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A jam submission

Cosmic Dawn (in development)View game page

A throwback shooter that's too hard for you.
Submitted by Mat (@swimclubdunk) — 2 days, 19 hours before the deadline
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Cosmic Dawn (in development)'s itch.io page

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Comments

Deleted 224 days ago
Developer

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it! Campaign is in the works :]

(2 edits) (+1)


There are some "deal-breakers" here in the details that are spoiling  the experience for me but if you can get those ironed out I'm really eager to attempt to play through this properly.
Developer

Thanks so much for taking the time, there's a wealth of feedback in there :O !!

(+1)

You're welcome; it was fun to do.

Hey I was thinking about this a bit after the fact and I'm not sure if I emphasized well enough how hyped I got when I found out I could weave between the blue lasers to dive in close to the bots and shoot them at point blank with the shotgun. That was one of those moments that tell you you're playing something special. That's the kind of thing I want to play more of. Hopping around in a big circle while shooting backwards at pursuing enemies isn't devoid of fun but it's not as interesting to me as weaving around, changing directions quickly and (sometimes) approaching intentionally. I think it would be worth aiming for more of that with your enemy designs. Some of these extremely fast pursuing enemies are maybe encouraging more of a fleeing engagement than anything else right now. It's also I think worth considering how these designs apply to levels with progression vs. the arenas you have right now. It may be sensible to run away constantly inside a big symmetrical arena but if you're exploring levels with progression, especially ones you've never seen before, it's harder for me to imagine jumping and shooting backwards the whole time. Sure the levels may be large wide-open areas but I think there's still a difference in the approach that should be taken into account with the nature of the enemy designs.

Developer(+1)

That's a really good point! It's something that I found bothering me a bit too (the backpedalling heavy gameplay, due to the fast running zombie guys). I am currently fleshing out some enemy designs that encourage (or require even) chasing down and being very aggressive. One will be an egg laying type of enemy that will actively avoid the player and be a threat purely by laying eggs out of which lesser enemies hatch. And there's a few more I have in mind that I think will change the gameplay in this sense. You're definitely spot on with the level designs concerns too, as I'm working on a first set of campaign levels I'm finding that my current enemies don't hold up so well in tight space. Might actually end up doing campaign-only versions of them with tweaked ai's... Thanks for the awesome comment!

Submitted

A well done wave shooter that was fun to play and felt slick.

Scroll wheel should go through my weapons. The player's movement should be clamped to the ramp when going down them (instead of the player floating off, mostly into the acid).

Developer

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it. Good point about the ramp movement, that's on the to-do-list!

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Great visuals, but the weapons don't feel distinctive enough, and worse, often don't feel satisfying to use, specially the shotgun. I'm not sure how you implemented bunnyhopping, if at all, so I'd help if that was explained somewhere.

Developer

Thanks! There's definitely some juice missing with some of the guns. Maybe I'll have to see how I can get a nicer feel to the shotgun 

Submitted(+1)

IT IS VERY DIFFICULT! 

And very cool. I like fast-paced games, but this one was too difficult for me. And that was honest. I understand that these are my mistakes. I couldn't even pass the first level: P
Perhaps I needed to jump a little higher, sometimes I could not get out of the acid and it was annoying.

Developer

The movement definitely takes a little while to get used to. But when I eventually release it the campaign should definitely still be enjoyable on lower difficulty settings! I plan to balance the lowest difficulty around my gf being able to finish the game without too much trouble, so that will be very very easy lol. Thanks for checking it out!

Submitted(+1)

Really good! I think there should be a radial menu for selecting weapons or something, also the ammo scarcity is really punishing

Developer

Thank you! Yes some sort of radial menu is probably how I'm going to implement weapon switching, I think it's more convenient than simply scrolling with a mousewheel. And the ammo spawns/amount definitely needs tweaking, that's definitely on the list.

(+1)

If I can chime in once more, I think every method of weapon switching with mouse+keyboard is imperfect in some way when you have this many weapons. But one nice thing is that you could implement the number keys, scroll wheel, and radial-style weapon switching all at once and they wouldn't get in the way of each other. 

That was fun to play, it's very fast and enjoyable. Here is a couple of suggestions:

  • Air movement feels very limited, thought idk if that is your intention.
  • Mouse wheel doesn't select nex weapon.
  • Super Shotgun could use more kick.
  • When running fast and getting down on the ramps in the middle leading to the toxic pool , the character seems to miss the ground for a moment and then you can't make the jump. I think double jump should be available if you fall or something, not only after when do the next jump. It feels better, imo.

Keep it up, wish I could play more levels.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the kind words and feedback. There's definitely some issues with the movement controller still which creates some weird behaviors at times. Definitely looking into that atm. I hope I can post some more levels soon!

Submitted(+1)

Very cool, oldschool quake vibes when it was still a Quake. Looking forward for your campain mode. And I'd suggest you to add mouse scrolling for weapon switching to next weapon that has an ammo.

Those weapon sound effects is such a music to my ears.

Developer(+1)

Thank you! Weaponswitching is definitely getting reworked, and I might have a campaign level or two ready for next demo day I hope!

Submitted (1 edit) (+2)

wow what progress!

