itch.io

Related threads about easy cross search: https://itch.io/t/2222412/a-way-to-search-within-a-category https://itch.io/t/2773200/how-do-i-use-filters-in-a-text-search

I’m looking for HD sprite collections that contain the word “computer”.

I noticed that if I first browse through game assets (https://itch.io/game-assets) and possibly some tags like 2D (https://itch.io/game-assets/tag-2d) then there is no text field to search text on top of this.

Instead you must search via the top text field with is a global search field and will reset the category and tags: https://itch.io/search?q=computer

So at this point you need to select tags again, but the interface is different: you must select from a list of tags. But the list of tags seems very narrow, they are probably just the most used ones, and not all of them. There is no text input field to start typing the name of the tag as in category/tag search.

You must click on “All tags” to see all tags (https://itch.io/tags) but then you really see ALL the tags and it completely forgets your previous search.

Category is easier: you just have to click on the corresponding tab, e.g. Game assets (https://itch.io/search?q=computer&type=games&classification=assets). But it would have been even better if you could select category, then search text and it would remember the category.

To summarize, it would be better to have a more consistent, uniform interface, a bit like Steam maybe:

• a search field common to all types of searches, and that is remembered
• a single option radio for category (well, why not multiple option checkboxes if people look for multiple things at the same time, but I admit it’s more rare to look for games, game assets and soundtracks at the same time)
• multiple option checkboxes for tags (possibly with an OR / AND mode option depending on whether user wants to combines tags or search multiple tags, but I suspect AND is more common)

And user could input either of those in any order, with a consistent interface (the one from browsing page https://itch.io/games + a proper text search field inside the content rather than at the top would be a good start).

Ah, I see. Then Maria had many things to say like “my original target was Critique” although it’s not certain how that would have helped. But I was thinking at the end “hmm she really got to pick her words carefully now”. Reversely, the fact she was so clumsy/honest at the end made me think she wasn’t a professional spy and therefore it made me want to believe her, that she was genuinely a civilian who loved poetry and was picked for her affinity with the library but she ended up just sharing what she loved with someone who needed it.

But as always in these spy “love” stories, timing is key: the spy who reveals themselves before being uncovered gets more trust than those who wait to be uncovered. As an afterthought, since Maria really got close to Tractatus, I think revealing herself one day before the departure would have actually been a good timing, to give him one night to think over it. But then that would be a rather different story (the kind that is not kinetic and where you can choose to forgive or punish, maybe).

In fact, after playing the game I kept thinking a lot about it and possible endings. I think it’s good, as John Truby called it the “endless story”, when you keep thinking about the story after reading it, it means it was impactful and connected to universal themes.

For instance, when both characters went into the star I thought the two would disappear and their absence would allow to bring another balance to the universe. Maria would have succeeded in her mission but still be shocked as she started getting attached to Tractatus.

Or, the end could be basically the same but a slightly different timing, where Tractatus leaves the ship alone, trying to swallow his sorrow, losing himself and becoming emotionless as before. But then he realises he won’t make it and then he projects the hologram of Maria as an emotional support so he can go on. That would end up the same but give a slightly different feeling.

But I realise that these particular ideas matter less than the reflection I put in them, as a writer, as it makes me work on my character evolution and endings. So the analysis and feedback ends up being more important for myself in the end (because you probably thought about all of this already).

Thank you for making this game, I’ll try to focus on writing more short stories in “closed” spaces like this. And since I’ve been writing 2-character dialogues for O2A2, I’ll try to handle 3-character interactions next!

Oh, this entry really caught my attention and I played it at once (in French), start to finish. Unlike usual BAF entries, a lot of time is allocated to daily life activities compared to action. In a shounen, it would be more like the kind of things we see in a prologue/prequel/flashback showing how a former super soldier changed.

The beginning follows quite a clear, classic pattern, but it’s enjoyable to read. The second part is more uncertain as it opens the door to many possibilities, leaving room for surprise. I’ll leave the Writing comments at the end of this post so people who haven’t played it yet are less likely to be spoiled.

Visual

The backgrounds are clearly recognizable and reused smartly by having the daily routine go to the same rooms again and again (the opposite of my own VN which just moves on and on to different locations, giving a lot of work to my BG artist).

The characters have nice design, we can find consistency across the uniforms (even between the super soldiers and the civilian, with the grey and orange color palette), even some sci-fi lights without being too gaudy. I was surprised to see Maria wearing a skirt, as it’s not often seen in space, but I suppose that it’s alright in the future (thanks to artificial gravity - long hair too, actually) and to stress her civilian status.

The character placement could be improved, centering both character on screen when there are 2 of them, and having them face each other (I haven’t used Renpy for a while but Naninovel does it automatically so it now surprises me when it doesn’t happen).

Some facial expression changes are subtle, and the full fade out + fade in of the character prevents us from grasping what changed (comparison is harder when objects disappear momentarily).

“Tractatus lui rendit un regard rouge sang” -> facial expression doesn’t match. Instead, it matches a line more below “Un sourire amer se dessina”. Now, I just checked Tofu’s character sheet and the “angry” expression doesn’t exist, so I suppose you picked the closest one. Well, I just made a game where I prepared 50 expressions that I had to shrink to 13, so I understand the need to “drop it and pick the closest one”.

