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Thanks for the feedback! I'll work on refining the controls.

Great! Got it working. The first time through, I broke the combat system by flailing and pressing too many buttons at the first set of attacks. I tried to reproduce it but I wasn't able to. I tried again and got the hang of the battle system. I feel like there's a lot of depth there that could be explored in a proper tutorial. Loving the aesthetic and audio so far, keep it up!

I couldn't get this to work. None of the controls (wasd, arrows, z, x) worked, and the game never progressed past the "You are that man" text on the right.

OS: Windows

Thanks for the feedback! I already fixed the zipline bug and uploaded a working version. I think I know what's causing the optional dialogue bugs -- if I'm correct in assuming you played through the tutorial, that is.

Now, as for the concept: mechanical similarity between generations was an intentional choice to make it feel a bit smoother to play across generations, but you make an interesting point. It's something worth considering, and would mean I'd have to completely revamp my approach, which might not necessarily be a bad thing.

That said, I'm intent on keeping the puzzle-y design. I know each level can be crossed at least 6 or 7 times before you start running out of blocks. Platformer/strategy isn't even really a genre yet. Maybe I'm starting to see why, but I'd at least like to see it through.

Great, I think I know what's causing the bug now. Thanks for your help!

Thanks, glad you enjoyed! Can you give me some feedback about how exactly you encountered the optional dialogue bug? A few people reported it but I can't reproduce it at all. Where/when in lvl 2 did you press T? What were you doing at the time? Did you complete the tutorial first?

Welp, the cats definitely killed me.

First of all, I absolutely LOVE the visuals. They ooze soul. The shaders you use are great. I'd love to have a similar sort of effect in my game.

The game itself feels a bit TOO challenging, especially if this is intended to be the first level (which I highly doubt). The roguelike aspect of the game sometimes means that you don't spawn near any weapons at all, and you have no chance of winning because the default melee weapon is useless.  Progression hinges mostly on luck. The shotgun isn't as good as the rifle or the tommy gun. As soon as I got one of those weapons, the rest of the level was a breeze. Turret spam isn't good design IMO. Bullet hells just don't work very well in FPS format.

Also encountered a bug where trying to walk through the level gets you stuck and unable to move. I can't imagine this is intended since there were some areas that you could only pass by walking through the lava in order to get a power up.

Would love to see this polished up a bit and play a later version! Great work so far

Thanks for the feedback! Could you tell me where it froze or what you were doing?

I'm going to have to echo the sentiment that the tutorial needs to be expanded. I run around the crash site trying to find a torch. I found the broken lever, but then it got too dark and I couldn't see anything anymore. I was left waiting around for the sun to come up again but after waiting for quite a long time, I just closed out of the game. I'd be willing to give it another go and provide better feedback if there were more structure towards the beginning.

I'll have one eventually, my bro, just for you <3

Fun game, beat it pretty quickly. Would I sound a little bit biased if I said I enjoyed the visuals? ;)

Great fun! I especially love the mini-map you can move through when you step on a teleporter. You can tell a lot of love went into that.

It feels really good to play, and I only have a couple of very small comments:

The aiming reticle feels off. It doesn't quite feel smooth enough, and it should always be visible on the screen. You should clamp its coordinates to the very edge of the screen so that it doesn't get lost.

Is the ammo cap on the default pistol really necessary? I know there's more than enough ammo to get through dungeons even with killing all of the enemies, so I have to wonder what the point is

The camera could maybe front-run the character a little bit more -- especially when heading upwards. I walked into a new rooms and immediately got hit in the face with a projectile a few times, and it doesn't feel fair. Either that or you can give enemies a bit more time to wait before targetting the player when you enter the room.

Good fun though, I really enjoyed it! The artwork is great too and the effects are spicy.

Glad to see you’re still working on this. Hadn’t seen progress in a while

Okay I finally beat this game. Now I can uninstall it.

Bug: Torrupt's special ability incentivizes reducing the game speed from 4x to 1x. At 4x, its ability almost never activates since it's based on "seconds" rather than seconds * game speed or something. Also, Shiecken can be OP AF if the steel ability is active.

Thanks for playing and for sharing the vid. It helps me to see a few things I need to change. I shouldn't have gated the tutorial behind a long dialogue sequence. The tutorial explains most of the mechanics you're confused about, including the "game not working" -- I used the unintuitive idea to press "T" to advance dialogue, and didn't mention it anywhere in-game, only on my game's page. That's why it seemed the game got stuck or stopped working. That will be the first thing I fix. Glad you enjoy the controls! You seem to have a pretty good hang of them. I'm thinking of adding coyote time for an extra few frames

Great idea, I'll add that to the to-do list.