  • loved that you got the movement a bit more control, felt much more managable than before which compensates for the high speed
  • I might be playing this wrong, but ammo is still an issue for me. I keep running out and feels like i emotied the entire map, still think enemies should drop ammo when you hit some sort of combo or something similar
  • Nice that you added quick buttons for weapons but please add weapon changing with the mouse wheel that jumps to the next weapon with ammo, when im running around almost dying pressing numbers in panic trying to find a weapon it breaks the whole fun.
  • Nice leap in graphics too :)
  • Loved the new flies
Developer

Thanks for the great feedback! Enemies dropping ammo backpacks is something I'm actually looking into right now, I'd definitely agree that ammo needs some balancing one way or another.

sound didnt work for me?

Developer

Hm, never had anyone complain about that. Are you sure it's not something on your end?

(+1)

I've had non-functional sound for 3 other demos so far so it could be on my end, I just don't know what. A shame too, I wanted to hear the girly grunts. Either way, just mentioned it as a fringe case in case it ever helps.

Submitted(+1)

This is looking really good!  Sensitivity changes don't seem to apply correctly.  I'd really like a FOV slider too.  And what everyone else said, scrollwheel for weapons!!  Great job though

Developer

Thanks a bunch! Those are all on the to-do list. It's hard coming up with a nice scroll wheel system that avoids having to cycle through all weapons but I'll figure something out! 

Submitted

Played in nightmare. Really solid so far, I'd have liked to change weapons with scrollwheel but beyond that it was really fun. Going fast and I play as a cute girl. 

Developer

Thanks a bunch, appreciate it! Fun is the main thing really ;)

Submitted

It's a really cool quake-like. I think having the scrollwheel scroll through weapons would help a lot and so would having just a little bit more ammo lying around

Developer

Thanks for the feedback, those are good points!

Basically what boxes said.

A bug I encountered was with the mouse sens: when changing it, it would only be applied after I had died. When changing it again, it was back to whatever the default speed was.

Developer

Thanks for the comment, the mouse glitch I'm definitely looking into now!

Submitted(+2)

Aesthetically, I love this game. Mechanically, I'm torn. Shooting is great fun and clearing a wave is satisfying, but the ammo scarcity keeps getting in the way of that. It can be difficult to keep tabs on ammo counts for each weapon, and I often found myself pulling out a gun I didn't have ammo for. A few of the ammo pickups are a bit hard to see, especially at a distance, which aggravates the problem. My other major sticking point are the flies. Its very jarring whenever they hit you, especially if they come at you from behind or above. I think I'd be preferable if they pushed you in a direction other than the one you were heading in, rather than stopping you outright. This way they'd still exert their disruptive role without overly intruding in the player's flow. But that's just me.

Regardless, I'm very interested in seeing how this turns out.

Developer

Thanks a bunch! You can press M to flash an ammo overview but this is a quick fix really, I'm simply leaving hud/ui work for the later stages so a good ammo indicator is missing atm. In terms of ammo scarcity though, some fine tuning aside, it shouldn't be too big of an obstacle. Although sometimes one gets quite unlucky with the random respawns but generally if the right weapons are used in the right situations the ammo consumption can be kept in check somewhat. The warmup phase initially is also intended for the player to clearly see what spawns where, so there is no blind searching for ammo pickups. 

The flies are definitely what I'm getting a lot of mixed opinions on so they might get some serious rework. They are the most dangerous enemy by far atm but I feel like there's no use working on finer balance until I have more content, especially levels. Thanks a bunch for the feedback, I really appreciate it!

Submitted

Heyo, I played your game. Clearly I'm not the target audience for it, but I'll put some notes here.

-Misspelled your game's name on the main menu, lol.

-Weapons seemed pretty fun.

-Sense of scale is incredibly strange. It feels like you're crawling along the ground at high speed with how short your character is and how big your guns are.

-The FoV seems weird. Maybe it's a genre standard but it had this really wierd and offputting fisheye effect

Even with this, you should probably listen to your target audience more than me, though.

Developer(+1)

That's embarassing, thanks for pointing it out! Scale is a bit weird indeed, it's something I've become aware of recently as well. FoV is really extreme atm, definitely adding a slider and options hud soon so players can adjust it to liking. Thanks for the feedback!

Submitted

Incredibly well polished, good job!  If I can think of one thing to improve on, it would be some kind of effect emanating from the acid pools that makes it more obvious that they hurt to walk on.  A heat wave or bubbles + a steaming or boiling SFX would help.

Developer

Thank you!! I'm actually working on some acidy bubbles to communicate that more clearly atm!

Submitted(+1)

I really liked this one. I liked pretty much everything, the movement, shooting, textures, enemy design, there's really not much I can say about it. One thing I'd like to say is that I think it would be better if the focus were more on the shooting aspect than conserving ammo, from what I understand the ammo doesn't respawn right? at least that's what it seemed to me, or maybe I should just get gud. Anyways, I'm more interested in a single player campaign for this game though.

Developer

Thank you! The focus really shouldn't be on conserving ammo too much. You can check out exactly where ammo respawns (it does! But somewhat randomly) during the warmup phase. I think with a bit of practice it quickly becomes apparent what weapons excell in what situation, and then using the right tools for the job translates into lower ammo consumption. But that being said there's definitely some finetuning necessary when it comes to all of those numbers etc. Campaign is already in the works!