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DPad Dungeon's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun | #299 | 3.733 | 3.733 |
| Overall | #354 | 3.747 | 3.747 |
| Originality | #589 | 3.760 | 3.760 |
| Presentation | #712 | 3.747 | 3.747 |
Ranked from 75 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
In our game, you play as a controller (a DPad, to be specific). It's bullet hell/rogue like, in which the location you take damage impacts which controls are available to you. Lose all four cardinal directions, and you're out of luck. (Look for those A and B button power ups, though. You can use them with LMB and RMB.) Additionally, the enemies you fight fit the theme of "controllers", especially the boss at the end!
Did your team create the art for this game during the 48 hour time slot?
We created all art during the game jam
Did your team create the audio for this game during the 48 hour time slot?
We used pre-existing audio
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Comments
This game's beautiful art and design really pulled me into its world, and I had a lot of fun dodging all obstacles while dealing with missing keys. The difficulty definitely spikes the more you take damage, though that's just the fun of the game! It was frustrating on the few instances I could only move up or down, and the piece i needed was to myy right/left. Good job!
thanks so much for taking the time to play and review our game :D im glad you enjoyed it!
Really like the added touch of letting the character wraparound the screen but not the bullets or enemies. Adds a new layer of strategy! Would have liked an increased frequency of power ups though.
Good job!
agreed, thats something we'll be adding after judging ends. thanks for playing and the feedback! :D
I really like the concept and visuals!
Suggestion - Add arrow key support and make gameplay a little faster for more juice.
Nice Job!
thanks! i agree, we'll add full keybinding support after the jam ends, and improve the pacing, both are much needed. glad you enjoyed :)
This works very well! A really clever take on the bullet hell genre. Great work!
thank you!
This is a great take on the "losing control" concept, and I could definitely see myself playing this for a long time with some expansion and balancing. I did several runs, but I only managed to find an attack ability once, and it only seemed to work one time. I think that to keep the game fun you should be able to use attacks much more frequently, since I felt pretty defenseless. Aesthetically, the game is gorgeous, and the sound design worked really well!
i agree, the powerups have a cooldown period but it is definitely too long, and needs to be telegraphed to the player in a more clear way (right now, the button color just changes). thank you so much for taking the time to play and give feedback! i appreciate it :)
The art is so nice, and the music is well implemented, together they create a sort of Binding-of-Isaac type feel that I really like!
I didn't ever figure out what the letter buttons do? Should I be playing with a controller? It'd be better to make that more obvious.
I've seen a few other games in this jam about specific movement controls breaking, but this one stands out from them by actually showing the controls on the player, and the genius screen wrapping that stops the player from getting stuck. Good job!
thanks so much! the letter buttons, A and B, are controlled with LMB and RMB respectively. they are powerups (A shoots bullets, and B grants a temporary shield). im really glad you liked it, thanks for the feedback :)
I'm not a huge fan of bullet hell games, but I really liked yours :) The d-pad is not the best shape to avoid bullets with, but the concept of making controls your lives, which you can lose and gain back is really cool, it makes getting hurt more dramatic ;)
lol yeah we realized late in development that a d-pad is pretty much the opposite of the shape you'd want to be in a bullet hell haha :) thanks so much for playing, and im glad you liked it :D
This is really polished! I love the animations for all the sprite characters! Makes the game feel really unique! Fits the jam theme perfectly! Awesome job! :D
thank you very much! glad you enjoyed :D
Perfect pixel art and a fun bullet hell! This was really enjoyable! I've played a few jam games with this overall idea but this is my favorite implementation.
thank you so much, it means a lot :) im very glad you enjoyed the game!
I had a great time! I see a lot of potential in this game, awesome job! Liked everything about it!
thank you so much!!! makes me very happy to hear you enjoyed it so much :D
Very interesting concept ! I liked it a lot !
thanks a bunch!
cool game ! liked the art and music :P -Ivory-
thank you!
I'm a fan of both bullet hells and rogue likes so you're off to a great start here! A nice take on the theme and having the controls be your health is a really cool idea. The art style is awesome and the feedback whilst playing is satisfying.
