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ShadowFall's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #233 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Cleverness | #269 | 4.333 | 4.333 |
| Artistic Style | #386 | 4.333 | 4.333 |
| Playability | #713 | 3.667 | 3.667 |
Ranked from 3 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.
- I love the premise and the setup. Controls and enemy responses were quite unforgiving which turned me off from an otherwise exciting game. I saw comments on similar issues, namely fall damage and enemy projectiles. Those are fine tuning things though, I imagine an extra day or two of testing with a couple friends would have tightened that up. Love the idea, cool concept, refine the execution. Also, GDD was quite thin. Take a look at PirateSoftware's template for reference.
- GDD Could included images of inspirations, art and game mechanics, dev timeline. Just a little more depth. It is too short. Remember to included the theme of the jam and its interpretation. Otherwise good job! Game I think the game could have a need for remapping options for controls. I enjoy the color swap between light and dark world. However I died a lot to the gremlins and goblins who can shoot fast and hard. I feel that difficulty just ramp up. It feels like end game enemies meet level 1 player.
Did you include your Game Design Document as a Google Drive link?
Yes
Seriously... did you include your Game Design Document?
Yes
Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes
Tell us about your game!
ShadowFall is a falling shooter inspired by Downwell and Ikaruga. In ShadowFall you use the Arrow Keys and the Z and X buttons to move, shoot, fall and collect items. Items can be turned into potions with the help of a friendly Witch.
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Comments
Lightmode vs Darkmode users
Great game, I had lots of fun playing thru it. At first it felt weird that jumping and shooting were tied to the same button but I got used to that fairly quickly.
However I felt like the dimension switching mechanic was quite underutilized. I didn't really feel the need to switch mid fall, I mostly went through the first long descent in the shadowrealm and it meant that i only had to fight half the enemies. After clearing that part I had enough materials to upgrade my damage to 1-2 shot enemies so they weren't an actual issue from then on. Weirdly enough I started switching way more after this since I could now just switch and kill sentries immediately. I actually accidentally killed the boss in less then a second, before i realised what was happening, due to my damage being upgraded to high hell.
That being said I really enjoyed the fact that you have to break your fall by shooting. It's a satisfying mechanic and created an interesting interaction when my damage was high enough to kill the bricks in one shot, because now I couldn't just land on a single brick that easily. Gaining upwards momentum and raining hellfire upon the goobers below feels great.
Overall loved it :> and the art/sound design definitely enhanced the experience even further.
This reminds me of Downwell quite a lot. Gfx worthy of it.
Groovy music.
I really liked the added realm switching mechanic aspect.
This game was pretty fun! Felt very different from its inspirations, but the differences were definitely not detriments. I like the music, and the sound design is very solid. All in all, pretty fun.
I would have liked to see the enemies have different appearances that would have hinted at whether they were walkers, shooters, or twin-shooters. The guesswork involved was a little frustrating at times. However, it was very well received that even if mistakes were made along the way, the game would only put you back to the beginning of the room.
The velocity mechanic was interesting, though I feel it really tends to slow down the pace of the game due to forcing the player to land frequently and take careful steps. One thing I really like about Downwell is how when you’re spiraling down the chute, you gotta maneuver yourself carefully and make every bullet count, not necessarily slowing yourself down but being careful to keep your steps secure, whether for your combo’s sake or to avoid obstacles. Here I just felt like it was a slow-paced platformer, and felt encouraged to linger and farm enemies rather than blitzing through carefully. With the ability to backtrack as well, I quickly became too powerful.
I like the idea behind the world-switching mechanic a lot! I thought it may have been somewhat underutilized, though. Both worlds seemed more or less equivalent in content, and although it seemed like it may have been useful to switch between worlds to dodge bullets, the bullets both came somewhat too quickly to react fast enough consistently enough, and enemies tended to fire almost immediately upon world-switching for me to the point that trying to world-switch to evade often just ended up putting me in even more danger than I was in before. I think with some polish, though, a mechanic like this could really shine in a game like this.
