I love these kind of multitasking challenges, and this one was designed well!
My only complaint would be the TYGH squares mode, I think the yellow indicators approach the squares way too slow and they are really difficult to parse because so many of them get cramped together.
But otherwise I had tons of fun (and suffering) playing the game, great work!
I’m late commenting but I did manage to get my rating in before the voting ended ;)
The rhythm was sometimes a bit confusing to follow, but overall it was pretty nice. I like how you reinterpreted chess into a rhythm game and incorporated the theme.
Maybe you could have made the game a bit less harsh by incorporating lives, since you immediately die if just one enemy manages to get to you.
There’s some parts in which the garbage became invisible, it really confused me at first. I’m unsure if it’s part of the gameplay or it was a bug. There were also points where it seemed to desync with the music, but then it came back on beat again.
Cool concept! I like that we both thought of ghosts for our game, hahah!
I liked the game, but the music was out of sync for me, both in the web version and the Windows version, making it a bit frustrating to play :(
I also stumbled upon the spikes bug mentioned in the comments below, preventing me from progressing further.
In any case, good job putting this together for the JAM, and I hope you can fix the issues after the voting ends and upload a more polished version :)!
Really fun game, I wasn’t expecting a bullet hell on this JAM, what a great surprise!
The music is frenetic, the bullets are well-synced with the rhythm and the patterns are interesting and fun to dodge. I went straight to Hard since I’m kind of a hardcore danmaku player, and it didn’t disappoint, hahah!
Great work :D!
If you don’t mind me showing off, here’s a video of my no-hit clears of the two Hard levels!
Nice! satisfying to play. As a bit of feedback, I think it’d help to make the asteroids more visually distinctive and/or have more space around the sun so spotting them is not part of the difficulty.
Awesome music! and a very satisfying implementation, played several times to improve the score and was left wishing it had a few extra levels. Nice work!
Don’t feel bad by any means, level 7 is a bit obscure, you’re supposed to activate the trap with Orby, which is immune to it, so that Ghosty can then go through it safely. The concept could surely have been introduced better, but we had to rush the levels since we spent so much time building the rest of the systems ><
In any case, I’m so glad that you enjoyed the game and liked the twists we added as a fellow ADOFAI player! After the JAM ends, we plan on fixing some issues and implementing some elements that we didn’t have time to include, so stay tuned ^^!
Really cool art and nice story! The songs were also quite emotional and beautiful.
The songs are well-mapped and make good use of the “switch side” mechanic.
The dialogue system is a bit buggy and I missed some of it because of that. The “hold” notes are also not very well indicated, the longer ones still only have a very short bar in the center, disconnected from the diamonds, which is very confusing.
Nonetheless, I really liked the game and I hope you can polish it after the JAM, great work!
I absolutely adored the visuals and atmosphere, quite mesmerizing.
The sound design is also really good, although I would have loved more sections with those piano notes that you need to avoid. I’ve also read below that the lasers were supposed to have sound but you forgot to implement it, oh no!
I’m sad that you also had to cut out the story as it seemed like the lore was very interesting just from the visuals and setting alone.
Overall, very nice little game, great work! I would love to see a longer, more polished version!
Really fun game with a unique take on lane switching!
I liked how in the tutorial song the time stops and the game slowly introduces the mechanics.
For me, it was way too confusing to not use fixed rotation, maybe I would have enabled it by default since I had to remember to press space at the beginning of each song, hahaha!
The game offers a good variety of songs with different difficulties, I started with an Easy one, then climbed up to Normal, Hard and finally I managed to beat an Expert one. Good difficulty progression!
The songs are generally well charted and incorporate the rotating mechanic in a nice way. I also really liked that you get an indication for where the notes are going to fall so you can plan ahead.
Overall, really good job with this one, well done :)!
It took me a while to understand that this is actually a tower defense game apart from a rhythm game, I was really confused when I started losing lives even though I was hitting the notes perfectly.
The multitasking is quite challenging, especially on Hard, in which you need to buy additional instruments and place them while hitting the correct notes at the same time.
Overall I had fun playing it and I think it’s got potential, good job!
Nice little game, although it gets really repetitive quite fast!
I also didn’t quite understand if there’s actually a goal, it says you need to collect enough energy to activate a portal but I never got to see it even at 100+ energy.
The rhythm game part is also a bit lacking, but it’s cool for being your first game in Unity!
Visuals are nice and the concept is interesting, I would have loved to play it but sadly on my system the notes are completely out of sync with the song :(
Also, it’s cool to see someone use Python to make their game rather than Unity or Godot!
However, as others have commented, it broke my brain to have the keys laying horizontally on the keyboard but vertically on screen, it took a while to get used to and was mildly frustrating, especially considering that the difficulty ramps up quite fast and that you have to wait a while for each try! For short JAM games like this I think having very low retry delay is a good idea :)
Also, for some reason the calibration didn’t seem to work well for me, I tried it several times and it always gave me a delay of about 120ms, however the notes were really out of sync with that delay, I manually set it to 0ms and it was much better.
Very cute graphics! I see that the game is ultra-casual, but it was a bit too much for me, it got a bit boring after just a few levels ><
Maybe more rhythm variety, different songs, and more involved level layouts or puzzle elements would make it more interesting. Also, some SFX really would help liven it up more :)!
