itch.io

Wow, thank you for the super kind words!!

Especially about the AI, since that's what gave us the most heartache during the project, haha. There was a really bad bug on the second to last day that had us up until 4am on a discord call debugging where seemingly randomly, ALL of the letters would freeze in place and start spinning in circles firing in random directions endlessly (it'd even affect newly spawned enemies). A handful of hacks later, and you get the current solution that's in the game, which involves the C letters listlessly staring off into the distance for some reason. But whatever, we were just happy the game was playable :)

As for the map, you're totally right in that it was primarily a template blockout. Myself and the other programmer were more interested in making the shooting/scoring/AI systems the best they could be, so we didn't put that much time into map design. And yeah, the game's connection to the theme is admittedly pretty weak... we latched onto the notion that an echo was a copy of something early on, and figured we could pretty conveniently work that into whatever game we wanted to make, which ended up being a score attack arena shooter :)

Thank you again for the review!

Gotcha, will keep that in mind. I didn't know that was an issue since doing the "Extract All" option on my computer automatically generated a folder for the files, but I guess it behaves differently on other machines.

I see, thanks for the feedback.

Extremely engaging, this is easily the game jam entry I've spent the most amount of time on.

After four attempts, my best score was 712,300 at wave 72 :)

This is pretty fine for a first game :) one piece of game jam-specific advice I'd recommend is to try and incorporate a scoring system into a game like this! It doesn't have to be anything complicated, just adding 1 to an integer whenever you defeat an enemy, and displaying that to the player. Heck, you could have even just made it output in the console.

I also think it's important to scale the difficulty as time goes on. I'm not sure if the current version of the game had it, since I only played for about two minutes, but it felt like the enemy counts weren't increasing and they weren't moving faster. Again, it doesn't have to be anything complicated; making them spawn slightly more often as time goes on, or making them spawn with a slightly higher speed as time goes on, would really make the game more engaging.

It's rough around the edges, but I had fun with it regardless. Give me blocks and a character to jump on them, and you can never go wrong :) though I was damn near ready to tear my hair out at the second to last challenge haha, landing on the half of the blocks that didn't have the side arrows was a nightmare!!

I don't think this game hits up the theme at all, but whatever. Hope you had fun making something :)

The echo effect looked cool, but I don't think it added much to the game for me. Avoiding the turrets and the guards was engaging on its own, while waiting for the echolocation to recharge just kinda felt annoying. Though I guess without the mechanic, the game wouldn't really adhere to the theme, so I understand why it's there.

Solid entry though :)

This is SUPER polished!! I really appreciate the amount of effort that went into making it FEEL good to play, such as the pitch-scaled sounds when destroying the various shape types, the camera shake when firing, the particle effects when the shapes blow up, etc.

While I did find the gameplay fun and engaging, I personally think there were two flaws that tarnished the experience for me:

1. Having an infinitely scaling score multiplier felt bad to me. It makes it so that what matters most is building it as high as possible in the early game so that you can have a 100x multiplier in the late game where the most enemies were. The moment I lost my multiplier in the late game, it felt as though the run was pretty much over already, since building it back up would take too long. I think having a multiplier cap of like 5x or something would have made it feel a lot better to me; you'd be rewarded for going on streaks, but not immensely punished for losing it. I also think needing to build to each new X multiplier would have been nice (e.g. 5 kills for 2x, 10 kills for 3x, and so on)

2. The recoil gimmick was more frustrating than it was entertaining. The vast majority of the three games I played I spent blasting myself into a corner, and pretty much staying in that corner for the rest of the game, because I believe there's logic that prevents shapes from spawning too close to you. It's good that nothing spawnkilled me in the corner, but not good because I don't think I was engaging with the game the way you wanted. I found myself wishing I could just move around with WASD, which part of me thinks would have been fine, since I don't think the recoil was important for the game's theme.

With all that said, this is still definitely in my top 3 entries for this jam!! My high score was 2,489,500, with a 182x bonus streak :)

Unless I missed something, it felt impossible to play because there was no way to differentiate between a tree and a bear trap. I died twice and couldn't muster the energy to try again :(

The atmosphere was pretty spooky, though! And the first time I got snagged by a bear trap, it gave my heart a jolt that horror games don't typically do to me, haha.

