RELOAD (Quickly, now) post-mortem

The jam is over. I enjoyed it a lot.

Wow. Third. I'm actually pretty surprised. Thanks, everyone!

I even got a tweet from the Official itch.io twitter account. Woohoo!

Here's my breakdown of RELOAD (Quickly, now) in the same way I gave feedback on other entries (that's only fair, right?)

👍

• People enjoy the game. I think it's fun, too.
• This was my first attempt at proper procedural generation. Varying success (some guns are fragmented) but I'm pleased with it.
• I enjoyed drawing the pixel art. It's not my best work,  but I think it successfully convey all the information the player needs.
• Despite being a short jam game, I managed to finish it. Finishing games is surprisingly tough, and I've come to appreciate just how impressive it is that developers get their games out in the world at all! So well done everyone, in general.

👎 

• The game is somewhat repetitive with no ramping difficulty. The randomness of each gun keeps the player on their toes, but I would perhaps have preferred to have a gradual increase in challenge.
• The generation isn't perfect, and a few guns arrive in three of four separate pieces. 
• The inputs are very basic. Each 'button' needs just one click to be complete. Ideally I would like to have had more types, such as dragging the bolts back, swiping the revolver wheels etc. I got this a lot in the comments. Originally I had many more ideas for gun mechanisms, but I didn't have time to put them in.
• I struggled with keeping the UI under the 64x64 limit. Unity's UI canvas system is tricky to work with. I tried using render targets, screen-space cameras and other tricks which would have kept it strictly low rez, but nothing quite worked properly. 

Quite a few people in the comments have mentioned porting the game to mobile. That's within the realms of possibility, but if I were to do that I'd want to do more than just a straight port. I'd love to address the issues and thoughts brought up in the comments. I'd love to make the game even better. We'll see.

That's me - here's a few of my favourites from other in the jam.

BLAMDODGE

Using a similar mechanic to Downwell, every time you move in BLAMDODGE you shoot a bullet in the opposite direction. Staying alive is a frantic series of near-misses as you try and kill off waves of hungry cubes.

Tale of Xenia 2

An impressive miniaturization of a Zelda-type game,  seemingly Minish Cap, Tale of Xenia 2 has a decent size world to explore and fun combat. The art is lovely, too.

URDL

This game is super simple, enter the given input correctly or get bitten . Despite this simple gameplay, the use of the reversing red arrows makes you second guess every input, and it becomes a fun challenge. Also I just got the name. Up Right Down Left. Very smart. The palette is simple and lovely.

Don't Let Them In

For some reason I love Tank Controls. Maybe it was Metroid Prime and Resident Evil 4, but I find something quite soothing about the simplicity of the controls, and the deliberate nature of how you must move. Don't Let Them In is a sort of zombie wave horror shooter with a nice spooky atmosphere. There aren't too many enemies on screen at once to each encounter feels significant. The game definitely has it's own visual identity, but I'd love to see this with more refined visuals.

Thanks again to everyone who played and rated RELOAD (Quickly, now), and well done to everyone who entered the jam! I'll keep this page updated with any more news on this game. Stay tuned.

I also added a support button to the game page - enough little donations could get this thing to mobile ;)