UI

The Language option at the top-left of the main menu is a good idea to avoid having user go to Preferences first to find it (although in this case “Préférences” it spells almost like English, it could not be the case with other languages).

Audio

Nice music, I see you composed it yourself.

The ending theme is much longer than the ending animation, I paused it at the last message to hear the end. Fortunately there is the album on Bandcamp so I can listen to the tracks in full outside the game (so you created a Bandcamp Pro account for this? Do you have to pay the subscription from day 1 even if you haven’t started selling?)

I would put more SFX on action scenes, but maybe you want to keep things simple. It also have some aesthetics to only play BGM. However, once you add voice acting it shouldn’t be a step too far to add some SFX. That said, I myself struggle to decide where to add SFX and where not to (since you could add them indefinitely to the lowest level of detail, or just stick to the biggest, most important sounds), so it may be a tricky decision.

Writing

I played the game in French, and I could appreciate the literary quality, although a few expressions were reused in some consecutive pages. I found several typos, pretty basic ones which you can fix with an advanced spellchecker (one that detects agreement (accord) or just an ML-based spellchecker like Google Doc), but this is a list just in case:

• étonnement (cela ne me dérange plus) -> étonnamment
• nous sommes fait (pour collaborer) -> nous sommes faits
• (Tractatus fit) un avant en avant -> un pas en avant
• désivageait -> dévisageait
• tu ne serais pas vaincu -> tu ne serais pas vaincue
• Désolée, (mais je ne te laisserai pas gagner) -> Désolé

Other comments:

• When Tractatus stops visiting Critique, she wonders if she has “heurté” him and whether he’s “fâché” which are two emotional words that suddenly appear in her vocabulary. Was she thinking like this all the time and hiding it, or is she really starting to use those words? It’s a bit surprising. But at the same time, I don’t really see how you could have expressed it otherwise. And the next sentence “pourquoi est-ce que je me pose toutes ces questions ?” shows that she’s also in a kind of transitional phase, although it’s weaker than Tractatus’s.
• I just searched for “Tractatus” and found about ~~German~~ Austrian author Ludwig Wittgenstein’s book, which now makes sense together with “Critique” (which could also be written “Kritik” since the book was written by ~~German~~ Prussian author Emmanuel Kant)

The end reminded me more of very down-to-earth (if not cynical) cyberpunk stories. It is, indeed, more rational to create a therapeutic AI companion, move away and join the opposite forces in order to create a status quo with the other massive destruction weapon embodied by Critique in order to bring peace to the galaxy (and I suppose open the path to the new order mentioned by the Creator). In addition, an artificial being is less likely to criticize another AI (although apparently they had a secret ingredient to give them “true life”). However, I was surprised that Tractatus, who built up emotions until this point, managed to follow this pragmatic approach right at the end. A typical shonen progression would have him destroy the whole mothership out of rage - or just leave, promising to create a new order for the human race. Then again, the rest of the story is not typical shonen.

Interestingly, at the beginning, I suspected Maria to… have dropped the poetry book on purpose to change Tractatus’s heart (independently of any mission, just because he needed it). Thinking about it, if it was really a mission, it was relying on a lot of luck that Tractatus would go to the library, as Critique just recommended it to him that day, on a whim. If the plan was originally to meet Critique, though, who frequently attends the library, it would make sense. Maybe there were actually another guy in the library trying to approach Critique but he somewhat never made it?

Oh, frustrating and funny! What are the exact conditions for a bottle flip? Twice it did fall on the ground and with momentum rolled back to proper upside position, but it only registered success the second time.

Context

Before, the Download section used to show a constructed low-level hyphenated name like my-game-my-channel.zip. This required developers to change the display name manually to have a nice visible name (although it wouldn’t change the zip/folder name on download/install via itch app). However, it had the advantage of showing the channel name as suffix (automatically appended, at least when using butler).

Now, if the developer didn’t overwrite the build display name, it automatically shows it the actual name of the archive file (.zip, .7z, …) which I find more meaningful, however it also means it stopped showing the channel name (unless the developer renamed their archive to include the channel name on purpose).

Example

It’s still usable in my case thanks to the version number and file name, but developer needs to pay extra attention to it - in particular, because of the ellipsis cut, definitely not put important build variant information like “Demo” after too many characters! (the rest is visible on hover but I wouldn’t count on it) Or they’d need to change display name, which defeats the advantage of the new file display name.

I personally find the new display pretty nice, in fact, I used to rename my builds exactly like this before, so the user is not surprised when they download the file from the website and see the same name. So I’m okay with keeping it, but…

Suggestion

I would suggest to add a new field to display the channel, just besides the version number.

Otherwise, the channel is only visible on itch admin page and when using itch app and trying to install the game, which makes the download instructions on my page (“we recommend downloading the post-jam channel…”) meaningless for all the users not using the itch app.

I see, unfortunately I’m not a professional climber myself and not sure where the human limit really stands. I saw some people visualize their paths by looking at the climbing wall and taking some time to simulate their moves, so doing this in a few seconds goes beyond that, but it’s not like the player could really feel time that easily with static graphics like these.

