itch.io

Hello hillcrawl!

As you can probably guess, you won! lol. Anyways sorry for the late reply, but I'll get into why it took this long in a little bit. For now tho, I've played your game! Here's what I thought about it:

Your game was great! When I first started playing it I thought it was really hard, and was going to comment about balancing, but after getting the hang of it and learning the strategy it was actually a fun challenge. It forced players to find a strategy that works and takes them a while to get good at it but then becomes fun when you start to play it. You don't see that a lot in games nowadays, as most of the time it's just pretty easy when you learn how to play. Games that are hard to learn and still hard to play even after you learn is a thing that every good game should have, to keep you coming back to try and beat it and not be bored always beating it/winning all the time. The fact that you have to beat it multiple times with different weapons also adds a fun challenge and new dynamic which forces you to find a strategy with every weapon. The fact that you could do something like this as your first game is honestly impressive, and it was really well balanced. You have a ranged enemy, a close enemy, and a stronger enemy, which are all essential in a well balanced game to provide a game where players have to focus on all the enemies at once rather than doing one type at a time.

I only had a few problems with this game though, and they were mostly some fine tweaking for gameplay and compatibility. The reason this took so long is I couldn't play it on the device I'm using. I have a laptop, but it has a generally lower resolution. Because of this when I tried to play your game it was set for a resolution that was too high for my device to fit in one frame, and I could only see one corner of the game, like this:

this is what I see launching your game on fullscreen, resolution is too high and I can only see a corner of the screen, while the rest of the game is off the frame.

On my laptop as well, the hitboxes on buttons were off, and I tried to play it like this, but I couldn't press it because it was off the frame. In the main menu the button hitbox was at the bottom of the screen, and the second menu the button was off the frame and I couldn't play it. I was eventually able to play it because I borrowed a friends laptop which had a higher screen resolution, which is why I'm writing this reply so many days after. I didn't have a hitbox problem here on his laptop, but as I kept playing the more I died and restarted the respawn buttons hitbox slowly moved down the frame. It wasn't noticeable, I only noticed it after line 10-15 respawns, but it is something you might want to look in to. Something I would recommend in the future when making another game is when setting your resolution, you should either A: set it to the lowest resolution you can get away with, which is not recommended because it will be small on higher resolution screens or the quality might be bad B: stretch the screen so that it fits in all devices, which is what you should do if you are starting out or C: allow multiple resolutions in the game so that players may choose a resolution that fits or even D: auto detect screen resolution which might work but affect performance sometimes if doing something like streaming because players may want to set it to a lower resolution and won't be able to. It is very important you have resolutions that everyone can use in the game, and resolution and pixel sizes should be one of the first things you do when setting up the project, as it is very hard to change later on.

Overall, this is a very good game, and is very amazing considering it is somehow your first game. It's very well balanced and a nice challenge, and only has a few compatibility issues, (unlike my first game jam lol.) Once again, I'm sorry the jam ended like this, and I hope you continue on your game dev journey and join more jams, as I am exited to see what else you make. Keep up the good work and keep making games!

Thanks for participating!

FiftyThirdRail