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What a blast!

I got to say, that last level with the three teleports, what a masterpiece in level design. Super difficult (for me at least), but I found it to exercise the cumulative skills the player should have at that point, and was able to complete it (after a TON of attempts).

I have to admit, initially I found the controls a little fiddly, specifically with the white cube. I understand his advantage are long horizontal jumps, but even with the first level I found it hard to align my jumps. It almost discouraged me from continuing the game. Oddly though, after the first couple of levels, it wasn't so much a problem. Not sure if I just got used to controlling the white cube, or if the level design made it easier to handle (e.g., less precision jumping needed to avoid lava). Any thoughts on if you found this to be an issue? Not sure what you could do alternatively. Maybe something more akin to Princess Peach's float jump (so normal movement, but still more "horizontal jump"). If not that, maybe an updated first level with a slightly larger/safer platform for the white cube to move on? Again, it didn't become so much a problem in later levels. Just curious on your thoughts with this.

As someone mentioned already, an in-game tutorial would be nice, but it's not so hard to find out the abilities through experimenting. One thing that might be hard are knowing the Celeste-like abilities, especially with players who may have not played it before. Moves like wall jumps and how the dash resets in certain cases (and on the flip side, when it doesn't reset) might be moves and mechanics the player is not aware that they can do in the game. I do think the level design does help with players experimenting with the dash resets, as they do progress nicely in difficulty once portals are introduced.

I've already mentioned how much I loved the last level, but the levels overall had great design. I thought you did a great jump slowly introducing mechanics to the players, and continued to build on top of that. The number of puzzle-like levels you created is astounding (at least for me, puzzles are hard to make). I hope you had a blast experimenting and making these levels. I did find it odd with some of the portal levels that had a continuation by scrolling the camera to the right of the screen. Nothing game breaking, just found it to be inconsistent with the rest of the level design.

I'm impressed with how much mechanics you were able to integrate into this game. Outside of the way the cubes moved, fusing two cubes, implementing dash with reset considerations, wall jumps, portals that maintained momentum, and teleports for switching the characters is impressive given a week to work on the game. Most of the mechanics were put to great use, with maybe the exception of the wall jump. I felt like I only encountered one level that needed it (of course I could be forgetting other levels that needed it). Would be cool to see more levels requiring it, but not a big deal, given the time frame to work on the game.

I had a great time with this game. I think individuals who enjoy a challenging platformer would really like the levels and mechanics presented in this game. I hope others encounter your game and gives it an earnest go to finish it. It's tough, but ultimately very rewarding.

I had a fun time playing your time! I found myself going back and constantly farming resources to prepare for the last battle:

The three potion types were quite distinct (heal, single attack, multiple attack). Do you have other ideas you'd like to integrate in future builds?

I found the graphics in your game just amazing. The sprites and enemy design stood out, and the animation for both the attack enemies and throwing potions was fun to watch every time. One suggestion I had has to do with the hub, where you choose the battles and make potions. If it's possible to update the camera to show the next battle, I think that would help streamline the gameplay and prevent confusion early on. I found myself playing the second battle multiple times before realizing I had to scroll down to fight the next battle. Also, if it's possible to label each battle, I think it would be helpful. I had to frequently go back and fight specific battles to get more materials, such as bones (stage 5), and ghosts (the stage right before the final fight). Something as simple as numbering them would be good enough for me (I found myself counting up from the top to find the skull battle). 

I think the UI can be improved in a couple of ways. In battle, if the potions can be organized by potion types, that would be helpful. If it were organized similar to the way it's shown when brewing potions (healing on top, single attacks in the middle, and multiple attacks in the bottom), it'll be easier to navigate and choose potions during battle. I guess one challenge would be if the player doesn't have certain potions made...? I still think dedicated "shelves" would be handy to the player.

In future builds, if you're able to integrate tooltips, I think that should also streamline your game as well. Being able to just hoover over the potions I'm interested in to verify damage dealt, and then click on it and then click to throw would streamline battles, and eliminate the need for the "throw or cancel" pop-up. However, if you do play to make this a mobile game, I think your current UI flow is fine in this case.

Overall, I had a great time playing this game. A lot of my suggestions above is a matter of streamlining certain aspects of the game, and definitely didn't ruin the experience for me. Awesome job on this one!