This is a solid entry for someone that's very new to gamedev!

It was an alright experience to me. The echo not being on some kind of cooldown made it fairly trivial to get a feel for the map, and I think the player was too slow which made it annoying to maneuver around.

Again, though, this is a fine entry for a game jam :) I hope you keep at it and make new stuff as time goes on!

This is a rare situation where I think a jam entry was way too short!! I was havin a great time and getting a feel for the game, and it ended really abruptly.

I'm sure you were strapped for time, but I think it would have been valuable to invest the time it'd take to make the waves infinitely scale in difficulty. It wouldn't have had to be anything complicated; just spawning X amount more enemies per wave, giving them X% more health per wave, etc.

As for the main gimmick of towers only being able to shoot around the generator, I didn't really feel its presence. I played this one as I would any other tower defense I've played, which is to say I spammed all of the towers towards the start of the track and let them run wild. The only real difference is that I kept them within range of the echo generator, which didn't really affect the game that much to me.

It took a minute to figure out what was going on, and I lost my first run because of that. On the second run, I had a much better idea of what I was doing, so it was starting to become enjoyable to me. I do like this idea of herding something into an area to gain points! I found the tornado to be more annoying than engaging, but I understand why it has to exist. I think making the player a little bit faster would have made it less annoying to chase down the balls it would kick away? I'm not sure though.

I didn't read any of the text the NPCs in the levels would say, since I felt like I was always on a really tight timer to keep as many reinforcing ideas in the zone as possible. It never felt like there was any downtime to take a moment to read what they were saying.

The intro cutscene and general aesthetics of the game are weirdly charming to me, like they're straight from an old CDrom game from the 90's. I really liked them.

Gameplay-wise, I think there's inherent satisfaction to watching the map layout unfold in real time as you progress through it. However, the way it unfolds is a little slow... I personally would have found it more satisfying if the echoes happened more frequently, and had a wider range. It'd reduce the 'difficulty' of the game, but I don't think the game is really difficult to begin with, just time consuming.

Oh man, I really liked this one. The controls felt difficult to wrangle at first, but by the third level, it started to feel natural to me.

I bet there's multiple ways to go about the later stages, which I think is a really cool aspect to this entry! Usually in game jam entries, the dev will implement a single ironclad solution on how to go about solving their puzzle, but this one felt more open ended, which is really good.

This is SUPER polished!! It feels like a demo to a complete game, which is really really good for a game jam entry.

I accidentally found some cheese really early on though that made the difficulty of the game really trivial, though. If you jump and then press z -> x in quick succession, you can functionally create infinite platforms for yourself and ascend upwards anywhere. If this cheese was addressed somehow, I could totally see this being converted into a full 1hr experience or something if there were more levels :)

I actually really loved the controls! They were simple yet so effective at making it engaging to traverse the level.

One thing that would have helped me out a lot is some small text on the screen saying "Press A to use the Echo" or something. My first run of the game I didn't know that mechanic existed, and when I came back here to write my comment, I noticed in the screenshots that the level was fully lit in some of them. I took a look back on the itch page and saw that yeah, there was an echo mechanic that I could use with the A key, so I replayed the game using that and it felt much better.

This felt like a fine entry, especially since you mentioned you're a new developer!

As I'd imagine others have probably already mentioned, it's really awkward using the arrow keys to move, space to jump, and clicking to shoot. Changing the jump key to the up arrow would have helped out a lot with this.

I'm a big fan of scores in jam entries, but in this game it wasn't particularly difficult to avoid the birds or falling spikes, so I think I could have gone on forever. I love the idea of one of the player's projectiles being a moving platform that they can ride, but in the current version of the game, I didn't find much purpose in using that given how much mana it cost.

Overall, though, this feels like a fine entry :)

A microphone-based game is very bold for a game jam! It's a shame we couldn't see it in action, since I'd imagine it was just a few project settings or something that's preventing our microphones from being able to be used.

