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A jam submission

Bill Two ScaleView game page

Use your side iron and your speed to clear floors of an endless tower!
Submitted by mjoldham — 1 day, 1 hour before the deadline
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Bill Two Scale's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Style#8393.9523.952
Enjoyment#9203.5713.571
Overall#9503.6833.683
Creativity#17083.5243.524

Ranked from 21 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?
The tower is built to be scaled by you, each floor is built to scale for the exponentially increasing number of enemies there, the enemies themselves are of different scales, and your name's a pun.

Development Time

96 hours

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

This game was so so fun! I absolutely love the drifting movement and the visual feedback from shooting the gun. Very nice game!

Please do check out our game too!

Developer

Thanks for being the 20th rating!

Submitted(+1)

Wild and slightly disorienting in a wonderful way. Cool VFX when you ventilate the cowpokes. I think my preference would have been for a fixed viewmodel for the gun, but maybe that's me being uptight. Either way, that sort of drifting movement for an FPS is a great idea. Hope you keep working on it or take the movement system into another game.

Developer(+1)

Thanks! Yeah when you're blasting the gun can get a bit wild, might be improved by having a gap between shots. I definitely think there's lots to be plumbed from taking tank controls in new directions. Currently have a vision in my head of using this system for pirouetting in the air...

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

This might be the most viscerally fun game (not game jam game, game) I've played in a while! The control scheme is like nothing I've played before and it works so well! If you described it to me, I'd probably not believe it but playing this game just feels good. The amount of juice and polish put into this is impressive! I love the art direction and especially the character design. Seriously, this game is instantly addicting. At first I felt the connection to the theme was a bit tenuous (ok some cowpokes are scaled up and some are scaled down, sure) but that is, I think, key to this game working so well. If they were all the same height, aiming from one to the other would not be as engaging as it is now!

I think the one weakness this game has is that engaging with the mechanics on a deep level is not incentivized as well as it could be. The game becomes trivial if you just stand back and spam pot shots at cowpokes from a distance, rather than running and gunning. But the running and gunning is so much fun!!!! Ideally, the optimal strategy should be the most fun strategy too.

I have a couple suggestions, I'm sure some of which you've already considered or actively had to cut for time (I know the feeling haha!)

  1. Adding terrain/ obstacles would make it harder to snipe cowpoke from a distance, forcing the player to engage. You're character controls kind of like a car so it might be fun to design the levels like you would a karting game, with ramps and turns etc. But even just walls and columns would go a long way to make the movement and shooting coalesce better.
  2. Missing a shot doesn't feel very punishing since the gun doesn't reload and is fully semi-auto. I love how cowpokes are stunned if you hit their torso so that you can follow up with a head shot, but right now it's so easy to spray and pray that the stun is kind of negligible. Decreasing the rate of fire and adding a reload may help.
  3. As the game "scales" the difficulty doesn't really scale with it. More cowpokes doesn't add more challenge, it just adds more cowpokes. It's just as easy to defeat a cowpoke if they're surrounded by a dozen or standing alone. So teaching them how to use their guns may help add scaling difficulty. It also might make the stun when you hit their torso more engaging. I'm imagining a scenario where a cowpoke is signaling that it's going to attack, and you have to decide in a moment: do I risk missing the headshot and eating a hit, or do I take the safe but slower path and stun them before they can get off their shot on me?
  4. The dodge/ crouch action didn't feel particularly necessary or like it added depth to the already excellent movement system.
  5. Unrelated to the game itself but, I'd recommend adding gifs to your game page! The screenshots are beautiful and expressive but they don't really capture what makes this game so much fun!

This is genuinely the first jam game I played where I immediately wanted to get right back in when I finished (I'm not sure if I lost or won lol) and if you release a post-jam version that really hones in on what makes this game so instantly engaging, I would sink hours into it without a doubt! Anyway, great work! Now, I'm going to go play it again.

Developer

Wow so that's how it feels to get an essay in the comments! Thanks very much for your time!