I'm a sucker for zombie games, so of course I had to play yours:

This was the furthest I got before I couldn't find anymore soldiers to devour. 

That first moment when the camera zooms out when your horde grows was awesome. Although small I thought it added to the experience. Being able to see more of that throughout the game would be pretty great, and add to the sense of your growing army. 

The soldiers taking out some of your zombies seems to be the challenge here (besides also finding the soldiers, which I think is the bigger challenge). If the soldiers can react faster to start shooting, or increase their fire rate, this would add more to the challenge, I think for the better. This would also help emphasis the obstacle of dealing with clusters of soldiers, which I saw a few times in your game. Those clusters should be even more of a worry for the player,  and make me second guess myself if my horde is big enough to take them on. Right now, given the late reaction and fire rate, it's pretty easy to take on any sized cluster.

I like the scenery you added to the map. I think adding more would really help when it comes to exploring and finding the soldiers. Also, at one point I did get lost in the map ( I think the top right corner) where no scenery was present, so I couldn't tell if I was still moving up or if I've hit an invisible boundary. Besides additional scenery, adding something that clearly marks the boundaries would also be helpful and make the game more fun. 

Finally, I can't tell if the number of soldiers available on the map matches the quantity of brains needed. For example, in the screenshot above I have 4 brains left. Are there only four soldiers left, or are there a lot more soldiers available beyond 4? Given the map size of the game, ideally there would be more soldiers present on the map than the target brains to consume, to give players a chance to finding most of the soldiers (and not necessarily all of them). Either that, or consider making the map smaller to make exploring more viable, or adding more landmarks to get a better sense of navigation.

At some point, the horde shown visually wouldn't grow anymore. I would be able to pick up more zombies but the shape and number of zombies shown in my horde wouldn't change. Nothing game breaking since mechanically I think it was fine, but was definitely noticable.

Great job on your first game jam! I thought it was great playing this ever-increasing horde of zombies to eat more brains!

That's totally understandable. Better to have an overall finished game than an incomplete one. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out to see if you guys continue to develop this one out!

Fun and challenging game!

Visuals were great and worked well during gameplay. As someone who is colorblind your shades of red and green worked great for me. Boris looks great!

Big props to the sound and music! Kept me going and excited to try and finish the game. As another user mentioned, having some indication of progression would be nice, as I also thought it was an infinite game.

Gameplay was pretty solid. I love this balancing act of keeping the audience happy while also retrieving words of encouragement to keep the ever-increasing stress levels down. Without having the two, I think the game wouldn't have been as challenging (and depending who the player is, not as fun).

I did find myself getting close to the words of encouragement and hitting spacebar, but not registering the hit. Of course, I may not have been close enough to it. Is there a reason for needing to hit spacebar to get the words of encouragement? Was this to add variety to the gameplay?

I did wish player movement was slightly faster compared to the notes. Seeing a green note pass me and trying to chase it upward proved to be hopeless. It looks like this is something you noticed as well based on other comments, and I think it's definitely worth trying to tweak.

Overall great job!

If you happen to have someone to play a local co-op with, check out my game for an asymmetric gameplay experience.

Wow, I really appreciate the time you've put into your feedback.

A lot of the issues pointed out and suggestions made in regards to sprites I'll definitely be checking out after making improvements to the game design and some bug fixing  (thanks for all the references and tutorials supplied!)

I’d recommend using a pre-made palette from a site like lospec

Actually I ended up using this palette I saw in Asperite: https://lospec.com/palette-list/matriax8c

My goal was to use something with a small selection of colors, as too many options tends to keep me second guessing myself. Plus being color blind, I found that the shades presented helped in distinguishing between the colors. That does NOT excuse me from properly using the colors in my pixel art, and will be something I'll be working on. I did forget to change up the color for the Tetris side and the borders, as both came from a tutorial I relied on for that portion of the game.

It could do with some music since the game is very quiet and has no passive audio (i.e. audio that is played without the player needing to do anything). There’s some aural feedback (when the player shoots and hits something) which is good but I think there could be more. As far as I can tell, there are no sound effects for the copilot (Tetris component). Perhaps something subtle like a SFX when the player rotates a piece or it hits the ground?