It's pretty impressive to have created this quantity of warioware-esque minigames in the timespan of this jam! My favourite was the haus one, and the golf one was pretty good too.

My high score was 5 :) I tried again for a higher score, but a bug killed my run at 4, where my clicks stopped registering on the soccer game. I think I accidentally clicked again after it had turned green, which might have broke something.

I like the idea of having a character that needs to disguise themself to get by an enemy. As another comment mentioned, though, I wasn't able to sneak through the levels as I think was intended. After two attempts at doing that, I ended up just sprinting through all three levels and that seemed to work just fine. Solid entry though :)

This is a pretty solid entry. I really liked the VFX and overall atmosphere of the game, it feels like a lot of effort went into the soundscape and lighting.

Mechanically, I never really knew exactly what I was doing. Throwing the stone made rings grow outwards from where it landed, but I never processed what that was actually doing. I didn't even know I had an inventory that I could scroll through at first; when I did realize that, I gathered the first soul echo thing by randomly using stuff I had, without really knowing what I was actually doing.

I also got rocked by the reaper, I didn't know what to do to avoid it :(

Regardless, I think you did a great job!

Aw man, that's really unfortunate. Try not to get discouraged, though! It happens to the best of us, especially during the hectic final hour of the jam where we're all trying to make our builds and upload them.

If you end up re-uploading when the rating period is over, lmk and I'll play your game :)

Glad you had fun! We initially planned on the S boss being bullet-helly, but ran out of time lol. Prediction shooting would have for sure been great to have for it.

I was surprised at how well put together the one puzzle was that utilized all three of the mechanics taught thus far (placing boxes on buttons, pulling levers, and placing boxes to block doors). That puzzle genuinely felt like something out of a fully developed and well thought out game.

The art and aesthetics are really nice :)

Mechanically, the echo location seems cool on paper, but to me, it felt like an annoying-to-use flashlight. Like, I think I would have enjoyed the game much more if there was just a static light around wherever the cursor was pointing at, so I could engage with the environmental puzzles more conveniently. (though then it wouldn't fit the jam's theme lol)

That's a unique interpretation of the theme :) I actually quite liked this one! It was really satisfying amassing an army of teal lads and watching them take over. I also found it really engaging to amass an equivalent army of some other color, and when it was only teal and that other color left, I removed all of the walls and let them have at it. Really fun!

As for if I understand how the game works... somewhat. I know colors can debate with other colors, and that more of a color equals better debate outcomes. As for specifically how they choose their debate targets, and how others choose to gang up on any particular debate target, I wasn't sure. Not knowing those specifics didn't impact the experience for me, though.

I love the idea. I didn't understand what was happening at first, but on my second run, I was excited to try and make my own kill-box that would trap the particles I shot out and almost guarantee that every single one would hit an enemy.

The enemies felt way too tanky to me, though. Even when it felt like half of my shots were landing, and I was using both the red and blue shots off cooldown, I still got overwhelmed really easily.

Regardless, great entry :)

This is one of my faves so far for sure! At first I thought it was just ok during my first run, and that it was a little annoying how tanky the orcas were. But upon dying and realizing there was an entire tech tree, I was really surprised!

Immediately I felt engaged and spent time grinding out the money to get the engine upgrades and torpedoes, which felt good to use against the orcas that gave me so much trouble in the beginning.

I was a little disappointed to come to the realization that there was no actual end to the cavern, and that it just endlessly looped (unless there is, in which case sorry!)

A piece of feedback I'd give is that enemy variety is important for a game like this, atleast to me. In the context of a game jam, a quick and dirty hack you can utilize to get atleast *some* variety is to slightly randomize the size of whatever enemies you face. And in this game, slightly randomizing their speeds would have helped avoid them all clumping up together into big orca masses, and would provide some extra engagement in that players would want to target the faster ones first!

Loved this one. It was really engaging taking a moment to parse each room before moving forward with it. And while jumpscares like the one in the game aren't everyone's cup of tea, I liked it!