I got the same feeling with Eyeshield 21, I have no idea if it’s just plain football with fancy names and cool camera angles or if something would really tickle a football fan (or referee).

Anyway, the original superability is held by the Mastermind who’s barely seen in the Prologue (and won’t be seen in my release today because I had to cut scenes for the jam deadline). Even then there is a pseudo-scientifical explanation for this, but then Phi Brain is the same (a device that boosts brain power… but the more the series goes on, the further it breaks the limits).

Then I suppose I should better submit the main story with the full cast for the next BAF. Or wait for “Narrative sports jam” to happen. Or make it a real spaceship!

In the meantime I’ll just submit it to Josei Jam. I discovered it like 4 months ago and I have no idea what kind of games there are there. We’ll see!

(I accidentally posted this in the 2024 jam forum so reposting here, sorry to ask so late)

Hello, I’m working on an escape game x sports Visual Novel and I realised that my story doesn’t feature obvious fantasy / supernatural elements.

It’s a Prologue to a bigger story I wrote last year, which was inspired by anime Phi Brain and featured a device that would boost brain capabilities (as in movie Limitless). However in the Prologue it’s not visible. Instead, the main character’s forte is sports and her “brain ability” is to visualize possible climbing routes in advance (as Sena visualizes free running paths in Eyeshield 21). Apart from them, the character can run fast and jump high, but nothing superhuman (something that intermediate athlethes could do, not like superhuman physical abilities shown in Dr. Stone, for instance).

The guideline says that fantasy or supernatural elements are required, but at the same time there are many sports shonen manga where:

• the physical abilities are just slightly exacerbated versions of normal moves (sometimes there are crazy FX like the dinosaur meteor in Prince of Tennis, but in the end it was just a powerful ball)
• the mind abilities help them visualize things better but it’s actually something that professionals do (e.g. Go players can visualize many moves ahead)

I haven’t written the part where the protagonist “visualizes” stuff so it’s not visible yet, but otherwise there are classic sports story patterns (failure, come back, etc.).

So I was wondering if I could still submit my entry to BAF VN jam.

Otherwise I will just post it for the Josei Jam so it won’t be totally lost (but originally it was intended for BAF VN jam).

Hello, sorry to use this space for personal communication, but I received a ghost notification on Discord from Hvoiaa (that is, when I check for a new message I see nothing as it must have been deleted, as happens with either bots or people sending a message by accident). Profile information is hidden and I share no common servers with them anymore (sometimes happens with hacked then banned accounts).

Do you know if they lost their Discord account?

That explains it! 5 years later, and I finally got the answer to this mystery. Now, to actually solve the problem, I still need to know which sides have a length of 7, 10 and sqrt(73) (is it in order: AB, BC, CA?). And M is useless, it should not appear in the problem. Then I can apply proper trigonometry, but for a scalene triangle (not isosceles, not equilateral, not right), that doesn’t look like a high school question. But maybe it depends on countries… or the game takes place in the past, before the math level decreased so much.

Anyway, I came back here because I found this screenshot of my answer that I had apparently never posted (wow it’s small, right-click > Open in new tab to see it better):

I totally forgot to tell you I used this pack 5 years ago, for my Nanoreno 2020+ game, which is absolutely not a dating sim: https://komehara.itch.io/sidetracked

In fact, once you remove the hearts, it becomes a wholesome UI that can be used for slice-of-life / comedy stories.

Oh, OK, I don’t see a video on the Machina X Flayon page so I can’t comment much.

Your video with Houshou Marine (surprised by her voice btw, considering her pirate look) actually reminded me of some game I made in high-school on a Casio calculator. For some reason I didn’t use RPG Maker for that long, at the time (and nowadays it wouldn’t fill my professional needs, e.g. balancing all stats with a spreadsheet, coding the way I want, debugging… and too many plugins needed to make it look the way I want) but I had fun making my own systems.

That became my first non-trivial digital (if not video) game, a text adventure with a few procedural 4-color pixel art CG (yeah!) and extremely boring turn-based battle (I didn’t know the words “game design”). There was even a shop+equipment system so you could almost call it an RPG.

If it was shown publicly, it would look lame, but at least the script was written as a parody of RPG with a lot of pop culture references, so I suppose it would look like it’s done on purpose. In fact, I considered reviving it as a proper comedy indie game, but I’d need to revive that old calculator, maybe some cable to dump the data to my PC (or restart from scratch, it wasn’t really that great), revamp the battle system and probably make the 4th wall breaking even more obvious. Hm, looks like I got carried away.

Anyway, that Zelda save corruption video was interesting! Could be a funny exercise for students “find an edge case causing a bug in this piece of code taken from an actual game”. I also liked other Zelda hack videos like the one one blue dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1l6Xj4PLEk

My videos would be different in that I don’t have access to game code / disassembly (they could be more modern games that have not been studied so much), so instead of analyzing things I can see, I would be trying hard to reproduce the bug by making hypotheses and experimenting. I suppose it could be fun, if shown the right way (and there comes the question of video editing!)

Strange, I remember playing the very beginning of this game but apparently I stopped very early because all the rest, including graphics looked very new to me (yet they were already in the Early Demo from 2021).