All in all, it was a good time. Good job to the team!
Thanks so much for playing! The velocity mechanic was the starting idea, I wanted to explore how fall damage would effect Downwell's play model. My plan to address the issue of how easy it is to just farm and get overpowered is I want to try and change the game so your upgrade materials get mined out of floor blocks where you have to like, avoid enemies while you stop to mine a pickup. I'm at least gonna try it out cause I think it'll be interesting.
Glad you enjoyed!
This was a super fun game, it felt like a whole game already!!
I really loved the art style and the sounds. The upgrade mechanic with the monster parts was a great addition as well. I really liked the shadow and light world mechanic, felt really unique for this kind of game. It's also similar to Downwell which was super fun to see!
I ended up buying the upgrades a lot and started one-shotting the enemies haha. Earlier on I thought they were too difficult because it took a lot of bullets to kill one, but after upgrading it was really great. I also really liked how it was a potion to upgrade which matched the alchemy theme.
I think I did notice some oddities when switching between the shadow and light worlds where enemies would fall through the floor but other than that, it was so so good!
Overall this game was great and super fun. Well done!! :D
Thanks for playing!
Enemies start off beefy (as you noticed) as an incentive to upgrade. Tho due to a lot of feedback I've gotten I've got plans to rebalance and change up how upgrades work and to balance out the player's power scaling. The enemies falling thru the floor glitch has already been fixed, but it wasn't fixed in time for the deadline lol. It came down to fixing that or getting enough sleep that night and I picked sleep.
I'm glad you enjoyed it! I had been wanting to make a game inspired by Downwell for a while and was super excited to get the chance!
Sleep is definitely more important than fixing the bug for sure! I look forward to your next release!! :D
I had fun playing this game! The art, sound, and music were all really great too! It felt very well put together. I really liked the diversity of mechanics at play, lot's of stuff to think about at once (e.g., ammo, fall speed, switching between light and dark, and so on). The game is very difficult, but at least to me that felt intentional, and it works nicely as you get better at it and get upgrades. It really makes you divide your attention a lot, which makes for a great challenge!
Here's some feedback if you expand on this more:
Overall, really great job! It's awesome how polished you made this!
Thank you for playing!
On the last day of the jam when I was crunching to finish, tuning down the speed of the enemy projectiles was on my list of things to do after I finished the ending of the game. Unfortunately I just didn't have the energy to go do it lol. I spent the final few days of development constantly thinking "Those projectiles are too fast" so I'm totally in agreement.
And the health potion is totally underbaked. It's only application is to heal if you finish a level with low health, but I hadn't even thought about intentionally dying to heal lol. I should probably recontextualize healing for the updated version.
Right off the bat, love the title screen and logo! The logo is super cool and stylized and I really liked how you blended it with the background!
The music's also really nice, makes me feel like I'm on a mission!
The gameplay is really interesting. Switching between both worlds seamlessly becomes very rewarding once you start to master doing it midair. Trying to get quick shots between worlds to avoid getting hit whilst still maneuvering the character midair was really fun! Kinda made me imagine a speedrun of trying to kill all the enemies and how sick that'd look!
Trying to master the controls meant I was completely cleaning the rooms, which meant I had a lot of materials to use for potion crafting! Needless to say, that boss was liquified.
There was a tiny glitch where a collectable wasn't obtainable or didn't disappear, but other than that, everything was super polished and felt really nice to play. A really strong and solid entry! I'd be interested to see, if there's to be further development, which different ways the between worlds aspect would be applied. There's a lot of interesting possibilities with it.
I enjoyed playing it! It's fun!
Interest idea of a platformer you've got there! I enjoyed it quite a bit! The swapping between light and dark and the downward shoot as jump really make the game quite unique and standout. The game is obviously difficult but the general experience is quite good when you finally got the hang of it.
