Play game
Not Another Bubble Shooter's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Art Style / Visuals | #31 | 3.219 | 3.219 |
| Gameplay / Fun / Engagement | #36 | 2.750 | 2.750 |
| Theme | #41 | 2.906 | 2.906 |
| Overall | #43 | 2.625 | 2.625 |
| Audio / Sound Design | #54 | 1.625 | 1.625 |
Ranked from 32 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Game Engine / Tools
Unity
How does your game fit the theme?
You have limited space, the bubbles will continuously move down the screen and your bubbles also fill the space. If any bubble crosses the line, it is game over!
Anything else you'd like to share about your game or development process?
!!Post your score in the comments!!
My highest is 28,490 :D
This was an interesting project - had I just done normal unity things, it would've taken at most 2-3 hours. However, it is built using the command bus pattern, and there are only a few monobehaviours - bubbles are not gameobjects, there is no Unity physics, it it the most lightweight game I could make. The challenge of doing something so completely different and optimised was really interesting! Post-mortem: https://wayfarergames.itch.io/nabs/devlog/1031238/not-another-postmortem
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Great submission. Simple but fun game play.GJ
Nice game, a bit too simple and for now just a bubble shooter. For what I've understood you self imposed a limitation on yourself to make this game as lite as possible. Although impressive, I don't think it can justify the lack of content and the presence of bugs (bubbles of different colors getting wrongfully removed and lag when popping larger clusters of balls). So, for now, I cannot rate this project.
P.s I'm curious to know how big are the project files, I always love optimizing work💯
I got it down to 6.4mb post-jam! I'm not sure what you mean about bubbles of different colours getting wrongfully removed though - it correctly matches the colour and plays a pop animation, then any bubbles that are no longer attached to the top fall off. That's intended, and it's how you get higher scores!
As for the lag, it was a lazy bit of jam code and I'm really annoyed with myself for it 😭 I fixed that straight away: https://www.crazygames.com/preview/bc56318b-77bf-4646-aca9-c3f5012f4b70
Hey. I like your bubble shooter and that it has an option to pick the color of your bubble -- something I've not seen in the ones I've played yet. I recall other people talking about a lag on Discord. The only one I saw was that sometimes it often took a second for the bubbles to disappear after the bubble hit them. (Maybe you've long since resolved this, bit that's the point I noticed a lag.)
I got 16.015 after I cleared it. Is that the end? Also I am not sure about the balatro part you mentioned. It ended so quick, I think it would be nice to make the bubble generate endlessly and faster as time goes by. This can also work great in mobile. There is no music nor sound so it feel stale. The graphics is simple and good with nice color choice. You did good work.
Nice, fun shooting game! Had been following your updates on discord, so im really interested where you take this post the jam! In terms of gameplay, i dont have much to add other than what many of the commenters have said.. I like the color scheme and the little animations as the bubbles pop. Once you add sound effects, will really make it addictive :)
Also im really interested in learning the tech you used behind this, which significantly optimized it. I will be reading your postmortem! Good luck on this :D
I've just updated it to include a section about optimisation, that apparently I missed when writing it up last night 😂 thanks for the reminder! And the feedback 😁
The highlight for me is the minimalist, clean design of the game. Great work on that! I'm sure you had more planned that didn't make it to submission, but congrats on getting something out there before the jam ended :)
Soo I think just about all my comments will be stuff you are already aware of, and from your Discord comments it seems like there's some really impressive stuff going on under the hood, but the game itself is a bit underwhelming. It would have been super cool to see some of the roguelike powerup elements you mentioned, if the jam deadline had been a bit more cooperative. The functionality of the bubble shooter itself feels nice, and coupled with little bits of polish like the dotted line animation of the aimer and the touch of highlight on the bubbles makes for a satisfying experience. I really dig the minimalist aesthetic you have going on, the color choice is great too. Obviously, sound/music, a win/lose condition, etc would help make the game more fun and complete, but you are already aware of all that. One minor critique is that it got annoying to re-select the color bubble after every shot; I would have preferred the next bubble being auto-selected, and then if the player desired being able to select one of the other colors. I think you've got a good foundation for a balatro inspired bubble shooter, and wish you the best of luck if you continue with it, nice work!!
No endgame? Did I break it? I mean it is what it is... and it works. So, it's not bad. It's just missing stuff . Like maybe a rainbow colored bubble that's a bomb or star shaped bubbles that randomly flash over the screen and if you hit it with the right color, the bubbles that are inside it drop? Something to make it more exciting? I think it's a start that would do well as a mobile game.
I like the trolling with the css so it wasn't a square. Gave extra points for that. Smart*ss! ^^ hehe
There's something here, but it needs more polish. Adding sound would give this game a lot more juice. Exploring the theme more would be cool too.
There was also one game breaking bug. At some point the bubbles stopped spawning, and I just had to finish the game :(
Don't worry, that's not a bug it is just the end of the content 😂 I don't know if you followed in the discord but I had a last minute issue where the entire level was gone, so I had to do a couple more builds and didn't have time to flesh out the level or add a "you win" screen 😭
I didn't follow the discord as much as during the previous jams. For a game like that I'd probably go with randomly generated infinite level though :)
I mentioned it in Discord but I’ll paste it here. Very nice bubble puzzler. It may be missing some juice but I was following your journey and looks like you prioritized the tech underneath. I hope you can leverage it and grow it into something. Also, I kept running into slowdowns when there were a bunch of bubbles being “popped” or “dropped”. I believe you are already aware of these. Also, another challenge in these games is that you need to estimate where the ball will go. Since you use mouse input I can just click where I want the ball to go even if its outside of the line of sight/preview. I’d suggest maybe allowing only clicks close or even behind the fire spot (which are not even allowed now) to incorporate that into the game.
