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Took me two tries to beat, so I appreciate the strategic element it has to it. Still haven't decided what's the best priority of upgrades, but with some feverish smashing of the spacebar, finally managed to kill everyone anyway. Meticulous pixel art characters and moody soundtrack make for great atmosphere of ultimate destruction.

I just saw this now, sorry for the delay in the response! I watched the video all the way, I was very happy to see you enjoy it and are looking forward to the future content. I'll send you a build of the game when the next update is out. Thank you so much for making the video!!!

One day I hope so!
But right now my localization framework isn't fully integrated (only some things are translatable, some are hardcoded). Then I have to make a demo release to my website, then someone actually needs to translate it (let me know if you want to volunteer, it'll be a community-driven translation), and finally it can make it into the downloadable build.

Hey, glad you were able to launch it. 

I tested only in Ubuntu on a VM and it worked fine by launching it from the GUI (I can only test an arm build for my M1 mac, but I assumed it would work the same for an x64 build). 

Thanks for sharing that it works from the terminal, maybe someone else will run into the same issue and can run it that way.

Thanks Tim! It's great finally seeing all the polished stuff coming together.

Very happy to hear that! And while you're waiting for me to put more content into it, there's a free Study Guide in the main game which you can use to do some learning ahead of time. You can find it here.

Great first game! Can't wait to see how the swashbuckling adventures will continue into the future!

That was awesome! I love how spooky you were able to make the atmosphere, great art direction!

Doesn't work for me in the browser either. Clicking start freezes the tab.

I had quite a lot of fun with this. First it seems difficult and unfair how quick you get caught, but you quickly become very efficient at dodging the enemies and it starts feeling really good how you can outsmart them. Not sure if it's a bug in the end, I tried to have both characters on the same switch to activate it, and nothing happened. Then I tried each character to be on its own switch, and it still just said 1/2. So I couldn't finish the game, but in general, very cool!

Lovely pixel art, you chose the assets and sounds nicely together. A bit difficult to find where you're supposed to go in the big open areas.

Wow, all across the board impressed. The dynamic music first off makes it feel very satisfying to move around in the world. The physics simulation once you're joined with the parts also feels great how you rotate. And once you figure out you can rearrange your configuration while you're in between doing maneuvers, it really has nice depth. Superb!

And one more with all 3 fuel pickups, 0 failed landings, 26 successful ones, score: 4740. Could get 5k if I didn't botch the last 2 landings. I'll leave that as a challenge when someone beats my score now haha.

With the fuel pickups now. :) Not the smoothest run though, plenty of room for improvement. :D

3520 in the new version. 

For some reason the right fuel pickup didn't give me any fuel though. Could have gone longer otherwise. :)

Yeah, he didn't go even pick up the sword, I just got control back, but it seems you figured it out. I was able to jump around past enemies for a bit so I saw the rest of the art a bit still. I personally like the peaceful zones the most so I got what I was looking for. :D

Hey, just played the demo a bit (version from about 3 days ago). In the cutscene where the old man throws you the sword, I couldn't pick it up. I continued on, was able to get through the fighting tutorial since I had the guard's sword, but after I gave him his sword to complete the quest, I remained without a weapon. Based on the interaction with the guard (not wanting to show the sword I was supposed to get from the old man), I should have gotten the sword? But when I went back to the scene with the old man, the man and the sword was gone. So maybe a bug that got into the build somehow.

Woot, woot!

Hey qinapses, it's been lovely watching you develop this game. I just played it and since the only thing you ask for is feedback to help you improve, here are some of my thoughts in terms of art.

First, things I already quite like: The fish animation is simple, but solid and serves the purpose well. The general palette of the game and feeling it gives is great. Lovely cyan background, nicely countered with the goldfish that stands out a lot, like it should. The enemy fish also communicate nicely that they're dangerous. At first I was a bit annoyed with different resolution of the background and the fish, but it does serve the purpose of differentiating the two even more and in the end I'm not really bothered by it.

Things to improve: The foreground floor is moving slower than the fish, which makes it seem like it's in the background. Yet, the grass is layered in front of the fish. The only physical explanation for such movement is that the camera and the goldfish are very slowly moving to the right, while all the red fish are blazing in to the left. If your intention was to make the red fish stationary and goldfish try to run past them, then either you have to push grass in the background (so it moves slower), or you have to speed it up, faster than the red fish. 

I'm not sure if you used any references drawing the floor, it seems a bit random. The bigger problem perhaps is very 'gooey' shading (like it's a translucent gelatin). Things underwater have a quite prominent hemispheric lighting setup with strong shadows underneath. Backlit setup would work here nicely as well I think, giving the foreground a nice black silhouette in front of the playfield. You could have multiple layers of grass with progressively lighter shades to give the scene more depth. Some layers could be grass and waving slowly around, but that's asking a lot. :)

The texture on the background works a bit against you I think, because it falls very flat. The layers of increasing lightness work well to indicate depth, but since they don't move in parallax, they give the impression this is painted on some cardboard layer in the background. A linear gradient (not necessarily a smooth one, it could be in 5–10 palette steps) would probably do a better job. You could add a few layers of god rays, slowly pulsating in intensity and overlapping to give more interest to the background (but very slight opacity so it doesn't become distracting to the foreground).

All I've said creates quite a bit different art direction, so take that into account—it would make the game look quite different, which might not be what you want. It's more of an alternative look that has more depth/volume. It might also lose the clear distinction of foreground/background, so you'd have to be careful and probably adjust some things to go with it. 

But in general, learning more and improving shading+lighting setup is probably what would give you the biggest addition to your skillset at this point. Especially confidence with your shadows. Ask yourself, how would you shade things if you had only black and white? right now you're relying on slight changes in value to indicate some sort of shading, but not really commit to it. Black and white will force you to decide what is in shadow and what is not and think about it from a geometrical standpoint.

Alright, I hope this is helpful. I'm not going to comment on gameplay since it's a clone, but form a technical standpoint it's very well executed so props on that! Finishing any game is hard. Since you code so well and also improve at art all the time, you're up for great things in the future (not just flappy bird clones :))! Excited to see what you bring us next.

Hey, nice to see the screenshots!!! :)