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(1 edit) (+1)

Clear with score of 11524!!!

I liked the theming of the bosses being mythical creatures.

The "walls that stop" attack was probably the hardest of the set for me, I kept getting hit here due to the shmup cardinal sin of "player ship having inertia" please consider not doing this in future bullet hell games. (surprisingly, this is the only game I've played so far with inertia, there's a reason it's much less common for precision dodging type games)

The cockatrice boss was a standout hit for having fun to dodge patterns, but kelpie's bubble dodging attack was a pretty close 2nd. Kelpie was the hardest boss for me by far because of the walls attack, but I seemed to have encountered a safe spot at the back on one of my attempts? (the bullets despawned before reaching all the way to the back of the screen, unsure if it consistently happens)

The charge shot felt very clunky to use because the DPS wasn't that notably higher but the punishment for releasing too early was that you don't get any shot at all. It kind of worked together with the cleaning mechanic decently well though.

The shrink maneuvre came in pretty handy for the first boss's walls with gaps attack, this felt well implemented and fit the jam theme well, but I don't feel like the iframe dash was very well implemented - most times you'd use it, you'd either run into another bullet as soon as it ends, or you're better off not using it at all and just dodging or shrinking. It's like conceptually OP so it seems like you felt the need to balance it this way, but the end result is that there are almost no actual use cases for it in the game. The only use case I found was to skip the last wave of the "walls with gaps that stop periodically" attack.

Overall super fun and pretty engaging experience though. I liked the sprites.

Congrats on the clear and the score! That's awesome.

Appreciate the detailed feedback too. The movement feel point is fair. I wasn't specifically aiming for inertia, but if it came across that way during precision dodging, that's definitely useful to know and something I'd pay closer attention to in future bullet hell-style games.

Good catch on the Kelpie safe spot too. That definitely sounds like something I'd want to look into, since I didn't intend for that attack to have a free safe zone.

The charge shot and dash feedback make sense as well. Charge was meant to be more of a timing/cleaning tool than pure DPS, but I can see how the early release punishment could feel clunky. My wife actually shared a similar critique lol. Dash distance/timing was one of the things I wanted to revisit before the final build, but it didn't quite make it in.

Really glad the Cockatrice patterns and Kelpie bubbles stood out though. Thanks for taking the time to clear it and write all this out. Super helpful feedback, and I'm glad you still had a fun time with it! :)