itch.io

Neat little game but overall I'd agree with the other comment that there's nothing especially fun here. Could use an extra mechanic or two that people would see in a trailer or screenshot and think "I want to do THAT." Some kind of flashy parry or stun or super move or execution sequence. Otherwise, leaning more into the comedy could work too. It is wacky to fight a killer whale, but it doesn't really do anything wacky or silly. You could go in a Parodius kind of direction, or maybe even have silly parodies of well-known bosses and attacks in the genre. A burping mushroom just doesn't really do it for me

Nitpicks:

I kept trying to hit the whale from above when it did its left-right leap, and I could only sometimes hit it from below, never above. You could maybe expand its hurtbox to make that easier

Slime seemed a bit too basic when tackled safely, but you probably know that

It seemed like I couldn't jump over the mushroom's clouds? Maybe you're supposed to dash through them, but I expected jumping to work

I don't understand why the cannonballs still one-shot you while they're sinking in the water (also why do they take so long to sink?)

I quit on the ship fight after losing 1 hit away from beating it. (I moved down too fast after jumping the third fire line, trying to set up for a jump over the next one) (Why does everything one-shot you here? Surely they could 2-shot you instead)

Thanks for playin'

Windows build is up, and I replaced all that nasty placeholder art with more final assets :^)

Thanks!

Just put up a windows build, hopefully that runs well enough, I've still got a big optimization pass to do at some point...

IMO this seems pretty perfect as a VS. multiplayer game, actually

While there is inherent randomness to whether the certain snacks you need show up, that's no different from getting the right gems/breakers in Puzzle Fighter. And that small degree of randomness is necessary for casual-competitive games like this. Smash Bros with your friends stops being fun when you beat them every time, and that's why it has items and stage hazards. You could even do the thing Puzzle Fighter/Twinkle Star Sprites/Tetris do and have both players share the snack order over the course of a round

You'd maybe need more content if you wanted to keep people playing for more than a few rounds though, something like items, wacky stages, unique characters, etc.

Loved this game. My criticism was going to be the lack of drawback to mindlessly ignoring chains while preparing a big combo, but then I saw your comment saying that failed combos increase Speed. So it's cool to see you've thought of it, but I also didn't notice the drawback. You could maybe flip it to a temporary speed loss for the player, like a tummy ache from mixing weird flavors or something like that to be thematic, instant, and noticeable. Barring that, just make the vending machine and Speed number flash red when you whiff a combo or something

Got a score of 568,600 on 00 normal and 48,000 on 10 hard

That Normal game did feel a bit drawn out, especially in the beginning as I was figuring it out, but getting that one 102,400 popup was a pretty fantastic feeling and I got nowhere close on Hard. In contrast it was a little disappointing having lower-number chains not really do much, it doesn't seem worth going for them rather than just getting repeated 1chains while stocking up your main snack. Maybe you could have a longer Stamina bar, and higher chains refill more of it? But something like a 4chain would start to max it out every time.

That and the above speed loss for whiffing would kind of flip it so chaining gameplay is the survival gameplay and scorelets would be encouraged to engage with it, much like Radiant Silvergun levels up your weapons for chaining properly.

I'm going back in for a 00 Hard run with new tactics in mind

Neat idea, very chaotic

Not sure why pieces you drop lock in place for a couple seconds before dropping, it doesn't feel very good

I was able get a score of almost 2000 never using the "Solidify all blocks," throwing bits around haphazardly and just pressing the Expand All button whenever I was close to losing, which doesn't seem like the strategy you want people to be doing. (Maybe make it so blocks that are too low or offscreen don't get expanded?)

I like how the 3d fella looked, very soulful, you should do more stuff like that

You should probably add an extra button to go to the steam page to the post-game screen instead of just opening it in players' browsers

awesome, glad to hear it

Thanks for the feedback and kind words, happy to hear I'm on the right track with the gameplay concept, and the visuals especially.

>It was kind of hard to tell what enemies did what.

All the non-animated and hue-shifted enemies are placeholder, so adding more models/animations should help with enemy behavior clarity. I'll be sure to pay attention to it.

