this problem with the right one, and in general I found operating with it easier. I think it's because the tentacles actually are different - below is a screenshot of both tentacles pushed to the outside. Notice how they curve differently.

Still, great game, I think with slight post jam improvements it will really shine.

Indeed that's odd. I'll try to look into it, but honestly not sure how.

The sound of being hit or hitting are important, so they are intentionally louder, but of course it might be too much. And the sound balance can absolutely be different between platforms - I didn't really notice it in this game, but when I was exporting https://ralh.itch.io/fastest-gun-in-the-west to Android there were massive differences, some decently loud sounds were suddenly completely silent. I had to explicitly set the volume of every sound per platform. And of course this only happens in the final build, so it's really annoying to test.

Thank you very much for the kind words! It was my first time making something even resembling a platformer, so it was really surprising for me how hard it was to get the jump to feel "right", and I wasn't completely certain it does in the end.

I didn't edit the HTML file (at least not for that), but I'm not exactly sure what you mean. The Unity web player seems to be the one handling the fullscreen, I'm honestly not 100% sure how. But the game in Unity adapts to any resolution, so seems like a natural extension of it.

Interestingly enough, on itch it is a bit blurry. I couldn't figure out why, it's absolutely crisp when just loading it on an empty page. But when you go into fullscreen mode, it's crisp again. Perhaps it's something to look into further.

Does not launch for me (on any browser), which is kinda of a shame, since you had me hooked with the premise. Looking at the browser console, I think I had a similar problem before - did you check Decompression Fallback in Unity's Project Settings/Player/WebGL tab/Publishing Settings? I think it fixed it for me, but of course I'm not sure if your problem is the same.

Oh, that's a huge shame, I feel the sound does add a lot to the game. Can I ask what browser are you using, and on what platform? Are you able to try the downloadable Windows version perhaps?

Thanks! The controls are intentionally simple, so they would at least sort of work on mobile. It's something I'm definitely looking into!

Hi,
Thanks for the comment!

The sword sound is actually like something you can get out of sfxr, so retro in a way, but maybe you are right that it feels too realistic.

I don't really understand what you mean by level change after each death? Except the very first platform, every subsequent one is random and generated as you run.

Slash your way to the end boss in this non-endless roguelike runner depicted in 1-bit pixel art.

[ Play ]

Prove you are the fastest gunslinger in a bloody shootout with hordes of outlaws. 

[ Play it here ]

Winner of the GamesPlusJam2021, now rereleased to preserve the original jam prototype.

Many new features were added, including a new enemy type and online leaderboards! More details available in the devlog.

Hi, thanks for the suggestion - cosmetic options/rewards are certainly something I've been thinking about. Though I'm not sure what you mean exactly - which particular aspect of the "60s/70s western look" did you have in mind that could be applied via a filter? I guess very old westerns were in black and white, but I don't think that's what you meant.

I added the R key as a reload button alternative. Thanks for pointing this out!

Interesting, can you please tell me more about the device you're on? Desktop, mobile? What operating system? Is there something else unusual about it, maybe it's very old for example? What actually happened, did anything display at all?

It's funny, I originally thought there's no way it could be fun on mobile with those controls, but indeed, it sort of works. For now it's possible to reload with a two finger tap (strange Unity touch->mouse mapping), but of course that's hardly usable.

I'm going to release a post-jam update, including an Android version, when the voting ends (Sunday). I was thinking about a mobile-only reload button below the cowboy, but I'm still considering my options.

Sure, great idea!

You are the fastest gun in the West. Defend your title in a bloody shoot-out with hordes of bandits.

Prove you are the best

Thanks everyone for all the kind words!

I updated the game with a small bugfix - previously it was possible to cheat the timer by pausing the game at the right moment, now it no longer is.

I love the music! The boss fight is also pretty fun and well designed.

I think the controls could be slightly better - mouse didn't work for me, only ctrl, but sadly ctrl+d is the in-browser bookmarking shortcut... So that caused some problems :P

Still a lot of fun though!

Is the game still working at the moment? I think perhaps something broke, or it's just me. I see a green circle in the middle of the screen, then eventually red enemies appear and damage me. But I tried clicking around and pressing shift, but nothing happens.

Maybe I'm a dumbass, but I couldn't get past the first laser that "only blue can pass". Your replay clone becomes blue when replaying, but he doesn't replay beyond his death. So I'm not sure what else is blue. 
I like the artstyle and music, but I don't understand the gameplay at all.

Cool artstyle and music. I especially liked how well the animations convey the feeling of attacking, even though they are so simple.

My feedback:

• It was a bit annoying to me how inconsistent colliding with walls and spikes is. As a player, you collide with safe walls and sort of learn how big their hitboxes are. Then it turns out spikes have a much bigger hitbox, even though they are not really visually larger. They should either have the same or smaller hitbox I think.
• The movement of the character is a bit floaty. Maybe that's intended, but it made moving around a bit of a chore. Especially with the inconsistent spike colliders.
• I didn't really understand what the helmet (crown?) does.

It looks very nice and I liked the music. However, I think the platforming could use some work - I found moving between platforms to be pretty frustrating.

Incredibly atmospheric, the music fits very well. It felt a bit odd that there are no other sounds - the barking, walking, the racoon, all completely silent. Even going through doors would feel better with a sound effect.

Hi, thanks for your feedback!

I wanted the game to be a roguelike, so that's the reason for no checkpoints. I think if the levels were more diverse, with a different tileset etc. it would be perhaps less frustrating. After death you'd be returning to a level different than the one you died in, so you wouldn't feel like nothing changed.

It might need to become easier though, not sure. I don't think many players are currently able to finish it, even though it's pretty short.