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Yuminous

8
Posts
A member registered Mar 09, 2021

Recent community posts

Great work!

Generally a great start. The concept is a nice reversal. Love the style start menu, and the first two songs. I think it's there's some really good polish for what it is, but what it is – just a simple maze. 

Really love it! Spent hours and hours playing until I eventually figured everything out and won. I thoroughly enjoyed it. For a two-week game jam(?) this is amazing. So I'll review it like a full game.

This game has some seriously great design elements which come together and account for a well-exectued roguelike gameplay loop, keeping you engrossed until you can overcome the challenge.
Things like the gambling aspect of upgrade paths, wherein you can't back out once the cards are revealed, is absolutely excellent for replayability and encourages the player to try out different upgrade paths every time. 

I found the difficulty suddenly spikes at about wave 40-60, this is both good and bad. The good is how it keeps you on your toes and rushing to upgrade down a certain path before the big boi enemies come charging in and that also makes for great replayability. I went through many different upgrade paths before overcoming the challenge. It was what kept me playing and was a lot of fun.

The major disadvantage to that is there ends up being essentially only a couple of ways to surpass the challenge, given how much HP the end-game enemies have (and how many of them there is). You either lose within 1 or 2 waves, or you beat the game. The final wave dependant on how much lag your computer can take before the webpage crashes (ie., gets sick of figuring out how many enemies die when you deal Infinity dmg/second over the whole map). If you don't figure it out, then you can't really get past wave 50-60. If you do, then you don't need to advance in the game anymore. You win when the game freezes.

Further work could drastically improve the game overall, not only by extending the end-game, but also with several QoL features that would be really nice for the player. 

For higher waves, it would be nice if the difficulty didn't spike so suddenly (introduction of orange enemies) so there would be more room for experimentation with upgrade paths and different units. Less mass dark-orange waves early on, bascially.

Equally important is addressing the other side of the coin, "winning". Infinity damage is really fun when you achieve it but then becomes hollow quite quickly. Miss Fox needs a counter-play. Potentially by adding an enemy not necessary based off of HP? Necessitating usage of other units like Spider or Cat with debuffing? Fox, Dog and Hawk's exponential damage upgrade paths I think are really good to have in the game, it is a really rewarding experience for the player to acheive that, but once you achieve it, you're set. Some ideas for enemies could mitigate this and spice up gameplay a little:

- Shield-type enemies (shields others, Spider + Cat defense debuffs)
- Timer-based enemies (Infinity HP, need to be slowed until timeout)
- Unit-disabler-type enemies (temporary)

There are plenty of Quality-of-Life features that could be added to the game. For example, this is a survival game but it doesn't feature a final summary. Sometimes I was so engrossed I didn't even know what wave I ended on! Here's just a few:

- Round summary (final wave, highscore, enemies killed, etc)
- Restart button
- Music/SFX toggles
- 2D-grid overview for unit placement
- Credits (what game jam was this from!?)

All-in-all, it's a great tower defense game. Great choice of platform with HTML5. Minimalist design but sincerely well-executed, leading to excellent replayability going well beyond the average session length. 

You guys should change the pricing model to allow donations! Seriously, I feel guilty not being able to give something for this game! There are many, many successful games out there 100% more expensive, with 50% of the features and only 20% of the enjoyment-factor. Don't stop creating stuff – this was an awesome one, thank you both / everyone!

This is the most complete game I've played so far, and I have to say, it's nice to have a proper tutorial! All the elements are there as well. I like all the extras in the menus, all the settings and all the options like skipping cutsceens. And an OST with several themed songs (nice!)... It just makes the game have so much more depth to it, even if seemingly inconsequential. From the gameplay side of things, I think both difficulty modes were nicely balanced. It was quite relaxing on casual, reasonably more difficult on hardcore, it's what you'd expect and I like that aspect. The game design was well planned out and I though it was also executed well.

Still, some combat elements may need adjusted in future updates. Some moves don't behave as you might hope (like the teleportation not having a momentary shield or a tweened slow motion to cover the player against projectiles whose velocity they cannot determine), and the wave attack's dubious usefulness except in certain circumstances. Also regarding other aspects, while it's nice to see another game really try and tackle the theme element of the jam, perhaps this is too pronounced in things like the tutorial (and throughout the game) that it was hard to figure out what it meant—this confusion being resolved after properly starting the level and testing every button, it still felt like I left the tutorial knowing less than I though I did when I looked at the control map initially. The most concise reason for this feeling: too much text. Too much dialog intermixed with not enough gameplay made me forget the controls I was being told whilst trying to absorb to the story as it came along. In general, tutorials are far less important than gameplay so this is not any major detriment to the game, but since the tutorial has actually been implemented to this degree it is worth noting.