Thanks for the feedback. Clever man to wait 10 mins! There is indeed a dialogue easter egg for actually waiting ten minutes, but it seems I F'd up the coding. Cheers for the two bug reports, I'll get those fixed ASAP.

I still have a lot of cleaning up to do in the game mechanics. I threw together the dialogue system the day before the jam started, and it's kind of a mess. I'll be making all the changes you suggested. As for the "reset view" button -- resetting the room via the computer does just that (IIRC). Is this sufficient, or do you think a specific button to reset view would be best?

I've tried to run through the game about 8 or 9 times and I still can't beat it. I've only gotten to the E3 once. A few balance issues -- it seems like the ultra rare mons are just not worth the investment. I've found it better to focus on common ones and just keep evolving them. Their buffs are pretty good as is, and you can get one or two 10% boosts from evos pretty easily. The ultra rares aren't particularly useful and they're pretty much impossible to get three of and evolve. Also, a counter would be nice to see how far away from the gym you are -- I've lost a few times because I didn't take a rest and instead captured a mon when I would've been better off resting. Just a suggestion.

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed. My initial concept was to have the Vector stuff JUST be the tutorial, thinking people would get sick of it quickly, but I put so much work into it that I decided to make it an entire world. You’ve given me a lot to think about. Like you said, I am kind of married to the idea of the Evoland thing, especially as it plays into the story, but I will try to think of how to include more Vectrex-style stuff, or maybe make a spin-off or something.

One of my fave devs. I'm excited to finally be able to playing this. I was the one who suggested the trash bag visual btw. Turned out more hilarious than I ever could've imagined.

Loved the intro, too. I've played a bit and I've been getting my ass kicked so far. I got wiped out immediately after the first gym a couple times. Gonna keep at it.

Got to the Elite Three and got smacked down at the 2nd dude. Really enjoying this so far. Gonna try to clear it.

In the tutorial, I'm not quite sure why pressing F activates a toggler block when you still need to hover your mouse over it. It was kind of strange and misleading. Why use a button when you have to use your mouse anyway? I got to the part of the tutorial where you can stack stuff in your inventory. After I got to the bottom of that, there's this large area with copper veins, and nothing tells you what to do next. I tried collecting and stacking the stone, but it didn't work. I collected a bunch of copper, but nothing that allowed me to progress. Just hung out welding, unwelding, and trying to click on the stone.

I eventually figured out that you COULD store some of those small individual blocks if you unweld every side, but that's a bit tedious -- essentially having to wait for the "unweld" animation to draw out 3-4 times for every block, then hold shift and hover over and right click to retrieve each of those blocks -- it'd be nicer if there was a button that streamlined that entire process -- especially since this is essentially the crux of the game.

When I got to the extractor, I was lost again. I turned the one on the right on, and it started extracting ore. I knew that I needed to turn the one on the left on, and ride the ore to the top, but it didn't quite work... I also couldn't get the prompt to appear again, so I had no idea what to do. See pic:

This, too, I eventually got working by... I have no idea. I do not know what I did differently, but suddenly it started working again. I tried making sure everything was "welded" together before but for some reason this time it started.

One more thing -- I got the arc furnace working but no idea what the other equipment around it was. The arc furnace could be a bit tedious to run -- I had to collect every individual piece before the next one was "loaded" and then made available to collect to build the next part of the bridge.  This process ought to be automated -- maybe let the arc furnace slowly run through the tower of ore on top and "stack" them automatically into the block touching it? I don't know.

Definitely recommend introducing the zoom in/out buttons in the tutorial towards the beginning. I never knew about them until I read another person's comments.

The crouch animation is pretty cute btw.

Thanks again for clearing it up! I was afraid to add too much momentum/too little friction to the game and instead focus on near-immediate starts/stops so that the movements feel more "precise". It seems like a few people mentioned this however as making the game feel just the opposite though -- imprecise. So I'll play around with the different settings and see if I can make something that feels a bit better. Thanks for the script suggestion!

Love the feedback, thanks! You have some excellent suggestions and I'm going to be implementing most of them without question.

Not sure why levels 7+ weren't opening. The code is the same for all of the doors and I've never run into or heard of this issue before.