There was no Once Upon a Time VN jam at the time, but it’s interesting that a full tale is narrated at the beginning… and I recognized that Gardner boy character in my own Once Upon a Time (2023, the first one) entry. Maybe a classic tale pattern I unconsciously introduced (also stories goes on very differently). Anyway, the initial tale is as if telling us “OK, here is a simple story - but our own will be more complex - but there may be a little of that tale inside anyway”. As in the beginning of Shrek, but with more poetry and less All Star.

I’ve only played the first scene and eager to see the rest. I see the project is on hiatus, so not sure how much my feedback will help, but:

• UI: the main menu has a pretty layout, but I cannot navigate in circle with the keyboard navigation (I had the same issue in my game where buttons were not aligned, I think the trick is to tell Renpy to move to the next button when you press right/down but not sure how to do it)
• UI: the big snowflag to the left of the dialogue box seems to shake as it’s rotating. It’s surprising if the rotation is done via Renpy directly. Even if pivot wasn’t exactly centered, motion should be smooth…
• nice text with outline and inverted black/white colors to replace bold. I usually avoid too much outlined text but this one looks OK.
• Aster’s sprite facing the camera looked off compared to Lumine’s sprite. But maybe that’s a trick for future scenes with future scenes feature 3 characters where they can’t all face every other one.
• Aster’s voice acting really conveys his character! I didn’t feel as much with Lumine, but maybe it’s her current state where she’s more passive and her expressions will unlock with time
• I know it’s just a matter of budget but I feel a few expressions would deserve some arm movement, esp. Lumine who has this hesitating hand gesture, but sometimes she’s vexed and it fells like she would rather put her hands on her waist or something (hm, I’m myself working on a VN and we have this discussion on layered characters, and it looks quite complicated to setup a combination of arm gestures, outfits, clothes following the arms, etc. but we’ll see how it works out)

I see. I searched yesterday and found a few fan games featuring Hololive characters, but I don’t think they were made by the members themselves. More like a “we give you right to sell games with these characters, make something cool” (I would love having an open license to work on, similarly to Touhou, but it turns out that my main issue is actually drawing sprites, so having a character design, and Touhou for instance requires to create original sprites, so I’m not sure how much it would help me).

I also want to make more videos on game development and combining it with gameplay videos that are fun to watch. Like: there is this bug/exploit in this game, how can I reproduce it? Fix it? Is it a fundamental game design issue? But I don’t spend enough time on video editing. Got a lot of recording from Sonic Frontiers I haven’t been using, and a bunch of exploits I remember from Tales of Symphonia I’d like to try again in the remake to see if they still work…

Anyway, I think it’s good as an indie to find your own path and skill combination. Taking another branch of entertainment, idols learn acting, voice acting, singing, dancing, but no producer would have the idea to have them learn… illustration, or movie editing (useful for promotional videos!). But I’ve seen many artists move from interpretation to creation, try side activities, and it contributed to their creative power as a whole. At the same time, I get that it’s hard to learn too many things, in depth, hence the teams. For specialized individuals, an organization that can connect people from different fields together is ideal! Maybe something like Game Creators Camp in Japan.

A pretty advanced interactive portfolio!

OK, I stumbled on this page from my itch notifications, probably after following you from malViolence (not played though). I tried to run it without any context (the “[Learn more about my history with auditioning for Hololive here.]” had no hyperlink, I found later the link in the Development log but I think there was supposed to be a link in the sentence too).

So I was kinda confused, but since the presentation is lively and interactive with voice acting, I got caught it (only checked Illustrations so far). I’m not familiar with auditions but I did play a few game dev interactive portfolios (you know, the ones where you can actually play and move around to see the dev’s career on your own, sometimes complete with rhythm and beat ‘em up web game), so it was the closest thing I could connect to. But it’s the first time I see one that is voiced!

It’s actually catchier than my own proper Visual Novels - but the character is addressing the player directly so I suppose it’s not something I could pull in my own stories, considering their format. However, I learned a thing or two from animations (the character tilts their head when they say “good taste!”). Audio is also refined (filter on voice coming from behind the door).

The voice acting is very good, I was wondering if I would naturally voice my own character well because I’m actually playing myself and showing my own work. But looking at your post-mortem which shows you actually worked on song covers, etc. I suppose that’s part of the acting work really. Not sure if it’s worth learning proper acting just to be able to voice myself in my own programmer portfolio… That’s probably better to have a clean voice to play an animated character, but if I used live footage then I suppose my normal voice would be OK since it wouldn’t really differ from the usual Zoom interviews.

I have troubles playing web games on my laptop as they take 50-100% of my CPU so I would have liked playing a desktop version, but I understand why an audition/portfolio is better in web format.

Well, I suppose this page is for people meant to recruit you but it was interesting having links to your non-game works which are not displayed on itch.io. I also found your website: https://madocactus.portfolio.site/ (better for me to quickly get the links and save images in my personal notes). Feedback: the carousel doesn’t show left/right arrows, it may be easy to miss for people who are not familiar with the dot selector at the bottom, and they may think that there is only one work. I’m used to it so I pressed left/right arrows but it’s better to offer obvious mouse navigation too.

The VTuber world is a bit obscure to me but I do recognize a combination of skills that indie game devs usually look forward to (unless they prefer hiring other people, as I’m myself trying to do). I wonder how they could put your game dev skills to contribution. Promoting your own game with your avatar would bring more views? Making games for other members too?