The story is hard to judge without more content, but the set up is there and it looks like it will be quite nice. Given how much effort the developer clearly continues to put into the game, I have no doubts it will also be substantial. "The setup is there" really is the best way to put a lot of things positive about the game, but on top of that 'the actual game' is there too. It's just really nice to see that planning... it comes through on every element. And the fact the team were able to pull through on delivery, even if there's still more they wanted to add (think of it as DLC, no?) , it's still quite fun even at this stage, so really nice job on it.

More playtesting is required for this one. I don't bother playing difficult platformers, but I feel like this overstepped those bounds in some instances. The redeeming feature to aid that is that the checkpoints were very generous and resets were instantaneous. I always appreciate games that don't mess you around when you just want to get back in and give it another shot. But still, it felt like there was an awful amount of luck advancing with the platform speed as it was and the intermittent but (seemingly) hitscanned laser enemies. The story is... well, nevermind. I guess platformers don't really need that to begin with. But it does mean that there's nothing to substance regard the theme either. To be fair, perhaps there was a story later on, but since I couldn't advance and couldn't be bothered learning how to advance further than a minute into the game, I never got that far. I did find that some elements had the makings of an interesting overall concept, like this slow-motion effect when you fell through the school gym, that felt pretty cool for a moment. The dynamic camera adjusts a bit too fast some times making it difficult to judge movement for a critical second when you're trying to navigate around enemies. The game is audio-less, not so bad if you're playing music anyway but it means the game can't really stand on its own. All critical elements aside, there's not actually much work (from the player's perspective) to bring this into quite an acceptable state. So basing off that, it's a really solid foundation. Whether the developer wants to continue with it or not, well, it's fine either way. Good on them for making it playable at least.

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It feels unfair to rate a game in this state, but since it's up here I have to be fair to the other games. I know the developer would have all the elements ready in the background, but linking them together to have something playable is the unexpected challenge that catches you out. Anyway, since the game is not ready for play it doesn't cross the starting line in terms of rating, but that's totally fine because the jam is more about having a go than anything. But while this game so far fails as an actual game, rating it as a concept: I would like to say that, by far, this game has/would have had the best theme interpretation out of any game I have seen in this jam. It's so elegant and straight-forward, but so unique and original when paired with the theme. "The dance of black holes/neutron stars just before they collide" inspiring a "turn-based rhythmical battle system". Thisand thisand this paired with this. I can totally see that! The pulsing ring matching to some sweet beat as you "dance attack" your enemy, and maybe on their turn you switch sides in an orbit to have the enemy attack you from the same angle? Maybe the enemy and your character get closer and closer together putting a time-limit on the battle before they both 'collide'? Who knows. But what I do know is that I really like that concept. There is just so many ways you could expand on it and all of it sounds really fun. So I hope perhaps we could see this game in a more complete state some time! I would recommend focusing on the battle system instead of the office girl walking around/open world(?) aspect, as that would be more doable with the time you have. The story can come later. But the rhythmic dance battle inspired by orbiting gravity wells? 

I. Would. Love. To. Play. It!

This would be one of the few bullet hells that I actually played semi-seriously, so I don't have much of a comparison but I thought it was pretty good. I really liked the coin/credit system wherein you could reset the level upon death with added boosts. That sort of thing really makes the game more accessible, which is great. The enemies and bosses were straight-forward, the story is very functional above everything, which fits well into this game. That's because the everything just flows. It's a game you can pick up very quickly—which means it ends fast, but more levels could surely be added to alleviate that, which I don't think it needs. Now, the difficulty levels are really suited for players with previous experience and the brief tutorial isn't at all suited for the layman, but you can figure most of that out by playing. It feels like a game that is paying homage to its origins, which I think is fine because it feels like the developer achieved the game they wanted to make. You can tell, because it's a good game. Great work!

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The point-and-click gameplay leaves much to be desired, but with a story the gameplay element doesn't have to be substantial. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell what is going on without subtitles or any particular story in-game. I do like the effort that went in to the cutsceens and the music is very relaxing to listen to. But the description here tells me more about the game than actually playing the game. The magical girl concept here is not very relevant in-game, it's something that is really just mentioned in passing and doesn't seem to be relevant to gameplay. If the player is the cat who is batting all the mice, well, the cat would do that anyway. The random spawning of targets matches the 'superposition' concept, but again that's quite hollow on its own. If the game moved towards being more of a visual novel with subtitles for any story that there is, and while changing up the targets in the future point-and-click levels, it could be improved quite immensely.