Cool game, congrats! I pretty much agree with what everyone else wrote here so far, I would only add that enemy bullets should move a lot slower so you can dodge them. Also, I suppose there are some people that like mixed pixel art resolutions, but it generally just makes the assets look disconnected. If you want to keep working on this game, try making everything at the same resolution, I think you'll like that better too.
The low poly artstyle looks great and everything looks very polished. As pretty much everyone here, I also love that the characters gets bigger and how that limits the usable paths, very creative design!
Picking up a biscuit should have some feedback, I was confused at first if it worked at all until I noticed the biscuit in the characters hand, and later I ran back a bit without a biscuit because I hadn't noticed that I was too far away from the cookies. Maybe a little particle effect to communicate that the interaction was successful.
It was a bit unclear to me what the condition was for being caught, but I think that was actually good. It was clear enough for me to eventually win, and it made it more tense, not knowing exactly how far you can go. Great job!
Cool game, congrats. The idea of the main mechanic is very interesting, having to risk health to defeat the enemies. The main problem is that the game is too easy, the power attack is just not needed. Everything just walks at you in a straight line, so you can circle forever. I got 11 biscuits, then quit. I barely used the power attack because why risk health, and when low on health, the entire run, if I am completely fine just not doing that? I think just refilling the entire health bar after every room would help a lot, because it would give some room for failing the power attack, so it would make more sense to use it. More enemy variation would be great too of course, but that also takes a lot more time.
Generally a nice little game, the snail looks cute! The gameplay is definitely hard, but in an unfair way in my opinion. I never understood the appeal of rage games, so if that's what you were going for, take my advice with a bigger grain of salt than usual. The meteors suddenly hitting you without any room for reaction just feels unfair. Maybe make them float menacingly in the air at the top of the screen, so you at least know that it's there? It also got annoying having to replay the start all the time, once you figure it out it's no threat anymore, but still takes a lot of time, and that gets frustrating. Some checkpoints would have been nice.
It's a really funny game with so much character! The MSPaint aesthetic, the voice lines, details like the formulas on the mug and the "Protect" table (not quite sure what that one was, but I recognize it from somewhere, something with entropy maybe?, my physics knowledge is mostly disconnected YouTube videos lol)! There is such a variety of minigames and bossfights! I found the "Dip" the hardest to get right, even without the extra effects on it, but I got it somewhat consistently in the end. "Steal" was confusing at first, but I figured it out too, so congrats on designing not just fun, but intuitive minigames! Great job!
Good job, congrats on your first game jam! Never played Black Jack before, so I had to look up the rules first. The only real issue I have with this game is that it is pretty much entirely luck based, some more player agency would have been nice, but making Balatro in a week is basically impossible.
Thank you, rated and commented on your game. Sorry it took so long, itch servers were not responding. That comment also took a concerningly long time to upload, hope I'm not getting another error soon.
The manual breathing mechanic is very unique, never seen that before. Took me some time to figure out, then I got it consistent to full light, but later struggled to get anything more than dim light. My timing probably just got worse, but I think some more feedback what the timing should be would be helpful.
I really appreciate how you avoided a HUD by showing health with the brightness of the character and put the tutorial as markings on the floor. It makes everything more immersive!
Very well polished game with a lot of clever mechanics that allow for a lot of skill expression. I barely beat it 5 to 4 on the first try but obliterated the AI 5 to 1 the next time! The art looks cute and the frog portraits somewhat reminds me of Frog Island. Did you watch the devlogs or is that a coincidence? Great job overall!
I would usually advice to not mix pixel art resolutions, but it fits so well with the MSPaint aesthetic and makes the bugs easy to spot. It works better than it has any right to, great job! The gameplay was a bit confusing though, and sometimes I would just lose instantly when a level starts.
That is a really good game. You have a solid core mechanic of controlling the plane and essentially a playground with some goals to play around with it. That is very clean design, great job! The controls are intuitive and feel nice, although it was confusing to me that you press the up key to go down, and down to go up. I seem to be the only one with that issue, so maybe it's a standard in flight sims, which I never played before?
Rating period is almost over, but I and a lot of others still have less than 20 ratings. I rated and gave detailed reviews on almost twice as many as I got, but I guess the only way to get enough ratings are these posts.
