Post by Nat Delnova in Last jam comments

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Haha, the intro with the VO was a nice touch. Pretty lighthearted and fun start to the game.

On the accessibility front, I'm running a Macbook Pro, so I don't play games at 1920 x 1080 (it's a 3024 x 1964 resolution screen that displays everything with double pixels at 1512 x 982). So putting the game window at 1920 x 1080 means it goes off the screen for me. You're not the only one to do that, and dw I get why you did – putting it in Fullscreen works. But, because escape is a button used for getting out of the tutorial or pausing the game, it also throws me out of fullscreen. So I found it difficult to engage with the tutorial early on.

Anyway, the gameplay itself was... interesting. Everything felt pretty "numbers go up", I wasn't really finding attacks that were orthogonal to what I could do previously. It would be cool to explore multi-attack, curving attacks, AOE, etc. I was mostly just picking the options with the biggest numbers and waiting to see if the game got fun.

Sorry for the harsh critique! I hope you enjoyed making the game. The wheelchair guy was a nice touch. If you decide to continue the game, my advice would be to throw in one orthogonal upgrade then give the game to 3 friends and watch them play. See what they're enjoying, and double down on that.

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Tenebris Set11 days ago(+1)

Hey! Thank you for playing my game and reviewing! You are absolutely right on the numbers go up thing, this game is mostly a survive until you cant or the number of objects overwhelm your machine and your framerate dies. It has a way to go before it is a game as opposed to a couple of mechanics in a trench coat. ;) its hard to believe that for my first game jam game i didnt create the next warcraft killer right? (/s just in case)

But seriously, thank you. I hadn't considered the native resolutions of those displays and I had limited testing in other browsers and OS and had run out of time before I could create metaprogression, additional characters, and new weapon types (and now manual shooting with skills to increase user control). The level system is just an rng to a switch right now so tons to explore in development there.

Additionally, the exiting full screen mode and the menu fighting each other will now be one of those issues that will haunt me in every project I make. I am inclined to solve this with my own solution but I really appreciate user feedback and yours seems to come from a knowledgeable place. Is there a standard solution for web games to that issue? I am usually a download able game kind of guy so this is some new territory for me.

I can kill hours in a fun survivor like so I would love to keep this project going, even if just for fun. The fact that I have received such positive feedback on the voice over at the beginning is enough to keep the dev fire burning. Little by little little things become bigger, right?

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Nat Delnova11 days ago(+1)

Haha, totally get you on the Warcraft killer comment. People don't get how much works goes into games.

We built our own survivors-like (just released our demo on Steam actually 😄), where you compose spells on a musical loop and fight to impress the audience. We started with a super novel mechanic (whammy mode from Guitar Hero and a Magicka like spell composition system), but then learning to do even just half of what the other games in the genre have accomplished has been most of the battle. 😅

Btw for your fullscreen question, I don't think there's a standard approach here. In Don't Read Chat, I did a cheeky thing and made a separate menu if the container is at exactly 960 x 540 (which is the size I made the itch.io container). So it detects if you haven't gone fullscreen yet, and tells you to go fullscreen to start the game. Otherwise, I've seen other people make their game window TINY so you have to click fullscreen to play. Or you could just make it 960 x 540, which is probably pretty big already on most screens, without being too big.

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