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A jam submission

Blood RunnerView game page

A endless runner with juicy gore
Submitted by kacproc — 2 hours, 49 minutes before the deadline

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Blood Runner's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Polish#82.8572.857
Fun#142.5712.571
Overall#152.5182.518
Creativity#172.5002.500
Theme#182.1432.143

Ranked from 14 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Talking points of your game
Juicy bloody goodness in endless runner form

What assets were used?
Everything created by me except-
All the sounds
some blood animations

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Cool game, but too many screams ^^''

I'm not sure how adherent to the theme it is, but going for a runner was a good idea: immediate and fun. Good job C:

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedback

Submitted(+2)

Interesting idea, and I see how you tried to put a twist on the endless runner genre, but the knives make it feel a bit button mashy, and sometimes i get first-frame spawn-knifed by one of the angel dudes and die. Not cool angel dude, not cool.

Developer

Thanks for the feedback, will fix.

Submitted

The game was alright.  Endless runners don't generally have a lot of variety either way, so it's not the easiest game-type to do much differently with.  

The knife mechanic, I found to be handled rather poorly.  You had to be a bit preemptive if you were to dodge them, which actually could be considered a quirk that made your runner more unique, not only endless running, but always having to be shifting directions vertically to avoid the knives as well.  Could've been an interesting element, but then you have the knives being individual objects, which means that when you have multiple knives on the field, if any of them are disrupted, even by enemy knives, you end up with falling spikes.  I ran along the ground for a moment just to see, and the knives accumulated bouncing in front of me, dealing constant hit damage each time they'd bounce off and hit the ground and be encountered again.  All in all, having the knives return to their pool when they hit, anything, would've made it a bit more reliable of a mechanic, or, setting all the knife throws to be on a regular timer, and thus, making the chaos more predictable, and able to be maneuvered, either way would've delivered a better experience in my opinion.

As for the player knife throwing, the constant angle really made it difficult.  Again, two alternate solutions I might suggest: Throw the knife on the X axis, and maintain it on the X axis, so that targeting can be handled through the jump mechanic itself.  Secondly, do a physics based throw mechanic, which in turn allows consistent but skillful use of the knife mechanic.  In it's current state, it's not unlike the straight flying dagger I mentioned first, but the ever present angle requires you to get a much greater feel of when to throw as the variable angle is dependent on height from ground, and it doesn't even align with the ground point, so all bases beyond trial and error are lost.  

All in all, the knife mechanic kind of spoiled it for me, on both ends.  It's a functional game, but I feel like it's an endless runner that dipped it's toes in bullet hell but without the rhythm or consistency to really match up with the pace of the game. Sometimes it felt like the enemy weapons were way too on point, other times it felt really good, like I was deftly dodging them as if it was intentional, but it wasn't.  If you could factor it so that it is more reasonable to intentionally dodge, rather than be always dodging, then I think this game could be very amusing.

Developer

Yep, thats definitely a issue, I had no idea where the game was going so the knives and gore were added as a last minute thing to "save" the game and make it at least entertaining and compensate for lack of any direction.

At first the knifes were supposed to be traveling slow using my own coded movement system but although more gameplay wise sound it didn't look as cool so I went to a physics one as it was slightly less buggy and looked cooler when for example they would throw a knife above themselves. 

I contemplated having knives deal damage only once but that was in like the last 4 hours of the jam where I was done after a solid 15 hours straight of working on it so I was kind of done at that point.

But yea in the end the philosophy on the 3rd day was along the lines of " Fuck it, make shit explode it'll be fine" 

The player throwing was quite literally stitched together after I made the main menu and realized the game still was missing something, adding a crappy knife throwing mechanic that made enemies xplode would help that I thought. And yes the angle was a result of the knife physics messing up as I was forcing it to go on the x axis and yet it was still being affected by the y.

This isn't me giving excuses, those are genuine issues with the game, some can be fixed the day voting ends but the fundamental knife throwing thing would need to be redone from scratch.

Yes, biggest problem is the complete meham and randomness of the knives, as they bounce around and do random damage to everyone.


Thank you for detailed feedback on the game.

Submitted

Yeah, I can understand.  I was working on my game for 71 of the 72 hours, well, besides sleeping, and the last hour was spent doing 10 builds trying to iron out last minute build breaking errors, or debug things left in, or settings set, that allowed me to test. xD  I remember my first build, the ending wasn't triggering, it was because I had forgot to 'save' my script when I built it, that would set the ending 'active'.  I fixed that, but to test it I had manually given myself the battering ram to get through the door leading to the exit, only to then try the game build, and realize, now the player had the battering ram from the beginning.  Rebuilt that, and tidy'd up the 'ending' code, only to realize that in doing so, I had stopped capturing the movement data when triggering a puzzle, so now players would trigger a puzzle and be able to run around the dungeon with it on their screen!  Last minute aspects are a tremendous pain. lol  I know, next Jam I do, to plan to be 'finished' on the second to last day, no new things added after the second to last day, and spending the whole final day on testing!  Yet, if I had done that here, there would only be two types of puzzles, no ending, among the problems the game still has!  So, oh well, lol, first Jam for me, so it's been a great experience!

Submitted(+1)

Cool bloody runner. The sound effects were a really nice addition. I found the early stages of the game quite easy but I thought it might be nice if the player was a little more in the center of the screen. Luckily I don't need my ears in the near future. Thanks for the fun and good luck!

Developer(+1)

If the player was more in the centre you wouldn't be able to see all the enemies behind you kill themselves and xplode, literally the only reason camera is so far back, and also the fact that the world generates only 1 tile in front of you, a easy fix but still would have taken time to generate the world 4-5 tiles ahead. 

And yea, ears are overrated 

Submitted

I thought there was likely a good reason for it. Don't mind me (:

Submitted

Fun but poorly balanced at the beginning. Audio levels are way too high on default, but I dont blame you for this since every game that has audio has ear shattering levels (thought at least add an option to change the volume).

The juicing on this however, is nicely done. The blood feedback, and the sounds for every action is a good touch. I'd say its more polished than you think, its just missing the endless part.

Developer

Thank you, after the voting is over I hope to fix all that and add a main menu to wrap things up.

Submitted

The game is a creative idea, and a interesting endless runner. The problem I had was not know how to shoot my weapon, and the screaming noise was to much sometimes. It still plays well though.

Developer

Thank you for your feedback, after the voting is over I'll be doing minor things like limiting the amount of screams that can play at once etc.