Will rate and give constructive criticism to anyone how does the same for me (although at most ten games, I don't have unlimited time unfortunately); also play and rate the games of others who post here.
You can post if you have more ratings, but games with less than 20 ratings have priority.
Nice first game, congrats! I like the artwork and lore. Having floating people make you fly into orbit rather than traditional spikes that just make you lose is so cool and creative! And terrifying now that I think about it.
Some advice since you want to keep working on it:
- Generally don't mix pixel art resolutions. While each individual asset looks nice, they look incoherent when put together at different resolutions.
- Give the player some room for error without punishing them. For example, hitboxes should be smaller; allow jumping for a few frames after moving of a ledge (coyote time). Stuff like that is in every game and just makes it feel more fair, the player usually doesn't notice even it.
- "Control" nodes in Godot have a "mouse_filter" property that needs to be set to "Ignore" when it shouldn't interact with mouse input, otherwise it will block mouse input for, say, a button in the game-won-menu underneath it.
- The title screen and the menu screens are not centered on the resolution I played it at. If that is unintentional, you need to look into Godot's anchor system.
Cool game! The faces on the main menu character are a nice touch and I love that selecting the difficulty is not just a button! The chromatic aberration on everything works great and gives a nice arcade-y vibe. Great job!
Some hopefully helpful criticism:
- Spam clicking as a bossfight is just not fun in my opinion.
- Screen wrapping is generally a great mechanic and has the potential to make combat a lot more interesting. However, by just standing at the edge and shooting until the enemies almost reach you, and then wrapping to the other side makes every encounter trivial, which also defeats the risk mechanic. Enemies really need to use screen wrapping to track you as well.
Yeah I also immediately noticed the flat attack cooldown duration upgrade and wanted to become a laser. It is a completely broken upgrade that is just objectively better than any other upgrade, especially after getting one damage upgrade that makes you oneshot everything, which makes upgrade choice rather uninteresting. However, I cannot deny the simple fun of abusing this to get overpowered and probably wouldn't have stuck around nearly as long if it were balanced. I really need to criticize the mixed pixel art resolutions though, it just looks so messy and unintentional. Consistency in art style is very important.
Amazing game! It feels so polished and was a lot of fun. I didn't read there was a dash at first which made some of the later attacks simply impossible to avoid lol. But I read the instructions again when I wanted to write the review, and then went back to playing to eventually beat it on max difficulty.
The juiciness is fantastic and I especially want to praise using the background as a health indicator, showing progress while also slightly obfuscating the remaining health to add tension!
Some constructive criticism:
The mouse cursor is way too small. I kept losing track of it in the shower of particle effects.
Dash input is ignored if also attacking. This might be intentional to make dashing more skillful as you have to also stop pressing a button to dash, but to me, it felt unfair. I think it should simply take priority over attack input.
The starting countdown was a bit annoying, I just wanted to try again and had to sit there for way too long. It adds tension the first time, but should be a lot shorter when retrying.
The boss's bullet attack should have some cooldown, when it is picked two or even three times in a row, the entire screen is covered in death and there is nothing you can do about that. This also adds an unwanted luck element to the fight.
The stutters others have reported as well are shader compilation, and happen when a new ShaderMaterial or ParticleProcessMaterial are drawn, which is then cached, so it runs smoothly afterwards. The fix for this is to simply make sure everything is drawn once in a loading screen, invisible to the player. This forces compilation while the player expects a delay, so it runs without interruption in game.
Running on web, the Leaderboard fails to load. Console logs:
The api key is also visible, probably not an issue for a jam game but I removed it just to be sure. The post request didn't throw an error, I hope it worked I had over 12000 points. The leaderboard also didn't show on Windows, although I have no logs here to know that it truly failed and not just takes longer than 10 seconds.
The visuals are amazing and the tower design is really clean. Instead of a mess of towers and upgrades just three towers with unique roles and three upgrades that apply to each. Good job!
I also like that the ants have cracks as diegetic health indicator, it makes it more immersive and health bars tend to add a lot of visual clutter.
I discovered that towers had upgrades because of a quest that said it disabled upgrades for two turns, that felt pretty natural. Nice.
The main mechanic definitely snowballs very fast, the only solution I can think of would be to make the quests scale with the player, so their relative risk stays consistent. That sounds pretty much impossible to balance right in a game jam though, so not really a criticism.
