I appreciate the style used for the visuals, music and the story. The background effect was really cool, and overall it definitely felt like the game had an identity.
On the gameplay side - while I managed to beat the boss on my second attempt, I really feel that the patterns have outstayed their welcome by a looooot... With how little damage the player deals, as well as the bug where homing bullets apparently don't deal any damage, and the fact the boss even shields from damage on pattern transitions for some reason - each pattern took over a minute or so and would get stale very quickly.
I think overall the gameplay design was mainly held back by two things - first, the very slow player movement with a really wide playing area. It takes a long time to move from one side to another and enemies tend to spawn on one of them rather than in the middle, which made it not very possible to reach most enemies to destroy them in time. One side would get swarmed by the waves and maybe you are safe from being hit, but it didn't feel very fun waiting out until they leave, I really wish the player had some means to properly deal with this situation, like a side shot.
Second, the underpowered bomb which, while it does protect you for a decent amount of time, does almost nothing against the enemy as counterintuitively it doesn't deal any direct damage, and the reflected bullets seem to deal very low damage. Moreover, the boss would regularly use bullets that can't be reflected, which nerfed the bomb even further making it more or less useless in the final pattern as it seems you don't even get any invulnerability frames from it. Even for the rest of the fight - the very, very long pattern duration makes the bomb's slightly longer than average duration irrelevant, even if it lets you survive 5 more seconds the pattern will last for way longer than this...
Basically, I think these two issues make the player too weak and lock them to rather stale defensive tactics, allowing little to no player expression. I wasn't able to enjoy the gameplay much as a result, it's unfortunate that you didn't have as much time to balance it properly. Still, well done finishing the jam, I think you've done a good job with the patterns (the only issue is their duration), and if you think the boss is a big step up from your previous work then that's a great thing. Thank you for sharing!
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First of all, I appreciate it sooo much your in depth and honest feedback, this is the kind of feedback I always seek because they are the ones that help me to improve my games faster
About the boss hp, I over did it, while I was testing, I noticed that if the player gets both “rate-up” upgrades, the boss could be melted quickly with the original hp, and I got a little worried that if that happened, the player would lose interest. The next day, after the submission time ended, I realized that if the player doesn't pick both upgrades, then the boss becomes a sponge
At the end it ended as a sponge because the homing bullets don’t work and also realized after the submission time was over, so the fight is already longer than it should
The attacks overstay because for some reason when I tried to stop the attack and free the bullets or remove some patterns, it crashed the game in a line that hasn’t anything to do with the bullets, but before when I was trying each phase individually it didn’t
Also the shape patterns are chopped, when I tried to fix it, the game started to behave strange so when I fix my bullet system, the attack duration should be better…
About the not making damage between phases, I couldn’t implement the original idea, it was supposed to be a damage “race” with easier patterns than the actual ones, if you didn’t break the shield in 30 seconds, you would get a status that makes you “shrink away” but I didn’t do that and forgot to reduce the timer on the animations…
About the speed, thanks for the observation, I’ll check it more when I go back to continue the game. I left it as it is now because I thought that if the player was faster, they would collide more than intended with the bullets or the flying enemies. Which can be dumb to think that but the day I was building the level and boss, I already couldn’t think properly and decided to keep building the stuff because I felt if I start to change stuff I wouldn’t make it on time
The bomb, I agree it’s useless in the last part of the boss, with the gray bullets and it can also be useless with the flying enemies once the 3 seconds of “invincibility” ran out. I decided to make the last part of the boss like this because I would like to have just a “skill” check but since the homing bullets are bugged and the boss is a sponge, it ended as a bad and slow part, and I don't want the player just spam the bomb but that's hard to balance
I could rework bombs after the jam since I would have more freedom and not just stick to “shrink away” bullets but also I couldn’t make attacks that could benefit from this shield/bomb better due the technical issues I mentioned above haha
This said, I’m sorry this game didn’t give you an enjoyable gameplay experience, also congrats on being the 1st person on beating the game or I know of!
Thanks for reading the credits, I’m happy you gave my game a try and still decided to give the feedback despite the inconveniences
Thanks for playing! ^^