>I picked the artillery card and I did not like what it did. 

Yeah artillery is kind of... bad. I think it's interesting though, so I'll tweak it and try to make it better. At some point I'd like to have a tooltip system where you can mouse over keywords to expand, so you could read exactly what it does.

>Music is fantastic I dunno if it's an original composition or what. 

It's all ripped from various bullet hell games I like, namely: Battle Garegga, Armed Police Batrider, DoDonPachi DaiOuJou, Ketsui, and Espgaluda. The final music will without question be significantly worse, lol

thanks for the kind words

>How did you do the trick that the game goes auto full screen when you first click? I want that for my game.

Funnily I'd rather it only did that in desktop builds, not web, and just never tracked it down to fix it since the build time is so long. Seems like the code is:

if ( [the save data for the toggle says to use windowed mode] ) {

    Screen.fullScreenMode = FullScreenMode.Windowed;

} else {

    Screen.SetResolution(Screen.currentResolution.width, Screen.currentResolution.height, FullScreenMode.FullScreenWindow);

}

And I just call that code when the game starts, and the save data defaults to fullscreen on.

I do not remember why I use Screen.SetResolution() instead of just "Screen.fullScreenMode = FullScreenMode.FullScreenWindow;" but I guess try both if you're not getting the results you want, lol

thanks for the feedback, m8

>Frustratingly laggy, in general and especially when using the special ability. Would prefer to play it as a download.

Yeah I keep doing optimization but the stuff I want to do is just inherently laggy since my enemies are slightly more intelligent than in most Survivors games. I've still got a couple big optimizations to do, so I'll get on that.

>you can actually destroy progress on a turret by changing the weapon? that sucks, made me almost quit

Oh yeah, I had grand ideas for how this would tie into the upgrade system and sometimes be the right choice, but never really finished it. I'll probably just take it out, thanks for shining a light on it.

>so far it was quite entertaining (only reached level 18)

great to hear

Double-thanks for the playthrough video, those are always super helpful

Known bug: "fodder" enemies in boss rounds are sometimes invisible, I'll upload a fix later. Your turrets will still target them properly and clear them out

I mostly worked on the visuals this time, so let me know if the enemies look like ass.

Other than that, I'm always interested to hear your thoughts on the difficulty curve, how far you got on what difficulty with what build/strategy, etc.

I played more actually using the skill combining and it's pretty fun! The blessings and everything seem kind of OP, I got a setup that made the game super easy, but the combining is pretty interesting and neat. I like how it's balanced around mana costs more than support slots, that's a cool idea. Some kind of optional harder content would be fun, or maybe just a general rebalance. I ended up using Poison Bolts with all the +proj, homing + chain + speed, with the blessings for max MP and MP regen, and I was basically one-shotting everything from around level 35 to uhhh 100 (which was fun while watching a stream)

It's kind of strange you can just grab skills from anywhere though, it kind of seems like "build diversity" wouldn't exist since everyone should just grab every blessing, +proj/homing/chain, etc. Might make sense to lock skills behind classes... Or maybe more advanced/higher level versions of those skills on classes or class advancements or something?

Bugs:

I had a wand and buckler equipped, dragged a Short Staff on, and it let me have the buckler equipped with the 2H. I had to take it off and on a couple times for it to realize I'm not supposed to have a buckler with the 2H

It seemed like Scourge Spell wasn't aggroing enemies? (I almost remember this happening in some other ARPGs so maybe it's intentional, but very powerful)

Picking up gold from far away failed maybe half the time, probably other items too but I noticed it most with gold. Maybe I was just clicking next to it? If so a larger pickup radius or something might be nice?

>Are you referring to the character turning before moving? Characters only do that when at a full stop.

Yeah, it feels... pretty bad. Again, it's interesting strategically, I like how it makes dodging things and positioning more difficult, it's just kind of a "game sin" to not have any movement happen when the movement key is pressed. I can't think of any other ARPG that has this kind of delay when characters are turning, that's more of an RTS/Dota thing. I could see it turning a lot of people off of the game, they'd just think "the game's laggy" without really understanding it.