To be honest I had the idea for this kind of control scheme for a few weeks, and after I failed to submit my last project I was determined to do what I was in the mood for straight away to save time. As I was making it the limb system kind of appeared and suddenly it fell into place theme-wise. Good suggestions!

  1. I find level design is what allows a game's mechanics to sing and I definitely need to work on that haha. I was kicking myself after the deadline that I didn't limit the player to the circle of light, easy fix for the pot shots problem. After my last project I also thought I could shove in some kind of style point system for this one to encourage the player to play sub-optimally, but even with double the time things get cut. I found the strategy that works for me for these kind of fast projects is to keep it as dead simple as possible, hence no changes in elevation, obstacles etc. Funnily enough I was surprised how straightforward it was to get that kind of drifting kart motion, wondered whether that would work against it being an FPS but clearly not! The kart track design is a great idea, puts me in mind of something like the on-foot chase in The Good, the Bad, the Weird. Definitely want to work more on that feeling of momentum, flinging yourself etc.
  2. After playing Devil May Cry 3 I've kinda warmed to the idea of rewarding the player's ability to mash, but a reload should hopefully bring the best of both worlds. And the animations were a total rush job and I should've emphasised more the use of limb shots to create openings.
  3. (&4.) Those cowpokes really should use their guns, it seems silly that they run around and don't fight back. If they did then the player would have a use for their dodge, and in fact if they angled their heads differently then the player would have to crouch under them to get a shot at their head!

5. This is the first time I really engaged with the selling of the game, not just the making of it. I really should look into putting up gifs, especially when YouTube seems to decide to take down your video and not tell you why haha.

Everyone's destined to eventually lose in this game I'm afraid haha. There used to be a kind of win-state by crashing your game with the amount of cowpokes, but I had to go and be clever and make sure that didn't happen didn't I. I did not expect someone to react to the gameplay this strongly, so this was very encouraging to read!

Submitted

I love the art style and the 3D models and the music! It was really satifying to play!

Developer(+1)

Thanks! If you'd prefer to listen to the music without shots and loud footsteps there's a video linked on the main page.

Submitted

Love the artwork and music! nice job.

Developer

Thanks! I realised after submitting it that the music gets drowned out later on, so I'm glad you enjoyed it while it lasted!

Submitted(+1)

Movement is very smooth, style is great, and music. That music catches you, well done. Maybe you should tweak the gun sound a bit, it kinda gets in front of the music too much. Lower the high freq parts, or something else, other than that sound design is absurdly good. Drifting kinda resembles the titanfall 2's slidings, which were also well polished. I always drift around the first levels as you have time for those kind of artistic shootings. 

Only complaint I have is shooting while drifting is so hard I ended up LMB spamming at high levels. Writing this review after killing 510 cowboys in a single run.

Developer(+1)

Yeah the gun shots were made last minute by literally just adding together an impact sound and some melee strikes that I made in my last project haha. No time for any ducking or EQ, but very pleased to hear you enjoyed the sound work apart from that!

I originally wanted to include some kind of style system that would nudge players to act cool, but as it stands I'm just relying on them doing it because it feels good. And yeah I had thought to either expand the hitbox while you're spinning or introduce a slowmo mechanic, but apparently even given double the time things get cut haha. I've been meaning to check out Titanfall 2! What I had on my mind was actually Vanquish, though that obviously plays quite differently.

Ah 510, so that must mean you lost on the 12th wave! The theme of Built to Scale made me think of exponentially increasing numbers so the cowpokes spawn in the Fibonacci sequence.

Submitted

Interesting movement and enemy mechanics, loved the models for the cowpokes!

Developer

Thanks! I figured out with my last project that the classic Alone in the Dark look suits my limited modelling/texturing ability.

Submitted(+1)

I kill'd fitty men!

Submitted

Shooting is fun, and the feeling of inertia in the character's movement is great. One thing is that you can spam LMB and get through levels too easily.

Developer

Thanks for the feedback! Glad the movement clicked for you.