This is great thank you, keeps all the feedback in the same place so I can refer to it later 😁 good notes, the game is currently way too easy for sure. I'll play with the input method, you're definitely right there. Hiding the cursor wood be a good first step I think!
Good simple game. The border is not nessry and go agent the rule of the jam I am not taking any star a way for that because game have to a edge.
The border is not in the game, it is CSS on the game page! The shape limitation was in-game only 😜
There you go, I changed it to dotted for you 😂
I like a lot better
okay I did know that was part of the page you the back color mach the page color
A good starting point for a more complete game. Besides the obvious issues others mentioned: it felt a bit tedious for me. I had to move the cursor up and down a lot to select, aim, and shoot. I’d like to suggest that you pre-select one of the balls automatically (randomly, perhaps), and if the player wants to change the selection, allow them, like it is right now. That would make the gameplay more dynamic.
Ooo this is really good feedback thank you, I definitely noticed a bit of this but put it down to the fact that I've popped these same bubbles over and over again for an hour at least. Not sure I'll go with your proposed solution but it is definitely something to consider, I bet there's a way for me to make that interaction meaningful
Looks great, nice consistent visual style and smooth gameplay.
I got some lag when popping bubbles sometimes and it made me misclick my next projectile. But it's probably just the webGL build.
I'd like it if the 3 balls to choose from were not all randomized each shot, but just that the one you used is replaced by a random one. That would make planning ahead a part of the game (should I use the yellow one now or save it to clear some blue bubbles first so I can better reach it).
It's obviously missing sound and on completing the game it just goes on. But those are just the jam time constraints I guess.
Cool game!
That lag was my own laziness - I fixed it here: https://api.wayfarer.games/bubble 😂 I'd appreciate if you could give it a quick go and check it did actually fix the issue 🙏
"allocations won't matter here" (narrator: they did matter)
So the original vision for this was something like a deck builder. Those three to choose from are your "hand", which gets discarded at the end of the turn. To start with you can only play one, but upgrades and things would change that. Alas, I had too much fun with the architecture and forgot to make a game 😂
The version in the link still lags sometimes when it wants to destroy bubbles.
I don't know the calculations behind removing the connected bubbles (recursive maybe?), but it seems to hang on that calculation.
Still?? 😭 It doesn't happen to me at all, the profiler days there are no allocations and it only takes 3ms 🤔 I'll investigate further. What device and browser?
Win 11 PC on Firefox
okay this is the fastest I can possibly make it, firefox should have WebGPU support now so it should run for you - if not you'll have to take a look in Chrome, FF has been weird with WebGPU in my experience.
https://www.crazygames.com/preview/bc56318b-77bf-4646-aca9-c3f5012f4b70
really fun game!! was satisfying replaying and trying to get a higher score, i did occasionally get stutters when popping big groups of bubbles but otherwise it was great!
i would normally give some feedback on how you could improve the game but i think since you were doing this with technical limitations i'm sure you had ideas for how the game could be improved.
great work, fun technical challenge, great submission! would love to see what it turns into with some more time to be cooked up :)
I managed to clear all the circles and I got 16,000 points. How do you get higher scores?
You get 25 points per bubble, +5 for every bubble in the match, and 50 points for every bubble that drops - so you want to match lots of bubbles at the same time and cause a lot of bubbles to drop!
Why is the name of the game not another bubble shooter?? Also almost everyone are getting more score than me, but why not me?🥲
Things you should improve-
1) Add score when the balls are cleared even though they aren't matched like I can clearly see that matching some blue or yellow balls will break away a huge chunk of balls. So then I'll go for that instead of breaking/matching every combination.
2) Just like everyone, I too agree that a message that the game is finished would be appreciated, even just text would've sufficed but maybe you didn't have enough time for given you were under the jam time contraint.
3) Your game name made me think that this won't be a bubble shooter, but sadly it didn't hold up to that.
Well A for effort I guess, at least you didn't go against the shape rules 👍!
You get 25 points for every bubble in a match and 50 for every one that drops! You get higher score for dropping them 😁
Time got away from me unfortunately, I spent too long on the architecture - I intended to make it a roguelike deck builder, something like balatro with crazy combos and effects!
I would've appreciated getting some king of congratulation message for winning, but I really liked the game!
This is a simple but well polished game. I maybe would've liked to see more level variety or even some simple SFX/music, but the framework of the game is great! It is fun to play and quite satisfying :)
This is looks really polished, i understand you ran out of time to do more but from what i played, it was really good. the bubble falling animation was so nice and made me feel good Lol. i did eventually complete the level and there was nothing more to shoot at, so maybe a tiny restart button mightve completed the loop abit more. (my score was 17k)
i did see you made a level editor (lol), so if you plan to develop this further and add a few sound effects im sure the result will be great, gg!