>why not try adding/stacking Multishot or Chain Shot or both to your projectile spell, you can combine compatible skills. You don't have to though, and thanks for the feedback!

I totally didn't know you could combine skills, that seems neat! You should probably emphasize it in the skill tree UI more or wherever so people don't miss it

I also just realized I never used the vendor because despite reading the controls I never realized I was in a "Respite Zone" so I never pressed the button. That could also be more clear. It's super important to make this kind of stuff totally unmissable for dummies like me who don't want to pay attention. Maybe just by displaying some text in a corner of the screen saying: "Respite Zone" "Press V for Vendor, H for Stash" whenever you're in one of those zones. I'd imagine that whole system is placeholder and you'll have more visible shops/stashes at some point, though

All right, that seems pretty perfect for where I want the difficulty to be. Ultra might be too easy, although "some hours" might be just enough playtime to justify getting close to beating it. Maybe I'll just add a fourth difficulty that's super crazy instead...

 Thanks a lot for the feedback

cute, lovely, mysterious

I like the concept a lot, but I don't really like the controls. They seem kind of finicky and oversensitive, though I might just not be used to them. Using the mouse to control angle+thrust would be neat, but also make the game a lot easier. Maybe to maintain some difficulty you'd make the player click away from themselves and aim the balloon/thrust instead of just putting the mouse where they want to go.

Walls/floor friction making you lose your velocity beyond simply bouncing off them felt kind of bad, I'd expect to be able to slide along them.

I could maybe see this being one of those low-budget streamer rage-bait games if you wanted to push it in that direction. Like Jump King, etc.

Didn't seem to work for me? Or I just don't get it...

When I start, the number is immediately 6, enemies seem to be dying the frame they spawn unless I'm standing on the other spawner, and even then they often just die out of nowhere? Doesn't seem like anything can damage me either.

Playing the web build on Chrome

>My suggestions are towards allowing the player more freedom to choose a specific weapon or build.

In general, I think roguelites should really encourage "making the best of what you've got." At least that's my philosophy towards them, so I don't think I want to change much of that other than keeping the upgrade level of weapons when switching them (And maybe even lowering the "upgrade level" by one so the upgrade price isn't permanently higher). If it's easy to scrap together the same super-strong build every time the game gets boring, IMO. This way selecting your upgrades can be more skillful and a bigger influence on your success, so in theory just getting really good at that part will let non-bullet-helly people win. Swapping weapons/builds with turrets is interesting though, I'll consider that. Maybe I'll have that feature unlock in meta-progression so new players aren't overwhelmed with buttons their first time playing.

>Other things I'd like to mention is that I found the repair +/-% a bit confusing. I'm not quite sure whether +repair (as in turret repairs more) is good or -repair is good (as in turret needs less repair)

The wording is deliberately a bit vague because the number does a lot of stuff. You definitely want more, it's both the max "health" of turrets, and repair speed for that turret. On the player it's repair speed for all turrets and repair range. Honestly, the stat isn't working out exactly how I wanted so I've been considering scrapping it. (Ignoring damage items and stacking Repair on the player was way too strong, it's annoying when it turns out low, it doesn't feel good to be forced to pick some up, etc.) Alternatively I might just throw it in a "Helpful Tips" text box somewhere in the game. Alternatively alternatively I'm going to make "good" stats green and "bad" red at some point... Thanks for letting me know it's unclear.

>And I don't understand why, on the first level: I get a free turret+turret upgrade is within budget but player upgrade is out of budget

Since the turrets are the unique, central element of the game I'm trying to push and encourage their use, so that's a subtle way of doing it. If they don't feel like a central element then I'm fucking up and I need to find more ways to tie mechanics into them, hehe.

>Oh I almost forgot. Esc pauses/unpauses the game but it's also the shortcut in the browser to leave fullscreen.

Oh right, I noticed that before and DID forget. I'll fix that up, thanks

Good feedback.

