itch.io

Amazing submission! Honestly an unbelievable amount of polish and visual juice in this short amount of time; I've been trying to get this granular pixel-perfect look too, if it's possible, could I get some pointers on how you got this look? Is it designed specifically for 1920x1080p? Are there any specific pixel-perfect camera setups you use, like the Cinemachine one?

This is a nitpick, but I wish the mechanics were a little bit less dodge-spammy, and a tad more deliberate. I loved the game feel, but the combination of the smoke closing in and the player's bullets decelerating made it a bit stressful for me to try and hit the enemies. I think I sort of perceived the range of the player's attack to be quite limited, and then so I felt like I had to go up to the edge to try and hit them, which meant I was much closer to their attacks and felt like I didn't have ample time to deliberately dodge the attacks. 

Also I loved the nameless/random upgrades. It's honestly refreshing to see upgrades just thrown at you, and honestly for the scope of a game jam game like this I think it actually really increases the replayability of the game because you want to know what else there is, and because you're guaranteed one after every couple levels, instead of having to spend time choosing, or reading lengthy descriptions. And also saves time implementing buying systems and shops and upgrade selecting systems and whatnot, I thought it was a pretty nice move. 

Awesome awesome work, among the best submissions I've played yet. Congrats on putting out this cool project!

All around super awesome game, loved the presentation of the concept and the theme. I didn't really have trouble adjusting to the controls, maybe could have been ASD instead, but considering it's a game jam game and the only actions are shoot, switch, and move, i think the approachability was not all that bad.

I think one opinion that I had is that the switching, in the phases were the boss was outside of the arcade screens (which was most of the time), actually gave more of a risk to the player than not switching at all. The theme of confinement was really sold well, but it sort of ended up being a double-edged sword, since there was actually no feedback outside of each individual arcade cabinet to the overall game state, except when the boss would enter the cabinets. I would get caught in a tough spot or in a situation where damage was unavoidable, and although my first instinct would be to switch to a "safer" cabinet, I'd immediately take damage upon switching because I couldn't split up my attention between the active cabinet and the two non-active ones, so I just ended up staying on one cabinet for most of the duration I played the game. It seems like a hard problem to tackle especially because of the novelty of the format of the triple-cabinet mechanic, and I definitely don't want the novelty of the format to be sacrificed, because I really feel like there's something cool to be explored here and honestly think it's a really cool concept.

On the other hand, when the boss was inside one of the three cabinets, I thought it was pretty interesting how you could swap out to avoid attacks, and then swap back in, and definitely gave the nice feeling of dodging things and being slippery, the basic feel-good-ness that bullet hell games generally give.

Definitely a stand-out game among the other submissions, awesome work and bullet/attack patterns made in such a short time. I feel like it's the kind of game that has a looot of room for iterations, alternate mechanics, pivot points in development, etc. that would improve the game simply because the base concept is so cool. Enjoyed playing it a lot, congrats on the submission!

Awesome awesome awesome game, loved the visuals going along with the music, and the bullet patterns were super satisfying to dodge, although I would have enjoyed a focus mode/button that slowed down the movement. I think there was probably a missed opportunity turning the confinement zone into a NCS style super visualizer :P

I think the difficulty was spot on, although maybe I would have enjoyed a smattering of phases with more slower bullets instead of the fast ones, and maybe more patterns that made use of the confinement zone, like the purple ones that looped around inside in level 1 i think? And maybe might have liked some feedback on whether or not shooting things does anything, although I'm completely fine with just one hand WASD dodging since the visuals are so sick.

The overall polish and game feel of the levels was super cool, amazing work! congrats on the submission :)

Awesome interpretation of "confined"!! I think being able to see the enemies come, but not being able to move towards them or fire their bullets at them adds an exciting sort of stress, like you're trying to prepare for the bullets, but not able to do anything.

The 3D graphics, while not totally relevant to the actual gameplay, really sold the feeling of confinement because it helped explain the premise of being stuck inside a virtual space inside the real world.

