Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
(2 edits) (+1)

Nice! Calling it here.


Very neat looking UI and clean art work over all. The game chugs very hard on first instantiation of some effects due to shader compilation I think. The trick to get around this is to have a loading screen where you instantiate all those effects/shaders once so that it doesn't then stutter in the midst of action. This was my first time using Godot really in a long time and struggled quite a bit with the same thing. The web build shader compilation (on some machines at least, seemed to be slower on PC than Mac) really seems to be slow. But even if it'd be faster, it's not optimal to do it in the middle of the action when it will at least skip some frames.

Sounds too were good but some music really would have been needed. And there were some actions that weirdly had no sound. Enemies overall could also use some more "passive" movement sounds and even stuff like a warnings before a charge etc or something.

Sometimes it took ages to find the final enemies of a wave. Of course you could just stay still and wait for them to find you but you'd run the risk of getting ganked without any time to react. Some indicator arrows pointing at off screen enemies would help a lot. That same thing would make starts of rounds more fair as you'd have at least some clue on from what all directions you'll be swarmed at.

Guess I lied about that being my final run, went for another one but now at around wave 10 I can't find the final two enemies anywhere. I've been wondering around and even completely idling still for a good 5 minutes but nothing. Not fun really. And the same thing happened now a second time too. I had just one charger enemy left so as it was about to charge, I slowed down the time to trigger that very over powered mushroom powerup and the enemy just vanished not to ever appear again.

I find that the time slowing mechanic is maybe a tad bit too powerful (or recharges too fast after use or something). It kinda forces you into this awkward dual play mode of slow down & nuke everything and then kite around until you get your charge back. Then just rinse and repeat and hope you don't get stunlocked into oblivion after a slow charge ends. This strategy also makes quite a lot of the upgrades kinda moot. Like the shot speed (especially the rare one) seems awesome at first but with such a limited clip size, slow ass reload and the forementioned slowdown strategy, it's kinda pointless. So from all I've seen, it's basically just mushroom, ricochet, homies, clip size and finally slowness extension, damage reduction or maybe some extra hp (too much seems like  a wasted cost) when nothing better is to pick.

But the constant disappearing enemies forcing you to a soft lock really detracts me from going for a better run.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Thanks so much! This is incredibly valuable feedback! I do need preloading, i think most of the stutter is just from loading scenes actively. Im also actively building my library of sounds at the moment, it's a bit hard since I work on everything solo and I basically had to rush this game down in a week due to other priorities. I never encountered enemies just disappearing like that though in my playtests, even when I set the wave to 30+, might be collision issues or something. Anyways thanks a lot! I think this is the most useful feedback I've ever received on a game, I plan to smooth out the game post-jam to make it more playable, this will help a lot.

(+1)

Glad you found it useful! I often think if my feedbacks are overly critifal. I just give out same kind of feedback I'd like to receive myself. And of course pointing out what are the aspects that could be improved on is more useful than focusing on what does work. Even if one wouldn't do any post-jam version and fix any issues, it's still a possible learning experience and one might avoid the same mistakes and design flaws the next time.

I found that Godot's GPU particle systems are the biggest framerate killers when you instantiate them for the first time. My game completely froze for a good 10 seconds or so the first time an enemy was killed the first time I tried the web build on PC. Weirdly enough on (a less powerful) Mac it wasn't just a couple of dropped frames and while playing on editor, it was completely unnoticeable.

I feel ya, I'm completely solo too (though this jam I had a colleague of mine do music). It is a lot of work to juggle all the different aspects of development. I usually do 48 hour jams so a full month long jam feels like an eternity 😅 but that too can slip away fast, especially if one has some other priorities like you did this time.

And since you plan on doing a post-jam version, one other thing that would give the game much more replay value and longevity is more powerup variety. I think maybe doubling the current pool would be a good number to aim for. I think that'd be enough that you would get more varied choices and especially the common ones wouldn't always be the same. Dropping one of the pick options to that classic "choose one of three" too might also be worth considering as that'd increase the build variety per run as you couldn't always get what you want. Even super simple additions like basic stat boosts that you already had a bunch of would help the variety a lot. Stuff like damage, reload speed, acceleration (never really wanted to take the speed boost but better acceleration would have been awesome), less knockback or more invunerability frames etc.