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leeevans1 day ago(+1)

Easily my favorite music of the jam, and that's with some really strong competition. Unconventional harmony in a catchy structure. It feels right at home with OSTs from HAL Laboratory games, like the raw personality and weirdness from Earthbound/Mother series meets the chippy allegro of Kirby. 

I trained for Captain Nefarious back on Yoshi's Island, and luckily main an Xbox controller on computer. I think this was a good mechanical choice for solo developing a jam game that allowed you to work on art, music and story, which is what really makes this game fun. Polly's a G. The palette change in the boss fight is cool, but the way the whole scene became spooky was more than just colors. Just really good design all around. The continue without losing progress is highly welcome for a jam game, allowing for some difficulty without discouraging the player too much.

The water shader looks awesome, I like how the layers suggest foam and tide. It is a little difficult to appreciate when trying not to get shanked. Sometimes you just gotta make what you find fun though. 

Overall, a well-rounded entry with a ton of personality.

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Kieran (K-Embee)1 hour ago(+1)

That is very high praise for the music, thank you! I never thought I'd see the day where my work was compared to Kirby soundtracks of all things! I'm not much of a musician, I've dabbled unsuccessfully a few times throughout my life and only recently did the ideas behind constructing melody, rhythm and harmony really click for me. I have your game on my to-play list, and I'm looking forward to giving it a go some time during the ratings!

The shader was not fun though. The shader was my inner programmer co-opting an art day to write some of the most hair-pulling nonsensical math code I have written in my life. I love how it looks, and probably could not have drawn an animation that good looking in the equivalent amount of time, but it was pain.

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leeevans38 minutes ago (2 edits) (+1)

re: Music - the style also reminded me of crosswalk music in Japan. I think I keep seeing similarities with these Japanese electronic sounds because they a share similar understanding of what makes an "ear worm", and it's less about the specific notes/keys/modes and more about the melodic movement over time, where the rhythmic emphasis is placed, etc. and it's recognizable even across different tonal/harmonic systems. I think even for people who found the music more dissonant than they are accustomed to, they may find that it was actually quite memorable a couple days after playing. That being said, you did stick with many established expectations, for example: tension and dissonance in the battle theme, consonance in the fanfare. I generally think of this as being genre-savvy, similar to playing tropes straight, because subversion for the sake of subversion tends not to be great. 

Edit: I replayed quickly just now to listen to the fanfare, the arpeggio-like flair on top seem to be from a different key. Structurally I perceive this as a "sparkle" effect, in which case, I would de-emphasize their pitches and play with the timbre to sound more like chimes. Duty cycle modulation is one way you can do that on GB/NES.

re: Shader - oh I did the exact same thing. The background in my game is just a processed noise texture that scrolls with time, and when I started implementing different scroll speeds, it would jump to seemingly random positions (because it was just UV * TIME * scroll_speed). Took me like 3 frustrating hours to figure out how to offset it properly, but in the process it helped me solidify my understanding of UVs. One of my goals in the jam was to practice technical art, and I was happy with my progress here, although it came at the expense of gameplay, so I've also learned valuable lessons about priorities.

It also reminds me of how in Portal 2, the devs were very proud of the animation of the neurotoxin generator implosion, but playtesters didn't even look since there was no real reason  to, and so the devs put up the "In case of implosion, look directly at implosion" sign. I can't hate on technically unnecessary pet projects haha.

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