This was a banger. I managed to max out skill tree pretty quickly, though achieving that last shield upgrade really took time. I loved the straightforward art (the particle effects!) and mechanics here, but I'd be curious to see how the game would play differently if the upgrades were locked behind a progression mechanic that forced me to finish the boss before accessing more of the tree. I became OP pretty early on which made the rest of the levels a breeze. Lovely entry. Thanks for making and sharing it!
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Thanks for playing!
I had to severely nerf the tech tree costs and complexity to allow raters to mostly unlock it within 10 minutes, otherwise they'd see an enormous tech tree with huge costs and get bored.
If I were to remake this as a commercial product I'd probably use Godot, but I love using TIC-80 for game jams since it helps me limit scope creep.
Optimizing for the jam crowd is 100% the right move. The last jam I did had a pretty amazing incremental game that had me and other players hooked for over an hour, but the level of polish and fit on that was unlike most other games I've played in this space—especially considering it was a jam game!