Funnily enough, Hololive JP sent me an offer for “Unity engineer” once, but I wasn’t interested as I wasn’t into it (the few VTubers I listen to are part of other crews, and I really just care about their music - I tend to strictly separate channels to listen to music and those to watch Let’s Play, probably due to the habit of working while listening to music in the background vs actively watching a gameplay video to learn about the game). I haven’t checked Hololive EN, maybe I’d have more interest in them, especially if they have a more mixed cast and cool designs (like this one). But, I suppose in the end I just really like seeing characters inside games and movies rather than as avatars. So, I can’t guarantee I’ll be watching Mado on YouTube - except for the song covers.

Erm, it got a bit long, sorry. Plus, it’s not great putting too much personal opinion as comment just below someone’s portfolio. I can trim my comment to the essential feedback if you want.

Make it smaller to make it bigger… I never thought it could go that far!

I can’t believe I died at the boss! I realize that you can’t crouch to dodge the ball… and there is no checkpoint so you have to restart the level. But it’s still faster than having to go through 3 acts.

The PICO-8 rendition of Green Hill Zone is quite nice! I like the slides and all the effects.

I am myself in the process of exporting the tracks of pico sonic to compile a soundtrack (looks like PICO-8 export .wav creates very long tracks, I have to reduce them myself to 2 loops). If you publish the cart and/or export the BGM, give me a heads up!

Hey, it looks like the mac and pc tags are inverted (PC zip shows Apple icon while mac zip shows Windows and Linux icons)

(coming from santiago’s profile)

Phew, pretty hard first boss!

• the bullets are much faster than classic bullet hell
• some bullets seem to bounce or be shot from the area edges
• my projectiles don’t go through the big bullets and big crescent attack
• you need to aim with the mouse while the camera moves

In addition, the charged shot doesn’t seem to increase DPS that much and requires extra focus, and it doesn’t go through the big bullets and big crescent attack so it’s easy to “waste it” which means losing even more DPS. I found out that not charging at all and focusing on dodging gave me better results. I survived until boss HP reached 10%, I think I’ll be able to beat him soon.

Otherwise, I find it cool that the whole arena rotates.

We need a making-of for this! At first I thought it was easy to do by growing the maximum hair, take a photo, gradually trim them while taking more photos. But since the “top haircut” and “priest shaved top haircut” are complementary, this means you’d have to grow your hair, trim the side to keep the top part only, then grow it again, and trim the top to keep the sides only…

Does that make it the game that had the longest production time relatively to its budget?

Being able to play at once’s pacing means it’s not really a rhythm game, but it got some automated risk-reward as you speed up trying to reach a certain score and increases your odds of messing up (at least you only waste time, not lose more score).

Sounded really hard to get 550.

Adding SFX when pressing direction keys would make a big difference in feedback/feel.

If some representative tells you about copyright infringement, just tell them that the game takes place in the real world and actual people are just cosplaying their favorite characters to enter the club (maybe it’s mandatory).

Nice layered gameplay!

I have troubles on Linux+Chrome at least where the pointer speed is very high, and I keep moving the cursor character outside the play range. And it doesn’t clamp on the edges, it just leaves the play field and the level restarts. It happened many times and I gave up.

Some philosopher said something like this about Spanish bullfighting:

Often, the matador wins thanks to intensive training and superior skills. Would he be injured, he would be evacuated to have a chance to recover and, if not suffering from permanent injury, give it another try. Whereas the bull is just a fresh player. Now, imagine that we let the bull fight the matador, take a few non-mortal blows, leave the arena to take the time to recover, and repeat. Wouldn’t the bull end up learning the matador’s moves and how to counter them until it can kill him?

This fight reminded me of this. Except, when I was the one bleeding, no friends were there to save me.

The last sentence is important, I was curious about the true impact of voting since I saw the most recent comment on a popular game being a shameless plug / spam advertising another game (probably their own or a friend’s game), totally unrelated to the genre of the game in question. It got several negative votes but without a StackExchange-like system to put it to the bottom (relatively lower score) and grey it out (negative total) it didn’t seem that useful.

So I’m okay to keep the comment votes specifically for these cases (and I suppose vote up could be useful too but on YouTube I found it to snowball short but funny comments to the top, leaving my longer, more analytical comment much lower, so this would have to be weighted).

Ideally, the final sorting could be configured:

• by author for all their games
• by author per game page
• by user in their global preferences (e.g. follow author’s decision or override it)
• by user on a specific game page (with buttons to switch between sorting by time, popularity or a mix of both)

In the meantime I’ll report the spam comment to make sure it’s deleted, but it’s still unclear in my mind who really gets reported by comment reports (I have myself never received such reports but I’d need to create a dummy account and report a comment to be 100% sure it works, since my own reports are probably not notified to me - and after reporting things on someone else’s page, I never saw a moderator reaching out asking me “hey is everything alright? Thanks for the report, we banned this user, it was a bot”) - but that’s another issue.

I just found this other Constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) puzzle game on Steam: Is This Seat Taken?

Which post are you referring to? The Bluesky one to recruit for Super Sonic Heroes?