All in all a great jam entry that I had a blast playing. Really nice job and I hope you continue to develop after the jam is over!
thanks so much! development will continue as soon as judging wraps up, hoping to develop this into a full game with a number of stages and bosses. glad you enjoyed playing it :D
I really like the concept here. The only problem I had, is that I spent most of my time playing with all 4 inputs intact, even though the most interesting situations happen when you have a few inputs missing. If the difficulty scaled with the amount of input you have, this would have been a really creative minigame, or even a rogelike.
interesting, most people had the exact opposite response (they felt they were getting hit too much and were unable to control themselves). i do like your idea to scale difficulty based on how much control the player has, might be something we add in the future! thanks so much for playing and your suggestions!
Great concept, really well implemented. Love the various enemies and animations. The controls were super smooth and once I remembered the wrap around world it got a lot more fun :) Don't think I ever made it to the boss bottle but I had a ton of fun surviving as long as I did.
glad you liked it :) thanks so much for playing!
I loved the ebb and flow of control in this bullet hell, it made for a really great player story. Graphics and sound were delightfully snappy. Wonderful work!
thank you very much! glad you enjoyed playing :D
Great concept! I wasn't able to play with my gamepad, but I think its okay, judging that you only had 48 hours to make the game.
yeah, unfortunately we didnt have time to add support as i expected most folx to just play keyboard and mouse. will definitely be something we add in the future. thanks for playing!
Really cool presentation! I do think that this implementation of the theme means that if you never get hit the theme will never manifest itself and that when you do it can quickly make the player very helpless.
I also think that the game feels very passive as of now. More active abilities could spice it up a lot and make it much more fun!
fair point, however i would be surprised if anyone actually beat the whole game without getting hit (and very impressed), especially since so many people criticized the game for being too challenging. i feel there's a bit of a difficulty curve in adapting to using less controls, and as you play it becomes more manageable to avoid enemies with less ability to control, so i can understand where you're coming from. definitely will be adding more abilities in coming updates, many have suggested such :) thanks for the feedback!
Cool idea and well executed! I especially like that i can see the health of the enemies in the sprite, very clever. I got the B powerup, wasn't sure what exactly it did. It seemed to shield once, but then was disabled. I played on a 3440x1440 resolution with 150% scaling on Windows, which created some UI issues - but no issues on gameplay :)
Great job overall!
thank you! and yes, the B is a shield, the power ups have a cooldown period. in the future we're going to make the cooldown shorter and have a visual indicator so that it's more clear. also, what kind of UI issues did you encounter?
On the start screen, it scaled to full width, thus cutting something at the top and bottom. My screen is 21:9, instead of 16:9. In the game itself the whole screen was usable, but the background texture did only cover a 16:9 ratio, not the full width. The outlet shots did the same thing, i guess the sprite is only that long. But it was perfectly playable. I guess it's best to check it out yourself with a 21:9 resolution, maybe it's the same for windowed mode.
interesting, i had someone who was going to stream my game run into a similar resizing issue, and i sent him a rebuild with Unity options set to allow resizable game window and to launch as a maximized window. this worked for him, if you have the time to try it out, i could send you a link to the rebuild, just to see if it fixes your bug as well. if not, i totally understand.
Sure, if you want to test a fix i'll help you out ;)
thanks a bunch! i appreciate it. here's a link to the test build, its the same as the one on my page but with the changed Unity settings: https://maxmitchell.itch.io/test lmk if this fixes the bug.
Sure, no problem. Looks the same as before, so sadly not fixed in fullscreen 21:9. I think i figured out how you can reproduce the effect. Just force the window mode (alt+enter on windows) and the adjust the window to be quite wide. You'll notice how areas of the game vanish. What is pretty cool is that the playable area is always correct (as big as the window), so i can modify the playing field :D
ah, i understand now! not sure why it's happening yet, but at least i can reproduce it. probably has something to do with the screen resizing and not scaling the camera view to account (or something).
i think the reason why it's all still playable is because the screen wrapping and enemy/pickup spawning are all dependent on the screen size (not a static value of what i expect the screen size to be). so when the screen size gets out of proportion, it messes up the UI and background image but is still playable. neat! thanks for the insight!
Really clever and original idea! The presentation is excellent especially considering you did all of the animations and art duing the jam. Excellent game!
thank you! all the art credit goes to my co-devs @scribbibble and @AstronotCB ! glad you enjoyed the game :)