Skip to main content

On Sale: GamesAssetsToolsTabletopComics
Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
(+1)

Didn't expect to see a movement shooter here! 

I have mixed feelings on the tutorial, if you are experienced with Quake or other movement shooters, you'd already know how to do a lot of the things that the tutorial is trying to teach you. At the same time, a less experienced player might be put off by the amount of mechanics being taught to them at once, some of which never really got a chance to be used (like b-hopping), and others more important (rocket jumping, since it's explicitly used later on). 

The difficulty curve also doesn't really build up to the use of those mechanics, the first gameplay rocket jump challenge requires you to rocket jump 4 times in a row while avoiding enemies that can't be killed. I feel like this is a difficulty jump that wasn't very warranted, especially since you can get soft-locked in that room if you die enough times. Unfortunately, I was unable to see if anything else came after, since I got softlocked in that room.

Regardless, for a first time making a 3D game, it really does feel like a solid movement shooter. It's got a lot of the fundamentals down and even the weird and niche movement abilities, so I can understand why you'd want to try to teach those to the player. The unfortunate thing is that they are inherently a little unintuitive, so it can be hard to directly teach the player how to, for example, b-hop (especially within time constraints). I think the game does as much as it can in that regard. 

Overall I enjoyed the experience when I wasn't struggling with the controls or the balancing. The premise and story are pretty cool, even if they stray from the theme of the game jam. I'm a sucker for these kinds of games, so I hope you'll continue developing games like it :)

(+1)

Thanks for giving such elaborate feedback! I agree that the tutorial is lacking, if I didn't have a time limit I would have probably made some kind of visual to demonstrate the mechanics like a bot or something.  It was hard to estimate the difficulty level because both of the people working on the game are pretty familiar with this style of movement and we procrastinated any and all content to the last day so I was kind of delirious after making maps for 7 hours straight. The intent was for the player to utilize rocket jumping even in the previous levels to shave off some time and I tried to communicate that with the placement of pickups but that again is a lot easier to register when you have already internalized that piece of movement tech.

As for the softlock you got, could you please explain what was keeping you from progressing? I recall a level loading bug on that map but don't think it could actually limit your progression in any way so I'm curios as to what happened on your playthrough. You didn't miss any gameplay though, that was the last room before the outro map.

(+1)

Oh my god I also felt the level design crunch at the end of the jam as well, so no worries there. With the softlock, the little orb guys stop spawning after a few resets, so there's no way to reset the room since the R key is broken and you can't force yourself to die. You're just left with 0 rockets after you've used all of them, with no way to get up to the last platform to kill the last guy.

Yeah that is weird. No real clue what could be causing that.