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A jam submission

Bat out of HeckView game page

Survive increasing waves of enemies in this retro 64x64px bullet hell shooter.
Submitted by JoeParker — 22 hours, 56 minutes before the deadline
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Bat out of Heck's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Authenticity (use of resolution)#1654.3574.357
Graphics#1733.3573.357
Overall#1773.3933.393
Gameplay#1853.0003.000
Audio#2022.8572.857

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

Did you work in a team?
1 member; this was a solo project to try out a new programming language and have some fun.

Was the resolution a challenge?
Designing a game with a lot of moving objects on screen at once in such a low resolution was a challenge. It was important to make sure that every asset was visually clear - the player needs to be able to quickly identify the type, velocity and direction of an object as small as 2 pixels quickly and easily. It was crucial not to get carried away with artistic license and to instead make visual clarity the key factor.

What did you learn?
I learned the API to a new engine and became more familiar with the Ruby programming language. If nothing else, I learned to read the documentation!

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Comments

Submitted

Nice bullet hell, a bit hard to hit missiles. Nice that you can pick and throw the vehicles. In general it plays well, and the space and velocity of bullets/character are adequate to the playing area in this resolution. Good music and nice graphics complete a very good entry. Nice job!

Submitted

Nice art! Background and sprites looks pretty.

It was hard to make bullethell in 64x64?  Field of view crucial for such genre.

Submitted

Nice game. The visuals and sounds were great! I did find the gameplay a bit hard though. Some of the enemies were very small targets. Overall though the game was pretty fun. Good job!

Submitted

nice graphics on the background, but i sometimes struggle to see the too little enemies, and this combined with the floaty movement makes the game too hard. I like the palette.

Submitted

I don't what those green/grey things that came from the top of the screen were, but the background looked great.

The bat was a bit floaty which I personally found not so fun, and the tiny hitboxes and only being able to shoot horizontally made hitting things difficult in an unfun way.

I don't know if it was a bug or by design but the audio was also kind of noisy/glitchy at times which was really hard on the ears.

DeveloperSubmitted

Thanks for playing! The floaty movement was intentional but I agree from the feedback that it only seems to increase difficulty and lower the fun. Sadly the audio issues are only apparent in the embedded browser version of the game, perhaps I should have provided download links

Submitted

Amazing style, art and polish! The contrast between background and characters/bullets is great too, you managed to make everything clear. The game gets quite hard quickly, between the difficuly of amining properly (you just shoot and hope) and how crowded it gets. Perhaps the powerups should be more distinctive, I had no idea what they were the first few times and I was avoind them and trying to shoot them.

DeveloperSubmitted (1 edit)

Thank you! The difficulty curve definitely could use adjusting, and I completely agree on the power-ups - making them more distinctive was on my TODO list but I unfortunately ran out of time

Submitted

I had no idea that being a bat was so hard. In general, as have already written below, there is something wrong with the controls, although maybe I’m too old for this. Maybe the bat should fly а little faster and learn to shoot up and down. But anyway, the game leaves a good impression!

DeveloperSubmitted(+1)

Thanks for playing! The floaty movement and momentum based shooting are by design, but I think it doesn't feel as fun to control as intended - I appreciate the feedback

Submitted

Really like the main character animations, but as said below, controlling is a challenge for sure. I got a bit better after a few go arounds.

DeveloperSubmitted

Thanks! It certainly feels easier with each attempt - I think there's a bit of a learning curve for the player movement

Submitted

Its a bit too hard to control and to aim. The game looks great tho.

DeveloperSubmitted

Thanks! I think I got a little too good at it from all the playtesting - I should have probably toned down the difficulty a notch