So I assume you’d be more keen on working on some HD logo than in-game pixel art?

I was checking the top 10 games of the Boss Rush Jam 2024 (https://itch.io/jam/boss-rush-jam-2024/entries) sorted by Popularity, assuming Popularity = Top rated.

However, I noticed a few entries with very low jam ranks. I checked this explanation of filters on the general game discovery page: https://itch.io/t/719515/how-does-itchio-sort-games-by-these-criteria-popular-newpopular-top-rated-top-sellers-most-recent and, assuming Popularity works the same for jams, it’s using a different algorithm that takes into account activity (apparently a mix of dev updates, comments on the jam page and possibly comments on the main page too).

In this case I think a Top Rated sorting for game jams would make sense. While I do not like using Popular and Top Rated during jam voting to avoid being influenced by other people in my votes, I find it very useful after a jam + voting phase ended so I can enjoy the best games out there.

To be honest, the Popular sorting works quite well and most entries at the top also have good ratings, although they are not ordered in the same way as e.g. Overall ranking - I could only find one entry at the top that didn’t make it to Top 100, and I think it’s because it had a lot of dev updates. It’s, but it may give a false impression that a game is really liked when the dev is just patching many things, so I feel that this should be reserved for the sorting “New & popular” which is used on the main game discovery page (but currently not on game jam entries list).

Thank you for your reply, this time it was very detailed and I could understand your intentions and way of thought better. If you’re already using thumb up and ratings then that’s alright!

Then yes, your one-liners make sense, just make sure give more details when you can, so I can feel you’re really giving a personal feedback.

Also, don’t feel obliged to comment first on a video if you have nothing special to say. Some people just comment “first!” but it doesn’t really help the creators (obviously “nice game” is already better because it gives some evaluation, but you have to mean it). Nowadays comments are often sorted by popularity (on YouTube, not itch though) so it doesn’t matter that much, but it would still show if you only have 2-3 comments on your videos (as in my case).

As you noticed I hid your comments on YouTube until you read my message. I’ve unhidden you now so your new comments will be visible. Or you can just thumb up as you said.

Reversely, I will also think about using thumb up on users’ comments with thumb up, so you know your feedback is appreciated.

Looks like you can just put anything to build at any step… is a piece verification missing in the code?

Also, how do you control player 2? Arrow keys and WASD control the same character. I haven’t tried gamepad though.

Oh, I see the demo was already released on Steam in June 2024 (with Kickstarter, although for some reason I can’t see much info on the funding anymore), so this must be the latest demo and also a way to promote the game on different platforms and prepare the itch page before the actual release. Wishlisted and eager to try the demo in the meantime!

By the way, I notice a duplicate link to Steam page in the metadata.

So it looks like it’s more focused on frenzy shooting than balancing or forcing the player to die and retry. The recovery rate is quite high and obviously infinite lives make it doable in one rush, although you can challenge yourself to rush without losing a life. But considering your lack of time, it was a smart way to ensure the game is finishable.

I was pretty impressed by the graphics, not just the sprites themselves but all the shaders around to give it a scifi look.

The first boss was the hardest as there is a gimmick to understand and you must stop spamming shots continuously. It disturbed me that you can only move horizontally and only on that boss, it forced me to wait for the right moment to shoot and makes it harder to experiment shooting at different locations. But the gimmick itself is clever.

After that it’s mostly about barriers. The first one rotates a bit too fast to rotate around, the further ones are okay as you always find openings to shoot through - and the barriers break if you shoot them too much anyway.

I think barriers damage you too much, at the end I was only focused on dodging them and didn’t care about hitting asteroids or projectiles are they would relatively damage you much less, and you can recover that.

UI issues

I pressed Escape once to open pause menu, then Escape again to close pause menu and it closed the game!

Testing Windows version on Linux via Wine

The game shows no text at all in menus and ingame.

I tried to randomly click on buttons and it started a boss, where I could properly move, jump and shoot, however I did continuously lose HP even when nothing seemed to hit me (it was a bit hard to verify when camera was behind spin top as it would hide enemy bullets, but even moving it I didn’t see the enemy’s green bullets - or I didn’t know how to dodge them). Maybe with text I’ll be able to read more instructions and understand how to play.

In case it’s a Wine thing, I’ll try again later on Windows 11.

Oh, that’s cool!

I forgot to say that I really liked how the music went up when entering phase 2. I’ve been playing a few entries where the music was too quiet and/or monotonous so it really stood out!

P.S.: good dedication, I basically stopped working on the game while uploads were locked, using it as an excuse, instead of preparing a patch!

Oh, is that the game from the organizers?

Very polished!

I’ve been looking at a few circle arena boss fights and in this one too, rotating the camera to track the player character is quite nice. It’s hard to counter to rotation to aim correctly while moving, fortunately it’s easy to stabilize and stop during boss 2, and to aim at the flying enemy while moving during boss 3. Boss 3 is probably easier than boss 2 but it’s actually nice to move more freely at the end!

The reload mechanic is a nice retake on the “perfectly timed reload” from some other shooter games, with a penalty of slow reload if failed. The tutorial page seems to miss some text “Reload” before it explains the reload mechanic so I didn’t understand it, but it was easy to understand by experimenting. Same thing for the boost description about the blue/yellow gauge area, it should state “Using the boost” somewhere.