Any thoughts on the difficulty curve? I've been making pretty sweeping changes to it lately, would be really curious to hear how far you got and what difficulties you played. + If it ever felt unfair, or too easy.

Pretty fun, even against bots

Great presentation, too

The skill tree was a bit unintuitive, it took me a second to understand "unlocking" the skills, and initially thought things needed 10 points since it said /10

I understand the delay on movement to make kiting weaker but it still feels unresponsive... Maybe try having the player's movement speed ramp up over that amount of time so it still feels like the game's responding to inputs? You could start around 10% speed and SmoothStep up to 100% over those 15 frames or whatever. You could tweak the numbers to make it mostly identical gameplay-wise while still feeling better.

I felt pretty unthreatened until I got to a green guy with a sword 5~ areas in who "Flicker Striked" me (in PoE terms) for 18 damage and one-shot me which felt pretty unfair. I had even just put my first few points into HP just in case, at level 5 or so. I suppose I should have been focusing more on defenses, but spells were hitting me for like, 1-2 damage so I felt safe. (Maybe since I was playing a wizard myself?)

Overall fun and impressively "complete" RPG systems but I don't feel compelled to try again since I don't see any unique gameplay features to mess with or anything specific it made me want to try to do. Playing D2 you see skills deep down the tree that sound really fun, so you keep playing. Playing PoE you keep seeing new skill gems with neat effects and supports that compel you to find more so you can combine them in neat ways. A small feature that's unique and distinctive could go a long way.

I like it a lot, played it for 20 minutes or so, but... it's just Luck be a Landlord? That game did super well with an honestly pretty similar level of polish, but you might want to think of some way to differentiate Lucky Rogue. Maybe come up with some kind of spin on the idea (heh), somehow making it bigger or deeper in a satisfying, intriguing way.

Something like turning it into an RPG fight so rather than symbols earning money for a deadline, they can deal damage/heal/restore mana/etc. and you have to balance those? Or maybe you can just be Luck be a Landlord but a web game, that works too if you don't care about trying to sell it

Shows a ton of potential, love the style. So I wrote a ton of notes while playing

Gameplay:

I did a "grab the grafitti" challenge and then a combat challenge as my first two and honestly didn't enjoy either at all, but then I did the "race across different buildings" challenge and liked it quite a bit! (Could have an indicator for what the next building to move to will be, though.) My favorite stuff in the game is definitely traversing larger platforms and not doing any precision stuff. Just bouncing and flying around the "open world" is super fun, but that seemed like the only challenge to lean into that.

The player should probably decelerate some in the air if they're not holding any direction input, the movement can feel a bit finnicky as it is. Conversely, it might feel better to have a bit LESS friction on the ground with no input. I'd pretty much just rip values straight from Quake for this.

I don't like how picking up balls gets rid of the power you have on that hand, I'd expect it to come back when you throw the ball.

The distance to pick up a power from walls also feels a bit short, I never felt confident in doing it while moving, which seems to be the point.

It seems like running up/down slopes has no effect on jumping, which feels like a huge missed opportunity. You could add a lot of depth and fun to the movement by making up-slope jumps convert some of your momentum upward, and down-slope jumps push you faster forward. Like Sonic, or Tribes/Quake/Source games.

Graphics:

I like basically everything about how this game looks quite a bit, except the player's hands.

I'd suggest moving/rotating/scaling them a lot more in the animations. You'd be surprised how much animation you can "fake" by getting good at that, without actually drawing very many frames.

I also think giving more life to the sway/inertia when moving around would look a lot better. I'd describe basically all of the hand animation as "stiff" right now.

FIGHT KNIGHT makes fantastic use of these two things. You maybe shouldn't be AS bouncy and over-animated as those are, but I think that'd be something worth experimenting with.

I hated doing animation until I watched this, check it out if you haven't:

Thanks

I do have cool "bonus rounds" planned for between waves, like "kill as much as you can in 20 seconds," "survive this bullet hell as long as you can," etc. Chasing down some fleeing enemies could totally be one of them! Adding it to my doc

Hmm, I never considered people might want to view other weapon setups to make that decision. I'll keep that in mind, thanks.