As for the gameplay, I don't want to simply ask for more content like different upgrades or more bullets when giving feedback since the game was built in the scope of a game jam, but I wish that the upgrades stayed over the different loops, especially the bullet increasing one. I think having persistent upgrades while simply increasing the number of enemies or bullets, not even necessarily having to create new enemy types or bullet patterns, would have made the upgrade decisions much more worthwhile while having to add minimal new implementations (besides having to adjust the difficulty scaling to match permanent upgrades). 

I think the diagetic UI with the buttons on the tamagotchi were a super nice touch. The game sells the theme really well and I really love the concept. sick work you all, congrats on the submission!

super super sick concept and awesome eye candy, never thought dodging this slowly would feel so satisfying! I think some points to note is that to me it was a little unclear what the enemy behavior would be whenever I ended my turn next to one. I think there were moments when I ended my turn next to an enemy, and it didn't attack me? And sometimes they did? Or maybe enemies never attack when you end your turn in a diagonal space and not adjacent to them? 

I think another thing to note is that this specific turn based format seems a tad bit predictable to me because the enemy shooting and bullet moving happens one after the other, and as long as there's not a bullet or enemy in the adjacent tile you're sort of guaranteed to be safe. I'm sort of crossing the line of giving feedback and becoming a backseat designer here, but I think an interesting pivot/spinoff would be that after you decide your turn, everything happens at once? You can take all your time making your move, but the bullets fly and enemies move at the same time you're also moving, and if your path happens to cross the mid-flight trajectory of another bullet, then you lose? Obviously that would completely alter the implementation, and add some non-discrete elements to the gameplay like collision detection, but it might be a little less stale and add some interesting opportunities for other player/enemy behaviors. 

I always respect designers who break boundaries in terms of how they interpret and respond to genre/thematic limitations, and this game definitely seems to be one of the best genre-benders in this jam while still keeping up with the bullet hell constraint. Sweet work and congrats on the awesome submission!

so sick, definitely some of the best eye candy and dopamine fuel out of the other submissions out there! Love the feedback on the shooting and the dodging feels nice and tight, the coin sucking implementation also feels awesome. Amazing work!

I love the interesting concept! I think that any mechanic in games that's used/dependent on a resource of some kind has the potential to be played around with and manipulated in cool ways. In your case it's the charge bar for the lighthouse. Right now the mechanic is sort of linear because it depletes at the same rate and charges at the same rate when you let go, so using the light sort of quickly settles down into a maximally optimal and sort of stale pattern of lighting up to a certain radius, letting go, and repeating the same thing. What if the resource could be manipulated by getting kills? Maybe it depletes faster, but charges back up a bit every time the player gets a kill? Maybe the shooting and the light energy is combined, making the player uses some energy when shooting, so they can't spam bullets into the dark? Maybe there are certain powerups that orbit the lighthouse instead of going straight for it, that regenerate the light bar when you shoot it? I think there's a lot of options for messing around with the charge bar to make things more interesting.

I think the mechanic is a super cool answer to the Confined theme, and I appreciate the speed and health variation in the enemy types. Congrats on the submission, and I hope you can continue working on this neat concept!

Thanks for the feedback! I implemented the purchasable health drops on first instinct, but I think inline health drops from enemies might feel more rewarding and better integrated into the main loop, so I definitely agree on that!

Yea, I was honestly worried that the giant worm was too fast, but if at the same time it seems too easy to outrun it, then I feel like I might add some difficulty scaling thing to make things lighter at the beginning and then harder later on. Damage dealt by any enemy bullet is currently just by an integer of 1 by all bullets, but I think I might add a short invulnerability time or hitstun period after getting hit where other bullets can't hit you, and might make taking damage feel more fair. Thanks for the great feedback, I appreciate it!

Yea, I do agree with the difficulty stuff, and I think it's a classic case of developer syndrome where I misjudge the difficulty because I've been getting too used to my own game. Other people have given me feedback about the difficulty easing in, and definitely the bombs feel more harmful than good, and what I've seen people end up doing is just digging straight forward at the edge of the map simply because avoiding enemies altogether seems to be the best choice. I appreciate your thoughts, and thanks much for the feedback!

I loved the hand-drawn artwork and character sprites! The idea of splitting up your hitbox into three separate mechanics was really cool to me. As for the bouncing mechanic, it took me a while to get it because it was lacking a little bit of feedback, but once I got the hang of it it was real fun bouncing on top the bullets, and the input buffering before the pressing space bar on top of the bullet was definitely a nice game-feel touch. 