Nice to have damage + damage confirm or recovery in player character health “bar”, to reduce punishment and reward player who pays attention after the first hit.

I had troubles with the enemies that explode sending bullets, but it forced me to manage them by killing them one by one (or several but only in safe times when there were no spikes), so it was manageable in the end (although unfortunately sometimes spikes would appear quite fast after I make my decision to kill them).

My issues:

• lack of feedback on damage, esp. for boss 1: no particular feedback FX/SFX on eyes when hit (about the same as when hitting a wall / non-vulnerable part). As a result, during phase 2 when it’s invincible I tried to shoot at the orange parts (thinking orange was color coding for weak spot). It did nothing but it wasn’t obvious since there was no clear feedback to start with. In the end I just looked at the boss health bar and deduced it was invulnerable while health bar was empty.
• some bullet patterns are really tight and player character hurtbox is quite big, matches the model (understandable, as it’s not a classic bullet hell either). I tried to play smart and zigzag between the bullets but always got punished for it (typically by double hit, confirming damage) so I gave up and tried to just avoid the tight patterns completely
• … but sometimes it’s not possible because you’re stuck between that and some other damaging entity (in boss 2, the “tail” and its spikes, or the small enemies projectiles on death and the large spike areas), and the best seems to run across the level away from them, taking one hit intentionally, and count on the timed recovery (didn’t try though as I kept trying to fit right between them, to no avail)
• boss 2 large spikes covering 1/4 of the circle: appear quite fast, esp. during phase 2 and you need very good reflexes to get away… if you happened to be near their middle it’s almost impossible to get away in time

Bugs

At the end, boss 1 timer was 0

The final button to go back to Main menu didn’t work, I had to Alt+F4

UI improvement suggestions

• pause menu item / shortcut to quick restart the current boss: after losing 1 HP near the beginning it will be too hard, may as well die to restart, but it’s cleaner to do it via menu or button shortcut (require holding it to avoid accidental press). And exiting the level would go back to main menu and you’d have to restart from boss 1.

I didn’t take part to Boss Rush Jam 2024 but I played Shinigami Shrine from last year and really liked its GBC Zelda Oracle style.

This time it looked like a hybrid kinda GBA with vertical screen for shmup. I liked the aesthetics including that spinning main menu (I realized later it was on the theme too!), and Intelligent Drums (so reminiscent not only of GBA but also PS/Dreamcast era).

It was clever not to make the character rotate around the screen but having the camera track the character and rotate the whole arena around instead, as it would be disturbing to press left to go clockwise but then it would go right when the character is at the top of the screen (as in Sonic when you’re on the ceiling and horizontal direction is reversed). Although circle arena just work in some games like Froggy’s Battle but I think this one allows stick control (while old school games work with D-pad).

Using radial coordinates also help maneuvering around bullets which are also using radial coordinates: it’s natural to go left and right to follow the waves (while it would be tricky to move diagonally to follow the same patterns in XY coordinates, esp. with a D-pad).

It was interesting to shoot while moving sideways (and shoot very little if you alternate left and right too fast), to force you to move and keep the same direction while having to decide when to stop before hitting projectiles => dynamic of moving left as much as possible, then right as much as possible, etc. Although during the tutorial it toook me a bit of time to understand why going left was shooting to the right (because the BG wasn’t rotating, understandable in pixel art - but I got it once I understand it was the camera following the player character).

Boss design

Sometimes it felt like it was impossible to escape a wave of huge bullets, and the best way was simply to predict it and start moving completely to the left or to the right in advance… Or maybe there is a way to dodge between the big bullets and it was part of the challenge.

The boomerang bullets of Side Car in the middle of another pattern was quite smart to make you think (and not such a common pattern).

UI

Convenient to put Options on a dedicated key in the main menu, although I kept opening the Options by accident when I wanted to confirm my selection… I thought it was a bug at first (it’s easy to swap X and Z on a new game)

Art

Very pretty and polished, I don’t know enough GBA to know if it fits particular hardware constraints but it felt right. I did spot a few rotating bullets in pixel art, but I think all pixel art teams had issues in this jam about “Spin” (even us, we were kinda saved by going with HD at the end so we could rotate the main character and his weapon as much as we wanted).

Generally not a fan of “moe anthropomorphization” (probably saw a little too many - I suppose I wouldn’t notice if there were general anthropomorphizations with mixed gender teams), but I admit the character designs are quite varied and funky - I especially like the space cowgirl (?) at the end.

The animation details like the hat drop on defeat are also very nice. I think the jiggly breasts are a bit too much though, they tend to break my immersion esp. in old school games.

Ending

I remember saying that Shinigami Shrine didn’t have a clear ending, so it was nice to see a proper ending sequence and explanation of why all the battles, esp. considering the time constraints. I’m happy to join the Elite Four!

I haven’t tried Hard mode yet but it seems harder to fill the SP gauge, and also it’s cleared when I get hit, so I must be extra careful!

Oh, it had quite the pacing! I read it was the first game for your team members, and it’s working quite well!

