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Ben Allen

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A member registered Jan 14, 2014 · View creator page →

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this is really good! love how you can try to go for speed or completion, it's a very smart design. i want more

Ok so I did some testing and wasn't able to replicate this issue. Made a new save file for myself and both my first and second scores saved to the leaderboard. Restarted the game and played two more, and both of those scores saved as well.

That all being said, I *think* when playing I got a 127k score which I don't see on my scoreboard. However, I'm not 100% sure because I wasn't keeping super close track of what my scores were until after this happened, and I do see 4 unique scores on my scoreboard, which is the number of games I played. So it's possible that the issue isn't that scores aren't being saved, but that they are being saved incorrectly in some cases. If your 150k score isn't on your score board, it may have saved as a lower score. I'll give this a closer look soon to see if something is going awry.

I did also notice a few other bugs: one being hands are sorted in reverse now, whoops. Second being the second game you play after the tutorial will be a multiplayer game even if you don't have two players.

I'm going to wait a bit before making a patch to fix these to see if more bugs come in. 

Ah, sorry about that. I don't think it used to do that. I'll have a look tomorrow

Before your comment, progress was 0%. Now it is 100%*. You legally have to download the game now and tell everyone you know to do so as well.

Please read the button mapping table in the page description before playing. Keyboard inputs are not displayed in any way in the game.

this is one of my favorites of yours that i like to revisit it whenever i remember to. it never fails to make me laugh. happy to see it on itch!

Great game, would love to see it expanded! If you do plan to expand it, I'd like to see more work to make it feel like an actual operating system, because right now the UI feels somewhat superfluous. I would also like to see more work done for notetaking. Being able to right click folders to use as breadcrumbs is not as helpful as I want it to be. This would be a cool case to implement the ability to rename folders imo, then the player can come up with their own naming scheme. 

No, this is a very basic platforming shell.

I'm so glad you enjoyed it, thank you for commenting!

Might be good to add a turn timer to unfreeze, it'd be an easy way to prevent this from happening. I'd rather be killed for my blunder than be put in an infinite zugzwang like this.

I seem to have permanently froze the enemies in front of me, and the rest of my board is all spores. Seems impossible to clear them out, and I also cannot die.

am stuck on level 2. feel like im missing something

Interesting game! I'm not sure that this concept is currently working as well as LBAL does, but I'm sure you already know that. I think the main thing that feels lacking is how it doesn't feel like you can really build towards anything. I pulled a very rare plant, and it got delivered after just a few turns, which felt kind of bad. I feel like if you could find a way to redesign this so you kept your plants, instead of delivering them, that would be a more satisfying experience.

thanks!! will hopefully have more to share soon!

it's actually very relevant, because there's a card playing aspect here too! and yeah, that's how i have it setup for card playing right now. although there aren't very many animations that occur when you play cards yet, so it's not super noticeable.

This is really good.

Super fun! Every level introduces something new, whether that be a recurring mechanic or a one-off gimmick. Astra has a pretty varied skillset: you have a slide if you want to go fast, and an aerial float if you wanna take it slow. There's collectibles if you're a completionist, and individual level / full game timers if you're a speedrunner. 

There's a lot of fun ideas here. Highly recommend if you're a fan of platformers!

Lovely tribute! I just barely couldn't get past the third screen, so I decided to return to the title page to input the infinite jump code and see what I missed. Through doing this, I learned something about the game that let me beat the third screen without infinite jumps. I think that's amazing and wanted to share it.

oh that makes a lot more sense. i understood how energy works, i just thought there was also a cooldown mechanic happening. 

seems like it would be better to just have that radial energy restoration display over your energy tracker, rather than on each individual card. as it exists now, it's a very confusing ui

Fun! Your next attacks shoots bombs + regenerate your energy to full + shoot 4 bullets x times is a bit too powerful. The cards that don't cost energy are just very strong in general because you redraw immediately. 

I don't love the cooldown system. Having to wait to play cards feels bad. I'm not sure that cooldowns are even necessary when you already have to wait to restore your energy. Feels like you could remove energy or remove cooldowns and the game would be more fun.

Love all the visual improvements!

Potentially unintended behavior? When I dismiss a held unit, it triggers the essentia item that gives extra essence. This makes that item into a +2 essence per round with no downside, which is weird. Taking a unit off hold should probably not trigger on-sell effects.

Some feedback:

I like the changes you made from the build I played last year. That said, the gameplay has a pacing issue. The pool of units and indulgences is very small and they're all designed to be equally balanced, so there's functionally no power curve. Every turn feels exactly the same. 

Some games solve this through a rarity system, others solve it through a tier system where you can level up the shop to find higher tier stuff. More content would also help. Since the pool is so small, I find myself picking the exact same indulgence or units every round since it's so reliable to get extra copies and they all scale well. Diluting the pool would help force more variety into the game.