Lovely game, and congrats on the submission!

Enjoyed the powerup system, it felt nice and had good feedback. I think the fire rate stuff was a bit buggy, sometimes I shot streams of bullets with basically no restriction and sometimes I shot just as often in the small size as the big size, but I'm not sure. It changed only after I grew/shrunk a little bit at a time.

I think having the size of your player affect gameplay is a cool concept! I wish I could have seen more concrete/explicit use of that mechanic besides just the damage and fire rate, because it's a cool idea that has a lot of room for building around.

Congrats on the submission everyone, and well done!

Hi, thanks so much for the feedback! Yea, sorry about the screen size stuff, I'm still new to setting up full projects so I went with a fixed 900x900 resolution that couldn't be adjusted, as I felt like I didn't have the time adding all the settings and stuff to make dynamic resolutions work in time. Appreciate you letting me know!

this game is absolutely phenomenal, the core gameplay extends to other interesting combat patterns and enemy interactions super super well. Definitely a stand out game out of all the other games I've played so far. The bat boss fight was frustrating but in the best way possible.

As the other commenter said, I would have liked some aim assist with the grappling as well, since I feel like the game should reward your decision making in terms of what to grapple to instead of rewarding the degree of precision you have in aiming your hand throw, but that's a super minor nitpick.

This isn't a suggestion or even feedback as I'm not sure how it should honestly be, but I'm split on whether or not your character should have some or any invincibility frames during the grapple travel. I found it weirdly frustrating sometimes that some bullets seems undodgeable because they were coming in from the exact direction of the grapple, but it could also end up being overpowered and might require some clunky workarounds in terms of animation timings and cooldowns and stuff. Just something to consider I guess!

I loved every single second playing your game; it was a perfect example of doing a lot with a little, especially in a 10 day time frame. Congrats on the submission and awesome work!

I see that you're using GameMaker, but if I may ask, how did you manage the boss and enemy behaviors and switching in between phases? I'm assuming you used a finite state machine, but every implementation of that I use in Unity seems really clunky and awkward to work with, so I was just wondering what kind of options you have in that game engine.

Loved the ragdolls and the juiciness of the bombs. I wish there could have been a bit more feedback on the damage that happens after the red zone ends, because initially i thought it was just a slow. 3D look was nice as well! Cool game and congrats on the submission!

Love your take on a bullet hell rhythm game! Also, mouse controlling to dodge has a level of intuitiveness I wish more people explored, so I'm glad that was the path you decided to take.

As for the dodging part, I'm not sure if it's just because I'm not used to bullet hells, but I think there could have been a wider range in the level of difficulty, I couldn't find a map accessible enough where I could complete them. I think the walls closing in is a reasonable consequence of getting hit, but the way it works, it reinforces itself (walls closing in makes it harder to dodge, which closes in the walls more) too strongly and once I get hit once I end up getting hit by everything. 

I liked the patterns that went with the music, and especially found it cool how dodging the yellow targeted ones to the music actually let me progress a bit further, and I feel like rewarding rhythmical movements is something cool that could be explored.

Well done, and congrats on the submission!

I liked the picture taking mechanic and the bullet patterns were well balanced and reasonable difficulty, although a lot of the acts did have safe spots where the bullets never reached. I wish I could have an option to speed up the dialogue and the post game screen, unless there was some key/input that I hadn't come across. nice project, and congrats on the submission!

Hi, unfortunately I think your download is unplayable because when you upload a Unity project you have to zip up the whole folder around the executable and submit that, not just the single executable inside it.

holy hell this is so nice. I love the polish and the game feel, especially with the tonic. I understand from your other comment replies and game description that the difficulty progression is still sort of work on progress, but the difficulty did drag a bit. You already had some levels that popped down lots of pillars, so why not just do that even more for the harder levels?

I think the most interesting mechanic was the pillars targeted on the player though. I found it super interesting how your own position would effect the spawn point of the bullet, and not the usual way in which the destination of the bullets is the player instead. It felt like I was playing little mindgames with my past self from 3 seconds ago lol. I think there's a lot that could be expanded upon there.