Audio was definitely neglected when making this game for the game jam. It was intentionally prioritized last and suffered due to scope creep and time (mis)management. Ironically I find audio cues important in gaming, especially when it comes to applying feedback to the player. Going to learn more on how to properly apply audio in Unity and how to manage it (e.g., volume balancing as you mentioned elsewhere).

I’m assuming this is a bug but sometimes the second wave doesn’t start...

Uff, sucks you encountered a bug with waves not starting. I'll see if I can reproduce those bugs in the waves you experienced them (wave 1 and wave 12). I also got an idea on how to better determine when a wave has been cleared.

Having both shields and health seems a bit unnecessary since they serve virtually the same purpose - giving the player another shot. Since the player isn’t alive (they’re a space ship) I’d recommend removing the health and just keeping the shield to reduce UI clutter

Really good point. Since the hearts can't regenerate, I was actually thinking of moving that in the UI and use lives counter instead tucked into a corner (e.g., player has 8 lives). So now when shield is depleted and the ship gets hit, ship explodes, decrement a life, respawn with a moment of invulnerability, and continue play. I think it would also add to the allusion of classic arcade games.

The Tetris component feels like it should be more important. Since I’m playing solo my first long playthrough was completely as the pilot and I found it easy enough.

Right now I think it's a level and enemy design issue. I need to do more playtesting to tailor the levels for the pilot to really rely on the copilot/Tetris player to provide shield regeneration and power-ups. For enemy design, the grunts (the enemies you see in the first few waves) actually start their shooting interval at a random time, in hopes of introducing some pattern variants for the pilot to deal it. However, as you mentioned elsewhere, that can actually make some of the levels extremely easy since you might not be shot at for a bit, so it's something I'm aiming to remediate (such as shooting more immediately at the start of a wave). Ideally the Wave 12 bugged wouldn't have occurred so you could have seen the later level designs and an introduction to a third enemy type.

I feel like you should think more about what is important to the game. Adding new mechanics that aren’t that important may be forgotten about by the player. For example, my first few runs didn’t involve the laser at all

This is another thing I want to see if better level/enemy design would help mitigate. I think with added pressure, besides relying on the copilot for shield and upgrades, exercising all of their attacking options will be important too, such as the laser and (later on) their special.

I think the Tetris component is too easy and I’m sure it would be even easier if you had a person playing who’s sole job is to do that. What makes Tetris difficult is that it gets faster. But in this game - it doesn’t, since the number of pieces depends on how many the Pilot picks up. And you can also choose which pieces get picked up

I agree with most everything here in regards to making it faster. It didn't have the effect I expected by coupling the speed with the number of pieces picked up by the pilot. That can easily be tweaked to increase the speed gained, but I think I'm going to toy around with tying speed to wave progression (e.g., wave 30 is gonna be a lot faster than wave 1). Ideally with the increased pressure, there would also be more communication on what the pieces the pilot should be picking up next.

When you hit the top of the Tetris grid you are met with a cooldown which I don’t really like. I think it also resets the bonuses gained from the Tetris component which I think is a good punishment. However, I feel like the cooldown doesn’t really serve much of point since it more or less punishes the copilot by just not letting them play

I'm going to think on this, see if there's something I can try out so the copilot wouldn't just staring at their screen. You're correct in that the bonuses can go down in level, but that's tied more to a decay rate that's happening in the background. The cooldown is meant to serve as a penalty by preventing shield regeneration and to let the decay rate run unopposed, as clearing lines is meant to keep bonuses from decaying. (I'm actually considering removing that decay mechanic, but that's another conversation for now).

Overall, it’s quite good! It’s certainly not a masterpiece or anything and it does have a lot of issues but I enjoyed playing it and that’s pretty much the most important thing. The idea of combining two games like this is quite innovative and definitely fits the theme very well in a way I haven’t seen before this jam.

I really appreciate it, this means a lot. I've always wanted to make an asymmetric co-op game, and figured with the theme this was my chance try it out. Plus I now have some references and tutorials I can work on to improve my development beyond my first game.

Again,  thanks a ton for putting in the time and effort on providing me your feedback.