My little bit of complaint was that the enemies attack was way too fast, and dodging them seems really came down to chance than anything, also why shooting through walls? Another thing is that the fall damage is quite harsh in the sense that you can reach terminal velocity quite quickly, to the point where you can die in the witch's room via fall damage. I would suggest making the gravity a bit smaller and also a higher terminal velocity just to let the player some time to react.
But anyway, the game is quite well done, so good job!
Thanks for playing!
I agree that the enemy projectiles are too fast. Slowing them down was on my to-do list but after crunching to finish level 3 and the boss fight I didn't have the energy for any extra tuning and left it be.
Enemy projectiles going through walls is intentional, as them being blocked by blocks would have made the game significantly easier and the game is already quite easy (if you know how to exploit it(swapping worlds to dodge projectiles is key)), but I did go back and forth of this choice a few times and am still considering what way I want to go on this mechanic in the definitive edition after the jam. Enemies are going to be completely overhauled one way or another.
Velocity, however, is punishing on purpose. After all, you'll never take fall damage as long as you hold that last bullet to cut your speed! I wanted it punishing specifically to encourage the player to track their ammo count. I set the fall speed to limit at a specific threshold (you just kept falling faster and faster in the first few days of development lol) and tested the threshold a lot to make sure that you had a window to identify that the floor was coming up so you could cut speed. I may tweak it more in the definitive edition, but I'm very married to the idea of it being punishing. Maybe instead I change it to have multiple damage thresholds based on how long you were at terminal velocity instead of just 2 hp flat?
I appreciate the feedback!
Oh okay I get your point of purposefully being punishing, and I am okay with that. Difficult games are fun after all and I do enjoy quite a bunch of them. Multiple damage thresholds is a nice idea, so that I just don't loose 2 HP when I just get over the terminal velocity.
I will still insist that you should die in the shop "normally" though :)
I definitely agree about dying in the shop, I just have no idea how you managed to pull it off? Did you die while at terminal velocity and appear in the shop, thus taking 2 damage? Because that is for sure a bug, but I have trouble thinking of how you would go about dying in the shop.
I think I am just casually jumping in the shop and taking 2 damage when landed. Didn't notice the velocity bar though sorry :(
Nice game! This game is clearly difficult from the start because of the fact you have to switch between worlds constantly just to survive and add on to the shoot jumping cooldown while being shot at, it makes this game incredibly difficult for me to get past until I get used it. I actually love it, a falling shooter that takes a lot of playthroughs to get used to the enemy placements and the controls of your own character. The art is mostly white and black which I believe resembles the shadow theme and the obviously, the alchemy elements include using potions for power-ups. The audio and the music is really good too, an action-packed music that fits this game's genre beautifully. My biggest pet-peeve while playing this game includes the fact that the enemy can literally shoot me through the platform blocks, which I felt was just a plain hitbox error or a hitbox that was never implemented. I hope you can patch that after the jam's submissions have been rated. But either way, this is beautifully made despite my struggles getting past the beginning level.
This game was really fun! I enjoyed it very much! Awesome job!
Cool game. I really like the simple art style as small pallete. Just a bit inconvenient having to move all the way down to quit the crafting menu. Good work
I really like the concept and mechanics! The velocity indicator for the falling speed is a great idea, and the concept of doing everything based on shooting downwards is fun and innovative. The art is cool. If I had to nitpick, I'd suggest adding the ability to destroy enemy bullets with your own. Really a great game.
Good job!
The game is good. Not very bad.
But I feel like the shooting is quite not satisfying due to the size of the bullet hitbox does seems to match the size of the bullet. It is ok for the enemy's projectile to have a smaller hitbox.
The art and sound are ok. I think it would be better if there are more particles.
Well done.
Simple but cool idea. I had fun.
I kinda ended up getting very overpowered after failing towards the end of stage 2 twice and then using all those materials to make potions. Even defeated the final boss in a single jump.
There seems to be a graphical issue. The window size is wrong and the UI is on the left side of the frame for some reason.
I tried it in Edge and Firefox and it was broken both times.
I also found the option of using Enter to interact but X to craft the potion kind of weird. Ended up feeling a little clunky when trying to craft a lot of potions.
