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I fucking love this one but man is it brutal, I can't get past the first section in the building to save my life, even when conserving my ammo, solving the wheels as best I can and memorizing when its safe to reload. I think it just needs a bit more time between when an enemy telegraphs their shot and when it actually hits you so that you can respond better; as of right now getting caught reloading when an enemy walks up is basically a guaranteed hit. 

That being said this is one of my favorite gameplay loops in the whole jam, I love on-rails shooters so this one speaks to me a ton, its really fun and snappy and the wheel is well-implemented, and I feel like with a bit more time I could definitely git gud and crack it open. The goofy voice acting and over-the-topness of it all is great. Extremely good entry, fantastic job!!!!!

Thank you so much for the feedback! I'm glad you enjoyed it :) I am also glad you liked the over the top voice lines, making them was a blast!

The difficulty is something I contemplated on a lot over the jam, and im curious to hear everyone's opinion. I am personally a bit split.
On one end, the difficulty I feel like is very akin to the kinds of games this was based off of; arcade shooters. They can be difficult, sometimes even a bit unfair. Its rare to see someone last for more than 3ish minutes. I feel like that challenge can really push people to explore strategies and hone their decision making skills down to gut-based reaction. "Tension" is probably the core term I would use to describe how I balanced everything - the wheel encourages you to slow down and plan your choices ahead of time, but the fact that enemies shoot back and need to be stunned encourage you to frantically fire back and protect yourself. Those two mechanics oppose each other which creates tension. But if you manage to solve the wheels well and quickly, you are rewarded by not needing to reload much at all - the reload is essentially the punishment for making poor choices on the wheel (which is why I made it a bit annoyingly long). All of that was intentional, yes. But just because it was intentional doesn't mean its not frustrating...

You aren't the only person who has been pushed by the difficulty, some of my friends have also expressed similar complaints. I am aware that people are having a difficult time with it and I want to alleviate that, but i'm also reluctant to change any of the mechanics cause I feel like it would dilute the tension that I find so integral to the game. Even making the reload faster I feel would negate the whole ammo mechanic - if its *too* safe to reload, then there is no punishment for making bad decisions on the wheel, and that whole wheel mechanic becomes null meaningless.

The telegraph warning that you are about to get shot is exactly 1 second. This value was picked arbitrarily, and I didn't get a lot of time to experiment much with how easy/hard it is to react to that. Of course, everyone's reaction time is different. According to what I can find on the web, the average human reaction time is around 200ms or 1/5 a second, but thats without accounting for making a decision on the wheel and taking the time to aim. The real reaction time in my game is likely much larger than that. I would ABSOLUTELY LOVE to put some analytics in there and see what the average reaction time is in the game, then I could tune the length of the telegraph precisely based of that average. I feel like putting the telegraph time to somewhere between 1 second and 1.2 seconds would be ideal, but thats just my gut. I have no numbers to back that up. 

One thing I could do is make the reload an actual action that takes continuous effort than just shooting the edge of the screen - like maybe repeatedly shaking the gun? This would make the player feel like they are actually rushing to reload the gun rather than waiting to get shot while the reload animation completes. And if you are fast enough, maybe you can reload the gun faster and be vulnerable for less time? I feel like this would make it feel less like you are forced to get shot because the reload animation is slow, and more like you were shot cause YOU were slow. It could put more agency on the player's action and make reloading more active without completely blowing up the wheel mechanic.

But thats just a theory though. A GAME THEaohoae shoot me. I dunno, does those thoughts appeal to you? Does it make your blood boil? Tell me what you think!

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i think honestly it would be fine as-is, if only you got some checkpoints to smooth things out - old school arcade shooters dont have checkpoints, but they allow you to pay for more continues; the intense difficulty of them is a way to push that. Not having a feature to continue, but still having that difficulty, makes it super punishing because dying can mean getting sent back several minutes to gameplay sections youve already done 10 times. My real frustration wasnt EXACTLY the difficulty, its that it took so long to get back to the place I was actually having trouble on (the building), and repeating the entire streets section every time I want to make another attempt at that part begins to get dull. If you had checkpoints, pro gamers can go for deathless runs, but people who arent as good can still experience the whole game, just like in a real arcade shooter!

I think this is a fair point. I am contemplating making an updated version, and if I do that checkpoints will likely be a main addition.

Again thank you for the feedback! You are wheely cool :3