In any case, good job putting it together in time for the JAM!
Very unique game! The visuals are nice, and it offers an interesting take on a puzzly rhythm game, I enjoyed playing it to the end and figuring everything out!
I was having a hard time understanding anything until I realized that there’s an indicator on the bottom-right corner that tells you if you’re doing the correct inputs or not, maybe it could’ve been a bit more obvious!
Also, the first puzzles I could understand, but the later ones I feel like I just brute-forced the correct combination by trial and error, I’m not sure if there was another way to figure the patterns.
Nice work! Loved the claymation style and the gameplay is simple but enjoyable, took me a couple of tries to get the hang of it but then I kept going and vibing along
Thanks a lot for your comments, it’s really helpful to get feedback like this!
We had some discussions about the editor and eventually converged to its current state, originally you wouldn’t even be able to see the tiles update in real time, but we deemed it way too hardcode, hahah! It can take a while to get used to, but it’s kind of satisfying once you get the hang of it. I hope you at least found it entertaining rather than frustrating ><
Regarding offbeat rhythms, other players have also had issues with this. I think the main problem is that the songs don’t really follow the offbeat and their rhythm is pretty much disconnected from the one dictated by the tiles. We entertained the idea of generating dynamic music that fits the tiles’ rhythm but deemed it too hard to fit in the scope of the JAM u.u
Anyway, glad you could enjoy it despite this, and thanks for playing ^^!
Thanks for your comment! Yes, we definitely could improve the feedback, we’ve seen many people getting confused and not knowing whether they were hitting on time or not ><
A visual indicator would’ve been nice, we may add it in a more polished release after the JAM ends :)!
Check the game page for a bit of lore and explanation!
We sadly could not export to HTML because it broke everything and we didn’t have time to fix it. The windows version was uploaded a few minutes before the 1h grace period ended!
We’d have loved to polish the game more but we ran out of time. Please enjoy what we managed to make!
Oh wow, I completely missed that. Just realised it says “2 minute game” in the start menu, haha!
Maybe including it in the description more explicitly would have been nice for blind people like me :P
P.S.: Congrats for 2nd place in Visuals! Really deserved!
Thanks for your feedback, we’re so glad that you had fun and that you think it’s a unique entry :)!
As for the difficulty, we have concluded that definitely it should have been tuned down. Maybe as you say, we could have made the player hitbox a bit smaller. We also were considering increasing the delay between bullets in some patterns so that there’s more time to get closer (especially the blue and orange circles), but sadly in the we didn’t tune it down enough and kept it too close to the limit. Something to consider for future JAMs, never rely only on dev testing for difficulty, haha!
Thanks for your feedback! The intention was precisely that the patterns made it non-trivial to get close to the boss. However, as we’ve seen from other comments, we really should have tuned down the difficulty a bit!
Extremely polished game! Loved theme, graphics and music. The patterns were cool too. Overall an extremely solid entry for the JAM, one of my favourites I should say!
I only have a single issue that has irritated me quite a lot. I’m not sure if I’m missing something, but I keep getting game over’d for no apparent reason in the middle of the boss fight, even though I have lots of hearts left. I’m playing on Normal Mode so I don’t think it’s the “10 seconds shooting and you die” mechanic. I also tried stopping shooting every 10 seconds anyway just in case, but I was still getting killed without anything hitting me. So I’m quite clueless what is the cause.
Cool visuals and interesting patterns! It was fun to learn the way to avoid each of them. However, it got quite repetitive after a while, I ended up just killing myself at around 200 seconds. I think it would have been a great improvement if patterns got harder over time, or if new variations of patterns started coming up after you’ve been playing for some time. The music loop was also a bit too short and got repetitive after a while.
But in any case, overall it was an enjoyable experience, good job :)!
We also used simple distance checking to detect bullet collision, and we didn’t even have many bullets on screen at once, but still the Godot HTML5 export was a bit laggy and had audio stutter (it was more severe depending on the computer). We’ll take a look at the reddit thread you linked, it brings up some interesting things to try, thanks for sharing!
Neat concept! it really surprised me when building grandpa came into action! The bullet hell part was less satisfying, I personally found the ship a bit too slippery, and sometimes there was no way to pass through the curtain of bullets, at least with the default shooting frequency.
Overall though it was a cool experience, Good job!
Cool game! I was a bit confused at first by the dialogue controls (I was leaving the screen to the left/right which made me leave the stage and then I had to repeat it all over again), but once I got the hang of it I really enjoyed it. I liked how you blended the story and dialogues with the battles, I think it has a lot of personality.
Battles also felt good, it was really fun chasing after the blue bullets, and having the score as some sort of currency encourages taking risks. I’d only suggest having different feedback for when you get hit and when you exit the screen, sometimes I wasn’t sure what happened because the battle was suddenly over. Music wasn’t bad but it got a bit repetitive after a short while.
The visuals are quite nice! But be more careful with the SFX, the sound of each individual virus adds up at the start of each room, making an extremely loud sound.
The gameplay was simple, but fun enough. Overall a solid entry.