[Edited to remove potential spoilers/solutions for the game]

Took a while but was able to beat it:

Super fun game. I initially thought it was going to be the usual tower defense game, but found it to be more of a puzzle which I immensely enjoyed. Some of my experience during the game:

• Level 4 starts to get you thinking
• Level 6 was awesome
• Level 7 was awesome
• Don't laugh, but I was trying to beat level 8 with 4 turrets, not realizing I had 2 guns still available to me
• Level 10 was fantastic as the final level
• Loved the congrats screen still being another level

The graphic design to me was superb; clean, simple, and effective. Only suggestion would be to somehow differentiate the red squares, as I found myself constantly trying to track a square during a run to see which specific square I wasn't shooting. I initially thought having them numbered, or using different colors, but in the end I think this might ruin the simplicity of the graphic design, which again I really liked.

Again, I think the game design was top notch for a puzzle game. Level design was on point. I wish stacked turrets was needed more, but the fact that you created 10 enjoyable puzzles is quite a feat (at least for me, I think designing puzzle-based games is a difficult endeavor). Mechanically the game worked 98% of the time. There were some runs where if repeated, the outcome would change up (e.g., a red square that would get shot by a turret in an initial run, would reach the end in a later run). This was infrequent, but was noticeable. Not sure how this bug would be fixed programmatically (tighter box colliders maybe?), or even if this is a bug at all. Based on ArithMetic's comment below (where they couldn't duplicate your video solution), it potentially might be an issue. Let me know what you think.

I spent a lot of time playing this game, and enjoyed every moment of it.

If you happen to have someone to play a local co-op with, I'd love for you to try out my game:

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-5/rate/925883

You appear to provide very constructive feedback, and I think it's something that could help improve my game design and development in the future.

Super relaxing and chill game. The music choice and graphic design really emphasized this and I loved it. The characters were lovable and fun to talk to. I particularly enjoyed discovering and finding 2D. 

It was hard to find what I had to do next, but after a bit I found it fun and relaxing to just explore the map and see what I can interact with. Eventually I found and convinced all 6 students to come back and completed the game.

If you continue development of the game, what do you think of adding something like a journal to track the different quests? Do you think this would help, or would it be something out of scope for your game design?

Pretty cool idea! I was able to get through the tutorial and the next level, but it seems to freeze when Jimmy interacts with the door at the end of the level (let me know if you guys are experiencing this on your end). From my play through of the game, I think I got the idea of what 3 of the characters can do:

• Jimmy's the only one that can unlock the door, and seems to also jump higher than anyone else
• The tall fellow seems to have more weight, based on his interacting with one of the buttons in the level to lower down the log bridge
• The witch can teleport

I haven't figured out what the small kid can do. Would love some insights on his role/ability.

So I first found it hard to navigate the levels, as the characters can't pass through each other. But I did find they can jump over each other with well timed jumped (actually, I think I just had to spam the space bar), so that solution worked out find for me. Was that intentional?

By the way, I really love the graphic design, both the character design and the background. Props to the person on your team who did the graphics!

Was there any consideration on giving a wider view of the level? It became quite jarring and time consuming switching between the characters.

Also, I like the integration of a tutorial within the first level to get things moving. Always great when you can just start playing a game quickly.

Hello! If you have someone you can play a local co-op game with, I'd love to know what score you can get in TetroFighter. Let me know how far you guys get and what score you two were able to land. I have no idea how high the scores can get, and figured this would be a fun (and competitive) way to find out here in this post.

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-5/rate/925883

Some tips for a great score:

• You will get points for defeating enemies, but don't miss out on those debris! Each one collected gives you even more points
• Elites give the most points when defeated, but Blockers give out more debris
• The larger the row-clear combos the copilot can land, the bigger the payout (the amount of points for 4-row combos is pretty insane)
• Be careful on filling up the copilot's screen with debris! Besides not being able to help out your pilot during the cooldown period, you'll also lose out on blocks you could have scored on
• Both sides contribute greatly to the score, so make sure your partner is doing their part

Most importantly, have fun with TetroFighter!

Thank you! Let me know how your experience was with this Space Invader/Tetris mash-up if you get a chance to try it

It should be able to run. Was able to run it on two separate computers, although they were both running Windows 10 (64-bit). Let me know if you're still running into issues, I'll see if I can help you out.