The core mechanic is pretty cool. However, I have some tips for improvements:
- Make bullets massive, at least the size of the characters chest. It makes them easier to see and react to. This may not be realistic, but it's a video game after all. - Screen shake is a very fast way to add a lot of impact to things (shoot; damage taken) and helps make the game feel more alive.
What an amazing game! Incredibly creative mechanics, nice pixel art and a lot of polish. Even more impressive that you made it alone. Think there is a bug though with the tractor beams that push in all direction, when you fly through them they get collected, but you still get pushed. The last two levels feel a bit too long in my opinion, it is frustrating to loose that much progress when you make a mistake. Those are nitpicks though, great job!
Cool game, congrats! The leaderboard is an amazing feature because it really encourages risking as much as possible. The level generation adds a lot of replayability, although something like a wall jump would have probably been more important for a game jam entry. I tend to spend a lot of time on not entirely needed level generation too lol, I totally get it, it's a lot of fun to program.
As for the stutters, I am almost certain this is shader compilation, although it is strange that it happens again when restarting, it should have been still cached as far as I know. The initial stutter is compilation of the debris particle material, and then the particle material of the coin collection effect.
If I am right, the same fix I did in our game (also in Godot) will work: You add a tiny SubViewport set to render once and never clear and add a Sprite2D with each shader and a GPUParticles2D with each particle effect as children of that viewport. They need some texture, I just use a white 1x1 pixel. This will render them to that viewport, never to be seen by the player, but it forces compilation of these materials at the start of the game, so it doesn't need to happen at runtime.
Really cute game with a cool core mechanic of money = health. It was more stressful than other tower defense games because the usual downtime is replaced by the baking minigame, but in a good way.
I had some bugs though. The towers showed a price to upgrade past level3 and played the sfx when pressed, but nothing happened. Also the ending didn't show up, I got to wave 11/10 and no more dogs were spawning, but the ending that I heard praised in other comments here never showed. I played in browser and lost a few times before, and then pressed the "Skip all" button, maybe that messed something up?
Overall amazing game though!
I'm also curious what your experience was working in such a big team, it sounds like a nightmare to coordinate.
The fog of war is a really interesting mechanic in a game like that. I am curious how that works though. Is it just a ton of colliders and an arc of raycasts from the player to delete them, or did you come up with something more optimized?
The art is simple but very readable and the gameplay is pretty fun. I appreciate the pixel perfect rendering and the time-slow when hit is a nice touch. Good job! My main criticism is the lack of sound, it's really important for a game to feel alive.
I love the concept, a really innovative take on puzzle games. But I had to give up on stage 6 after half an hour of attempting everything I could think of. Maybe I just missed something obvious, but I think it is just way too difficult and ambiguous what is even possible. Hints would be ideal of course, but with limited time in a game jam a button to reveal the solution so you can at least see the rest of the game would have been fine.
The main mechanic of having a multiplier that can also give you negative effects works really well, but I think it needs to be communicated what possible effects there are and their chances. That would make it more strategic and make negative effects feel more fair, rather than getting unexpectedly hit with -70 hp.
The evil cookie looks amazing, but I have to criticize the inconsistent pixel size. I think it would have looked better with everything on the resolution of the evil cookie.
Great job though, especially doing this on your own!
Nice, polished visuals and audio and some very interesting mechanics. "Triad" took me the longest to solve, by far. Only nitpick is that the undo button uses the physical key code of "Z", which is a "Y" on my German QWERTZ layout, so that was confusing for a second. I generally avoid these two keys because of that. Great job overall though!
Congrats on making a game! Some music and sound effects would have helped a lot to make it feel more alive though. There are tons online, and I think its better to include something you didn't make yourself than to have no sound.
That is a very interesting main mechanic. I like how this also makes bullets not just a risk for your health, but more importantly, for your streak. Overall a very good game, but some constructive criticism:
The player feels a bit floaty, you should decrease the acceleration and deceleration time. Also the health bar is no longer visible after you die once (barrel got me).
The game freezes for a bit when you fire the laser for the first time, and when something explodes for the first time. This is due to shader compilation, which happens when a new shader or particle proceess material becomes visible. The way I fixed this in our game (also made in Godot) was to put every material in a tiny SubViewport that renders them once, forcing compilation at the start so it doesn't happen during gameplay.