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A jam submission

ExotherasView game page

Face off against Galialos & Guruina!
Submitted by DesignerMan (@fourcornersmons), texacid, ImpacTus, Jen-Chieh Shen (@jenchieh94), Sam Cox (@samcox08), BusyCL Music (@BusyCLMusic) — 15 hours, 42 minutes before the deadline
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Exotheras's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Visual#1342.7502.750
Audio#1662.0002.000
Theme#1692.1052.105
Overall#1792.0502.050
Fun#1961.9001.900

Ranked from 20 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Did you use any third-party assets or skeleton code?
Bullet Fury

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Some cool enemy designs and nice shooting. This is a great start, but as others have mentioned, I would work on polishing up the bugs and doing a lot of playtesting. Good work, and keep at it!

Submitted(+1)

haha loved how the game offers a chinese transaltion!

Submitted(+1)

The theme of the game really interesting. It's a good start.

Submitted(+1)

The controls are pretty fun actually and I like the art. It's a little buggy here and there if I'm being honesy, the enemies projectiles only went so far in the first section. Once I entered the portal I got stuck in the middle and couldn't shoot. Good start though, I hope you continue to work on it :)

Jam Host(+2)

I think it's a good start for a project - the enemies are visually super interesting, and the concept works pretty well, other than the odd bug (I couldn't shoot in the second area, for example). There are a few things I'd take a bit of a deeper look at, though:

  • The movement of the player has a ton of inertia - when you let go of the button, you keep sliding. I'd examine what you actually want to deliver with player experience. It's fine if you want the player to feel "out of control", but it should be done for a specific reason and with a specific mechanic/player experience in mind. Bullet hell games are usually about precise movement, and inertia ruins that. It's very difficult to make precise dodges when you slide all over the place!
  • The enemies all do exactly the same thing. Again, worth taking a look at what you want the player to be doing in the game, and what other games in the genre do! Having a bunch of variety in how the bullets move and spawn is actually really important, it creates interesting challenge for the player. In this game, you basically just keep moving and you're fine. Aimed patterns (which is what your enemies do) are good for stopping the player from being safe in one spot - but you might want to consider combining them with more static patterns to force the player into moving in specific ways. Again, the general theme with bullet hell games is movement and dodging :) your aim should be to make that as entertaining as possible
  • Enemy health is VERY high. This is fine for high-priority and boss-level targets, but when every enemy has such high health it can get pretty boring - especially when the enemy only does one thing. If they moved and changed bullet patterns, it would feel less repetitive. Generally, bullet hell games sprinkle a load of "popcorn" enemies around which have very little health (i.e. one-three hits to kill them), which helps the player feel like they're making progress and like their shots have impact.

Overall, there wasn't a huge amount of polish - but it's a jam so I'll forgive that 😂 in future, though, you should consider making enemies react to hits, otherwise it's very easy to think the game is broken. Check out the videos on the juice jam page for more info: https://itch.io/jam/gdb-juice-jam-ii

You might also want to spend a little longer on your UI next time, it's quite basic. It really shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes to grab a nice font from https://fonts.google.com and remove the default sprites from the buttons, and maybe use a colour palette tool for some colours.

I loved the speed and size of the player's bullets in the first area, and the art really is gorgeous - in particular the background in the second area is just excellent.

It's also really impressive that you managed to add translations to a jam game! Well done, you should be pleased with this entry :)

Submitted(+1)

You even localized the game! Great job!

Submitted

Once I went through the portal I lost the ability to shoot. In the first area I noticed an ammo count but it did not seem to work.

Submitted(+1)

There’s not a lot of feedback when shooting, adding some sfx and screenshake could help there. Also moving into the second area is very jarring as you go from simple geometric where you can shoot in silence to pixel art, loud music, and seemingly can’t shoot anymore.