As for the tonic I do think it would be overpowered, even with harder levels implemented, but at the same time the move speed bonus and the active-while-holding feel felt so refreshing compared to the overused dodge roll/dash mechanics other games have a lot. One suggestion from me would be to have an initial use cost for the tonic, which takes maybe a third or half of your bar, so that it would still be effective as a slippery escape tool, but now forces the player (hopefully in a good way) to have to commit to the button press to make the best use of it.

Easily the highest quality game I've played in the jam so far, by a long shot. Played all 50 floors, I really liked how much gameplay you managed to fit in such a small space. I hope you continue to develop this game further, and congrats on the submission!

congrats on the submission! it's been a while since I've appreciated a nice top down 3d shoot-em-up; I liked the visual effects and the bullet patterns for the enemies. I think it might have been a better experience if there was one unskippable boss rather than having enemies placed as obstacles optional to kill, but honestly when I was getting chased by those missiles it was pretty fun just running for it anyway. and I think it sold the prison escape theme you had going on pretty well.

quality project, well done !

Congrats on the submission! Loved the game feel and the looks, I liked the phases and the patterns; I think I just wish the dashing was a bit more reactive/impactful, I think I would have appreciated a few more iframes after it ends? I especially appreciated the little telecast exclamation point thingy showing the next path of the boss. How did you implement that btw? Did you use paths/curves, or animator? or some manual tweening?

Loved how you abstracted anxiety into a small confined square of dodging tears. and the dialogue is terrific haha

Nice submission everyone! The highlight was definitely the rage mechanic for me, I think the aiming changing into a hitscan really gave it a lot of juice, along with the movement speed. I sort of wish the melee part had something more impactful going on, as getting close got me killed really quick, and also I didn't feel like taking any risks as there were no checkpoints. I liked the dodge feel too, as well as the music. Congrats on your submission!! this is a solid project right here

it's sooo good. how did you come up with all this in 7 days sheeeesh

Thanks for the feedback! Yea, I've begun to notice that progression that "feels good" is 90% of the time gonna be a qualitative one vs. a quantitative one regardless of how effective such upgrades are overall; e.g. "Your attacks freeze/knockback/stun enemies" vs "Your attacks do +20% damage". So I might focus more on the qualitative side when I continue developing! I'm glad you liked the game, thanks for checking it out!

Great job on some of these tight platformer mechanics! The climbing mechanic felt the best and most responsive for me; it was an interesting twist on the one-way platform cliche seen in a lot of platformer games. I think the grapple mechanic has a really nice start, and in my opinion I feel like it'd be more rewarding if the player had more control over the trajectory, like choosing between directions with the WASD keys, or maybe pressing left and right to aim. Maybe if the platforms were much larger, and they were easier to target with the grapple, the player might feel more compelled to swing around and experiment, but the current aim-and-wait mechanic and the tiny platforms don't allow for the fun moves I expect to be able to do with such a mechanic. Also I'm not sure if this was intended, but I like the way you could actually float by holding down jump when you fall off a platform without jumping. I think this could be pivoted to be a base mechanic where you glide down instead of falling when pressing space, and it might allow for more deliberate movements/reactivity in the air.

I honestly haven't seen too many grapple mechanics in platformers that felt appealing to me, but combined with the climbing and tight controls I think there's a nice start to a cool grapple mechanic and great platformer game here. Congrats on the submission!

P.S. I could cheese my way to the end of the game by flying into the wall while spamming the grapple :P

thanks for the feedback! I was planning on implementing a whole time-freeze system to place towers where the menu would pop up at the same time, but I didn't have the time to implement it lol. A boss every few phases would definitely make things interesting! It's true I was tight on time for the jam, but it might have made things more fun if I had a few "event"-like cluster spawns instead of a flat rate-over-time spawn the whole way through, even without making an entire boss enemy.  I appreciate the comment, grats on your submission :)

Lmao xD

I think there could have been some mechanic that fit the looping theme better, but out of the little over a dozen entries I've played so far I definitely played this one the longest. I've noticed that some bullets that randomly spawned didn't actually damage me - are those my own bullets I've fired before, judging by the name of the game? If so I would have liked that to be more obvious, or maybe some text telling me how that mechanic worked (if I'm guessing right about the "recycled rounds" part).