I also appreciate how you implemented coyote frames for the platforming! I don't normally expect a QoL thing like that from a game jam entry, so I was pleasantly surprised.

I had a lot of difficulty figuring out what was going on at first, but once I figured it out, I had a fine time. I think adding that rotating line that shows on sonar machines would have helped with parsing what was happening.

I could not beat the game, I suck :(

As rough as this is around the edges, I actually like how control is taken away from the player just before  reaching the sound wave. If the player maintained control 100% of the time, the difficulty would be trivial, but having to time it such that the sound wave won't hit the glass after you lose control made it somewhat engaging!

My high score was 5 :)

The echo effect is kinda jarring, I think toning down the opacity of it would have felt better. I liked exploring the map, and the addition of an intro cutscene was a nice touch.

Thank you for the kind words!

The AI is definitely held together by gum and glue, haha. Getting that stuff even somewhat functional gave us so much strife, it doesn't surprise me that one of the enemy types is bugging out like that.

Both myself and the other programmer agreed that the B enemies were the most fun wave to face because it made us feel like we were getting sick air shots :)

And yeah, that UI bug didn't show its face until we built the game an hour before the deadline. It doesn't happen in the editor, but does happen in the build for some reason, and we were like ah well whatever lol

Other than the bugs others have mentioned, the game feels polished and complete, which is huge for a game jam. The music selection is nice, the Text Animator you used is charming, and the animated rainbow effect on the title of the game just made it all feel overall better to me, even if it wasn't directly linked to the gameplay.

Gameplay-wise, it felt alright. I never felt the central gameplay gimmick of touching the echoes disabling your movement controls; they were too far to the left to ever come into play, and even if I did go out of my way to touch them, it didn't seem like anything happened. The echo balls colliding with eachother did intrigue me, though; part of me wonders if there's something to explore with making the shots bigger and slower, such that colliding with the enemy shots occurs more frequently, which could potentially be exciting/interesting to play around.

Regardless, this is solid for a first attempt!

This is SOLID for a first game jam experience! The art and sounds were nice, and it felt like there was thought put into the design of the level.

At first I thought the amount of concepts being taught was too much, but by the end of the game, I felt like I had learned the language of the game and was swapping between the light and dark world and the past and present self as though it came second nature to me! It's a shame there wasn't enough time for more content, because I finished the game wanting more :)

A piece of feedback I have is that I wasn't fond of how the camera behaved. The way it lags behind the player made platforming feel kinda bad to me. I would have much preferred if it affixed the character to the center of the screen at all times, and maybe zoomed out a bit to help with determining where I want to go.

That's a shame this game wasn't able to be realized within the timespan of the game jam, echo as a terminal command is a unique interpretation of the theme that I haven't seen anyone else mention yet.

Bugs and general polish aside, one actionable piece of feedback I'd give is to try and inform the player on what the controls are, and what they're supposed to do.

Tutorials are all well and good, but since this is a game jam and we're all stripped for time, something as simple as a UI panel that gets slapped on the screen when you start up the level would be sufficient. Something like that in this game telling me what I can do and what my goal is would have done wonders, since in lieu of that, I just wandered around and picked up a couple cylinders without really knowing what I was doing.

Regardless, this is a solid attempt for a first game jam! I can see the ambition and effort on display :)

Such a bizarre, weirdly enjoyable experience. It was so insanely funny to me when, after what felt like 30 seconds of silence, a tiny one-memory creature I created drifted casually into the top right corner of the screen and blurted out "GOD DAMN"

Oh man, I really liked this one! Gameplay-wise, it was incredibly satisfying timing the jumps in such a way that I would graze the person I want to hit without touching the ceiling/floor near them, so that I could preserve my note for as long as possible and get more people during the strum.

My first attempt was 3 strums 56 echoes. Knowing the mechanics and general placements of the people, I tried again for a better score, and got 2 strums 33 echoes :)

The only feedback I have is general QoL stuff, like a main menu, the ability to pause/quit the game, and maybe a slider for the overall volume of the game. Though, given that you're so new to game design, I'd imagine you had a lot of other concerns on your plate, haha.