What I liked:

• how boss elements combine and are indicated by the mix of colors in the boss warpers
• combining dodge and attacks into dash
• you can tune your own difficulty by choosing to use the healing circle or not, between bosses and during the bosses (for instance you could start Easy by using it every time, Medium by using it only between bosses, Hard by recovering only 2 HP between bosses and Very Hard by not using it at all)
• game page explains only to deal damage to boss, there is also a little demonstration at the beginning

What I had issues with:

• even with the explanations and the spinning light demo at the beginning, I didn’t connect information together: dashing through the spinning light felt very different in the actual context of a boss vs doing it peacefully in the hub. In fact I didn’t even notice the laser attack at first, only when doing it with an actual boss. Unfortunately you’d require a proper “boss tutorial” to demonstrate that and that requires some time to put in place (we didn’t have one either, but entry Vertiga has a good one)
• I also didn’t get what the green circle was doing at first since you start at full heath in the hub. Fortunately it becomes clearer later (before I got hurt, I thought I had to stay in the green circle to spawn the spinning lights and trigger the attack)
• I have no control on how spinning lights spawn and I spend a lot of time circling around the boss looking for one. They don’t seem to spawn at regular periods like Spin On, or maybe they do at the opposite location in the arena and disappear before I have time to reach them
• so having an arena much bigger than the screen is an issue to spot these spinning lights, and also to see the boss actually spawning projectiles. We also had a circular arena in our game and we had camera scrolling initially but we changed the zoom so player could always see the boss, it was important to also predict the boss spinning attack incoming. In Vertiga you don’t see the whole arena but because most attack patterns are symmetrical by angle, you don’t lose much info, and most importantly you see the boss (you only miss the part of the arena on the sides and behind the boss)
• in the last boss, red projectiles are not contrasted enough with the dark red background (we also need to make our projectiles brighter in our game)

Suggestions:

• reward player with a nearby spinning light to deal damage after either a fixed period of time (like Spin On) or when dashing through a certain amount of projectiles (to encourage risk-reward) or when dashing through special, colored projectiles (requires attention and precision)

Art remarks:

• I see pixel art sprites but considering how big they are and how they are rotated, it could probably have been “HD” / digitally painted everywhere

Cool concept, I only saw it used for monster taming (frankenstein or genetic combinations) but not on enemies to fight.

Is there an end to the boss rush? Would be nice to see some progression/objectives like Win 5 times in a row!

I didn’t notice the procedural music at first, but looking at the description I assume there is some vertical combination of tracks based on the different parts, which is also an interesting idea.

The full dragon was dangerous, spawning fireballs everywhere. When it reaches 1 HP it raised a barrier and I couldn’t break it and lost… I’d like to have a hint on how to break it.

Performance-wise it was OK but there was a lag on first fireball spawn.

Gameplay

My main issue was gameplay, with controls being raw or unresponsive:

• no possibility to chain melee attacks, no Cancel period at the end of the melee attack animation. So you have to wait for a full melee attack to end before starting the next one (and there is no input buffering so it looks like click input was completely missed)
• similar issue with gun, although animation is shorter so it’s easier to chain
• gun has quite the startup time (time between input and projectile spawn)
• also felt hard to chain between sword and gun (same, no cancel period)
• tutorial mentions that sword charges gun, I suppose it means that individual sword hits charge the gun gauge. That would suggest that gun is quite powerful but it doesn’t seem so (I beat one boss more reliably spamming sword attacks) so I’m not sure if this mechanic really balances things

Art

the pixel art slot machine looks nice (except the rotation pokeball I suppose, but many of us got that issue about rotating pixel art in that jam), then there is the HD battlefield which is in a completely different art style, and even has pixel art fireballs in the middle, making it quite inconsistent. It’s less problematic between different screens but stands out on the same screen.

We actually thought about a Beyblade game when brainstorming, so it was nice to see something make a spinning top battle!

I really liked the shield + dash mechanic where you have to time contact point right. The tutorial doesn’t say it but combining dash and shield makes for really good attacks with no damage. From here, the key is to minimize the time spent on shield (may be difficult with bullets incoming and the slower basic motion). Fortunately shield regenerates slowly (I think it wasn’t written in tutorial, it seemed impossible to me to win at first when I saw my shield reaching 0), so it really becomes resource management (although once you get the hang of it you can just spam dash and insta-shield - many it becomes a bit too spammy and not caring about opponent’s moves?)

My main issue was the right-click to Dash button not reacting half of the time. After my last dash+shield I had to right-click once to “reset” the dash state and then once more to properly dash. Unless it’s not an input issue but some cooldown in design? In this case it should definitely be indicated on screen somewhere (e.g. a cooldown gauge and spark when next dash is ready as in Zelda: Twilight Princess for Cyclone attack, etc.)

The duel was funny too, although it felt like I could still move around instead of being at a fixed position and focus on releasing the trigger. On release I saw some message “-15hrs” which I suppose gives the time difference between me and the gunner shooting, and maybe time format was wrong so it showed hours instead of milliseconds?

Music: could be more dynamic, rocky or something. Also BGM volume is quite low while SFX volume is high so you cannot increase PC volume that much or the high-pitch SFX will be too strong.

Performance: I’d really like a standalone build as web runs quite slow on my laptop (I could switch to my desktop but it felt overkill for a simple 2D game like this)