This is a graphical glitch I wasnt aware of until after the deadline, it seems to only happen on laptops (are you using a laptop?) and I think its caused by the slightly odd resolution a lot of laptops run at. Hopefully I can figure out how to fix it when I go back over the game after the judging period.
Thanks for playing the game! I'm glad you enjoyed it. The game is unfortunately not very well balanced, as you saw. I've got ideas to address that issue too, but for the time being it is what it is.
Not on desktop, but I did play on a 4K monitor. I just tried to play it on my full hd monitor and it does look normal there. Zooming out to 50% on the 4k also fixes it. And zooming in to 200% on the 1080p monitor also causes the same glitch.
Thanks for taking the time to look into it! This is super helpful information.
Loved it but man, I was really struggling to find that damn gremlin paste until I realized that I have a QWERTY keyboard and needed to press W instead of Z Haha! Really fun way to dodge bullets by swapping between dimensions. Feels very polished, and it was very challenging!
You needed to press W instead of Z? I made this using a QWERTY keyboard as well. Do you mean you have a AZERTY keyboard? Cause yeah it looks like Z and W are swapped on that keyboard. I was using Z and X because they're right next to each other in the lower left I hadn't even considered variant keyboard until just now lol.
Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed!
Oh yeah, sorry, I meant AZERTY Haha. And don't bother with variant keyboards. Just my mistake for not thinking about it. You made a great game!
As a somewhat fan of the downwell I really appreciate this one and I like that this one!
Also like that you can quickly dodge enemies by switching realms.
But, as others have mentioned, would like to have adjustable controls (really used to WASD, arrows- brain hurt)
I agree, WASD should have been implemented before the deadline. It'll be added into a later version, but there's no going back to fix it now that the deadline's over, and like I mentioned in another comment I was indecisive on what buttons to move Jump and Swap to since using WASD makes Z and X uncomfortable to access.
Thanks for playing!
I remember seeing this on Discord and being worried about the flashing of changing between realms but it's actually completely fine and wasn't an issue at all.
The art was simple but really well done and very thematic. I liked the little witch between levels and the crafting screen, it felt very old school.
I had to admit I didn't really see any point in bothering to fight the enemies at all. I know you need their parts to make potions to power up but it felt like a hassle trying to kill them with just jumping above them and firing, felt like I was constantly putting myself in danger for it.
However I think this bit me in the *** when I got to the boss at the end and despite hitting it what felt like hundreds of times I just couldn't kill it haha. I'm sure it was entirely my own fault for ignoring the crafting system.
When I was finishing up development I started realizing that the enemies weren't exactly meshing with the game as a whole, like you said it's easier to just avoid them. And because there's so many enemies it's, inversely, really easy to farm and get super strong so the final boss was given like 80 health to compensate for the fact that the player could feasibly be doing like 10 damage per bullet.
I want to do a second pass at the game once the Jam's fully over where, instead of farming enemies for loot, you've got to mine it out of blocks, thereby making the enemy avoidant playstyle more valid, while also forcing the player to slow down and get loot here and there to stay powered up.
Thanks for playing! I appreciate the feedback a lot!
I like that concept! The enemies being specifically there to be avoided while you mine is much more appealing to me personally too. Would love to play again post-jam if you do update it :)
I love the polish, but I dont understand, how do I shoot? How do I jump? It feels like I'm missing a button! Nice art and animation though!
X is jump and shoot. There's a tutorial message in the first room that tells you, but I'll add the controls to the game description!
DUDE! WHAT! I love this! You even have a really nice tutorial level! So polished!
Thanks! The tutorial level was a total accident actually, the room I was using for testing mechanics just kinda morphed into a tutorial.
thats the best! xD
I had few technical dificulties but apart from that even though the mechanics were interesting I dont think they matched that well. but still it was quite interesting idea :)
Thanks for playing! I'd be interested to know what you mean when you say you don't think the mechanics 'matched that well'? Do you mean matching the jam theme? Matching with each other?