One last note, with damage no longer persisting between rounds, the game is now very easy. The AI might need more work or some more gameplay advantages. It could also be fun to give the AI access to units you don't have access to. Playing against different stuff might be more interesting than it always being a mirror match.

Thank you!

with great challenge

The feature that pauses the game when an ability procs is an amazing teaching tool. Made learning the game a cinch. 

I really respect the decision to design an auto battler where death, damage, and even summons persists from combat, however, I am concerned about this design. There's a reason why no other games have done this, and it's because it makes the game into a real feast or famine situation. 

Right now, it feels like the only way to win is to abuse the 5th cell to make one unkillable unit, and scale from there. When I did that, the game felt pretty trivial. When I wasn't doing that, I was having to rebuild my comp nearly from scratch every round. Playing the game "fairly" just felt like re-doing round 1 over and over again because I couldn't get any of my units to stick between rounds.

Another consequence is many of the relics feel useless. Why would I ever spend money to give an on death effect to a unit if it can only ever happen 1 time? The only time I'd consider buying this is if my board is full, at which point I probably was already winning anyway. The relic that gives a unit taunt is useful, but getting the pair feels actively bad because you'd only ever want to put it on the unit which you're scaling in the center cell. But that's also bad because that's the unit you want to draw damage away from, so it's kind of a cursed problem.

Game is very cool and promising, but it really needs some more systems to complement allies not reviving between rounds.

I love the world and art, especially the creative use of large characters as platforms. I just wish there was a bit more oomph to the platforming. I found myself frequently falling into pits because I assumed my jump was better than it was. I think I would have enjoyed it more if the jump height was a bit higher, or the movement speed was a bit faster, but I understand if the player being weak is part of the narrative.

this is fun! although i think it's missing some stakes near the end. when i died after calling riichi, i was expecting that to be a game over, but it just lets me try again until i succeed or get bored. it would also be cool if there was a way to win without calling riichi

Felt like the possibility space for tactics is stifled somewhat by how weak normal movement is. You get such efficient ranged damage options that making 1 tile movements often felt actively detrimental. Killer game otherwise though. Loved the sound and art design especially.

you're replying to a post from 6 years ago, but the answer conveniently is the same now as it would have been when i originally posted this. i use gamemaker because i like it, and i continue to use it because i continue to like it.

extremely good

I'm no longer working on the game, so it's not likely. Sorry. I think I remember someone getting it to work on Wine. Never heard of anyone trying it on Proton, but maybe it works!

Sorry I just meant I wasn't sure where I needed to go. I like getting lost, but the camera being so zoomed in and there not being a ton of landmarks makes it hard to have a good sense of place in the world.

The demo is lovely. The broom is a little clumsy and the player could use some more forward direction, but overall what I played was really charming and fun. Hope to see more glitch dungeon!

Thanks, but it's not so simple as to just choose what keys to map. I already know how I'd map it, it's just that implementation will take some time, and I don't have a lot of free time right now. I'll try to take a look within the next few weeks.

The simple answer, which will sound pretty stupid, is that I decided early on that this would be a free game and so I felt ok only supporting the preferable control scheme. Normally supporting both is trivial, but for this game I put a good bit of work into the cool analog menu system, which I programmed  for analog stick input only. I could theoretically make it work for keyboard, it just wouldn't be as quick a task as it would for other games where analog input & keyboard input are effectively the same.

I should really take a second look at the code though and see how much effort it would be to get keyboard working. I'll have a look in the next few weeks when I have some free time. If I release an update, I'll make a post about it so everyone knows. No promises though.

[Responding here in case someone else runs into the same issue] 
Apparently this tooltip is wrong and has been wrong for like 6 years! The key to warp is W. W for Whoops!

(1 edit)

What I'm fishing for is whether you still have the item or not, and didn't quit the game without saving since you got it. Because I can't really think of anything else that would cause this item to not work.

If you've checked and are 100% certain that you have the item, could you email me a copy of your save file? You can find my email on my itch page.

Can you confirm that you have the warp upgrade? You can see all items you have in the pause screen (escape key should open that)

Huge thanks for continuing to support this. It's been my preferred way to write GML for over a year now and I try to recommend it to others whenever I can. 

Love the look of it! Random gen is great and the color matching is a nice twist on the standard Pac-Man formula. 

It's really challenging, which is cool, but sometimes feels a bit unfair. The main culprit of this feeling (I think) is the tendency for chasing ghosts to clump up next to each other. If the ghosts are the same color, it's no biggie—if they're different colors, then becomes a problem.

Some "personal space" logic that prevents them from getting too close to each other would help. Another option would be to subtly differentiate the pathfinding algorithm of one color from another. IE: if choosing between two directions where each direction is equally fast, blue always goes left and red always goes right. Could also do something as simple as make it so a chasing ghost has a % chance to take a sub optimal turn at any intersection.

Looking forward to seeing the next release!