The problem with using "Jump" or "Use" to advance the dialogue is that some dialogue can occur while the player can move, so I'll have to think of a way to make this jive with the rest of the game. Probably the best way is to simply make this type of dialogue run automatically when activated. The dialogue system was thrown together in a couple of days and is a heaping, barely functional mess to be honest, so I hope to be adding some refinements to it.

For resetting the touched blocks on death, later levels while have blocks disappear soon after touching them, so I'd like to keep that aspect of the game consistent at least. Although it does make sense to have the level reset blocks if you haven't reached a checkpoint or finished the first clear yet, now that I think about it. Thanks -- I'll make that fix, too.

Awesome feedback, love to hear these suggestions. You have a good eye for good game design. Looking forward to giving your game a play later today too. 👍

Thanks so much for your feedback and for playing to the end! I think you might be on to something with the wallalide being too fast. I may slow it down a touch. As for the jumping being imprecise, could you explain a bit about what you mean? Walljumps or regular jumps? Apart from walljumps, there isn't much momentum in the game so you should pretty much stop jumping whenever you let go of the move keys.

I'll definitely be adding resolution options soon. It seems like my "perfect camera" option really only works for my monitor 😅

Progress menu will allow you to jump between generations, worlds, and levels when it's fully implemented.

Really appreciated your feedback 👍

Any chance you could keep it in and add a secret, along with an exit? It felt pretty cozy in that room 🙂

Thanks so much for the feedback! I ought to make it more clear -- you're not expected to "clear" every single block in every level. You just need to complete the level twice. I'll have to indicate that better, somehow.

Agreed that scientists beepspeak is too harsh. I'll soften it a bit. And I plan to fix the aspect ratio and resolution problems. I'll def follow your advice and show a "T" graphic for dialogue even though key bindings are temporary -- I'll make that change and re-upload the game when I get home today.

Thanks again for the very specific and helpful feedback!

Thanks for the feedback and for playing so much of the game! The key bindings suck for now for aure, but I'll be fixing them for future demos. Glad you enjoyed the movement feel. And gating the levels in the hub world like that is a cool idea, hadn't thought of it. Cheers!

Appreciate the feedback nonetheless. I'll have to explain/signpost this better.

Thanks for playing! I'll be adding key bindings in the future. I'm new to game jams so I thought when I uploaded, the key bindings would be shown here from my game's page, but nope.

The window becoming small when the actual game starts is absolutely unintended. I'll fix it, but I'm a bit of a brainlet when it comes to GameMaker resolution settings, aspect ratios, viewports, GUI sizes, room sizes, and cameras. All of those combine to determine the window size and it's a bit complicated.

I'll look into why the purple thing isn't working. As long as you make it to the door/teleporter after grabbing it without dying, it should register as "got". Cheers!

Hey Aura, thanks for attempting it. To advance text, press "T". It's not the most intuitive system, but I threw it together 2 days before the jam. Key bindings will be in the next update!

I was actually thinking while playing how it's an improvement on Realm (minus the playerbase so far, of course!). One thing that annoyed me about Realm was all of your progress you could lose in an instant. This game feels a LOT less cheap when you die. Keep up the good work and be sure to post in the thread if there are any groups playing online, I'd love to join.

Was not expecting this level of difficulty from this game. It's very misleading from the art style!

I'm going to have to agree with one of the other commenters who said that there is almost too much variety level to level. Every level introduces a brand new concept and sometimes it's not immediately intuitive how these concepts are to be used, or what the new "rules" of the level are.

For example, in Easter 1, there's a fruit you can jump to get that makes you go faster and... damage enemies and make you invulnerable? But only when you're either dashing or spinning, not when standing still? And yet you don't use that fruit anywhere else in the level, and you actually don't even need to use that fruit at all to get by. It's a bit misleading. A more gradual ramp up in difficulty would be nice.

That said, you seem very open to feedback so that's super promising for your game. The energy, the vibrance, the art style, sound, and character design are all excellent. I really want to love this game -- just maybe consider a less steep difficulty curve?

STRONG Realm of the Mad God vibes from this game, which I'm sure it pays homage to. I thought I completed the game when I became an Arena God, but I'm seeing from the screenshots that there are a LOT more bosses and enemies.

Loved the creativity that went in the enemy design -- especially the bosses. The present mimic was a great find, and the rabbit was such a laugh until it started getting angry and meting out some serious challenge. Nice game! Would love to play with others.