Pretty great, love the music, went back and found the secret book after seeing a 6/7

I do think it's missing -something- to be really fantastic in the future. The puzzles are at a pretty perfect level to keep non-puzzle players engaged and not frustrated, imo. However they're not super unique. This seems like a game people would play and enjoy, but not something they'd seek out, or tell their friends about. I really like the foundation, the atmosphere, the writing, the feel and polish. But I don't think simply adding more mechanics to the puzzles would be enough to push it into 9-10/10. I was reminded of Tower Of Heaven, a pretty similar game in scope, but it stuck with me by having really impactful, memorable moments, and a sense of "beauty". Some of your non-puzzle rooms were approaching that atmosphere for me.

Maybe try to think of some other hook, memorable moments, emotion, subversion of expectations, etc. to really knock this game out of the park.

Looking at that screenshot of "The Creature's Lair" gave me a vision of a moment where you unexpectedly gain the ability to explore the areas in the water you've been seeing, maybe with like, a boat that gets left behind when you touch land, creating larger puzzles spanning multiple rooms you thought you had completed. I dunno, something cool like that where your understanding of what's contained in the game is expanded. (Maybe I'm dumb and you already planned to introduce "Surf" and "Strength" to the game at some point)

The game was good enough to make me think (and rant, sorry) about what it could be in the future, so good job!

Yeah that makes sense, thanks

I should maybe mention the weapon evolutions somewhere, the game's going to be a lot harder if you don't know about them...

Then again, Vampire Survivors doesn't mention the evolutions and just lets you find them naturally, so  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks! The graphics are 99% placeholders ripped from other games, I plan to do a whole other kind of low-poly 3d toon shading visual style

What kind of build were you doing in that run, if you can remember? Other people were saying the 10 minute mark was a bit of a wall.

Like how many turrets, which guns, which supports.

Thanks

Oh, by the way, the music is all ripped from DoDonPachi DaiOuJou, Ketsui: Kizuna Jigoku Tachi, and Espgaluda, three Cave bullet hells from the early 2000s. So I deserve no credit and you can check out more of their OSTs on your own, they're bangers for sure

Really fun, kept me hooked until I beat it

Took me quite a while to get used to the order of the weapons though, a little DMC-style weapon swap indicator/wheel thing would help with that. You could also put attack cooldowns there, so it's not a waste of screen space for more experienced players

Also the invuln after taking damage seemed a bit short

Would also be neat to add special big projectiles that can be reflected with the melee attack

It might make sense to do figure out some alternative to standard sealing on medium-tier enemies. (I don't think there's sealing at all right now?) I flew up trying to melee them only to get shot down a number of times. Maybe something like they hold their attack startup up to an extra like 10~ frames if you're in "approaching for melee attack" range?

Nice, but weirdly balanced, full of SOUL, cute art.

I'm not a big fan of the unavoidable attacks like the confusion potions and the AOE vines that get plopped on top of you. I'd just make the confusion potions smaller so they don't overlap and make walls, since I think that combination of attacks is actually really fun otherwise. Or maybe you want the confusion to happen to force the player to start dodging the pattern while walking backwards? I died the a second after I got confused so I don't even know if the controls are scrambled or just reversed

I found it to be pretty hard, lost like 4(?) runs and then gave up, since my two good runs ended to unavoidable stuff

On that note, I also don't really like how the big crabs are straight-up faster than you. I get it as a way to beat kiting, but you could do something like making them lunge when they get close enough, which can be dodged. That would at least be more interactive and not a dps-check. But maybe you want it to be a dps-check, that's totally fine too

I also had an event where the treasure chest spawned (maybe spawned early?), but another wave of enemies spawned too. I picked up the chest halfway through that wave and it just ended the event with half the enemies still alive

Thanks!

I'm considering leaning more into the "base building" aspect, including buildable walls and cash generators you have to defend. You think that would be cool?

Thanks for the feedback, m8

Really fucking great!