I honestly loved some of the enemy types. The snake (even tho it came out after the boss died) was one of my favorites, honestly soooo sick. and I like the aim + dash type enemies too, left just the right amount of time for me to react and dodge and feel smooth about it.

One thing though is that the enemies early game are waaaay too tanky. I didn't feel like I was actually killing anything until picking up more upgrades after the boss died. I really liked the laser wall type enemy and how I'd have to destroy them to get past safely, but they were so tanky I actually just used my ability to dash through them instead and just ignored destroying them altogether. Also, I would really have preferred the upgrades/drops to come from the enemies and not as random spawns, so I would have felt more rewarded when killing the enemies (especially since they're "optional",  as letting them slip by doesn't actually have any consequence). The shield class is also literally invincible, as by the time I get hit after putting my shield up, the cooldown is already over, and I basically have unlimited shield. Also the round projectiles spawning at the bottom of the screen going upwards actually damaged me, I assumed that was my mothership helping out but maybe it might be a bug or something so I won't touch on it that much.

Honestly this game felt really good to play. It's probably the only game I gave a 5 star gameplay rating on. Just a few balance changes and squishier enemies and I feel like that'd already make it so much better. congrats on this awesome entry! I really wish this game would get more ratings than it already does, it really deserves to be seen more.

Hi, I really like the concept of your game! I liked the mana refill mechanic because it had the effect of tying the card game aspect together with the 2D bullet hell part of the game. Also think the card drawing system is cool and could be something that creates really fun situational battles that make replaying the game super fun.

As for feedback, I guess these suggestions aren't really about what could have been done differently, since the time span of the game jam IS super tight, but maybe rather about what could be added in the future? 

What I sort of felt was that which card I chose in the moment didn't really matter all that much. Shield gives me shield, missile launches missile, etc, but really I could spam every card while drawing new ones and just focus on grabbing the mana and they'd all have a loosely positive effect. Maybe the boss might have certain phases where it makes it more advantageous to use one card type over the other? Maybe there are elemental types and respective elemental defenses? Maybe the boss gets an armor HP shield sometimes which could be shredded by a certain attack type? As omalley suggested, a time stop card would be sick for targeting hard bullet hell phases too. While playing a game like this I would expect there to be a lot of moments where I go "damn I wish I had X card type right now but I just used it!"

I guess another thing is that in terms of where my attention is going it's kind of hard to think of dodging the attacks and also choosing which card to use at the same time, and it feels like I'm being mentally pulled away from either one in order to do the other. I suppose an ideal polished version (again, maybe not in the scope of this jam) would either use something like a hotkey system, or a time slow system while choosing, so that there's less "mental CPU overhead" in terms of the flow of dodge -> attack with cards -> collect mana. Perhaps the switch between choosing -> fighting -> choosing is more explicit? As in, maybe when you choose, the boss doesn't attack, and you get infinite time, and after you confirm your cards, there's a battle phase that lasts for a bit where you fully see the effect of your cards? These are just some ramblings that might totally not work with whatever other systems you decide to build on top though lol

Lol sorry, I meant to just take a minute to leave a few short thoughts but it ended up stretching out super super long, it might sound sort of like a rant. But honestly though, I don't usually leave comments or suggestions unless it makes me excited for what a finished version of the game might look like, and I think there's potential in this game that I was drawn to. I've played other games in the jam and a lot of them have polish and "tight controls" and "sick puzzle mechanics" and whatnot but it doesn't seem like it would be something I'd like to play for more than ten minutes at a time. While this game is still sort of bare bones, it's really interesting to me that it played to me like the kind of game that I could daydream about during the day and come up with ability ideas and boss phases and mechanics and stuff for, and honestly I think game ideas that sort of creatively occupy the game like that are actually good ideas.

I like the controls, felt nice and crispy. the music was also bumping.

"Failed to download file Build/rndh.data.br. Loading web pages via a file:// URL without a web server is not supported by this browser. Please use a local development web server to host Unity content, or use the Unity Build and Run option."  I think you intended for us to click on the "index" html file and play it locally using our brower, but it seems like unity webgl doesn't support that.