Ended up with this monstrosity and got to 51 before I quit

Never bothered using a second gun, although I considered making a pure bullet breaker...

If there was a "combine all" button and/or sorting on the modifiers I would have, but it seemed like too much of a hassle so I just stopped paying attention to new mods I got.

It also seems like the lower-tier mods might be too good? This baby clocked in at 1,837 dps with bullets that flooded the screen then all tracked to whatever enemies were alive. I'd pre-flood the screen then kill every enemy within seconds, the guys who shot bullets on death being the only threat.

I'd specifically look at the balance of the costs, maybe making some of the low tiers cost more and high tiers cost less. But I only did this one run so maybe you can make even MORE broken shit with high-tier mods.

There could be better audiovisual feedback on enemy hits/kills. The "pop" sounds too... friendly? Some kind of quick bleepy explosion would be cool. And maybe flashing a color on hit. The explosion visual could also use a bit of work, it feels more like the enemies just pop out of existence than "exploding."

I don't like these kind of late game scenarios where the player basically gets too strong to lose and the game can never catch up. Some devs/players do, so you might not want this advice, but I think making enemy damage scale, or enemy health start scaling exponentially per wave would do the trick. Or both.

My game happens to be... remarkably similar, so you might be interested in ripping off some of my "support items" for some of your modifiers. I know I wrote "bullet shrapnel" and "bullet ricochet" in my notes after this session.

Also, great job on the fucking optimization dude, real nice

Love these videos man, thank you so much.

I might have to steal that "big juicy button to smash into" idea, I've been trying to think of good stuff to smash into, like breakable walls. Couldn't really think of anything that would be "interesting" gameplay-wise

I wanted to like this but it kind of felt too simple? I suppose the next world could introduce more depth with different items, but the basic movement and using interactables seems pretty one-dimensional. 99% of the time you can only move left or right which means you have less control than Super Mario Bros. (I don't know if items will become way more common in later levels)

From the comments, I think you just introduced rotating and movement as two separate keys for that one selection? Obviously you know what you're doing with your game more than me but I'd suggest just making that the only option and leaning more towards that Trials/Happy Wheels kind of thing. I'd want to be able to rotate on the ground, do wheelies and have to really care about managing my weight and rotational velocity, and hitting slopes correctly.

I also really didn't like how the rotation speed in the air takes a moment to kick in and then has no velocity/inertia. It would probably feel way more satisfying if it just increased in speed the whole time you were holding it (with a speed cap or friction so you can't rotate TOO fast). And then had inertia so you really had to line yourself up with the ground before landing, basically like Trials/etc.

It could just be that you're trying to make a fairly casual game and it's just not for me, though.  These are mostly all suggestions to add depth (and the possibility for frustration) that you might not want in your game.

Gameplay video here:

Not much to say since it's just a training room, but it felt fairly nice. The animations/art are charming and "good enough for a shipped game" I'd say. I remember you went through and basically redid everything a long while ago, and it paid off.

I'm kind of surprised there's no hitstop or screenshake though, have you ever experimented with them? A few frames of hitstop+hitstopshake when enemies get hit would probably feel amazing. I just love that shit too much though, you might be one of those devs who don't like it.

Anyway, I made a short recording of the couple minutes I spent in it if you wanted to see:

Thanks for the playthrough video and thoughts!

You are spot-on with the Celeste comparison, I love that game, and kind of realized the similarity after adding the "2 dashes" state. I'm definitely planning on doing the "touch this to get your dash back" thing, but I figure I'll have to make them pretty big considering how hard it is to be super precise with the movement.

I tend to make platforming stuff way too hard, so I really needed to watch someone playtest this to see how quickly they grasp the mechanics, when I can expect them to be ready to learn the down-bounce and other intricacies, etc. So this was super helpful, thanks.

Also, there are already two secrets if you're really tight with your movement, one in Level 3 and a -very- hard one in Level 1 if you wanted to look for them ;)

sure thing

Thanks a lot for this, I've been desperately needing some playtest footage to watch